Of course this means that content for this blog will be syphoned off (as this blog once did to my original blog Virtual Fools), but I’ll be sure to link to stuff I write over there from here. I do recommend you subscribe to the new blog, though. It has a lot of potential as a central location for lots of perspectives on the same topic.

My first entry there concerns the use of central lagoons as a defining piece of landscape architecture in theme park design. It contrasts the layout of Epcot’s World Showcase and Universal Studio’s Islands of Adventure with the more traditional hub-and-spoke design or parks that appear to have no organization at all. Not only does this effect the arrangement of attractions and paths of travel, but having an open space gives an uncommon glimpse of a park’s totality. Give it a read and you’ll see what I mean.

I also have posted a couple of entries on the newsgames blog. We (Ian Bogost and Simon Ferrari) are wrapping up the book , but that doesn’t mean there still isn’t time to cover the hard hitting stories like environmentally-friendly celebrities and the “Balloon Boy.”

Lastly, Low Score podcast episode 31 has been posted. We brought in another guest this week to help mix things up. Low Score is not my most intellectual outlet for game thought, so if you’re expecting wisdom you’ll be disappointed. But if you’re expecting shtick and some good conversation about games, you definitely should give it a chance.

What have we been playing? Kevin’s put some time in with Icewind Dale II and Shadow Complex, while J and I have been ODSTing.

As our resident fan of Street Fighter IV, J discusses the potentials of the recently leaked Super Street Fighter IV. J and I admit they might consider playing Star Wars: The Old Republic, and all three of us talk Final Fantasy XIII.

We begin this week’s discussion topic by addressing an article that came up on Gamasutra about “fair trade games.” Follwing this, we talk retail models and the future of digital distribution. That’s right, we can see into the future.

This week’s THE LIST asks for five games that “peaked too early,” meaning they were fun right at the beginning and grew stale quickly. Our answers may (or may not) surprise you!

Download it. | Subscribe to it.

Music by virt

The Newsgames Project was begun by identifying a number of areas of inquiry that seemed to address the big picture issues. You can see these in practice through the main categories of the website. One of these, discourse, was identified through Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel’s book The Elements of Journalism. News is social because it affects groups of people and results in a desire for new facts, ideas, and opinions. Kovach and Rosenstiel feel that discourse not only promotes informative dialogue between citizens, but also acts as a way for people to talk to the newsmakers about their news.

When we think of discourse in this context, we are prompted to think about socially based discussions. Newspapers allow readers to write letters to the editor in which they voice their opinions on a story. Of course, this forum isn’t as democratizing as we might hope. It’s been often cited that online news outlets counter this by providing easier methods of feedback and unlimited space for participation, though a quick glance at the comments section of any news story prompts questions of the quality of this feedback. News radio often allows listeners to call in to argue (or perhaps more commonly, agree) with the host. The University of Virginia’s David Golumbia finds this “revelation” suspect, however.

While the Internet has been lauded for giving power to the people–providing outlets for feedback or turning consumers into creators by providing a distribution channel for various forms of citizen-created media–Golumbia wrote that we most commonly end up replicating existing structures rather than creating new forms of discourse. It is not about our newly found ability to talk back that makes digital media powerful–after all, we’ve had feedback outlets long before the Internet. Instead, we should look to digital media for new forms of discourse that do not have their place in the current structure. So how do we handle discourse within games?

When we think of social structures for games, we either turn to multiplayer games or external discussions about single-player games that often rely on support structures outside the game. We can imagine playing a newsgame in which two opponents take opposite sides and (often quite literally) hurl information back and forth. Or we envision tackling a single player game and then talking about it on a web forum or comment thread. Useful, for sure, but I endeavor to propose ways in which discourse can take place internally between the player and the game. I recognize that I am not the first to think of news this way, but having surveyed many newsgames (or related games), I have yet to encounter anything that actually does this. To understand how discourse can function in a single-player video game experience, we must ask questions about the nature and purpose of discourse and find a model which works with the elements that make video games unique.

We have the opportunity in games to create systems of feedback that can reinforce or negate actions. If procedural rhetoric is based on the authoring of arguments through processes, and one of the tenants of journalism is to strive to represents both sides (actually, the many angles) of the story, then designer-journalists can create forms of play that attempt to reveal these issues. If presented all at once, the effect is fairly standard. However, a well crafted news game can become a single player discourse system.

What exactly are the components of a single player discourse system? Most importantly, it does not rely on oral/written discourse in the traditional sense. If the game is based on procedural rhetoric, it’s critical that the player be able to respond in kind. It’s a system that builds in opposing viewpoints, challenges the actions of both the player and itself, and does not seek a single answer. Single player discourse systems within games are based on dynamics that allow flexibility in which the player can convince the software that their points are valid. It is about finding different results that can be juxtaposed to reveal what might have been concealed. The act of playing these games simulates the kind of social conversations we most commonly think of as discourse based around news.

The system is by no means perfect, however. One of the important elements of discourse is that it introduces new ideas. Can a game designer take into account every possibility? Of course not. We might excuse this, saying that our current news structures don’t attempt this either, but we can also imagine a game able to take into account external inputs. Or, we can imagine counter-argument games as Ian Bogost noted in Persuasive Games and Simon Ferarri plans to elaborate on in his future research. In these cases we have introduced social inputs into solitary activities.

By conceiving of these kinds of single player discourse games, we negotiate the issues we’ve had as a research group where so many of the “newsgames” we’ve played are either editorial or are just too dry. We also ensure that our feedback is spoken in the same language as our source, taking advantage of the properties of the medium of choice. Hopefully, the effort required to participate in the discourse will be more stimulating, engaging, and more rewarding. And, lastly, we can use the lessons learned in creating and playing in single player discourse systems to expand our own abilities to argue, reason, and negotiate new ideas and information.

Colin Rowsell, a writer for The Escapist, recently posted an article asking a variation of a common question: Why is the games industry so afraid of getting involved in the issues of the day? I understand and appreciate Colin Rowsell’s point and believe it’s worth pursuing further, but also feel we need to approach this question with a different strategy. We’re still in the early stages of the medium of the game.

Answering Rowsell’s question of why there aren’t any commercial games discussing political or social issues is as easy as one word: money. The problem with Rowswell’s article is that we already know this answer. Asking this question leads to an unsatisfactory answer, so we should reframe it. I’m hoping this blog post’s exploration will let us arrive at a better question and encourage people to think differently about the medium’s role in political/social issues.

Travian is a free browser-based MMO which was developed in Germany in 2004. It has been translated into 30 different languages, runs on over 150 servers, and has about 3 million registered players. When a player begins the game they choose a race to play as (Gaul, Roman, or Teuton) and are randomly given a village on one square in an 800×800 grid, starting at the coordinate (0,0) and moving outward toward +/- 400 X and Y coordinates. The game uses graphical representations but is not animated. As shown in the image at right, players spend their time upgrading resource fields outside their village to gain more income, and build and upgrade structures inside their village. In addition, players build military forces to raid other players’ villages for resources, go to war, and protect their own property. Essentially, it is a game about one of two things: dominance or survival.

Travian is played in “real time” and continues even when a player is not actively playing. By real time, I mean to say that actions in the game are given lengthy durations. Building a level 1 crop field takes 2 minutes when you first begin a village, but by level 10 that time shoots up to 9 hours. You can only build one piece of town infrastructure, one resource upgrade, and one type of military unit at any given time. As a browser game, it is generally something that cannot be played for more than a half hour at a time because it’s possible to exhaust all your actions. A “round” of Travian, which is to say the time from when the server starts to one of a few end-game states, is nearly a year. Players expand their empire to include other villages they’ve founded or conquered from other players, form alliances, and wage wars through this minimal interface.

Travian is basically a spreadsheet game. This is a term used to describe games in which success comes down to being able to crunch numbers. A raid (stealing opponent resources is nothing more than a count-down clock which says how long until your units hit their target, a table of result data, and a return-trip clock. Battles are not controlled by players but rather decided by numerical comparisons. Reaching End Game is as much a matter of endurance as skill. Once a player’s final village is captured, their account is deleted and they have to go start a new game on a new server. It’s a pretty serious consequence if you’ve been playing for six months. Unlike the Daedalus observations on EverQuest, death in Travian is the end of the bonding experience.

Why would anyone play this? you might wonder. It sounds time-consuming, boring, and masochistic. Yet, much like a MUD or a 3D MMO game environment, it develops certain types of players who love the game. I never thought I would enjoy a game like this, but I was fortunate enough to be guided by a top 10 player who could explain the intricacies of the game and teach me how to play like a top-100 player in a few short months.

Much like TL Taylor describes, the limitations of the technology and design of Travian create the player types. Players of Travian do not fall into the typical Bartle alignments. There are some similarities, as will be discussed, but Travian is a unique type of game that only allows for certain styles of play. This is a result primarily of its goals, it’s always-on design, and its interface.

The will to survive.
As I mentioned before, Travian is a game that has a real game over. Death doesn’t mean restarting. Death means losing everything with no chance of revival. The consequence of death means all the work the player has put into the game vanishes instantaneously. As I learned from experience, Travian is not a game for someone interested in only casually playing. Because it runs 24-hours, it requires attention throughout the day and players must take care to defend themselves when they can’t be at their computer.

In the first few months of a round, players are more likely to delete their account than get killed by another player. Why does this happen? Because aggressive players spend their time raiding their neighbors to steal their resources. No resources, no building. No building, no playing. And though there are safeguards to help players (you can build something to hide resources in), this time is spent “not losing” rather than progressing.

So how can we describe Travian players? This system I described heavily favors Bartle’s achievers. In fact, there’s very little else to do if you’re not seeking to survive through a round. As I will describe, socialization takes an interesting form and exploration is only a subcategory of achievement.

The player types boil down to achievers, survivors, and losers. Achievers come in all shapes and colors. There’s the ultra-aggressive type prone to starting conflicts (which might be seen as Bartle’s imposition group). The regular aggressive players who raid other villages for resources because it increases their income. The neutral type whose income in derived internally. Different paths of progression/achievement comes through expansion of empire, which involves either settling new villages or capturing them from other players. Regardless, the game is set up such that it’s extremely difficult to work with only one village and players have to expand to survive.

Personal representation.
Travian players have no player-embodied avatar in the traditional sense. They have no “characters.” They have iconic representations of their data tables in the form of villages, which is all the other players can see. One form of representation, then, comes through the naming of these villages. Players with default village names are seen as weak because they’re not choosing the label themselves. Players with numbered villages, on the other hand, are seen as aggressive or seasoned. Labling your first village “.001 Rockland” at the beginning of a game implies that you not only plan on building other villages, but that the numbers are an organizational tool–a form of high strategy.

Seeing the alliance of a player is also a way to understand them. It probably goes without saying, but alliances are groups of players who have chosen to work together. It might just be a scare tactic, to warn possible attackers that there’s the threat of retaliation from other players. It may also say something about a player’s nationality–”CRO”, for example, is an alliance of Croatian players who take the game very seriously.

Players can also keep very limited profiles which tell others their rank on the server, tribe, alliance, number of villages, population, age, gender, and location. One strategy, used by some of the more aggressive players, is to either use misleading information or leave these last three fields empty–you dare not give someone your location because they’ll have a pretty good idea when you sleep and use that as optimal time to attack you. It is not impossible to be social, especially if this information helps you identify others like you who might be good to befriend. It’s difficult to be social for socialization’s sake, but it is beneficial to make friends who can help you.
But with such limited forms of communication and representation, how do people socialize?

Communications channels for socialization.
Communication channels in Travian began quite limited. In the game itself, there were only in-game messages (IGMs), which could be sent to either one player or a group of players in an alliance. They are text only and not in real time. This probably began as a technical limitation, but has persisted as a gameplay convention even though technology has improved. The game runs on PHP and aims to be low bandwidth–both to keep server costs down and to allow players (especially in Europe) to use the website on their mobile devices.

To overcome these in-game limitations, players who wanted to socialize had to seek external resources like forums. The creators of Travian have since implemented discussion forums for players on their website, with topics ranging from feedback and suggestions on game design, strategy, and the usual off-topic discussion like music and politics. However, alliances have private forums to discuss game strategy or other alliance-specific matters. The game of Travian leaves little room for pure socializers as a play type, but makes for a strong community of play. Just because they’re playing the game means they have to be at least as crazy as you.

Socialization, as a strategy, means finding people to help you out. The progression of the game is much like an arms race. Alliances are more about defense than offense. Being a part of a good alliances requires not only playing well but making friends with other strong players. Weak alliances have little communication.

It is important to again note that most Travian players are European, which means there are language and nationality barriers in the game. There are specific servers for different countries (compare travian.co.uk to travian.nl), but players can choose to play anywhere. In my personal experience, when I couldn’t communicate with a player directly because of language differences, game action became our language. A message in Romanian from a weaker player I had been raiding was incomprehensible to me, but their gift of 200 of each resource clearly stated they were hoping for me to back off from my attacks on them.

As an experiment, I would love to see what the game would look like if communication channels were removed. Would it be possible to play the same way? How would strategy change? What sorts of representations would people use to express basic concepts? It would be a remarkable example of how the technology/platform shapes the evolution of play.

(As a side note, I noticed that a new game called “Travians” was launched this past summer, which takes the setting of Travian and lets people play as an actual character inside of a village. I’m going to start playing to see what sorts of niches in MMO play it fills that are absent in the original game.)

At the beginning of the semester I was excited to hear that Ian Bogost would be starting a video games and journalism project studio (essentially a research group). I, like most people, assumed it would be on journalism about games. Since I would love to write about games for a living this seemed like a perfect match. But I found out I was a bit off in my prediction. It would not be about games journalism, but rather using games for journalism–the “newsgame” if you will. For anyone familiar with Bogost’s work, you recognize how this fits in with Persuasive Games lens. It’s been an interesting semester in the project studio because we’re basically creating this discipline from scratch. Of course there are examples of newsgames out there, but most of them fall short of their ideals. We are trying to understand how games can be made journalistic, how they can fit into the world of news, and what makes a successful newsgame.

Most of our work has been done on a message board where we can discuss our thoughts privately. Between this research and our discussions in class, we’ve made some reasonable progress over the past two months. It’s a difficult topic–one that leads us back to defining ‘games’ and ‘journalism’ as entry points to the whole discussion. It’s kind of like having the “what is art?” debate that ultimately dead ends in a lot of ideas but no conclusions. But now that we’ve gotten over a lot of the humps, I feel I’m in a place to start discussing the work. We just began our project studio blog and I took up the charge of writing the first entry. It’s about one of the basic topics we’ve identified as being important to journalistic games: discourse. Discourse, at first glance, appears to be the realm of the social: people discussing news with other people or with the producers of the news. However, as a fan of single-player games, I wanted to explore how games could be made to produce discourse between the player and the game.  I have yet to decide if it’s even possible to have single-player discourse, but I’m hoping that putting it in public dialogue will give me some ideas to pursue. So check it out and share your thoughts, will you?

Single-Player Discourse in Games: An Introduction

The GameCulture Journal Blog is a place for me to not only muse on games but to include links to my other game related work, blog entries, and Master’s Thesis brainstorming. My goal, then, is to do a better job of keeping this thing up to date.  First order of business? The Low Score podcast, which I do with my friend J. We’ve recorded nine episodes thus far and the train keeps a’rollin’. So please check out the Low Score blog and subscribe to the ‘cast. We welcome comments and questions too!

Secondly, I have posted a few more blog entires for my Game Design as Cultural Practice course. Both are related to Grand Theft Auto games, but each uses a different framing question. My Vice City entry attempts to answers questions of gameplay styles and cultural context using values from the Values@Play Grow-A-Game kit. The San Andreas post discusses racial issues, playing as the dominant ideology, and the male-whiteness of the game industry.

For my other course, Ian Bogost’s Journalism and Games project studio, I’m currently looking into using Foucault’s thoughts of discourse as a model for discourse within single-player games. Look forward to that entry in the next week.

Finally, I’ve been researching my thesis topic. I’m going to be writing about the city in video games. From which angle, I am not yet sure.  To start my research I’m looking at books on city architecture and urban design, doing a survey of games that take place in the city for their gameplay and narrative elements, and thinking about play affordances within the city structure. Expect a lot of that brainstorming to go on here, as I’m using this as my Master’s blog as well.

The best discussions of games come from experiences gained in a play session so that new revelations may be made or old thoughts resurface. We played Monopoly’s progenitor “The Landlord’s Game” the other week and I have written about how it fits into some classical (Huizinga, Caillois, and Suits) definitions of games. While a traditional analysis would normally be a real snoozer, we had an untraditional play session that made things much more interesting. Namely, we made a lot of the rules up. Check it out and either comment there or come on back here.

[Game Design as Cultural Practice]