On Academic Detritus

A professor in my department is retiring in a couple of weeks, and he left a few hundred of his old books out for us students to take. Vulturing through this vast and dusty pile the other day, I was struck by a couple of things: 1) the large number of dated, obscure critical theory books, and 2) the fact that, at the end of his career, this guy had just decided to ditch them all.

It was kind of a sobering sight, and I’ve been weighing various responses to it. I’ve come up with three:

1. Despair: this is where my work, if it ever gets published, will wind up in 30 years – on a table amidst other dusty relics, too old and obscure to sell or even interest grad students. This one’s an obvious trap. I shall avoid it.
2. Ambition: this won’t be my fate! I’ll become a Big Name! My work will endure! There are two problems with this one: it’s arrogant (and who needs more arrogant academics), and it’s impossible (there’s no way to predict how your work will be received).
3. Self-reliance: if this is the likely fate of my work as a critic, then I might as well produce stuff I really like and am proud of. Something I would want to read, at least. And the third bowl of porridge was just right!

This isn’t so much a revelation as a reminder, but I’ve found that writing my dissertation – which is largely a struggle to establish my voice – is making me  appreciate aphorisms.

A late entry in the ludology/narratology debate

Psychonauts: proof that gameplay isn’t the most important element of a videogame, as long as the narrative and visual design are brilliant. Don’t believe me? Watch the Zero Punctuation review, and then download the game from Steam (for $10 bucks!)

Ways that WoW frames individual identity

When people ask me what my dissertation is about, and their interest level warrants a more detailed answer than “World of Warcraft,” I’ll usually say, “the ways WoW frames individual identity.” As in, the ways the total sum of the game’s gameplay modes (all of the challenges it presents and the actions it allows) plus its user interface (the medium through which the game represents its gameplay, as well as its aesthetic elements) communicates to the player with regard to that player’s identity as an avatar in the game world. Man, that was hard to condense into a single sentence, even an unwieldy one. I’ll have to work on that.

Anyway, I sat down this morning to try to list off all of these ways. Not really to say anything about them (yet), but to make sure I named ‘em all. And thus to consider whether I’m trying to bite off more than I can chew here. For lack of time to do a fancy Photoshop illustration, I’ve put them in a table. But don’t be fooled by the neat, rigid columns: this is really a continuum.

Let me know if I’ve missed anything. I’ll begin fleshing these out in later posts.

The secret language of World of Warcraft [gasp] exposed!

Here’s some more evidence for why The Daily Show is brilliant for lampooning the news media: an NBC Bay Area report on “The Secret Language of World of Warcraft.”

Okay, what it’s really evidence of is the ability of the mainstream media to take a topic that’s complex and interesting and boil it down into a grey glob of blandness. And manage to get a bunch of details wrong along the way.

But what’s even more interesting are the comments about the video after the stories on Kotaku and Worldofwar.net, which exemplify some of the ways the WoW community functions. My personal highlights:

• Players’ analysis of their own rhetorical norms. There are long debates over the popularity (or even existence) of the terms the guy in the video used, over the spelling of certain terms, over the way usage of those terms mark you as a player. There are a surprising number of grammar nudniks in here – people that abhor all abbreviations and leetspeak and popular misspellings. I used to be one of these, but I find myself typing “lol” more and more these days. Cultural usages work their way into you.
• Personal attacks on players who brag about themselves. There seems to be no quicker way to incur the wrath of WoW players than by bragging. Or, in this case, letting your girlfriend brag:  the reporter claims that her boyfriend is “ranked in the top ten out of 12 million people who are playing World of Warcraft.” That’s asking for it. As a result, someone in the discussion forum posted a link to his avatar’s page on the WoW Armory. (For those of you who don’t know, the WoW Armory is a function in the game’s official website that lets you check out any avatar you want – their armor, talent spec, PvP ranks, achievements, etc. Basically, everything but the player’s account information. It’s a special kind of surveillance: the officially sanctioned, publicly available kind.)
  • (Side note: Dan – notice his server? Do you know this guy?)
• Players’ deep scrutiny of the game. Most of the discussion on Worldofwar.net is about the validity of the guy’s claim that he “5 capped AB in under 2 minutes” – whether it’s physically possible, whether the Alliance can do it, the strategies for making it work, etc. It’s a good illustration not only of the enormous microscope the WoW community applies to individuals’ claims about their achievements but also of the enjoyment many players get from analyzing the living hell out of this game. If only I could get my students to practice that much attention to detail.
• Players’ defensiveness about their representation. Amongst various complaints about how the video makes them look, a few of the commentators psychoanalyzed the reporter herself, delving into her blog and concluding that her hidden agenda is hatred for WoW. I’ve noticed that WoW players (myself included) tend to be very defensive about depictions of themselves in the mainstream media. Which is understandable, given recent stories.

UPDATE: It seems that KNTV-TV NBC has removed the video from YouTube with a “copyright claim,” and there’s no evidence of its existence on their website. (I wonder if they got spammed with complaints?) If anyone can find this video, I’ll give them a dollar.

The odd amorality of Tenpenny Tower

Since I’m still playing Fallout 3 almost exclusively, I thought I’d see if I can use it to reflect on WoW and the individual some more.

Fallout 3 is, as I’ve already written, very focused on the individual: as the single player character in the world, it’s as if the world is there to cater to you much more than in WoW: it responds to you, stuff and other NPCs are there for your interaction and manipulation. True, other NPCs will fight each other (i.e. ghouls and raiders), but 1) I suspect that they don’t do so unless you’re nearby, and 2) so what. The game is constantly giving you the illusion that it’s a world, and that the characters in it are going about their lives regardless of what you’re doing, but buying that is a matter of suspension-of-dis-immmersion (what’s the antonym of immersion?) than it being really true: the world stops and starts when you turn it on, and as I’ve said, everything in it is pretty much there for your taking. There are consequences to you of your actions: you gain or lose karma based on doing good or evil things, like helping people, giving water to beggars; vs. stealing, committing murder, etc. So: the game’s designers want you to care about what you do to the NPCs.

(However, sometimes there are odd consequence-free actions or times when something I do has an instant effect that the game doesn’t show – i.e., I turn in a quest, the NPC was supposed to go somewhere afterward, but they really were just standing there in front of me the whole time; but when I go somewhere they’re automatically there. Non-real-time stuff.)

But: the ludic setup of the game oftentimes makes me as player feel like the NPCs are little more than world resources, there to provide me with stuff and money and services. I don’t typically think of them as people, or characters, unless I choose to “get immersed” in the story.

Viz.: Tenpenny Tower. The prettiest location in the gameworld, without a doubt – a beautiful twenty-story hotel in the middle of nowhere. How’d it get there? Presumably, the ego/chutzpah/intelligence of Alistair Tenpenny, a rich old dude who lives at the top. I’m sent there to kill him by Mr. Crowley, a ghoul who claims that Tenpenny’s a ghoul-hater – which is true, though Crowley’s motivations are somewhat more complex and less retributive.  At any rate, Tenpenny is living in this fancy tower, as are a whole bunch of other people – his tenants. They have kind of a separatist elitist thing going on, and when I rolled up, there was a ghoul named Roy Phillips trying to get in to trade and being denied because he was a ghoul. He’s mad. The Tenpenny tower head guard will pay me to go kill the ghoul, which, when I arrive in his shitty tunnel, he gives me the option of turning around and doing the same thing back to the tower’s residents by letting him and a bunch of feral ghouls in through the basement. So there’s an interesting classism/racism story here.

The bigotry thing is part of a larger theme in the game story about ghouls and humans: the ghouls are humans who’ve been exposed to a shit-ton of radiation, and thus they look like hell, but they’re still human. Many humans, however, fear and despise the ghouls, treating them like monsters or even zombies (sometimes evoking old zombie myths, like having to shoot ghouls in the head – hilarious). The ghouls are persecuted and rejected and sometimes enslaved.

The way this affects the player is that a Good player will side with the ghouls – be nice to them, recognize their humanity, not be a bigot. The game makes this pretty obvious, though Crowley and Roy Phillips present interesting wrinkles in the cleanliness of the theme.

So the Roy story involves letting him and a bunch of truly wild “feral” ghouls into Tenpenny Tower. Feeling the sting of the Tower’s residents’ classism/racism, I decided to do this. The instant I had done it and re-entered the tower, the place was totally trashed, looking just like every other shitty, ruined setting in the gameworld. Corpses were everywhere, though many of the residents and guards were still alive, fleeing from and fighting the ghouls, respectively. I let the ghouls do their work, and they eventually killed every one of the humans. I felt a little bad about this – a lot of the people had been fairly nice to me, though there was certainly an air of snobbery amongst them. Most of them were elderly, which I’m not sure what to make of.

It was the first really evil thing I’d done in the game; otherwise, my avatar is Good, generally. But here’s the weird thing: my responsibility for all these murders netted me no bad karma. I got bad karma for stealing from their apartments and shops (which has made me ridiculously rich – so much for going through this game without more money than I know what to do with, like every other single-player RPG) but I got no bad karma for their deaths. True, I didn’t directly kill them, which would have earned bad karma, but I consider myself pretty damn responsible for their deaths. Killing Alistair Tenpenny had given me good karma, for some reason, too.

So what am I to make of this? Fallout 3 is, in general, full of moral choices and is consistent about their consequences. But I regard this sequence as a very strange lapse. And apparently, the designers made it this way on purpose. Here’s what I make of it:

• Killing people directly is Evil, but getting them killed doesn’t matter.

• However, stealing from people – even if they’re dead – is Evil.

• The ghouls may be persecuted by bigots, but that doesn’t mean they’re all virtuous. Roy’s actions basically fall into the theme of, “hold low expectations of people and they’ll live down to those expectations.” Presumably, all he’d wanted to do originally was be a member of the club: live in the tower, trade with people, etc. But their rejection of him makes him want to kill them all, and he does so without remorse and with gusto.  So is he a monster after all? Or, is the game telling us that the Tower’s residents’ bigotry makes them deserve death? If that’s the case, why is it acceptable for the player to engineer their death but not to kill them him/herself?

There’s more to chew on here on the broader issue of racism in this game, but I’ll leave that for another post.

Starting to straddle the single-player vs. MMO dichotomy?

Haven’t been playing WoW over the last few weeks: Christmas Break (Boise), then playing Fallout 3. It’s interesting, comparing my feelings about that game to my feelings about WoW. Fallout 3, being an RPG, definitely also operates from a basically individualist, capitalist paradigm: the player sees through the eyes of a single avatar, navigating a world and gaining in power/status/wealth; a hero or villain of renown. But because it’s a single-player game, Fallout 3 contains really interesting differences from an MMORPG.

In particular, the player can affect the gameworld greatly, permanently killing NPCs and garnering a permanent reputation with NPCs. WoW and other MMORPGs are historically bad at this – it being pretty much impossible for individuals to change the world and still have a fair playing field for all – although WoW in particular combats this problem in a couple of ways:

• The phased instancing thing they started doing with Lich King
• NPC factions, with whom an avatar has certain status. This status can change, depending on the player doing quests for the faction, killing its members, allying with a rival faction (i.e. Aldor and Scryers), etc.

Therefore, the classic dichotomy of control-the-world-all-by-yourself vs. exist-with-others-but-in-a-static-space between single-player games and MMOs isn’t quite as neat as I’d thought. Even though MMOs came later, it almost appears to me now as if the single-player game is trying to mimic the kind of status/ethos that an MMO world gets automatically. Especially Fallout 3, where your actions affect NPCs’ attitudes toward you but you can’t easily see what those effects are (even garnering favor or enmity of groups that you don’t meet, like the Talon Mercs, who showed up randomly to carry out a hit on me because I’d been doing good deeds). Fallout 3 is trying to approximate the ways that ethos works in an MMO with other players, or in real life: you don’t immediately see the consequences of your behavior vis-a-vis other people. A move toward realism for this game? Yes. But ironically, also a move towards something the MMO gets by default.