CeME just needs a grant… or a big investor…

The short clip of the train riders playing pong on the train floor is extremely fascinating to me. It’s a case of pulling participation out of the digital and placing it squarely in the physical world. And that is a growing interest of mine. I want to make the digital and physical converge in interesting ways. Ideas abound. But, I want to make something happen.

Mark Poster is an emeritus faculty member at the University of California, Irvine. You can find his faculty page here, although he is not listed in his department’s current faculty listing.

Wikipedia has the only extensive bibliography of his I could find. His last major publication appears to be his book, What’s Wrong With the Internet (2001).

His faculty homepage trumpets an award from Lycos (seriously…).

Interestingly, his output seems to have tailed off right about the time the internet started to turn much more participatory in nature.

“Postmodern Virtualities”

Poster constructs an analysis of the then-still-emerging internet in the mid 1990s as a vehicle for exploring the dynamic nature of subjective identities and relationships that inhere to postmodern culture. He quickly narrates the development of mass media as a (mostly) one-to-many system of information distribution falling under the hegemonic control of those with the financial resources to manufacture the necessary equipment and distribution infrastructure. The “bidirectional communication systems” constituted by the internet asked for a reassessment of media consumption and production as relatively cheap means of production/distribution could be more widely disseminated to the average consumer.

From this, the notion of the “virtual” leads to a realization that “culture is increasingly simulational” so that “‘reality’ becomes multiple” (p. 538). Poster correctly predicts a few key shifts that will later happen in the late 1990s, including the impact of these information distribution systems on media products like music. We all know the infamous Napster debacle. A key and interesting point to take from that is how cheap and massive distribution systems altered the political landscape. For instance, Metallica wasn’t always so hostile to fans who gave away recordings of their music:

The use of Lars Ulrich’s image in this video was purely unintentional, and I did not want to violate said intellectual property…I swear…

But just in case he’s pissed off at me (WARNING: NOT EVEN REMOTELY SAFE FOR WORK):

Back to the point… Poster acknowledges the formulation of identities in these networks as contingent upon the interrelationships of subjects within “virtual” communities that seem simultaneously “real” (phenomenologically) and fictional (p. 543). Since the realities within these networks are “fanciful imaginings” that “evoke play and discovery…a simulational practice is set in place which forever alters the conditions under which the identity of the self is formed” (p. 539) — something Metallica apparently knows rather unwittingly…

The materiality of these communication systems highlights the nature of identity as a practice, therefore more explicitly rendering identity as “unstable, multiple and diffuse” (p. 540) as participants become more aware of the alternatives afforded to them for identity exploration. Immediately after this statement, Poster turns this recognition toward the collapse of communication and economic binaries into each other — perhaps one of the earliest formations of the “produser” or “prosumer.”

Thoughts

Though dated at this point, we can see within Poster’s analysis the kernels for a media studies analysis of the participatory web and the cultures that have grown alongside it. Though the idealized virtual reality systems he discusses have never really come to fruition, we’ve still managed to invoke a wide array of communities, and even “worlds,” online that command our attention and focus it in unanticipated ways.

(b. 1934

Currently the William A Lane Professor of Comparative Literature and Romance Studies at Duke University.

His list of publications is downright mind-boggling, officially listing nearly 150 journal articles.

Our reading, published in 1984, would form the basis for Jameson’s 1991 book of the same title.

Here, you’ll find a YouTube video of a keynote lecture that “Fred” gave at Duke in 2008(?). [Would have embedded it, but Duke disabled the option.]

“Postmodernism…”

Where to even begin? The article is encyclopedic in its scope, both in terms of art objects discussed and in terms of the different valences that postmodernism had taken by 1984. To risk VASTLY oversimplifying this, the basic principle Jameson explores is the one most often attributed to postmodernism: namely, that a postmodern culture is one unmoored to any referent beyond itself, or one of its own creation. The results, Jameson suggests, stem from 4 “constitutive features of the postmodern” (p. 487):

1. Depthlessness — a flattening of meaning so that art no longer lends itself to hermeneutical analysis (p. 488) because it rejects the metaphysics of the Cartesian dual subject (p. 490).
2. Weakening of historicity — history is no longer to be found at the base of a work of art, as it is replaced by pastiche, historicity, and nostalgia.
3. Intensities — a replacement for genuine emotion and affect that is driven by quantity rather than quality, detached from concrete situations and context that give rise to real emotional attachment.
4. Technology — the impact that technological innovation has had on the work of art, both as formal and aesthetic artifact, as well as political and economic vehicle.

Jameson states, “The world thereby momentarily loses its depth and threatens to become a glossy skin, a stereoscopic illusion, a rush of filmic images without density. But is this now a terrifying or an exhilarating experience?” (p. 504).

1. Depthlessness

Though Jameson never uses the term, it’s difficult to avoid the implicit presence of Benjamin’s aura as an underlying concept. Jameson states of the origins of the work of art, “Unless that situation — which has vanished into the past — is somehow mentally restored, the [work of art] will remain an inert object, a reified end-product, and be unable to be grasped as a symbolic act in its own right, as praxis and as production” (p. 487). Contrasting van Gogh and Warhol, Jameson explores this inertia as the product of art not only as the object of mechanical reproduction, but of mechanical reproduction as a theme within postmodern art.

Peasant Shoes

Diamond Dust Shoes

Jameson argues that “depth is replaced by surface” (p. 490) since Warhol’s “Diamond Dust Shoes” neither care nor attempt any sense of connection beyond the spectacle of the image itself. “Here…we have a random collection of dead objects, hanging together on the canvas like so many turnips, short of their earlier life-world as the pile of shoes left over from Auschwitz” (p. 488). By removing the contexts that support some sort of “hermeneutic gesture,” the image evokes nothing more specific than a general melange of disconnected, or “schizophrenic,” perceptions. The image can no longer carry specific meaning because there is no longer a distinction between the internal and external worlds of the perceiving subject.

Hence, fully formed emotional responses, tied to concrete, material experiences, are no longer possible either — what Jameson labels the “waning of affect” (p. 489-490).

2. Weakening of historicity

This disconnect between representation and referent leads to a distancing of historical origin — even to its wholesale dismantling, to be replaced by “the random cannibalization of all the styles of the past” (p. 494) so that pastiche is nothing more than a “neutral…mimicry” of parody (p. 493), nostalgia nothing more than the longing for a vaguely defined past that never existed (p. 495). Instead of lying under representation as a subtext injecting context into the work of art, history becomes a co-constructed node within the dynamic relationships that mutate around works of art, the artists, and the audiences. More importantly, the postmodern artist works to highlight that this is the case through increasingly sophisticated meta-textual movements, like intertext or metanarrative.

We need only look as far as Disney films or superhero reboots for examples. At one point, Jameson highlights moments in which nostalgia is mobilized as a form of critique against contemporary society. After looking at the visual style of van Gogh’s “Peasant Shoes,” I couldn’t help but think of Fievel Mousekewitz. An American Tail (1986) was repeatedly shown to me as a kid in school as an example of families pulling together in times of crisis, viewing their challenges as opportunities rather than obstacles. Using the (literal) rich fat-cat image as a symbol of greed and corruption, the film tied together the worst aspects of late 19th century political corruption with the rising mid-80s awareness that corporate corruption was a major issue. We, in rural Eastern Kentucky, identified with a small house trying to survive as an outsider in a world that was largely hostile to his existence. As a nostalgia piece, the film opened itself for us as kids to identify with the Mousekewitz’s as a repressed-yet-optimistic family who could overcome anything with a little faith. (We had a vague idea that they were Russian, itself an interesting concept in the mid-1980s. However, that Fievel and his family were Jewish was never, ever mentioned to us.)

3. Intensities

As stated earlier, intensity replaces emotion as one of the primary responses the subject can have to the postmodern work of art. Intensity is never explicitly defined, but can be vaguely reconstructed as a disbursed and ephemeral set of responses at work because the self is dead. “This is not to say that the cultural products of the postmodern era are utterly devoid of feeling, but rather that such feelings…are now free-floating and impersonal, and tend to be dominated by a peculiar kind of euphoria” (p. 492). This euphoria seems a byproduct of mechanical processes that push receptive processes to the point of “schizophrenia.” Quoting Lacan, Jameson describes schizophrenia not as a clinical diagnosis, but as a semiotic meltdown: “a breakdown in the signifying chain” that gives rise to meaning simultaneously arranged sides that mutually co-construct context(s) for each other (p. 500). This fragmentation reduces emotion to intensity by disconnecting perception from the work of art. If the semiotic operations within the work are unintelligible beyond an arbitrary imposition of meaning, then true emotional response is impossible. The audience isn’t responding to the work of art as an object, but to their own internalized perceptions that are only ambiguously and vaguely connected to anything actually represented in the work. Think Transformers or GI Joe as just a mustering of little boys’ fantasies about themselves.

4. Technology

Here is where the “logic of late capitalism” starts to emerge as an economic force that operates alongside postmodern culture. Drawing on Ernest Mandel’s historicization of capitalism into three distinct stages, Jameson ties the demands on the audience as active participant into the economy that sees mechanical reproduction as an end unto itself, rather than a means of supplying necessary goods. Though written well before its introduction to consumer markets, it’s easy to see the internet as the next logical step in the progression of late capitalism from pure production of goods into an information economy that values distributed knowledge production. The products themselves are less and less valued in the face of the [often free] work used to create them as well as the distribution networks that perpetuate their existence.

Thoughts

As seen in the fights about intellectual property that arose in the late 90s/early 2000s, the concept of the “product” has, itself, become a simulacrum. In an information economy, the truly valuable commodities are all either the practice of the audience, or often have a hidden material reality. The digitization of information makes knowledge work (the work of a participatory culture) much easier since the tools of production (computers and software) and the distribution systems (the internet) are far more readily available than the heavy machinery of industrialization could ever be. The tools on the “back end” of information systems are things that most participants are, at best, only vaguely aware of. Overlaying interface systems that simplify the use of these tools means that the truly important aspects of information economies can take place underneath the noses of participants, without them ever catching a whiff of the processes themselves.

In essence, one Jamesonian reading of participatory cultures might see a re-emergence of a duality within postmodern culture. The duality of the ephemeral and the material have reinstated themselves, only now the ephemeral information while the material is the systems (hardware and software) that make work possible. At leas that’s my application of his theory. Take it for what it’s worth.

This paper argues for the synthesis of media studies with theories from professional writing to establish richer frameworks for the critical evaluation of participatory cultures and the mediascapes that materialize around them. As media production, distribution, and consumption are increasingly remediated through readily available consumer technologies like computers and mobile phones, a number of theories have been adapted or put forward to establish frameworks for critical and cultural analysis of media content. The most important observation to emerge from this scholarship is that such content is no longer simply an object of study, but a site of practice for the audience in convergent media systems (Jenkins, 2006 & 2009; Booth, 2008). The technologies available to consumers and the material work or play they support unmask the audience’s reception of media content by fostering audience activities with that content. Meaning is recast not only as interpretation, but as motives and goals enacted by the audience. The distribution supported by the participatory web places the products of the audience’s work or play into their own dynamic streams of activity, as well.

By fusing methodologies from professional writing and information design — deconstructed information architectures (Johnson-Eilola, 2006); activity theory (Engestrom, 2000; Spinuzzi, 2003) — with media convergence (Jenkins, 2006), we can map a method for analyzing convergent media experiences as emerging from activities that persistently repurpose and rehistoricize media content through computer supported collaborative work (CSCW). In doing so, we can bolster critical media studies scholarship by understanding the underlying capabilities and limitations that support convergence within the audience’s work.

I demonstrate the value of this hybrid method by tracing the audience work and play surrounding the level creation tools of Media Molecule’s Little Big Planet (2008). Specifically, I will focus on the licensing of Alan Moore’s Watchmen (1986 & 1987) as downloadable content offered by Media Molecule for players to use for their own creative projects. Content provided on the company’s website will be analyzed in conjunction with video of player-created game levels that make use of this content by recreating and adapting events from Moore’s original story and its film adaptation (2009). This will be bolstered by an activity theory analysis of Little Big Planet’s level and character creation tools to understand the design (and hence narrative) capabilities afforded to the player. Examining both the visual and narrative themes of the game design as well as the graphic novel, in conjunction with the work analysis necessary to create player-generated levels, will unveil new insights into the concept of audience practice as meaningful cultural engagement.

In recognition of the growing call for audience empowerment in media experiences, the final section of the paper will take up the common professional writing strategy of offering design solutions so as to better foster participatory engagement in media systems by looking at Little Big Planet and its community as an example of the successes of such systems.

Barthes’ father was killed in WWI when he was only a year old. Raised by his mother, he dealt with repeated illness issues his whole life, including Tuberculosis. These problems kept him out of WWII. They also meant that he often had difficulty procurring teaching positions throughout his career.

He was also gay, and much of his work is often read in light of this fact. His resistance to bourgeois cultural values is often interpreted as a function of his sexual identity.

Barthes published extensively, solidfying his reputation as a scholar and theorist. “The Death of the Author,” his famous 1967 essay, argued that text created by the author supplanted the author’s authority within culture. Ironically, it also led to Barthes’ great critical reception by other literary theorists. Wikipedia has long bibliography of Barthes’ work.

“Mythologies” and “The Eiffel Tower”

Barthes saw myth as a set of semiotic relationships. And though, as any reader can see, he offers a meticulous and complex analysis of the semiotic operations at work, I’ve tried to keep it relatively simple for my own benefit. He calls myth an example of “speech” primarily because he sees it as a semiotic system. The easiest place to start are his assertions about myth’s function and character — that it commits “language robbery” (p. 131) by aiming for “immediate impression” rather than allowing thoughtful analysis (p. 130). Myth can do this because, through an elaborate semiological system, it “distorts” meaning by “distancing” history from the signifier. It doesn’t destroy this meaning, needing it as a vague and fuzzy base upon which to build. Instead, distance can be filled with whatever the bourgeois deem culturally or politically expedient by appropriating what they want from the meaning underneath. (Barthes sees myth as a distinctly bourgeois, right-wing phenomenon.)

His most prominent example is this, the young black boy in French soldier’s garb, seen here. The image is an amalgamation of French colonialism and patriotism, expressed through visual signifiers, that is instantly recognizable as an attempt to perpetuate the myth of French Imperialism. Barthes’ purpose is to establish a rigorous method that can uncover the mythic operation at work in the image, and hence offer resistant readings of it. In Barthes’ terms, “he is the very presence of French imperiality” (p. 128, emphasis in the original). What he means is that recovering this image from its mythical structure is an act that simultaneously exposes the myth’s operations, as well as the history that is being marginalized. Repeatedly, Barthes argues that this marginalization, or distancing at work in the semiological system, amounts to a “naturalization” of the myth.

In some sense, there is a connection to be made between Barthes and Benjamin’s concept of the aura. In effect, Benjamin is arguing this same distancing between the foundation of reality and the experience of stories about reality. The mechanically reproduced work of art is a myth that can be understood as a decontextualization of the hard reality of the artwork.

Barthes applies this method to the Eiffel Tower as a way of explicating its differing relationships to Parisians versus outsiders. The feeling imposed by an experience — that which evokes sentimental attachment to abstractions about time, place, or event — can serve as a way of distancing the observer from the history that might be found in the pre-mythic semiological system.

But Stephen Colbert can explain it better than I can:

Smythe was a Canadian-born scholar who worked as an economist in a number of government agencies in the United States in the early 2oth century. He was vocal about his socio-political stances, which often left him at odds with authorities, including difficulties getting published when he turned to teaching at the University of Illinois during the 1950s. See his Wikipedia page for more, or see this encyclopedia entry.

The International Association for Media and Communication Research gives an award named in honor of Smythe for quality scholarship dedicated to exploring the relationship between media and political economy.

Dependency Road: Communications, Capitalism, Consciousness, and Canada (1981) is Smythe’s most widely known and excerpted work. He has a number of journal articles credited to him. An essay collection is also dedicated to him, and is, ironically enough, extremely expensive.

“On the Audience Commodity and Its Work”

Our excerpt, taken from Smythe’s 1981 book, seeks to recast critical Marxist theories about mass media, grounding them in a more “objective and realistic” theoretical framework (p. 231). In his estimation, previous efforts were, at best, incomplete because they did not consider “real life processes” (p. 231) that determined the relationship between media, advertisers, and audiences. He develops the concept of “audience power,” which he defines as an audience’s ability to “buy goods and spend their income accordingly” (p. 243) so as to perpetuate capitalism and therefore reify state-held power (p. 233). To accomplish this, Smythe argues that free- or leisure-time is really only an illusion that hides actual work and the commodification of virtually the entire life of any given individual who lives in a capitalistic society. By focusing conscious attention on the spectacle contained within media, “the real situation is mystified out of existence” (p. 241). Instead of viewing advertising as a necessity for creating and broadcasting media, Smythe views “non-advertising” content as a trojan horse really designed to sneak advertising into the homes, lives, and thought processes of audiences — what he terms a “free lunch” (p. 242-3). The effect, as he puts it, is to “reaffirm the status quo and retard change” (p. 243).

Questions and Connections

Several questions stick out to me:

• Is his approach any more realistically grounded than those he dismisses?
• How does his theory compare to other cultural materialist theories of media?
• How does the participatory internet alter or affirm his notion that industrialization destroys creativity (p. 233)?

Smythe is a determinist, but not in the same way as McLuhan. Whereas McLuhan sees all (or at least most) human agency as irrelevant in the face of technological form, Smythe sees technological form as an extension of market capitalist ideology, and as the site of a “social process” through which the relationship between people and commodities is formed. Instead of being the actor with the most agency, technology becomes the conduit through which agency is controlled. He’s similar to Williams in this point, yet the audience is just as unable to affect this process as they are in McLuhan’s scheme. The use of the “free lunch” is distracting enough to hide the areas in need of critical examination.

Thus, I find him oddly reminiscent of Gramsci, in spite of his insistence that he’s more “objectively” and “realistically” grounded than Gramsci and others. Really, he seems primarily intent on providing empirical evidence of media as a hegemonic process. Yet, he does seem just as guilty in over-generalizing his theories, particularly with respect to print journalism pre-WWI.

Thoughts?

Click to go to Ducheneaut's PARC information page.

Nic Ducheneaut completed his PhD in 2003 at the UC Berkeley School of Information.

He works as a senior researcher at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). He primarily studies online game communities.

You can find a summary of his current projects here, and an extensive list of publications here.

He has a LinkedIn account and a Twitter feed. However, his Twitter stream is locked from general view.

Click the image to go to Moore's MySpace page.

Robert J. Moore formerly worked at Xerox PARC, and has also worked extensively as a game designer. Clicking the image will take you to his MySpace page, which seems to be his primary web-presence.

Summary

Ducheneaut and Moore present an ethnographic study of social interactions within Everquest Online Adventures for the PS2. They use participant observation to observe players at work within an online space, exploring the ways players socially interact to complete game tasks, as well as develop peer bonds within groups. Their essential thesis is that MMORPGs can highlight ways that games can be used to teach social interaction. They explore this idea by focusing on three factors:

Player self-organization

Players learn to organize themselves into groups to accomplish game-based tasks and establish community. The game’s design demands that players learn to cooperate and coordinate their actions in order to achieve goals. Players cannot play as individuals.

Instrumental interactions

Players must take on a role, learn its function, and master its tools to be useful to a group. In addition, these interactions provide the player with a certain amount of social capital that can then be spent in other ways.

Sociability

Players acclimate themselves to the social conventions of the game community. They adopt an identity and role, build reputation, and establish effective peer bonds with other players.

In-game text chat allows players to communicate more effectively, sometimes tailoring preset chat commands to relay more detailed information as players seek out social connection and to accomplish tasks.

Ducheneaut and Moore conclude that MMOs provide excellent examples of social learning that can then be used for actual teaching and pedagogy.

Discussion

The article provides a thoroughly detailed case-study that is an excellent example of ethnographic methods as they can be applied to online communities. Games provide specific social contexts around which players construct identities and relationships. They are already constructed frameworks that can establish community quickly and easily. The social nature of gameplay in MMOs provides a rich data set for researchers to explore.

Click image to go to Rutter's CRIC homepage.

Links**

Rutter’s page @ Center for Research on Innovation and Competition. He’s a researcher for the Manchester Institute of Innovative Research.

RCCS book review of Virtual Methods (2007)

Rutter’s Digiplay Initiative, focusing on games studies.

Digiplay Twitter

Introductory Chapter of Understanding Digital Games (2006), edited by Rutter and Bryson.

**I could find virtually no web presence for Gregory W. H. Smith outside of references to this article and a book titled Analyzing Visual Data (1992).

Summary

This book chapter grows from a paper presented in 2002, and is available in Virtual Methods: Issues in Social Research on the Internet (2005), edited by Christine Hine (preview available on Google Books; also available here). Rutter and Smith discuss ethnographic research methods as they might apply to online communities and the researchers who examine them. In this chapter specifically, they studied newsgroup discussion lists. In their words, they wanted to understand “how sociability is discursively constructed in a text-based environment” (p. 81-82). To that end, they archived and catalogued messages exchanged between participants, as well as conducted F2F interviews with some of the newsgroup’s members. They also examined the available web-presence of some members. Rutter and Smith describe their work as “participant observation” working with “thick description.”

In their research, they faced several major questions about defining the community they were studying, as well as their roles as researchers within that community.

What is this place?

The authors state plainly that “online ethnography describes places that are not spaces” (p. 84). As a result, much of the research process they describe can be carried out “at researchers’ own office” and can be automated with the right software (p. 84). The lack of explicit spatiality means they do not engage with the community online that often. Instead, they work with text itself, noting patterns of usage and content. One reason for this is the “asynchronous nature” of the communication within such a system.

The messages had no natural “link” to the time and space in which they were created, only to the times and spaces in which they were consumed. The ordering, timing and association with other messages was not uniformly constructed within the newsgroup and the virtual space created for it by the participants, but in their own everyday use of these texts. (p. 85)

Rutter and Smith go on to suggest that “we need to be very cautious about the where” researchers focus upon (p. 85).

Inclusion of research outside of the office

Though they suggest they primarily focused their data collection upon the text generated within the newsgroup, the authors did supplement their research with interviews and with attendance to the newsgroup’s face-to-face convention, RumRendezvous. While the researchers wished to share their findings with the group, they had to counter-balance such a desire with the need to maintain anonymity for the newsgroup users (even though some wished to be openly identified in publication.

Ethical concerns

Any ethnographic researcher faces critical ethical questions about their research practices. The need for studying and understanding the culture is important, but so is maintaining confidentiality and privacy of the research subjects. Researchers should often participate in the culture, but they must answer how and when they should do so. Rutter and Smith explore the limits of “participant observation” within online communities.

It is very difficult for the online ethnographer to maintain a stable presence in a virtual environment when people cannot see that you are there. This is made worse with the constantly changing composition of many virtual environments as new people arrive and others leave – mostly unannounced. Ethically, how are we supposed to negotiate informed consent? Do we opt for maintaining the letter of the law with regular postings that announce our research identities and our presence as researchers or do we, after a general announcement of our presence, slip into a more naturalistic mode? (p. 89)

What role should the researcher play within the community? How does working online complicate this question further? The authors note that they never completely extricated themselves from the community. It’s availability online make the community both persistent and easily accessible.

This persistence also raises a question of how to deal with online communications that are openly accessible for public viewing. Does this also mean that those communications are public in a social sense? Or does their context make them something else? Rutter and Smith argue that they should be treated closer to private communications.

Connections to other readings

Obviously, Rutter and Smith connect with many of our readings for the semester. They explore questions of methods and methodology central to the work of Baym, and more implicitly, Rheingold.

Limits and questions

Though the article makes mention of methods that are deeply entrenched in the need to articulate and understand the contexts of social practices, it doesn’t offer much concerning how the researchers connected their offline research with patterns they saw in online communication and communities.

How do they see participants in these communities? Individuals fulfilling individual needs? Or community members playing specific roles?

How does offline context affect online practice?

How do users understand spatiality within online communities?

As computer technology has significantly progressed in recent years — resulting in high resolution graphics, improved sound design, and more sophisticated control interfaces — these experiences become less and less dependent on traditional techniques of representation and communication. Video games can be seen as procedural systems [Bogost 2007, Malaby 2007] designed to create such experiences, ones with which players want to engage. Player experiences are contingent upon the relationships of six configurative elements: rules and fiction that govern the gamespace [Juul 2005]; perception, emotion, cognition, and action experienced cognitively by the player [Grodal 2003]. Developing analytical tools informed by an interdisciplinary framework allows us to not only critically analyze games more clearly for cultural and technological importance, but to also design games to more effectively take advantage of their communicative potential. These tools should account for affective elements of such experiences, or what Eugenie Shinkle [2008] has labeled “proprioception”. The relationships of these elements to one another are contingent upon the player’s embodied affective responses that emanate from the player in non-linear ways. The purpose of this paper is to synthesize several theories of games analysis, rhetoric,
and representation into a reconfigurable and interdisciplinary model that can usefully analyze the player’s proprioceptive experience. I’ll demonstrate the model’s efficacy through the experiences of two very different games: Grand Theft Auto IV [2008] and The Arcade Wire: Airport Security [2006]. Both depend upon affective player responses to create satirical commentary upon cultural and social problems. They engage unit operations [Bogost 2006] that can be termed “player frustration” as an important element of the player experience. Yet, that frustration is generated and deployed in very different ways: how can such a unit operation be utilized more effectively, and when is it subverted by other unit operations? Assessing the relationships of different elements allows us to see how unit operations work in conjunction and work against one another.

Grafting together Juul’s examination of fiction and rules and Torben Grodal’s cognitive model of narrative, I sketch a method with which understand elements of the experience players encounter, as well as what can be represented to and through the player in that event. Discovering similar unit operations at work within GTA IV and Airport Security allows us to contrast these experiences and the messages communicated through them to better understand how to design for affective elements of player experiences.

The final piece focuses solely on Airport Security.  And, I’ve found that Grodal has elaborated further on his model in his new book Embodied Visions (2009).  Unfortunately, I just managed to snag a copy a couple of days ago.  He develops his ideas I based this paper on into a more robust model he’s dubbed the “PECMA flow model”: Perception, Emotion, Cognition, Motor Action.  Grodal primarily focuses on film, but I think his theory has wonderful potential for constructing useful analytics for interrogating gaming experiences.  PECMA, so far as I can tell, adapts nicely to different media because it assesses narrative and representation as an audience’s experience, and not solely a structural consideration embedded within specific media.

Grodal wants to recover the audience’s experiences from both pure biological determinism and extreme post-structural social constructivism.  An audience’s experience is an amalgamation of “innate dispositions [as] flexible frameworks within which…[t]he development of culture has provided new options for satisfying” inherent psycho-social needs (p. 8).

Rather than assuming that the mind is totally socially constructed and hence completely malleable, a more cautious assumption would be a relative malleability: innate dispositions can be activated by exposure, deactivated by lack of exposure, and modified with certain limits. (p. 11)

As someone trained in a postmodern literary environment, turning to biology to partially explain some things long relegated to semiotics and aesthetics can be a disconcerting step.  Everything within the core of my scholarly being reflexively turns to social construction as to account for meaningful experiences.  But PECMA resonates too well with my own experiences in game spaces and participatory cultures, and it seems to resonate very well with emerging ethnographic research on gaming experiences and online gaming communities.