Transcript Public Rhetoric and Practical Communication Digital Games and Rhetoric Elizabeth Losh CAT 125: Lecture 10 http://losh.ucsd.edu.

Public Rhetoric and Practical Communication
Digital Games and Rhetoric
Elizabeth Losh
CAT 125: Lecture 10
http://losh.ucsd.edu
Outline
• Speaking as a participant-observer, life hacker, objectoriented ontologist, and feminist about games
• Thinking about gender and sexuality
• Thinking about agency: To shoot or not to shoot?
• Laurel’s “Video Games and Computer Holding Power”
• Thinking about systems of value
• Thinking about who is breaking the rules?
• Thinking about appropriation
• Thinking about causality
• Introducing Bogost’s “Procedural Rhetoric”
1. Participant-Observation
Research Questions
• How does monitoring the daily routines of others
allow players to optimize play experiences
without direct collaboration?
• How is social surveillance functioning?
• How are rules of negative politeness tested?
• What kinds of social contracts do these new
forms of reciprocity entail?
• How is the line between player and NPC
changing? Turing Game or crowd sourcing?
• Empathy or membership economy?
Archival Research and Field Work
Edward Castronova, Arden
Avoiding Mistakes
Cynthia Haynes on “god games”
Studying Designers: Ian Bogost
Bogost’s “News Games”
Airport Insecurity (2005) and Jet Set (2009)
2. Life Hacking
Johan Huizinga
“The Magic Circle”
Questioning Huizinga’s “Magic Circle”
• Markets
• Politics
• Law
What is Fair?
Tracy Fullerton’s Pathfinder (2010)
Alternate Reality Games
Ian Bogost and Jane McGonigal
Cruel to be Kind (2006)
Jane McGonigal
World Without Oil (2007)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-hzUGFD-Gc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oz_2OWHHC0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xmq-eLgF-2s
3. Object-Oriented Ontology
Philosophers interested in object-to-object
relations
Philosophers building on Actor-Network Theory
and assemblage theory
How Do We Understand a World of
Devices and Contingent Relations?
How Do We Form Allies?
The “loser” is defined as “the one who failed
to assemble enough human, natural, artificial,
logical, and inanimate allies to stake a claim to
victory” (Graham Harman, paraphrasing
Bruno Latour in Prince of Networks)
4. Feminism
Feminist approaches to games are not just
about promoting “girls games”
Brenda Laurel of Paper Moon
Feminism Studies Masculinity Too
Betsy Disalvo and
Amy Bruckman on
African-American teens
T.L. Taylor and
Emma Witkowski
on LAN Parties
Feminist Theory Also involves
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Property
Labor
Space
Agency
Two Legacies of the Sixties
The Situationists
The New Games Movement
From a Game to a Videogame
Kriegspiel
Would You Shoot This Iraqi?
Wafaa Bilal
Shoot an Iraqi and Virtual Jihadi
Joseph DeLappe’s Dead in Iraq
My Trip to Liberty City
Jim Munroe
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4Laeqr9e-k
Tale of Tales The Path (2009)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aBHppjmBmQ
Sherry Turkle
Books:
Simulation and Its Discontents (2009)
Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (1995)
The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (1984)
A sociologist in Science Studies who teaches at MIT
Once married to and a collaborator with
Seymour Papert, author of Mindstorms
How “human-machine love” can be unsettling
Angry German Kid
and “Affective Computing”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbcctWbC8Q0
Turkle’s Cases
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The girl playing Asteroids in the arcade
The kids playing educational games at the shore
Playing Pac-Man herself
Jarish going from pinball to videogames like Robotron
The development of Spacewar, Pong, and Joust
Adventure, fantasy games, and D&D lore
Marty, Roger, David, and adult players
Matthew, the five-year-old afraid of an infinite game
Jimmy and Space Invaders
The King of Kong (2010)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3K7wpatALDQ
Turkle’s Claims
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Holding power is “aggressive, passionate, and eroticized” (500)
“people are ambivalent about the growing computer presence” (500)
“a culture of rules and simulation” (501)
The myth of “mindless” addiction – analogies to television and to
drugs (501)
“strategic thinking” of “computational specificity” – the comparison
with chess and the contrast with pinball (501-502)
The liberation of games from “physical laws” and the “real world”
(502)
Despite complexity “there is a program behind, there are rules” (504)
Games as a gateway to computer programming (504-505)
“The entertainment industry has long believed that the highest payoffs
would come from offering the public media that combine action and
imaginative identification” (505)
Contact between “the child’s culture and the culture of simulation”
(506)
Describing making “play into an intensely private ritual” (511)
Turkle’s Questions (506)
• Will the player of the games of the future be in a
more complex world than is offered by today’s
games but still in a world that is created by
someone else?
• Or will the player be the designer of his or her
own game?
• In other words, will players continue to be
“users” of someone else’s program or will they be
programmers in their own right?
• Will they be able to create new characters and
change the rules of the game?
What Has Changed Since 1984?
• Advances in graphics and programming that
Turkle predicted
• Social games
• Mobile games
• Casual games
• Elevation of game narratives – Shadow of the
Colossus, Dante’s Inferno, etc.
• Mixing of real lives and virtual lives
• Rise of game economies
• Cultures around cheating, modding, and hacking
What Does Money Represent?
Gold Farmers, Speculation, and Ludocapitalism
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dkkf5NEIo0
“Ni Hao”
Who Is Breaking the Rules?
The Serenity Now Funeral Raid
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHJVolaC8pw
Mia Consalvo
Tactical Iraqi
Rhetoric about the Influence of Games:
Understanding and Misunderstanding Appropriation
May 4th, 2006: United States House Permanent Select
Committee on Intelligence
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATSz9ulJflg
One of the latest video games modified by militants is the
popular "Battlefield 2" from leading video game publisher,
Electronic Arts Inc of Redwood City, California.
Jeff Brown, a spokesman for Electronic Arts, said enthusiasts
often write software modifications, known as "mods," to video
games.
"Millions of people create mods on games around the world," he
said. "We have absolutely no control over them. It's like drawing
a mustache on a picture."
David Morgan, Reuters
It wasn't intended for the purpose what it was portrayed
to be by the media. So no I don't regret making a funny
video . . . why should I?
The only thing I regret is thinking that news from Reuters
was objective and always right. The least they could do is
some online research before publishing this.
If they label me al-Qaeda just for making this silly video,
that makes you think, what is this al-Qaeda? And is
everything al-Qaeda?
"Samir”
The oral tradition now also has an aspect of rumor. A(n) event
takes place. There is an explosion in a city.
Rumor is that the United States Air Force dropped a bomb and is
doing indiscriminate killing.
This ends up being discussed on the street. It ends up showing up
in a Friday sermon in a mosque or in another religious institution.
It then gets recycled into written materials. Media picks up the
story and broadcasts it, at which point it's now a fact.
In this particular case that we were telling you about, it showed up
on a network television, and their propaganda continues to go
back to this false initial report on network television and continue
to reiterate that it's a fact, even though the United States
government has proven that it was not a fact, even though the
network has since recanted the broadcast.
Witness Eric Michael
And there you see how all these products are linked together.
And you can see where the games are set to psychologically
condition you to go kill coalition forces.
You can see how they use humor.
You can see how the entire campaign is carefully crafted to first
evoke an emotion and then to evoke a response and to direct
that response in the direction that they want.
Witness Eric Michael
Furplay’s “Cantina Crawls”
in Star Wars Galaxies
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dTVgu0AQKo
Making Arguments
The French Democracy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stu31sz5ivk
Forms of Explanation: Game Causality
Figuring Out Grow Cube
http://www.eyezmaze.com/grow/cube/
Forms of Explanation: Game Causality
Gonzalo Frasca, September 12th
http://www.flashgames247.com/play/315.html
Rhetorics of Failure
The McDonald’s Game
(2006)
Darfur is Dying
(2006)
AntiWargame (2004)
For Next Time . . .
Procedural Rhetoric