Kill Screen Article on Textualism and Contextualism

A quick link to another Kill Screen post, this one on textualism and rule enforcement. I thought the idea had interesting ramifications in video games since we are all so used to to literal enforcement. The conversation about enjoying good old fashioned table top RPGs or looser experiences is nothing new, but it was interesting to twist the idea around to law then back into games.

I will have to think of something clever for the next one though, I'm not satisfied with the link ratios just yet. I can do better. With gaming culture there is always one sure-fire method for doing this: write about a classic hit. Unfortunately none of them seem to be about law. Or not yet anyways.

Challenging material to produce, hopefully not to read though.

Content Degradation in Modern Warfare 3

The leaves have changed and fallen, the days grow cold, and yet another Call of Duty game has been rented and returned. I picked up Modern Warfare 3 from redbox and made a weekend of it with my Brother and Cousin. We drank Bushmills and passed the controller until the Bushmills finished us off. The following day I dusted off the short campaign and spent another few hours in multiplayer. I liked it better than MW2, it is still not as good as MW1. Treyarch still makes the best MP maps.

The gist of a Call of Duty game is modeling the map. In multiplayer this is learning the various fire corridors and hiding spots, then cycling through them carefully without getting caught by another player. In SP it’s about identifying choke points that the AI is streaming through, whether these are infinite spawns or just how to channel a group of enemies without getting hit yourself. That’s the game design, all it needs is a steady stream of new maps and there is always new material for veteran players to model. Like a new sudoku or crossword puzzle, FPS maps can be created in near limitless variation.

The biggest thing that caught my eye about MW3 was the de-emphasis on setpieces. The setpiece, which is usually in a narrow section and your options are extremely limited, is a zero system. There is so little going on in terms of game design that the player supposedly ends up focusing on the content. All you can do is press X or move forward. These have become a staple in these games, starting with the nuke scene from MW1 and continuing into MW2’s macabre ‘No Russian’ level. They’re both zero systems but MW1’s deserves credit for making sure you never quite hits its limits. You can only walk around for so long before you just fall dead, you can’t run around exploring. It goes back to the map modeling nature of these games: the nuke scene works because it is always an unknowable space.

Alternatively, I spent most of the ‘No Russian’ level wandering around and admiring the details of the airport. Which was fun, but not exactly what the game intended. MW3’s is barely worth mentioning, you have minimal control over anything except to sit and watch as a family vacation becomes a lot more interesting. MW2’s suffers because I just go back to playing the game and figuring out how the map works instead of paying attention. MW3’s doesn’t let me move or give me any control at all.

Keep in mind I’m talking about a player who is not new to these games, a beginner who is still fixating on content would have a dramatically different experience. For the seasoned player the meaning of the content is so thoroughly degraded that it’s only inducing apathy. As soon as I realize I’m in a closed map where there is nothing to model, my brain tunes out and I start debating what I want for dinner. The nuke scene stays relevant because I’m fussing about trying to move somewhere, anywhere, in a sad echo of the rest of the gameplay.

When I say content degradation, I mean my diminishing capacity to view the objects in the game independently of the system for which they signify. I don’t think a falling chunk of skyscraper may actually potentially kill me in-game during the opening level of MW3. I see a setpiece unfolding. It is no more startling than an animatronic on an amusement park ride. I enjoy the aesthetics of the experience and possibly the jolt it sends my brain, but it bears no relationship to the play system I am in. It has no emotional meaning to me because my understanding of the game comes from the game design, not the content. MW1’s setpieces and levels are still some of the most memorable things I’ve ever seen on a console because that was before I plowed through five Call of Duty games.

Of course this is speaking for my own personal experience, I imagine someone whose very first shooter was MW2 would be blown away by it just as they would be by MW3. What’s going on here is that familiarity with the game design breeds contempt for the content. The moment I started playing MW3 I was analyzing the space and figuring out where to shoot. I wasn’t aware of the content on an emotional level anymore. The content isn’t a differential for the game design, it’s just a signifier now. And a setpiece signifies nothing except that I can’t move until it’s over.

This issue extends out to the game’s narrative itself. On a literal level I understand what’s going on in these games: Makarov wants a big global war and used the airport attack to make it happen. He’s ticked about the guy I shot in MW1. The General is upset about…the nuke or something from MW1. By the time MW3 comes around we’re just resolving various global conflicts and hunting down Makarov. The problem isn’t so much that the story is incoherent or that images of urban chaos are unmoving, it’s that the dialog, cutscenes, and setpieces no longer have any emotional meaning. It’s all been degraded because of their minimal relevance to the system itself. I’m only aware of signifiers and their value as defined by the system.

There is not a black-line test or moment when this happens for any player. We are talking about the dynamics of the subconscious and conscious as the symbols which represent things in the game become interchangeable. At moments the game is able to jolt me into paying attention to the content. Often this is in a new or unique situation where I don’t know what’s going on in terms of the system, forcing my brain to model new information and thus look at the content.

I focus on these minor aspects of the game only because so much of it is similar to the previous two iterations. I already wrote about map-modeling and the roller-coaster aesthetic years ago. Like eating a bag of Doritos or drinking Bushmills with family, these games are guilty pleasures. I am a year older, the world continues its cycles, and Call of Duty has stopped by for its November visit. I look forward to doing this again next year.

Systems Narrative

While working on the Gamification and Law series, I got curious enough about advertising to start thinking about the reverse idea. Games offer a new way for people to advertise crap, but do advertisements offer games a new way to communicate? It’s not really that strange of an idea, ads are basically meaning generating systems where values are assigned to various abstractions. Applying a few ideas from advertising to games has made me wonder if perhaps video games have worked like advertisements all along. I will be borrowing extensively from Judith Williamson’s excellent book DecodingAdvertising. Just bear with me.


The above image is from a famous ad campaign featuring Catherine Deneuve for Chanel No. 5. She is, or was I guess, famous for her sophistication and classic beauty. You slap the product next to her skull and print it into every single magazine you know potential consumers read. They glance at it, shrug, and keep flipping pages. The subconscious makes the connection, your conscious mind doesn’t have to do anything. The basic formula is “Fame and Glamour = Catherine Deneuve = Chanel No. 5”. You dump enough cash into this and eventually people will eventually just think, “Fame and Glamour = Chanel No.5”. That’s a basic 1 to 1 ad system with only one intermediary. Williamson’s theory is that, “this is the advertisement…constantly translating between systems of meaning, and therefore constitute[ing] a vast meta-system where values from different areas of our lives are made interchangeable.”

Here is the catch: unless you know who Catherine Deneuve is, the ad is just an empty system. It has no content, no value assignment. Williamson points out that an observer needs exposure to the referent system, the fashion and modeling industry, because this allows the observer to apply differentiation. This might be a bit tricky to understand if you don’t give a shit about modeling so I’ll try a different example. Pretend you live in a vacuum and there is only one chair. You have never seen or even heard about any other kind of chair existing, this is it. As a consequence, you have no conception of the chair being good or bad. There is no other chair to compare it to in order to generate value. It just is. Williamson explains you need to know about the whole system the referent exists in to fully understand the ad.

Like Deneuve’s skull and Chanel No.5, in a video game two systems are being juxtaposed so that the player will eventually connect them. The formula is “game system = game content.”  On a very superficial level you can already apply some of Williamson’s ideas to content you see in games now. The space marine image derived from Warhammer 40K or Aliens is borrowed heavily. Sexualizing the female form to play to male conditioning. Elves that look like Tolkein’s elves because people recognize that shape. Orcs that look like green nasty things because that’s what other people have done. This is obvious and you don’t need me to spell it all out. Games borrow these preconceptions and expectations because it’s likely their referents are already in our heads. We’ve all seen these movies, played previous games, or read these books.

What’s interesting about games is that they also generate their own referential and differential systems at the same time that all of this stuff is being juxtaposed with our models of reality and our models of the game’s system. That is, it’s borrowing the visuals for the orc but also assigning various values like HP, damage, and other values generated by the game design. Unlike the ad, interaction in the video game creates an additional layer of meaning.

Several interesting questions are raised by this, the largest being how much conflict can there be between the referential visual system and the differential game design system? This isn’t a new concept, Clint Hocking coined the term ludonarrative dissonance to describe when the content and design are experiencing disconnect. The issue, when using Williamson’s formula, is the fact that she asserts there is no need for there to be a connection between the two. The dissonance is what gives it meaning, not the corroboration. Hocking is presuming the opposite.

The revelation here is abandoning the notion, like ads long ago did, that the content is speaking to the player. It goes beyond just a translation between visual images and systemic values. It isn’t just X = attack. Instead a vast web of associations and meanings that cross from content to system, then back again are all in play. The NPC giving you a quest is not JUST a downtrodden peasant nor are they JUST a quest-giver. They are metaphors for one another with two separate sets of values. One comes internally from the game design and one comes from the content and our own cultural values.

This constant system of visual and audio metaphor taking on systemic meaning is akin to a specific kind of metaphor. James Geary breaks down the metaphor process in his book I is an Other. Metaphors are an extension of our natural desire for pattern recognition. We naturally assign agency and consciousness to things we don’t immediately understand. A knock on a wall becomes a ghost, a flash of light a UFO. You deal with something new by basing it on the familiar. Geary goes over many different types of metaphors but I think with games it might be better to focus on the scientific variety. This is because scientists have to struggle with the presence of literal scientific information and the need for analogy so people can understand it.

J. Robert Oppenheimer, quoted in the book, explains it like this, “We cannot learn to be surprised or astonished at something unless we have a view of how it ought to be; and that view is almost certainly an analogy. We cannot learn that we have made a mistake unless we can make a mistake; and our mistake is almost always in the form of an analogy to some other piece of experience.” Scientific analogies develop slowly. You begin in the subjective by asking something basic like is the Earth formed like Tapioca. You do tests, you compile results, and eventually you start to put together a model of the system. Metaphor tells you what things are like, not what they are. Eventually as you gain complete understanding of the system you dispense with the metaphor.

When we say the dissonance is what generates meaning in a system narrative, we mean that the relationship between unrelated systems, the referential mechanism of both value from game design and the analogies in content is where it comes from. Sticking these two things alongside each other establishes the connection, our minds will find it in the same way they make associations with an ad. Pressing X is attack. This does damage. I need to damage this thing. I know all of this because of the complex series of animations and signals the game sends to me. Competing with all this is the slow erosion of those first subjective impressions as the player goes from subjective to objective, from the analogy to the system. That transition process is where the bulk of the narrative takes place through metaphor and new experiences. New subjective information must constantly be added for the player to base their constantly developing model of the game design.

The necessity for this kind of approach is that most games already look like this. A systems narrative has several common features. Characters do not change independently, they are static until the system coerces change. The narrative consists of ever-shifting viewpoints of the system and various changes enacted there. These effects are observed as they spread and characters respond to them. Examples of this in other mediums would be something like The Wire, Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, or Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. I am mostly proposing abandoning half-ass attempts to shoehorn in literary conventions and conversely avoiding totally ignoring the attempts of games to tell their own unique brand of story.

We’ll see how it goes, it is time for me to focus on individual classics and modern games with a particular critical lens. We’ll see if this has any legs when going over a variety of individual examples.

So Long Buzz

I was inspired enough by Courtney Stanton’s eloquent rant on the loss of Google Reader that I decided to do my own homily for Buzz.

I’ve been bonking around social media the same way most people have: right on the cusp. Instant Messenger got big while I was in college and I had a long list of friends. Remember Away Message culture? Those funny little AIM icons at the bottom with those white faced cartoon characters? Repeating a funny quote from a convo or selecting that choice line from a movie that just really described your mood. I had a Prodigy account where I insisted on writing everything in all caps. An AOL account for logging in and jabbering in those awkward chatrooms. I even got onto that MTV show once where they livecast chats. I typed in all caps for that one too.

Facebook came to my college right as I was graduating and it was initially a lifeline to old friends as we all scattered around the country. I remember life before the newsfeed. G-mail was a no brainer and g-chat quickly became a staple of any lecture in law school. I signed up for Twitter as all the friends I’d accumulated writing about video games made the same migration. For the longest time my relationship with digital media was to connect with as many people as possible. To find as many points of view as possible and absorb them. My path was to always go where the people were.

I’m not quite sure why that started to change. The fighting, probably. I think I was known for having a temper back in the day but I’m not even sure what I was mad about. Law school was no picnic certainly. And I do have a blunt attitude. There are plenty of people out there who don’t have a high opinion of me and for good reason. It’s just…the noise. The endless waves of links, opinions, ideas, caps on, caps off, cacophony that hundreds of people generate when trying to talk all at once. I would turn on Twitter and spend 20 minutes just sifting through what I’d missed, only to have to spend another 10 sifting through what got posted in that time.

This got so intense that I would literally turn on Twitter and it would put me into a bad mood. Sarcasm has been an emotional crutch for me for so long that it might as well be a third leg. Combine these two things with waves of people talking at me and it just brought out the worst. And let’s not forget that this is true of people online in general. Why on Earth someone could ever think it’s a good idea to tweet to me that my article is completely wrong and I should read their correct article is beyond me. The fact that they meant it innocently, phrased it politely, or were totally correct was something you could only cling to for so long. I’ve begun to believe that being an internet celebrity has a lot more to do with patience than actual production.

I finally realized one day that something had to give. So I shut it all off. There is about a 9 month period where I basically vanished from the web. I moved to a new town where I had to make new friends. I had to start a new job and start all over again as a first year associate. I resigned from my post at Popmatters after 3 years of working for free there. I quit writing in general.

Buzz was something that I handled the same way most people did when it came out. I flipped it on, followed a bunch of people I recognized, lost interest, and went back to Twitter. I’d turn it on occasionally but never paid much attention to it. At my new job I found myself sitting in front of a computer all day. I don’t even remember why I was reading it that first time, boredom probably but I imagine the desire to share was finally coming back after 9 months of silence. You can only go so long without sharing with others, particularly about your passions.

Buzz was a pretty crude place. The people I found talking there were venting their rage and frustration at life and video games. You could call a popular, well-connected writer a fucking moron without worrying about them getting offended or blacklisting you. Even if they did hear about it, Buzz had so few active users that it wasn’t the same level of insult as saying it on Twitter. It’s the social difference between a whisper and a scream. But it was a well-designed forum. Topics could be posted and commented on indefinitely while new ones kept piling up to give each one a natural lifespan.

What interested me was that none of the usual social media vanities cropped up. Nobody cared how many people they were following. There was almost zero desire to vapidly increase the number of people they were broadcasting to. As a consequence you had less nonsensical posts of cats or wonk. Less desire to hit ‘post’ without even considering who would find it interesting. My theory is that like Facebook, Twitter began to sabotage itself by coercing people into connecting to so many others that you could no longer actually talk. If you criticized something, a dozen or so people would jabber at you about why you were wrong. Like Reddit, only positive and polite things would get encouraged by the system. The desire to ever say anything controversial or different was steadily eroded. I was on Twitter for 2 years. I can't think of a single meaningful exchange I ever had on there. At a certain point, the social service just became another mask.

Buzz was different because it stayed small. I've lost count of how many brilliant ideas or great links I've gotten from people on there. You got to know the people around you. People didn't take it personally if you mouthed off because they knew it was just you being you. You can't force something like that to happen, it's just a matter of time and place. I could post an elaborate ramble on a game I was playing, post a cool quote I saw, or just spout nonsense. On Twitter, you couldn't do that because everyone was watching.

And now, as with many others, the only online forum I give a shit about is being shut down. I’ve tried using G+ a few times but it is essentially the same problem as Twitter or Facebook. It’s a numbers system, people broadcasting their views on as many people they can while Google charts clicks and exchanges on a global scale. It’s not the privacy thing I’m bothered by, I accepted what these services were a long time ago. It’s being channeled into the same kinds of services I stopped using 2 years ago because they mostly seem to bring out the worst in people. Myself included.

Buzz was not a perfect service. The very thing I enjoyed about it was that so few people used it. But it is still a place in the way that all forms of social exchange become places. The occasional drunk rant. The rapid fire comment sections. The long, wordy posts and responses when someone suddenly had the impulse. Posting quotes from random books. The unspoken codes of conduct about not posting nonsense or delving too deeply into narcissism. You hold these things close even though they aren’t really yours or anyone else’s. They are the space we have between one another.

And now it is fading away.

Complexity in Laws

I've been really enjoying Friedman's History of American Law and discovering all the experiments, problems, and resolutions the country has adopted over the decades. It's probably a surprise to many people that many of the problems we're experiencing today with Banks and Wall Street are just one of the many times this has happened. Different solutions have been proposed over time, often involving getting rid of all the lawyers and making everything simple to understand.

That process of things getting complicated and the issues it poses for fixing it started to fascinate me. It has been discussed at length by various sources and you can find dozens of proposed to solutions. I decided to use my experiences with a particularly complex game to just illustrate the how and why of complexity with laws.

It just getting people to accept the very notion that nothing is simple with large rule systems is a start.

What Can Games Teach Us About Law?

I had the good fortune to get a column published over at Kill Screen. It's a relatively new webzine that is exploring the range of topics for games. I always manage to find a new angle that surprises me there.

The column is about the inherent knowledge gamers develop about systems and how this approach applies out into the real world. A lot of these ideas are in the gamificaiton series, but I tackled some relevant issues instead of getting bogged down into theory.

Here's hoping the gaming generation keeps getting bigger.

MMO Judiciary - Functions and Solutions

In the United States we are used to a court system whose focus centers on rule elaboration and enforcing public norms by handing down rulings. Joanne Scott, in her essay Courts as Catalysts, discusses the changing role of courts by focusing on their capacity to share information, fact check, and test the authenticity of government decisions by weighing their evidence. It’s a new model meant to reflect the role the courts may play in a steadily de-centralizing government. She inadvertently presents a potential template for resolving the conflict between Coding Authority and player.

The basic idea in Scott’s paper is that courts can serve to check the evidence of the governing authority while still fulfilling important obligations in the community. It’s a kind of PR, a government institution separate from the authority who handles disputes in the system. The institution does not have the power to make new rules, only legitimize or overturn existing ones. Scott’s vision of a system where, “courts become a source of communicating ideas and experience, without being the source of their creation, and without being specifically prescriptive in relation to any particular form” may find its most useful application in virtual space rather than reality.

The necessity for this kind of system, as noted in the previous essay, crops up when you have the strange type of tyranny that’s possible in an MMO. All laws are automatically enforced, traditional methods of feedback are cut-off and players are often forced to quit. It’s unlikely any developer would actually do this on purpose, it’s just inevitably going to happen in any system of rules. An essay by Leslie Green on the causes of Judicial Decisions reminds one that rules are indeterminate, not merely in dramatic or marginal cases, but in most cases, because indeterminacy flows not only from vagueness but also from pervasive unresolved conflicts among the laws of the system. There is always an unintended consequence or unexpected application stemming from the rules of conduct or the code itself.

Application of this will vary from game to game. You probably do not want the judiciary to have any authority over the actual design such as nerfing items. A more debatable issue, such as perching in Asheron’s call, duplication, hording or some other in-game strategy, is more ideal because it’s allowed by the Coding Authority. It just has the unintended consequence of disrupting the entire game for players. Rather than have the designers fret over financial impacts or disrupting the economy, you just have a hearing where people make their case. Evidence is drawn from the servers and personal accounts. The dispute gets resolved quickly, transparently, and with player involvement occurring throughout.

It’s important to remember that in many cases transparency just means communicating your reasons for acting clearly. Most concerns about the language of a judiciary becoming unwieldly aren’t really necessary. As Peter M. Tiersma notes in his book Parchment, Paper, Pixels, the reason the modern legal system is so wordy and difficult to understand is because the language is meant to only have one meaning. In America we practice common law, meaning each court ruling is binding on all future rulings. To avoid multiple interpretations of a contract, bill, or law you have to phrase it a manner that’s very alien to most people.

That’s especially true today where the internet has enabled rapid communication. People write like they talk now and it’s understood in the same manner. Unless the judicial system wanted to impose some kind of common law model, precision in the writing to that degree would be unnecessary. You just ask the judge for clarification. You can already see an example of this practice with Xbox Live’s Why Was I Banned? forums. Having a clear explanation from another person helps give authority and clarity to the rules of the Xbox Live service. The average person should be able to understand everything going on but having a model for dealing with people always helps.

The same goes for pleading a complaint: if they can form a complete sentence then there’s no reason they couldn’t make a complaint. Lawyers exist because just one part of the legal system takes months or even years of study to understand. It got this way because the bigger the population, the more rules you need to protect all those competing interests. An MMO is not ever going to become large enough that the average player does not already know everything they need to when crafting a complaint.

Diversity in judicial opinion, both between judges and their views vs the Coding Authority, should also not be taken as a huge problem. Uniformity must occur in the results of rules, but not necessarily in the way those results are reached. A textualist approach, where the Judge reads everything literally, may have various uses and appeals depending on the game. Alternatively a Judge who discusses the issue with the Coding Authority and adds weight to the views might be more favorable. A great Judge would be able to juggle multiple perspectives to get a result satisfactory to all. As Lawrence B. Solum explains, “Good judges are clever in using the resources within existing law to solve the legal problems that come before them. The very best judges are experts at avoiding originality. And the very worst judges may be the most original. Very bad judges may use the cases that come before them as the vehicles for changing the law, transforming the rules laid down into the rules that the judges prefer.”

At the end of the day, the existence of a judicial system would ultimately be derived from the Coding Authority, who is in turn controlled by the Developer, Publisher, and their shareholders. While mounting arbitration costs and threats from the outside world are a good reason for creating a means of resolving disputes in-game, perhaps the best reason of all is simply advertising. In his guide to building a successful MMO Raph Koster explains that the key is ownership of something in the game. Whether it’s buildings, characters, or a job the player needs to, “feel a sense of responsibility to something that cannot be removed from the game.”

Examples of MMOs violating this sense of ownership are everywhere. Despite the strong sales of the latest WoW expansion, players quitting the game by the thousands. The anger at the expansion varies from being being too short to stripping the game of all complexity for newplayers. One scathing comment explains, “Cataclysm is the end result of an MMO design by numbers philosophy inspired the wishes of accountants and avarice of shareholders. This is one picnic basket of childish quests and facile gameplay expressly designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator out there.” These complaints have nowhere to go and no one who will listen to them. And while the expansion might make money in the long term, it’s also costing them the veteran players who have stuck with the game for years.

At other times it’s problems that arise from a GM acting carelessly. A huge controversy arose in a Bioware forum when a moderator closed a thread because a group was debating homosexuality in the Star Wars universe. Such blank and total censorship generated massive amounts of negative PR even though the forum moderator was only attempting to prevent a flamewar. A similar example was the removal of Nazi soldier’s name from an in-game badge. No discussion, no explanation, and nothing but negative PR for the game for operating in a totalitarian manner.

The benefits of this will vary depending on the game, there is no one model for every MMO. A judicial branch mediates the conflicts that arise between the hard laws, the social standards and the general strangeness of humanity. All of these things clash and overlap in constantly changing ways, creating indeterminacy for the outcome of disputes. Introducing a third party relieves the Coding Authority from assuming a totalitarian approach to all conflicts, gives transparency to the process, and creates a more legitimate avenue for conflict resolution outside of enforcing the EULA.

Judith Williamson, in her seminal text on Decoding Advertising, explains that an ad is essentially the transference of human qualities and characteristics to consumer products. Concepts like fairness, loyalty and safety are generated and projected onto the game. An internal MMO judiciary represents a concentrated effort to form that connection with the player as a kind of background association. First and foremost, they should be enjoying the game and having fun. But if things go wrong, they can know they won’t need to deal with an expensive legal system or negotiate a EULA. Their problems can be resolved in-game, fairly and transparently.