Curry Chandler

Curry Chandler is a writer, researcher, and independent scholar working in the field of communication and media studies. His writing on media theory and policy has been published in the popular press as well as academic journals. Curry approaches the study of communication from a distinctly critical perspective, and with a commitment to addressing inequality in power relations. The scope of his research activity includes media ecology, political economy, and the critique of ideology.

Curry is a graduate student in the Communication Department at the University of Pittsburgh, having previously earned degrees from Pepperdine University and the University of Central Florida.

Filtering by Tag: gamestudies

Pokemon Go & post-pandemic mobility expectations

July 23, 2021  /  Curry Chandler

I haven’t played Pokemon Go since the early days of its release. It was nearly impossible to avoid the buzz surrounding the game’s launch. And as I wrote back in July 2016, the hype around the game was infectious and the game itself offered an exciting new way of interacting with public spaces in your local environment.

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic last year immediately and drastically altered attitudes toward congregating in public space. I had assigned my Communication Process students an assignment to complete during their spring break: spend time in a populated public space and take field notes on the interactions that they observed. When the scope of the pandemic became clear and our university canceled in-person classes during the spring recess I frantically emailed my students to stress that they were no longer required to complete the assignment and to affirm that it was in their best interests to avoid populated public places.

Many aspects of public life had to adapt to the new social-distancing realities of life under coronavirus, and Pokemon Go was no different. Pokemon Go developer Niantic announced in March 2020 that it was instituting changes in its games in light of the emergent public health imperatives:

“We have always believed that our games can include elements of indoor play that complement the outdoor, exercise and explore DNA of what we build. Now is the time for us to prioritize this work, with the key challenge of making playing indoors as exciting and innovative as our outdoor gameplay. We are adding to our product roadmap so we can enable more ways to play inside and around the home in the coming days and weeks, when the world needs it most.”

One of the changes implemented to Pokemon Go was an increase in the interaction distances for players to engage with location-specific game activities. These changes effectively doubled the distance from which players could interact with GPS-fixed game locations. In November 2020 Niantic provided updates on the changes and stated they would remain in place “at minimum through June 2021.”

Well, Niantic held to this prospective timeline, and last month the developer announced that it would be rolling back the increased interaction distances:

“Previously, PokéStop and Gym interaction distances were increased, to enable people to engage from further away. After this change the distance will revert back to the standard distance, when it makes sense in different places, though may be increased during future events and as part of certain features.”

Many players responded negatively to the reversion. On one of the most prominent Pokemon Go subreddits, The Silph Road, users explicated the immense quality of life improvement that the increased interaction distances provided. As redditor pogo_enthusiast explained:

“Increased interaction distances should stay, if only for reasons of safety and accessibility. Like many others, I was dismayed to see today's announcement concerning the reversion of pokestop and gym interaction distances. Beyond being a (much needed) quality of life feature, increased interaction distances made playing PoGo much safer and enabled disabled individuals in my community to more fully engage in the game.”

pogo_enthusiast outlined several specific ways in which the increased interaction distances improved accessibility:

  1. Crossing the street less to engage with stops/gyms

  2. Being able to interact with stops/gyms from safer (or more permissible) locations.

  3. Being able to raid more discreetly from further away and avoid harassment from other players

  4. Being able to keep walking at a normal place while playing, rather than abruptly stopping, slowing down, or moving off pathways to let others by

  5. Being able to mitigate the issues of drift and not move around erratically to get in range of a stop/gym

The entire reddit thread regarding the revised interaction differences is fascinating to read. The comments astutely highlight myriad ways in which the gameplay experience was made safer and more accessible by the pandemic-era updates. So far the gamemakers have remained firm in their decision in spite of the outcry from the player base. A Niantic spokesperson justified the decision thusly:

“Last year, we increased the interaction distance to nearly the length of a football field. It’s tough to discover new places at this distance. We’re going to revert the expanded interaction distance in countries and regions where it makes sense to help restore the focus of the game on exploration and discovery. Going outside and spinning PokéStops and Gyms is important to our mission because it encourages exploration of the world.” [emphasis added]

This official explanation raises a question regarding the imperatives of Pokemon Go. How is the promotion of outdoor exploration weighed against the imperatives of profit accumulation inherent to a commercial product? How are these imperatives to be differentiated or disentangled? Around the start of this year redditor jdunham_ritxniantic posted to the Pokemon Go subreddit asking “How has the pandemic affected how you play?” User TheDeviless responded that:

“I stopped giving Niantic money because of their lack of concern for those during a pandemic.”

I think this response changes the inflection of the earlier question. Commercial profit motives aside, how would any initiative formed around the goal of promoting outdoor exercise and exploration responsibly respond to the public health imperative of social distancing? Despite the prevalence of post-pandemic and reopening discourse in our present moment I suspect that this question will remain relevant.

Comment
tags / videogames, gamestudies, gamification, gaming, pokemon go, augmentedreality, smartphones, mobility, cities, public space, urbanism, urban studies, accessibility, coronavirus, covid-19, pandemic

Watch_Dogs: Legion, part 1: Open Worlds

December 07, 2020  /  Curry Chandler

I love the Watch_Dogs franchise. Or rather, I want to love it. I certainly love the overall concept. The distinguishing features of the series incorporate some of my favorite elements from video games in general, as well as more particular niche interests. For one thing, the games  are set in contemporary urban open worlds that can be experienced in “sandbox” style, which is one of my personal favorite video game genres. The game worlds are also based on real world cities, which is another plus for me that I will talk more about later. The second defining feature of the  Watch_Dogs franchise for me is the thematic focus. The game's primary thematic concern, as indicated by the franchise name, is technologically-enabled surveillance in modern society. The narrative and gameplay address obvious concerns surrounding intrusive technology in terms of the erosion of privacy. A related major component, particularly in the first game, involves urban infrastructure, as well as how the implementation of emerging technology for city management produces augmented spatialities and governmentality. Now, as I said earlier I definitely love the concept, but how the games execute these concepts can be more difficult to ascertain. I have looked forward to the latest entry in the series, Watch_Dogs: Legion, for the past couple of years and have enjoyed playing it over the past month or so. Now that I've had some time to think about the game, I wanted to offer some thoughts before my scant video game time becomes occupied with Cyberpunk 2077 next week. I am going to organize my thoughts and comments around the two themes I have already identified that appeal to me most about these games: the urban open-world play environments, and the thematic engagement with the issues of surveillance capitalism and imaginaries of resistance.

Open Worlds: Exploring Virtual Spaces

My love of open world games, and in particular urban sandbox style games, began with Grand Theft Auto 3. Driving around the three islands of Liberty City sowing discord while listening to Chatterbox FM was unlike any video game I had ever experienced.  Nearly 20 years later, open world exploration remains my favorite video game pastime. Self-directed exploration of a virtual environment provides me with a surefire circuit for relaxation, recreation, and escapism. I have thus far been focusing on the particular sub-genre of urban open world games, although I certainly have great appreciation for other varieties as well. For example, my experiences exploring the worlds of Oblivion and Skyrim remain pinnacles of fantasy role-playing. 

Now, even when limiting our purview to the subgenre of modern city environments, we can distinguish urban open worlds in video games between those that are based on actually existing cities, and those that are wholly fictional or imagined. I enjoy both types for their unique qualities and appreciate them in different ways. For instance, an entirely fictional virtual city offers the potential to explore an environment that is totally unknown and surprising, largely free from the baggage of preconception and expectation. Furthermore, a virtual city created from scratch is not necessarily bound by the constraints of real world geography and can therefore endeavor to prioritize a game space optimized for play and creative mobility. An example of this category might be the city of Steelport from the Saints Row series, although clearly even this fictional city bears evidence of association and allusion to real-world urban centers. Another example that comes to mind is the setting of the Crackdown games. In this case it is an extremely generic near-future urban environment; I don't even recall the name of the fictional city from the first two games... Port Town? Star Union? Megalopolis? However, the game world is designed to accommodate what for me is the key feature of the Crackdown series: bounding from rooftop to rooftop collecting power orbs, increasing agility stats so that you may reach increasingly higher peaks. Indeed, I was always somewhat taken aback to be walking or driving along a street in Crackdown-town and notice all of this superfluous level of street level detail that the designers had included, such as signage for shops and other businesses with punny names as if this was a Rockstar game. 

Speaking of Rockstar, the Grand Theft Auto series provides a perfect point of interconnection between the categories of fictional virtual cities and those based on real world locations. The aforementioned Liberty City from Grand Theft Auto 3, for example, is a fictional city: the name suggests a link to New York by evoking one of that city's greatest landmarks, yet the design of the game world itself does not incorporate much in the way of specific iconography or virtual re-creations of specific places. Vice City, the subsequent game in the series, declares a setting in Miami of the 1980s beginning with its titular allusion, yet that is only the beginning. This game furthers the funhouse-mirror-view-of-America-as-seen-by-Brits-through-the-lens-of-American-popular-culture that began in Grand Theft Auto 3. Yet in addition to drawing from gangster films and other pop culture of that era the game also incorporates limited recreations of iconic Miami locations. San Andreas represented an even further evolution, not only further in time to the 1990s where the game draws heavily from pop culture and media depictions of Los Angeles from that era, but also to the scale of the environment and the degree of verisimilitude attempted in its recreation of real world cities. Grand Theft Auto V extends this trajectory to an exceedingly ambitious simulacrum of Southern California that is simultaneously a parody of contemporary America, a condensed impressionistic depiction of Greater Los Angeles, as well as strikingly accurate recreations of actually existing locations. Of course, the metropolis of GTA V is Los Santos rather than Los Angeles, because while the game dips its toes in nearly simulation level depictions of LA, it's other foot remains firmly planted in the satirical and cartoonish Grand Theft Auto alternate universe. 

Further along the spectrum of realistic video game depictions of actual cities we find more grounded portrayal of real world sites. Some of the best examples come from the Assassin's Creed series, where some of the great cities of the world are recreated based on previous historical eras. Now, one of the reasons that I love accurate representations of real world cities is that they provide a novel way of interfacing, in a mediated and imaginative way, with an existing location. This offers rich benefits whether you have personal experience of the place, or if you have never actually visited. When you are familiar with the place depicted you can test the designed world of the video game against your personal knowledge and memory. You can, for instance, go seeking for a particular location or landmark to see if it has been included in the game world, and if it has been included you can compare the accuracy with your own experience or recollection. However, a detailed re-creation of a real city can be a wonderful means of learning more about that place. This is why one of my all-time favorite video game cities is the re-creation of Manhattan in True Crime New York City. The play space of True Crime NYC is a GPS-accurate block-by-block re-creation of the Manhattan grid. Because the game was released in 2002 it obviously does not offer the level of detail or graphical fidelity that we are spoiled by in more recent video games. However, True Crime New York City does offer the distinct pleasure of being able to race along every Avenue on the island of Manhattan while crossing every real-world street and encountering none of the real-world traffic. One of my favorite things to do in True Crime NYC was to think of a prominent building or other landmark, look up the cross streets on a map, then go to that intersection in the game to see if the landmark was included. Most of the time I found that it was. I remember playing the game after returning from a brief visit to Manhattan where I had stayed in Midtown for an academic conference. In the game I was able to re-create the route of my daily walk from the hotel to the conference venue, finding satisfying details such as the inclusion of a church right on the street corner where it had been during my stay. I also discovered landmarks that had been previously unknown to me, and learned things about New York City history from playing the game. For instance, one time while racing down 3rd Avenue I was stopped in my tracks by the appearance of a massive building with an attached tower. I brought my virtual car to a screeching halt in the intersection to face this distinct structure. The building stood in such contrast to the more generic streetscapes that fill in the spaces between more customized locations in True Crime NYC that I felt compelled to look up the cross streets online to discover whether this was indeed a re-creation of a landmark that I was not familiar with. It turned out that this structure was the mosque and minaret of the Islamic Cultural Center of New York. Yet another time I was speeding along through lower Manhattan. As you are driving in True Crime NYC, the names of streets that you are crossing are displayed at the top of the HUD. I saw in quick succession the street names “Duane” and “Reade” flash by at the top of my screen. I went back to confirm what I had seen, and upon further investigation learned that the Duane Reade convenience stores which are so ubiquitous in Manhattan are indeed named for the location of the company's original warehouse which was situated on Broadway between the streets of Duane and Reade. Moments like these are a large part of why I continue to feel such fondness for the New York City presented in the True Crime series even after so many subsequent games have presented more dynamic representations of the Big Apple. 

Watch_Dogs’ London: Virtual Horizons of Urban Life

The London of Watch_Dogs: Legion straddles the boundary line between realistic representation and fanciful imagination by virtue of its near-future setting. The city is unmistakable, rendered with a plethora of recognizable landmarks and significant amount of granular detail. However, the London-as-we-know-it is also augmented by certain science fiction trappings: landmarks such as Big Ben and Tower Bridge are emblazoned with massive holographic projections indicating a general threat level for terroristic activity along with the logo of the private military company overseeing local security. The other major deviation concerns traffic through the city, both at street level and in the skies above. The road traffic consists of an assortment of cars, trucks, and motorcycles, along with iconic London vehicles like black cabs and double-decker busses. These more familiar conveyances are joined also by fleets of autonomous taxis or self-driving ride-share vehicles (the in-game lore establishes that all personal vehicles are legally mandated to have autonomous driving capability). One gameplay change that this introduces is the ability to commandeer vehicles on the move without “stealing” the car and inconveniencing a driver. The autonomous taxi vehicles in fact have no separate driver compartment or steering wheel, and are instead designed like a commuter train passenger carriage with two benches of seats facing each other (they are incredibly similar to the autonomous taxis featured in the execrable third season of Westworld).

Self-driving cars represent one element of the near-future technological projections featured in the game. One of the other major additions (and more significant in terms of gameplay impact) is the ubiquitous drone presence in the city. Above the ground traffic buzzes a constant stream of autonomous drone vehicles, flying quadro-copters that largely follow the terrestrial street routes. Drone devices are mostly confined to a number of vehicle categories: delivery drone quad-copters ferrying packages; slow-moving cargo drones hauling crates and construction materials; CToS surveillance drones hovering around to monitor goings-ons in the city; news drones filming footage for GBB reportage (the in-game alter ego of the BBC); and assorted anti-pursuit and riot control militarized drones. The constant stream of drone traffic adds a distinctly cyberpunk element to the city (while also resonating with contemporary culture and directions of technological evolution), but it also introduces one of the most substantial gameplay innovations into the Watch_Dogs formula. One of the fundamental gameplay elements in Watch_Dogs has always been “hijacking” security cameras, i.e. “hacking” into them with your mobile device to gain a new perspective on a particular location, scout enemy positions, and leapfrog from camera to camera to solve puzzles (as long as you have line-of-sight you can progress along a chain of CCTV installations). I’ve always appreciated this aspect of the Watch_Dogs gameplay loop in part because it is (usually) not reliant on combat encounters and offers novel approaches to platforming segments. In Legion, if you are struggling to get line-of-sight on a particular CCTV position or need to gain access to a harder to reach area, you are often able to hijack a passing drone, grabbing it out of the sky and piloting toward your objective. As you gain proficiency with this practice it affords some creative platforming and puzzle solving, as well as emergent approaches to clearing enemy encampments.

The London of Watch_Dogs: Legion is often quite beautiful; it is also often buggy, glitchy, and bizarre looking, owing to a host of persistent graphical issues. Yet at its best, when all the environmental elements are working in concert, you can get some dynamite scenes of Regent Street illuminated by a late afternoon sun, or a magisterial Westminster across the Thames (the Thames, on the other hand, is real rubbish: the river traffic is a ridiculous procession of pop-ins and low-texture polygonal watercraft). Aside from the near-future aesthetic embellishments the Legion designers largely leaned in to a realistic re-creation of London. The game’s map and designated districts bear close cartographic correspondence to its corporeal counterpart. I last visited London in 2016, and I have successfully recreated certain walking routes from that trip in Watch_Dogs’ London (as is my custom in these sorts of games...it may seem silly, but it’s how I prefer to play). Crossing the Golden Jubilee Bridges from Charing Cross to Southbank, or walking from the base of BT Tower to BBC Broadcasting House, provide pleasing pretensions of previous perambulations. While we’re on the subject of pedestrianism: One of the other street-level innovations that I think is worth mentioning is the addition of building access doors that open onto the sidewalk. These are one-way portals (you cannot use them to access a building interior, and indeed the only interior space that can be glimpsed through one of these open doorways is a black void), but they allow NPC figures (perhaps we should designate these PPCs...potentially playable characters?) to step out onto the street. It’s a neat feature that adds to the sense of a busy, bustling streetscape and adds to the immersive illusion of navigating a densely populated city sidewalk.

(A brief sidenote regarding transportation options: the Underground system is well represented throughout the map in the form of tube stations that function as fast-travel transit nodes. There are no functioning, ride-able metro trains, which is understandable [the Tube is wonderful but not really known for the excellent views it offers] while also a bit of a disappointment [I’m a sucker for functioning public transit in games...I rode every inch of rail track in GTA IV and V, and thoroughly appreciated views of the Chicago skyline while riding the L train in the original Watch_Dogs]. Also, while acknowledging the technical limitations and risks of feature creep or bloat, bicycles would have been a wonderful option for engaging with the rich cyclogeography of London  [maybe even for limited, dedicated courier activities?])

OK, so London is (mostly) beautifully rendered, but how can you engage with the game space? What opportunities are provided for exploring and interfacing with the environment through gameplay? Watch_Dogs: Legion is a bit of a letdown in this area, as the presence of environmental activities seems to have been scaled back in comparison with the earlier games in the series. This will surely be a trivial concern for some players, but I really enjoyed how side activities were embedded into the game world of the original Watch_Dogs’ simulacra of Chicago. You could encounter a shell game on a busy street corner; play chess in a coffee shop or have a drinking contest  in a bar. There were various augmented reality activities such as timed platforming challenges or fantastical virtual reality battle modes. My favorite side activities in the original Watch_Dogs were the QR code puzzles: portions of QR codes were painted along the sides of buildings throughout the city, so that viewing the completed image required a combination of exploration, platforming, and CCTV hijacking in order to discover a vantage point from which the code could be viewed from the right perspective. 

As I’ve already mentioned, the availability of side activities in Legion seems greatly scaled back. There are pubs where you can drink beer (triggering temporary audio-visual distortions) and play a game of darts (which I have found to be far too tedious and aggravating to be worth the effort). Most pubs also feature slot machines, but unlike the first Watch_Dogs where slot machines functioned as a playable gambling minigame, in Legion slot machines are hackable (meaning you can siphon a small amount of money with the push of a button) but are not playable. There are Parcel Fox delivery missions, which are OK: assorted A-to-B courier assignments with varying prerequisites for success, such as a countdown timer for parcel delivery, limits to the amount of “damage” a package may receive en route to the destination, and degrees of “wanted level” that will activate police pursuit of your contraband cargo. These activities are decent and provide a fun way to explore alleyways and other alternative routes around the city, particularly as you try to avoid automated checkpoint stations that will alert the police force to your location.

The other substantial environmental exploration activity is represented by “paste-up locations”: particular spots dotted across the city where you can apply a large-scale wheatpaste poster. These are typically located above street level (sometimes quite high up on a rooftop) and therefore require some figuring out how to reach the location.  I found this to be a fun diversion for a while, but the novelty wears off rather quickly. They are nowhere near as fun or satisfying as the QR codes from the first Watch_Dogs. The available designs or “stencils” that you can apply are limited to the point of feeling monotonous once you’ve used them all, I was extremely frustrated at the lack of a “checkmark” icon or some other signifier on the game map to indicate when a paste-up location had already been completed.

That leaves collectibles. There are hundreds of collectibles scattered across the game world. Seriously, there are just so many. I’m familiar with the general criticism of Ubisoft’s approach to open world design, that it offers exhaustive and repetitive collecting, but I don’t play many video games so I don’t have much firsthand experience with this phenomenon. I get it now. Look, I played all three Crackdown games solely for the joy of bouncing around the cityscape hunting agility orbs. This element of the Crackdown experience provides a wonderful “mindless” gameplay loop where you can just put on some music or a podcast and bounce around for dopamine hits and scratching the completionist itch. In Watch_Dogs: Legion this translates to commandeering a cargo drone that you can (slowly) ride around the city picking up collectibles one by one. It also lends itself to a similar experience to the above mentioned Crackdown approach, but after a while it is agonizingly tedious. I also appreciate having loads of content in a game, but Legion takes this to the point of absurdity. The amount of collectibles across the map seem self-replicating and endlessly proliferating. I’ve nearly maxed out all the available tech upgrades: how can there possibly be so many tech point icons on my map? Ultimately the most rewarding outcome of this gameplay experience are the aerial vistas it affords and the new areas of the city that you can discover while hunting for easter eggs (often leading me to research particularly interesting locations to discern the degree to which they were inventions of the designers or faithful re-creations of London locales).

There are some further notable examples of environmental storytelling that contribute to the overall atmosphere and accord with my personal experiences of London. For example, visible homelessness is pervasive in this virtual version of London. This is not an innovation in urban open world design (the Grand Theft Auto series has had unhoused NPCs since at least GTA 3...oftentimes these have been deployed as jokey “bum” characters or as exemplars of urban eccentrics [GTA IV had some notable examples of the latter], although GTA V adds a sharper political edge to these depictions with its frequent allusions to economic recession and the pointedly politicized Dignity Village encampment), but these depictions feel like an integral component of Legion’s world rather than isolated dioramas or window dressing. This is accompanied by explicit activist installations and political slogans (some have more teeth than others). The game also directly addresses Brexit and broader issues of immigration and refugee populations. An arena in the game’s Lambeth borough (I think the closest real world analogue is London Stadium, but I’m not sure...incidentally, I have particularly enjoyed the inclusion of baseball stadia in the previous series entries...the first Watch_Dogs begins in a baseball stadium during a night game [although it doesn’t resemble either of Chicago’s real world major league ballparks], and Watch_Dogs 2 features a fictional San Francisco ball club with its own stadium based on Oracle Park) has been re-purposed as a deportation detention facility called the Eurpoean Processing Center. 

These more politicized elements of Legion’s London lead us to a consideration of how the game engages with the ideological dimensions evoked by its thematic trappings. In the second part of this commentary I will focus on this aspect of the game, in particular how Watch_Dogs: Legion gamifies class solidarity and commodifies culture jamming.


Comment
tags / videogames, gamestudies, gaming, Watch_Dogs, Lodon, cities, space, urban, virtuality, surveillance, capitalism

The unreal urbanism of Pokémon Go

July 18, 2016  /  Curry Chandler

Earlier this month the mobile-app game Pokémon Go was released in the U.S., and the game has been ubiquitous ever since. Aside from being a sudden pop culture phenomenon, the game's success poses some significant implications. First of all, this is clearly a breakthrough moment for augmented reality. Pokémon Go is not the first augmented reality game, nor is it the most ambitious, but it has undoubtedly brought AR into mainstream consciousness. Secondly, the success of Pokémon Go has led me to reconsider all my previously held assumptions about the uses of mobile apps and gamification for interfacing with urban spaces. I have historically been cynical about the prospect of using mobile games or AR interfaces to interact with urban space, since they usually strike me as shallow and insignificant, typically resulting in a fleeting diversion like a flash mob dance party, rather than altering people's perceptions of place in any lasting or meaningful way. Pokémon Go satisfies all the requirements of my earlier preconceptions, yet despite my best critical instincts, I really like the game.

The buzz about Pokémon Go had been building on various forums online, and after it was released it was virtually impossible to avoid Pokémon Go-related posts. Save for maybe 10 minutes with a friend's Game Boy in the late 90s, I've never played a Pokémon game and I preemptively wrote off Pokémon Go as yet another cultural fad that I would never partake in or understand. Curiosity got the best of my wife, however, and she downloaded the app and we walked around our neighborhood to test it out. To my surprise, the game was a lot of fun; our familiar surroundings were now filled with digital surprises, and we were excited to see neighborhood landmarks and murals represented as Pokéstops, and wild Pokémon hanging out in the doorways of local shops.  We meandered around discovering which of our local landmarks had been incorporated into the game, and each discovery increased my enjoyment of the app. Yes, the game is simple and shallow, but I was completely charmed. I downloaded the game so I could play, too.

Reactions to Pokémon Go have been as fascinating as the game's widespread adoption. Many news articles sensationalized the inherent dangers of playing the game: distracted players wandering into traffic or off of cliffs, people's homes being designated as Pokéstops and besieged by players, and traps being laid (using the games "lures") to ambush and rob aspiring Pokétrainers. There have also been insightful critical analyses of the game. An early and oft-shared article by Omari Akil considered the implications of Pokémon Go in light of recent police shootings of black men, warning that "Pokemon Go is a death sentence if you are a black man":

I spent less than 20 minutes outside. Five of those minutes were spent enjoying the game. One of those minutes I spent trying to look as pleasant and nonthreatening as possible as I walked past a somewhat visibly disturbed white woman on her way to the bus stop. I spent the other 14 minutes being distracted from the game by thoughts of the countless Black Men who have had the police called on them because they looked “suspicious” or wondering what a second amendment exercising individual might do if I walked past their window a 3rd or 4th time in search of a Jigglypuff.

Others questioned the distribution of Pokémon across neighborhoods, suggesting that poor or black neighborhoods had disproportionately fewer Pokémon and Pokéstops. Among urbanists, however, reaction to the game has been mixed. Mark Wilson at Fastcodesign declared that Pokémon Go "is quietly helping people fall in love with their cities". Ross Brady of Architizer celebrated the game for sparking "a global wave of urban exploration". Writing for de zeen, Alex Wiltshire boldly states that the game has "redrawn the map of what people find important about the world". City Lab contributor Laura Bliss proclaimed "Pokémon Go has created a new kind of flaneur". 

Others have been more critical of the game, with Nicholas Korody at Archinect retorting: "No, Pokémon Go is not an urban fantasy for the new flaneur". At Jacobin, Sam Kriss implores readers to "resist Pokémon Go":

Walk around. Explore your neighborhood. Visit the park. Take in the sights. Have your fun. Pokémon Go is coercion, authority, a command issuing from out of a blank universe, which blasts through social and political cleavages to finally catch ‘em all. It must be resisted.

Some, like Jeff Sparrow at Overland, drew direct parallels to the Situationists.

Writing for the Atlantic, Ian Bogost mediated on "the tragedy of Pokémon Go":

We can have it both ways; we have to, even: Pokémon Go can be both a delightful new mechanism for urban and social discovery, and also a ghastly reminder that when it comes to culture, sequels rule. It’s easy to look at Pokémon Go and wonder if the game’s success might underwrite other, less trite or brazenly commercial examples of the genre. But that’s what the creators of pervasive games have been thinking for years, and still almost all of them are advertisements. Reality is and always has been augmented, it turns out. But not with video feeds of twenty-year old monsters in balls atop local landmarks. Rather, with swindlers shilling their wares to the everyfolk, whose ensuing dance of embrace and resistance is always as beautiful as it is ugly.

Pokémon Go's popularity has led to many online comparisons to the Star Trek: TNG episode "The Game," in which the crew of the Enterprise is overcome by a mind-controlling video game. The game in Star Trek is not strictly-speaking an augmented reality game, but does involve projecting images onto the player's vision similar to an AR-overlay. Previous gaming and gadget fads have been compared to the TNG episode, notably Google Glass (for it's similarity to the eye-beaming design used to interface with the game in Star Trek) and the pervasively popular Angry Birds game (as evident in this parody video). The comparison has regained cultural cachet because, unlike Angry Birds which can be played on the couch, Pokémon Go is played in motion. This, of course, has contributed to the perception of the game's zombie-fying effects; we've grown accustomed to the fact that everyone's eyes are glued to a smartphone screen in our public spaces, but now there are whole flocks of people milling around with their eyes on their devices.

My cynical side is inclined to agree with the critics who see Pokémon Go's proliferation as proof positive of the passification and banalization of our society; the visions of Orwell, Bradbury, and Phil Dick all realized at once. But there's something there that has me appreciative, even excited about this goofy game. As my wife and I wandered our neighborhood looking for pocket monsters, we noticed several other people walking around staring at their phones. This is not an uncommon sight, but it is re-contextualized in light of Pokémon Go's popularity. "Look," my wife would say, "I bet they're playing, too." After a while she had to know for sure, and started walking up to people and asking, "Are you playing Pokémon Go?" Every person she asked was indeed playing the game. Then we were walking along with these people we've just met, discussing play strategies, sharing  Pokéstop locations, spreading word of upcoming lure parties.

One night around 10:30 last week we went into the Oakland neighborhood, home to both Pitt and Carnegie Mellon's campuses and a hotbed of  Pokémon Go activity. When we arrived, at least 20 people sat along the wall in front of the Soldiers & Sailors Memorial, smartphones in hands. We walked around the base of the Cathedral of Learning, where dozens of people in groups of two, three, or more were slowly pacing, stopping to capture a virtual creature. We crossed the street to Schenley plaza, where still dozens more people trekked through the grass, laughing and exclaiming and running up to their friends to share which Pokémon they had just got. Sure, most of these people were only talking to their own groups of friends, if they were talking at all, but it was still a cool experience. For me, the greatest thing was not which monsters I caught or XP my avatar earned; rather it was the energy, the unspoken but palpable buzz generated by all these people walking around in the dark of a warm summer night. Yes, I was giving attention to my smartphone screen, but what I remember most from that evening are the stars, and the fireflies, and the murmuring voices. Pokémon Go is promoting a sort of communal public activity, even if the sociality it produces is liminal at best. Yes, it is still shallow, still commercial, still programmed, but it's something; there's an energy there and a potential that is worth paying attention to.

Pokémon Go is not the be-all-end-all of augmented urban exploration, nor should be it considered the pinnacle of how mobile technology can enable new ways of interfacing with city space. But the game's popularity, and my personal experience using it, has given me hope for the potential of AR apps to enrich our experience of urban spaces and engender new types of interactions in our shared environments.

 

Comment
tags / urbanism, urbanstudies, gaming, gamification, gamestudies, videogames, smartphones, augmentedreality, bogost, ianbogost

Manifesto for a Ludic Century, ludonarrative dissonance in GTA, games and mindf*cks, and more

September 13, 2013  /  Curry Chandler

Systems, play, design: these are not just aspects of the Ludic Century, they are also elements of gaming literacy. Literacy is about creating and understanding meaning, which allows people to write (create) and read (understand).

New literacies, such as visual and technological literacy, have also been identified in recent decades. However, to be truly literate in the Ludic Century also requires gaming literacy. The rise of games in our culture is both cause and effect of gaming literacy in the Ludic Century.

So, perhaps there is one fundamental challenge for the Manifesto for a Ludic Century: would a truly ludic century be a century of manifestos? Of declaring simple principles rather than embracing systems? Or, is the Ludic Manifesto meant to be the last manifesto, the manifesto to end manifestos, replacing simple answers with the complexity of "information at play?"

Might we conclude: videogames are the first creative medium to fully emerge after Marshall McLuhan. By the time they became popular, media ecology as a method was well-known. McLuhan was a popular icon. By the time the first generation of videogame players was becoming adults, McLuhan had become a trope. When the then-new publication Wired Magazine named him their "patron saint" in 1993, the editors didn't even bother to explain what that meant. They didn't need to.

By the time videogame studies became a going concern, McLuhan was gospel. So much so that we don't even talk about him. To use McLuhan's own language of the tetrad, game studies have enhanced or accelerated media ecology itself, to the point that the idea of studying the medium itself over its content has become a natural order.

Generally speaking, educators have warmed to the idea of the flipped classroom far more than that of the MOOC. That move might be injudicious, as the two are intimately connected. It's no accident that private, for-profit MOOC startups like Coursera have advocated for flipped classrooms, since those organizations have much to gain from their endorsement by universities. MOOCs rely on the short, video lecture as the backbone of a new educational beast, after all. Whether in the context of an all-online or a "hybrid" course, a flipped classroom takes the video lecture as a new standard for knowledge delivery and transfers that experience from the lecture hall to the laptop.

  • Also, with increased awareness of Animal Crossing following from the latest game's release for the Nintendo 3DS, Bogost recently posted an excerpt from his 2007 book Persuasive Games discussing consumption and naturalism in Animal Crossing:

Animal Crossing deploys a procedural rhetoric about the repetition of mundane work as a consequence of contemporary material property ideals. When my (then) five-year-old began playing the game seriously, he quickly recognized the dilemma he faced. On the one hand, he wanted to spend the money he had earned from collecting fruit and bugs on new furniture, carpets, and shirts. On the other hand, he wanted to pay off his house so he could get a bigger one like mine.

Ludonarrative dissonance is when the story the game is telling you and your gameplay experience somehow don’t match up. As an example, this was a particular issue in Rockstar’s most recent game, Max Payne 3. Max constantly makes remarks about how terrible he is at his job, even though he does more than is humanly possible to try to protect his employers – including making perfect one-handed head shots in mid-air while drunk and high on painkillers. The disparity and the dissonance between the narrative of the story and the gameplay leave things feeling off kilter and poorly inter-connnected. It doesn’t make sense or fit with your experience so it feels wrong and damages the cohesiveness of the game world and story. It’s like when you go on a old-lady only murdering spree as Niko, who is supposed to be a reluctant killer with a traumatic past, not a gerontophobic misogynist.

What I find strange, in light of our supposed anti-irony cultural moment, is a kind of old-fashioned ironic conceit behind a number of recent critical darlings in the commercial videogame space. 2007's Bioshock and this year’s Bioshock: Infinite are both about the irony of expecting ‘meaningful choice’ to live in an artificial dome of technological and commercial constraints. Last year’s Spec Ops: The Line offers a grim alchemy of self-deprecation and preemptive disdain for its audience. The Grand Theft Auto series has always maintained a cool, dismissive cynicism beneath its gleefully absurd mayhem. These games frame choice as illusory and experience as artificial. They are expensive, explosive parodies of free will.

To cut straight to the heart of it, Bioshock seems to suffer from a powerful dissonance between what it is about as a game, and what it is about as a story. By throwing the narrative and ludic elements of the work into opposition, the game seems to openly mock the player for having believed in the fiction of the game at all. The leveraging of the game’s narrative structure against its ludic structure all but destroys the player’s ability to feel connected to either, forcing the player to either abandon the game in protest (which I almost did) or simply accept that the game cannot be enjoyed as both a game and a story, and to then finish it for the mere sake of finishing it.

The post itself makes a very important point: games, for the most part, can’t pull the Mindfuck like movies can because of the nature of the kind of storytelling to which most games are confined, which is predicated on a particular kind of interaction. Watching a movie may not be an entirely passive experience, but it’s clearly more passive than a game. You may identify with the characters on the screen, but you’re not meant to implicitly think of yourself as them. You’re not engaging in the kind of subtle roleplaying that most (mainstream) games encourage. You are not adopting an avatar. In a game, you are your profile, you are the character you create, and you are also to a certain degree the character that the game sets in front of you. I may be watching everything Lara Croft does from behind her, but I also control her; to the extent that she has choices, I make them. I get her from point A to B, and if she fails it’s my fault. When I talk about something that happened in the game, I don’t say that Lara did it. I say that I did.

Anachrony is a common storytelling technique in which events are narrated out of chronological order. A familiar example is a flashback, where story time jumps to the past for a bit, before returning to the present. The term "nonlinear narrative" is also sometimes used for this kind of out-of-order storytelling (somewhat less precisely).

While it's a common technique in literature and film, anachrony is widely seen as more problematic to use in games, perhaps even to the point of being unusable. If the player's actions during a flashback scene imply a future that differs considerably from the one already presented in a present-day scene (say, the player kills someone who they had been talking to in a present-day scene, or commits suicide in a flashback), this produces an inconsistent narrative. The root of the problem is that players generally have degree of freedom of action, so flashbacks are less like the case in literature and film—where already decided events are simply narrated out of order—and more like time travel, where the player travels back in time and can mess up the timeline.

The first of the books are set to be published in early 2014. Some of the writers that will be published by Press Select in its first round have written for publications like Edge magazine, Kotaku, Kill Screen and personal blogs, including writers like Chris Dahlen, Michael Abbott, Jenn Frank, Jason Killingsworth, Maddy Myers, Tim Rogers, Patricia Hernandez and Robert Yang.

Comment
tags / ludology, gamestudies, gaming, videogames, ianbogost, mcluhan, mediaecology, mediatheory, mediastudies, narrative, pedagogy, highereducation, rhetoric

Multiple angles on gamification

August 04, 2013  /  Curry Chandler

  • This week my fiancée told me about an app she had recently installed on her phone. As she excitedly described it, users of the app can "check in" at a retail store (it sounded like your location is verified through GPS) and you receive points for doing so, presumably to redeem for store purchases but I don't recall all the details. I should also mention that his app is not Foursquare, though I am not sure how the two apps differ specifically. Apps like this exemplify the gamification trend in marketing and advertising. There is an entire wiki dedicated to gamification, with detailed pages like this one describing the various game mechanics used in gamification.

Gamification applies basic game thinking and game mechanics to a non-gaming context. Many gamification models reward users for participating, completing defined user tasks, or achieving goals. A great example is Foursquare, which awards points and perks for "checking-in" to places you go. Although some models introduce distinguishable game-related features, gamification of online shopping includes any type of game thinking applied to an online shopping model.

Gamification makes things fun because it taps into our basic human appetite for competition, stature, and social interaction. Rather than feeling tricked or manipulated, we feel a sense of control when participating in transparent game-oriented shopping. As a result, shopping becomes more exciting and rewarding, while increasing highly sought-after engagement and customer loyalty for retailers and brands.

  • This LinkedIn post by Dan Sanker describes gamification as "the application of game elements and digital game design techniques to non-game problems" and considers potential applications:

Small tools, influenced by simple game mechanics can be used to modify people’s behavior. [...] There is a long way to go to make some mundane tasks more engaging. I think the paradigm that rang true the most this week, especially after talking with the kids about their experiences – is that we need to start thinking about customers, consumers, employees and/or students less as ‘Users’ and more as ‘Players.’ Are there ways to enjoy the experience of buying, procuring, working and learning? It might be a better way for us to consider interacting with Generation Z and those who come after them.

But gamification hasn't just grabbed the attention of the corporate world. Teachers are trying to make learning more fun by introducing games into the classroom in the hope of keeping children engaged for longer. This made me think about how many banks, building societies and other financial services providers are using gamification to encourage kids to start saving or educate them about money.

In the minds of Silicon Valley’s eternal optimists, and the journalists who so unconditionally love them, gamification is the possibility of rendering intricately complex processes, such as education or health care, more effective by transforming them into games. If kids aren’t reading, goes the gamified mantra, perhaps some friendly competitive system of badges and leaderboards might provide the missing incentive. And if adults are getting a tad too heavy, just slap a gizmo on their wrists that challenges them to burn more and more calories each day and they’ll play along.

As a professor of video games, I’ve strong doubts that the same principles that compel us to save Princess Zelda or defeat Donkey Kong apply in the classroom, the boardroom, or the emergency room. Like most game scholars, I view gamification as the creation of the TED-circle nabobs, largely empty, feel-good fodder for the intellectually limp. But the idea isn’t totally useless: There are some special categories of human events, rare and far-between, whose own innate absurdities are so profound that a touch of gamification might actually do them good.

I’m talking, of course, about the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

We are naturally drawn to entertaining, visually appealing, easily digestible information sources and the power is in our hands to choose who, when, where and on what we will engage.  Witness the rise of video consumption on mobile as part of this trend.

Gamification may be the answer but the problem is that businesses can rush into it without necessarily lifting the bonnet to see what is making it work. There are a number of services putting their hands up to execute it for you but executing without a clear view of what motivates your audience can and will prove fatal.

The concept of gamifying products and services came into being when marketers realised that loyalty programmes are becoming too banal to retain consumers. A number of leading brand names, including Hungama, Zapak, Adobe and Microsoft, have used the concept successfully to create a habit of their product amongst users.

Microsoft created a unique gamified tool that allowed users to learn the new MS Office applications and earn rewards, thus making the whole process interactive.

Comment
tags / gaming, gamification, videogames, ludology, gamestudies

Epic EVE battle, Critical games criticism, indie developer self-publishing

July 31, 2013  /  Curry Chandler

Update, 9:18PM ET: The battle is over. After more than five hours of combat, the CFC has defeated TEST Alliance. Over 2,900 ships were destroyed today in the largest fleet battle in Eve Online's history. TEST Alliance intended to make a definitive statement in 6VDT, but their defeat at the hands of the CFC was decisive and will likely result in TEST's withdrawal from the Fountain region.

In a conversation with Whitten, he told us that the commitment to independent developers is full. There won't be restrictions on the type of titles that can be created, nor will there be limits in scope. In response to a question on whether retail-scale games could be published independently, Whitten told us, "Our goal is to give them access to the power of Xbox One, the power of Xbox Live, the cloud, Kinect, Smartglass. That's what we think will actually generate a bunch of creativity on the system." With regard to revenue splitting with developers, we were told that more information will be coming at Gamescom, but that we could think about it "generally like we think about Marketplace today." According to developers we've spoken with, that split can be approximately 50-50.

Another difference between the Xbox One and Xbox 360 is how the games will be published and bought by other gamers. Indie games will not be relegated to the Xbox Live Indie Marketplace like on the Xbox 360 or required to have a Microsoft-certified publisher to distribute physically or digitally outside the Indie Marketplace. All games will be featured in one big area with access to all kinds of games.

If anything has hurt modern video game design over the past several years, it has been the rise of 'freemium'. It seems that it is rare to see a top app or game in the app stores that has a business model that is something other than the 'free-to-play with in-app purchases' model. It has been used as an excuse to make lazy, poorly designed games that are predicated on taking advantage of psychological triggers in its players, and will have negative long term consequences for the video game industry if kept unchecked.

Many freemium games are designed around the idea of conditioning players to become addicted to playing the game. Many game designers want their games to be heavily played, but in this case the freemium games are designed to trigger a 'reward' state in the player's brain in order to keep the player playing (and ultimately entice the user to make in-app purchases to continue playing). This type of conditioning is often referred to as a 'Skinner box', named after the psychologist that created laboratory boxes used to perform behavioral experiments on animals.

It obviously isn’t beyond the realm of possibility that, not only do financial considerations influence a game’s structure and content, financial outcomes affect a studio’s likelihood of survival in the industry, based upon the machinations of its publishing overlords. Activision killed Bizarre Creations, Eidos ruined Looking Glass Studios, EA crushed Westood, Pandemic, Bullfrog, Origin Systems… well, the list could go on, until I turn a strange, purple color, but you get my point. And, when 3.4 million copies sold for a Tomb Raider reboot isn’t enough by a publisher’s standards, you can’t help but feel concern for a developer’s future.

This relationship between environment-learner-content interaction and transfer puts teachers in the unique position to capitalize on game engagement to promote reflection that positively shapes how students tackle real-world challenges. To some, this may seem like a shocking concept, but it’s definitely not a new one—roleplay as instruction, for example, was very popular among the ancient Greeks and, in many ways, served as the backbone for Plato’s renowned Allegory of the Cave. The same is true of Shakespeare’s works, 18th and 19th century opera, and many of the novels, movies, and other media that define our culture. More recently, NASA has applied game-like simulations to teach astronauts how to maneuver through space, medical schools have used them to teach robotic surgery, and the Federal Aviation Administration has employed them to test pilots.

The relationship between the creator, the product, and the audience, are all important contexts to consider during media analysis, especially with games. This is because the audience is an active participant in the media. So if you are creating a game you always have to keep in mind the audience. Even if you say the audience doesn’t matter to you, it won’t cease to exist, and it does not erase the impact your game will have.

Similarly, if you are critiquing or analyzing any media, you can’t ignore the creator and the creator’s intentions. Despite those who claim the “death of the author,” if the audience is aware of the creator’s intentions, it can affect how they perceive the game. Particularly, if you consider the ease in which creators can release statements talking about their work, you’ll have an audience with varying levels of awareness about the creator’s intentions. These factors all play off of each other–they do not exist in a vacuum.

When we talk about any medium’s legitimacy, be it film or videogames or painting, it’s a very historical phenomenon that is inextricably tied to its artness that allows for them to get in on the ground floor of “legitimate" and “important." So if we contextualize the qualities that allowed for film or photography to find themselves supported through a panoply of cultural institutions it was a cultural and political economic process that lead them there.


[...]

Videogames, the kind that would be written about in 20 dollar glossy art magazines, would be exactly this. When creators of videogames want to point to their medium’s legitimacy, it would help to have a lot of smart people legitimate your work in a medium (glossy magazines, international newspapers) that you consider to be likewise legitimate. Spector concedes that ‘yes all the critics right now are online’, but the real battle is in getting these critics offline and into more “legitimate" spaces of representation. It’s a kind of unspoken hierarchy of mediums that is dancing before us here: at each step a new gatekeeper steps into play, both legitimating and separating the reader from the critic and the object of criticism. 

All three games define fatherhood around the act of protection, primarily physical protection. And in each of these games, the protagonist fails—at least temporarily—to protect their ward. In Ethan’s case, his cheery family reflected in his pristine home collapses when he loses a son in a car accident. Later, when his other son goes missing, the game essentially tests Ethan’s ability to reclaim his protective-father status.

No video game grants absolute freedom; they all have rules or guidelines that govern what you can and can’t do. The sci-fi epic Mass Effect is a series that prides itself on choice, but even that trilogy ends on a variation of choosing between the “good” and “bad” ending. Minecraft, the open-world creation game, is extremely open-ended, but you can’t build a gun or construct a tower into space because it doesn’t let you. BioShock’s ending argues that the choices you think you’re making in these games don’t actually represent freedom. You’re just operating within the parameters set by the people in control, be they the developers or the guy in the game telling you to bash his skull with a golf club.

BioShock’s disappointing conclusion ends up illustrating Ryan’s point. A man chooses, a player obeys. It’s a grim and cynical message that emphasizes the constraints of its own art form. And given that the idea of choice is so important to BioShock’s story, I don’t think it could’ve ended any other way.

 

Comment
tags / ludology, gamestudies, ideology, criticaltheory, bioshock, eveonline, gaming, videogames, malegaze, freemium, xbox

Thoughts on Oculus Rift, modding, and assessing the state of games journalism and criticism

July 26, 2013  /  Curry Chandler

Gaming journalism is, by some accounts, a broken field. By others, its unjournalistic process is a symptom of reporting online, where advertising revenue is minimal, at least when compared to revenue from newspapers or magazines. And that isn’t just exclusive to gaming journalism — most outlets, both online and in print, face an uncertain future under the weight of a change in the way we absorb news and opinion. (The change is evident when you account for how many sites have recently undergone a design to accommodate tablets better. USgamer, Kotaku and Polygon among others.)

[...]

That’s why gaming press seems like a corrupt industry, when it should be incorruptible. Corporate apologetics, publisher-granted exclusive reviews, mostly non-hard-hitting, superfluous bits to appease the companies. All of this is how modern journalism operates. (As an experiment, check notable outlets or magazines and look for the term “sponsored content”. More sites do it than you’d think.) But when the revenue stream is one-tenth of historical norms, journalists must find ways to continue writing, and that sometimes involves looking for sponsors. It’s not optimal, it’s not prestigious, it goes everything I learned in journalism school, but hey, money rules the world.

[blip.tv http://blip.tv/play/AYOT7SsC.x?p=1 width="720" height="433"]

Initially, I’m excited about using it for actors: there’s no reason it can’t work directly with the MVN mocap suits we use, and having actors able to see the virtual environment they’re acting in is a pretty mind-blowing concept. I may need to invest in a supply of sick-bags, though…

I’m also working on a virtual camera for the Rift, some tests of aiming cameras WITH MY FACE, the previously-mentioned preview suite, and more. Look for a post specifically about the Rift and filmmaking later this week or early next.

But for now, if you’ll excuse me, there’s a demon-filled corridor in Doom 3 that I’ve got to go be scared witless by…

Issues like over-crowding start to fade away. Of course, physical education can't be replaced (yet?), but actual problems that plague education for students, both young and old could be eradicated completely. Suddenly, post-secondary education becomes affordable once again. Taught by real teachers to real students with those social interactions at the core.

Political events could be attended by anyone. Having the ability to view political discussions on the hill are possible today through various news outlets, or public broadcasting. With integration of Oculus, you could physically be there, sitting there, watching anything and everything unfold as if you were actually there. Having something like this might increase public knowledge of the workings of government, and help youth become passionate about issues that really require their attention.

With both software and hardware modders growing in numbers at a staggering rate, and one that will presumably continue to increase, it’s safe to say that modding is the future of gaming. A single person or group of people going out of their way to improve the gaming experience for themselves and others for non-profit was almost unimaginable during the early stages of the industry. Today, it is the norm, albeit still a relatively underground one. Yet just as the amount of people who play games has risen dramatically over the years, I believe the same is destined to repeat itself for modders. In order for gaming companies to solidify their foothold in the industry, the implementation of cooperation with their target audience will soon be paramount.

Comment
tags / gaming, videogames, virtualreality, oculusrift, ludology, gamestudies

Powered by Squarespace. Background image of New Songdo by Curry Chandler.