Missives from the Mob

We are heading into the final day of what has been a rich week of discussion around the idea of power, play, and participation. So much has been covered that I hesitate to try and summarize; instead, I thought I add something new to the mix, which might seem to be something of a radical departure from most of the posts to date, but I will do my best to connect it back to some of the things that have been discussed. I have been reading a book called Play to Win, by David Sirlin. Sirlin is a professional videogame player (Street Fighter is his game of choice), and while he is not against “playing a game for fun,” he thinks that if one is to play to win, fun is beside the point. He writes “In pursuing the path of winning, you are likely to learn that concentrating merely on beating the opponent is not enough. In the long run, you will have to improve yourself always, or you will be surpassed. The actual conflict appears to be between you and the opponents, but the best way to win is to bring to the table a mastery of playing to win and a mastery of the game at hand.”

Within educational circles, a lot of lip service is given to the concept of mastery, of becoming fluent in a set of key skills. Mastery is certainly a form of power, and in order to gain mastery of a game a tremendous amount of time must be spent studying the game, practicing skills, and employing those skills against experts. When mastery is achieved, either in a game as simple as Warioware or as complex as Starcraft, players feel a tremendous sense of accomplishment.

Games invite mastery because they are made up of sets of discrete challenges, knowable rules, and repeatable choices. Beating a game is only one measure of mastery; I know many gamers who care not about beating the game but only mastering the skills to play well, and to perform at the highest possible level. The emotions expressed in the blog entry from the former WoW player were in part connected to the fact that the open-ended structure of MMOs fails to reward mastery of a known system. In WoW, the system is always changing as bugs are found and fixed, as new challenges are released—players enter into a Sisyphusian contract whereby one may never attain the kind of mastery games like Street Fighter, Warcraft, or Madden Football afford. And this can be incredibly disempowering.

Several of the posts over the last few days have touched on this idea of players being played by games, and the need to acknowledge the power structures inherent in games, be they embedded in rules or in the underlying technology. But I would argue that when a player gains mastery over the game, they acknowledge the artificiality of its construct, learning to speak the system so well that they make it their own. Sirlin is instructive on this point:

“A competitive game is…a debate. You argue your points with your opponent, and he argues his. “I think this series of moves is optimal,” you say, and he retorts, “Not when you take this into account.” Debates in real life are highly subjective, but in games we can be absolutely sure who the winner is.

The conflict is between the players; the game itself if merely the medium—the language—of the debate. The game must be expressive enough to allow the debaters to articulate complex thoughts. A skilled debater knows the nuances of the language and common tricks and traps of language he can use against untested opponents, but the language is only his tool. Once he learns the theory of debate, he can apply it to any language. It is common to focus entirely on learning nuances of a language at the expense of gaining a real understanding of how debate should be conducted. Expert debate involves gaining an understanding of the opponent and what he will say, and knowing immediately what you will say back. It involves deception and boldness, risk-taking and conservatism. If you learn to debate (play to win), then learning particular languages (games) become simple in comparison.

Is it useful then, to think about the value of playing to win in the context of power and participation? I think so, and I worry that in looking for forms of empowerment within games and gaming practices, we often overlook competition and playing to win as viable models. Part of the appeal of games is that they allow you to become something that you might not really be—for many kids winning while playing might provide them a rare moment of success in a life where those moments are few and far between. Empowering a child is often about giving them a challenge you know they can take on, but which requires them to invest in mastering the skills to fulfill that challenge. Games are natural systems for such a pursuit of mastery, and playing to win a strategy we should be more willing to take on when we ask how kids might be better empowered through their play.

Posted by gamersmob at 08:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I woke up this morning early to resift through yesterday’s posts and remain startled and amazed by the thoughtfulness of each entry in the online dialogue I am moderating as part of a seried on Games, Kids, and Learning. I am learning a tremendous amount from this discussion, both in terms of the positions from which people are choosing to express their ideas (as Justin noted, there are a range of disciplinary voices present), as well as from the content of what is being shared. I found yesterday’s posts to be particularly generative: more questions were raised than answered, and a number of frameworks introduced. I am thinking here of Lizbeth’s model of an AgencyAgency, Kallen’s discussion of bridging vs. bonding social capital, Jane’s notion of quality of life, Craig’s link between consumption and participation, Linda’s rumination on games as “mini-cultural spaces of their own making,” Justin’s call for an integration of games into all aspects of daily life. Each of these frameworks contributes to the conceptual toolkit we are collectively building around games and learning, and I am so happy to see the dialogue tackling tough issues. The question of “participation” is most certainly tied to issues of access (physical, economic, social) as well as the way in which participatory modes of gaming intersect with lives “complicated by physiological realities, human relationships and circumstances over which many may have limited control.”

I wanted to pull out one tiny thread from the giant tapestry of threads being woven here, mostly because it connects to a little and unformed idea I wanted to share. The term “deep participation” has been used several times, and in light of Lizbeth’s post on the power of “small moves” (my rephrasing here), I have been thinking about “largeness” and “smallness” as it relates to the creation of deep experiences. As a game designer, it is often easy to get caught up in the push toward making bigger games with more community features, complex mechanics, and a world that feels like a space in which anything can happen. As a teacher, it is also easy to get caught in the wave of “bigness” that drives a desire to educate—to give students as much as they can handle and then even a bit more, in the hopes that immersion in much, will result in the learning of many. Often, in discussions of power and participation, emphasis is placed, at least initially, on the complexity of an activity or the availability of multiple activities within a single space. I am making rash generalizations here, so please forgive the gloss, but the point I want to make is that when Lizbeth pointed to the power of a single small gesture made by a child with limited movement abilities, I was reminded that it is incredibly useful to remember that agency can be supported through the tiniest of interventions. We see this theory played out again and again in the failure state of games and the moments of micro learning that go on each time a player tests out a hypothesis about how something works, fails in that theory, and tries again. We also see it embedded in many of the posts made in this discussion over the past few days as people point to the specific small moments they observe where they see meaningful participation occurring.

I was thinking about this idea of “smallness” as I viewed one of the many YouTube demo video’s made around the game Line Rider. Line Rider is a simple flash game where you are given an interface with which to draw a surface for a little penguin on a sled to slide down. Once the surface is drawn, you click the play button to watch the ride. It is in essence a game where designing the level is the gameplay. There have been several recent games that use the mechanic of drawing as means of play (Draw Play, Okami) or the design of levels (Blockaction), placing something of a spin on the idea of modding. What interests me in these games, and the plethora of demo videos that document the levels, is not just the fact that players are empowered through design to literally create their own game world, but that the smallness of the game and the simplicity of the mechanic has led to the kinds of deep participation often documented in much larger and more complex games. In Line Rider, a player only has a line with which to work…the expression of that line within the context of a game turns it into any number of things: a landscape, a race course, a loop de loop, a movie set on which to film the trials and travails of a well-outfitted penguin. In noting the hundreds of demo videos made by players documenting the games they’ve designed, it is clear that the game has created a deep sense of participation from the simplest of means. Free, “casual” games like these are important, I think, because they can get into the hands of players who don’t have the economic means to support the purchase of games or subscription fees, and because they remind us that finding ways to place tools in the hands of players does not require complicated technology, nor complex gameplay. Something as small as a line can lead to a whole universe of meaning and participation for players.

Posted by gamersmob at 03:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The online dialogue series i am running called Everywhere Now: Games, Kids, and Learning started today. The first week's discussion is called "Power, Play, and Participation."

Posted by gamersmob at 02:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)