Thanks to all those who attended NerdNite at the Middlesex in Cambridge last night. Great crowd and wonderful questions. I wish I had time to answer them all! Upon several requests, I’ve converted my PowerPoint presentation to a QuickTime file (.mov). The audio and video clips are extracted, but the images are intact. Click here for a copy of my presentation.
Props to Jeremy @NerdNite who made sure everything ran smoothly, including coming equipped with a computer nerd’s kit full of A/V cables and connectors! And thanks to Brandon for a hilarious introduction to the science of optical illusions. I’m *still* seeing pink lines on the page, as promised!
I met lots of wonderful people, including Ethan Gilsdorf, the author of Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks, a touching, humorous, intriguing story about Ethan’s D&D childhood and later return to fantasy and other alt.life experiences as an adult. He told me the book comes out in paperback this fall, so get it and read it if you haven’t already!
Born of a handful of events and revelations in the games industry over the past few month as well as new directions in my research, this brief post about ethical gaming is a provocation for gamers and game studies scholars. It begins in the virtual frontier of Red Dead Redemption (RDR), a “sandbox” game set in the early 20th century American West from Grand Theft Auto (GTA) creators Rockstar Games and Take-Two Interactive. RDR was released on May 18 with the hype of a summer blockbuster movie, and reviews of the game are glowing, if not embarrassingly gushing. New York Times reviewer Seth Schiesel likens the game to a Sam Peckinpah film and calls RDR a “tour de force,” lauding Rockstar’s creation of a stunning geographical environment filled with compelling characters. With an estimated development budget of 80 to 100 million dollars, RDR reinforces the hit-driven trend of big games from established studios. As both a gamer and game studies scholar, I have been dithering for weeks over whether to purchase the game.
I developed a public lecture about video games and the military, which I presented at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and Worcester State College on Thursday, February 25. Below is an abstract of the talk. The WPI presentation was video recorded and is available in High-Res, Low-Res and Audio-only versions. My friend Darius Kazemi drove me to the WPI talk and took close notes of my presentation. You can read his on-the-fly transcript. The Worcester local paper, the Telegram & Gazette, published a story about my WSC talk.
Joystick Soldiers: Video Games and Militarism
This presentation is an historical and contemporary analysis of the relationship between the video game industry and the military. In particular, I focus on war and military-themed video games, which represent a large portion of games sold in the US, and argue that video games are the Why We Fight films of today. By paying hyper-attention to the details of modern warfare technology and tactical strategy, military-themed games show players how we fight wars, but rarely address questions of the moral responsibility and local and global consequences of military action.
On January 21 Sony announced the cast for its exclusive PlayStation Network reality TV series, The Tester. This latest addition to the reality-competition subgenre follows a familiar structure: Contestants compete through various challenges in order to land a sought-after and usually glamorous job (model, designer, chef, etc.). However, contestants on The Tester compete for a job in Sony’s quality control division testing games. As a friend of mine from the industry said to me about The Tester, the show’s premise “is like competing for a shot to become a fry cook.”
Presumably the audience for The Tester is gamers since one can only access the show through the PSN. Sony assumes this audience believes a job in the games industry is a dream come true. The recent Rockstar Wives controversy, which I wrote about on FLOW and Sean Duncan posted on Antenna, confirmed this attitude in the many online posts that followed the story. Amid sympathetic comments for overworked employees, it was common to read quips about how “awesome” it is to work in games and that the beleaguered employees at Rockstar San Diego should shut up and put up.
In addition to the veneer of “coolness” that hides the reality of unpaid overtime and exhausting, unrealistic production schedules, game testing, in particular, is widely touted as the best way to get one’s foot in the games industry door. On Sony’s website for the new show, David Jaffee, a former Sony creative director and lead designer on God of War, says, ”I started as a Tester 15 years ago with Sony. And testing is still one of the best ways to break into the industry. I’m looking forward to seeing which cast member rises to the top.” The show is motivated by this assumption and we should expect to hear anecdotes from successful Sony panelists and guests about the game production career ladder that begins with entry level Q&A jobs.
Viewers should also expect to see Sony address the “hard work” of testing. It won’t be portrayed as all fun and games – where’s the challenge and voyeuristic pleasure in that? No, we will hear about callused thumbs, soar eyes and aching backsides. We will relish the “physical challenges” the contestants must endure. But will the realities of working in games and the realities of play testing be explored in any substantial way? I doubt it, because it doesn’t make good television and, for a show sponsored by Sony, on the Sony network, packed with current and former Sony employees, featuring (I imagine) PS3 and PSP games, workplace realities challenge the “cool” factor, the escapist ethos, the fun of gaming, and the sublime corporate synergy of this production.
Ask any current or former play tester (and there are far more former play testers) about their experiences “playing games all day for pay”. The stories are not pretty or cool. Most play testing jobs are temporary, part-time, non-benefited, contract-based work. Slogging through a broken, buggy, unfinished game doesn’t look or feel like “playing” at all. Furthermore, the play tester who moves to fulltime employment as a designer is as rare as the high school basketball star who makes it to the NBA.
Some of the issues I will be interested in seeing and discussing when The Tester airs in February include how this show imagines game production and the role of the play tester in crafting ludic experiences? How Sony leverages itself in this program, and how audiences/players respond to this echo-chamber for Sony-branded entertainment? And, how will the critical dialogue about labor sparked by Rockstar Wives and the announcement of this show develop?
While popular discourse about the role of women in games is usually limited to the hyper-sexualized portrayal of female avatars or how to lure women and girls to play, the latest controversy over working conditions at a major game development company is a rare public opportunity to consider the gender and class politics of the video game industry.
On January 7 a post from anonymous author “Rockstar Spouse” appeared on Gamasutra, a news and information site for video game developers. The post reads as a collective complaint from the wives of employees about the working conditions at Rockstar San Diego. Rockstar is a top-tier video game developer owned by publisher Take-Two Interactive and most famously known for the Grand Theft Auto and Max Payne franchises. Rockstar Spouse borrows its handle from “EA Spouse,” the anonymous author of a 2004 LiveJournal post who raised nearly identical labor concerns about Electronic Arts. In both cases, the key issues include prolonged unpaid overtime (referred to in the industry as “crunch time”), declining morale and depression, physical and emotional suffering, lack of raises or cost of living increases despite record-breaking game sales, and the toll these working conditions take on the domestic life of employees, spouses and their children. As a result of months of abuse and inaction on the part of the company, Rockstar Spouse declared, “action must be taken to protect the rights of employees and those who depend on them.”
This latest labor relations controversy raises many points worthy of discussion, but in this brief piece I wish to draw specific attention to the gendered nature of this event. What the Rockstar Wives (as the post is now described) have written is a Marxist feminist critique of labor in the games industry, demonstrating once again that the personal is political and that corporatism inflicts tangible material consequences on workers and workers’ families.
Along with 69 million other users, I’ve been playing Farmville on Facebook for a couple of months. A simple point and click petri-dish game, Farmville by Zynga starts you off with a modest plot of land and a bit of Farmville (FV) coinage. You buy seeds, animals, trees, buildings, decorations, and seasonal items. You watch your seeds mature into flowers, fruits or vegetables, and harvest fully grown crops for more FV coins. You use FV coins to plow and plant. Some crops are worth more than others, take longer to fully grow but all will wither and become worthless if you let full plants sit too long. So the game has built-in incentives to return daily (if not hourly) to check on your progress. You can add neighbors (other Facebook friends with the Farmville app installed), gain experience points to level up which allows you greater access to high-yield crops, expand your land, decorate and redecorate, move things around, sell items, buy items, fertilize your friend’s farm, browse “special” items in the market and, if you are really into FV, use real cash to buy FV dollars for more expensive items.
There has been some controversy over how Zynga cajoels users to pay real money for FV cash, with a lawsuit now pending. I’m suspicious of all Facebook apps for liberal data sharing settings and the annoying ads, but Farmville play is free and casual. Like many users, I feel this is a small price to pay for a mildly amusing distraction. I was never tempted to buy FV cash. But now I’m ready to give up the farm. The leveling limitations of not paying real cash for FV bills and the monotony of plowing, planting, harvesting and plowing have brought me to the end of fun.
I could play Bubble Breaker for months and, perhaps, years to come. This simple, casual game gives me a new challenge every time I refresh the game board. I’m not challenged by Farmville. It reminds me of playing The Sims. Once I figured out the game mechanics, the promotional structure, bought the fancier furniture, arranged and rearranged, fell in love and broke hearts, I was bored. Expansion packs kept me going for a while, but eventually it was just more of the same.
Farmville has run its course for me. I hear that taking care of marine life over at Fishville is fun for a while.
Thanks to all those who attended NerdNite at the Middlesex in Cambridge last night. Great crowd and wonderful questions. I wish I had time to answer them all! Upon several requests, I’ve converted my PowerPoint presentation to a QuickTime file (.mov). The audio and video clips are extracted, but the images are intact. Click here for a copy of my presentation.
