Abstract
The chapter examines how indie developers elaborate and experiment with the video game concept, how they seek to establish new ways for thinking about video games, and how to use game technology. The epistemological, perceptual, and aesthetic bases of the digital objects are thus central to how the video game is enacted and how video games can model and reconstruct meaningful human experiences. The chapter includes a review of the scholarly literature on the social and cultural significance of play and games, and how various games can serve a variety of purposes in human lives, including the introduction of an element of chance in an otherwise predictable life, create novel experiences, develop new individual skills, reduce the tedium of everyday life, and so on. Video game developers were in many cases fascinated by games from an early age and are grateful for what the video games have contributed within their lives, and they are now committed to the idea that more people and new groups will be involved in gaming. Consequently, there are new genres and aesthetic expressions being developed in the industry, not the least in the indie developer community, being a laboratory for new video game concepts.
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Notes
- 1.
Similarly, Johns (2006: 173) remarks that the Japanese software industry draws largely on manga and animation films (anime) for inspiration and creative inputs. Furthermore, Johns (2006: 177) proposes that “when placed within the broader context of global flows of culture,” the high degree of “interconnection between the video games industry and other cultural industries is especially apparent.”
- 2.
Even though indie developers take pride in venturing beyond the point that Triple-A developers regard as financially sound projects, causal games being played on mobile media such as smartphones or tablets have relatively lower prestige among indie developers than other game genres. One explanation may be that the current generation of indie developers was raised prior to the introduction of hand-held devices, during what Johns (2006) calls the “console era,” and therefore does not fully recognize the sophistication of casual games. Another condition pertaining to the status of causal games is that “[c]asual games are often played by ʻbodies-in-waiting,ʼ” Keogh (2015: 157) writes. A significant proportion of video game developers are themselves committed gamers, but the casual game genres invite also non-conventional gamers, who regard video games as a form of light entertainment, which also provides the benefit of coming in handy during shorter periods of waiting, say, when communing. This “gaming practice” may deviate from the full commitment of the hardcore gamer community. Ultimately, Keogh (2015: 157–158) proposes, causal games serve to re-define gaming and thus pose a threat to the “outsider” identity of certain gamer communities: “Traditionally an outsider identity held by geeks and hackers as a badge of honour, videogames are now mainstream and ubiquitous, played on trains by businessmen and on computers by parents and on airplanes by small children” (Keogh 2015: 157–158).
- 3.
The scholarly literature on gamification will not be subject to any comprehensive review in this volume. It is still worth noting that the debate regarding the value of and possibilities for gamification—the use of video game technology for other purposes than mere entertainment, say, education and training purposes—is disputed. Scholars such as Robson et al. (2016) provide both “positive” and “negative” cases of gamification, but the basic assumption is that gamification is a potential that can be realized with net economic welfare following. Other commentators are more sceptical. Dale (2014: 83. Original emphasis omitted) defines gamification quite broadly as “the use of game thinking and game mechanics to engage users and solve problems.” The gamification market has grown considerably and has been estimated (in 2014) to be worth £3.4 billion ($5.5 billion) by 2018 (Dale 2014: 82). Sceptical commentators such as Woodcock and Johnson (2018: 543) discriminate between what they refer to as “gamification-from-above” and “gamification-from-below,” wherein the former represents the use of game technology to achieve already stipulated goals. Woodcock and Johnson (2018: 543) explain this distinction in greater detail:
Gamification-from-above is the imposition of systems of regulation, surveillance and standardization upon aspects of everyday life, through forms of interaction and feedback drawn from games (ludus) but severed from their original playful (paidia) contexts. By contrast, gamification-from-below represents a true gamification of everyday life through the subversion, corruption and mockery-making of activities considered ‘serious.’ (Woodcock and Johnson 2018: 543)
In this view, an uncritical application of gamification-from-above means that “game elements” are imposed on people, “purporting to improve their experiences without genuine engagement or dialogue” (Woodcock and Johnson 2018: 547). Under such conditions, gamification is treated, not entirely unlike other media such as digital technologies, as “an inherently and unproblematically progressive force,” Woodcock and Johnson (2018: 543) argue. Other commentators have argued that gamification applications that are introduced to serve pre-defined managerial interests easily result in conformism and generate other unintended consequences, or consequences inconsistent with formally acclaimed qualities of gamification and games more generally. For instance, DeWinter et al. (2014: 116) examine the case of what its proponents refer to as “lean training,” wherein a trivial case of how to instruct a group of trainees how to draw a pig illustrates the concern with the gamification-from-above model:
In this exercise, all participants are asked to draw a pig in a prescribed amount of time, and the skill levels range from excellent to very bad. Then the group is given a set of instructions to draw a pig, such as ‘draw a circle,’ and ‘draw a sideways 3 for the ears’. At the end of this process, everyone’s pigs look similar, and this norms the group. What is sacrificed is the outliers, which means that the people who were excellent are also normed to the group. (DeWinter et al. 2014: 116)
In the end, such uses of gamification to impose standards and to eliminate outliers on the basis of group decisions regarding tolerable performance are indicative of the unintended consequences of Woodcock and Johnson’s (2018) gamification-from-above concept. In the end, regardless of the praise and acclaims of the use of games and other forms of play in working life settings, DeWinter et al. (2014: 123) contend that play and games tend to converge towards economic and financially defined ends, which make play far less “free” and “creative” as early proponents of play and games claim: “[P]lay belongs to games, games belong to algorithms and algorithms represent the intellectual and manual labour processes of high-stakes economics” (DeWinter et al. 2014: 123).
Rosenblat and Stark’s (2016) study of the algorithm-based monitoring of Uber drivers is an illustrative case of DeWinter et al. (2014) point. Rosenblat and Stark (2016) explicitly speak about this line of work as a form of “algorithmic labour.” “Through tools such as dynamic, algorithmic pricing and a number of other elements of the Uber application’s design, Uber is empowered via information and power asymmetries to effect conditions of soft control, affective labor, and gamified patterns of worker engagement on its drivers,” Rosenblat and Stark (2016: 3759) write. Rather than using direct disciplinary measures on drivers, the Uber business model uses weekly performance metrics that reveal how well Uber drivers conform towards the behaviour and/or performance of other drivers. As such statistics are also revealed to presumptive Uber customers, the algorithm-based control has homogenizing effects that, if nothing else, undermine the claim that Uber drivers represent a class of entrepreneurs, simply because there is little room for entrepreneurial decisions as the algorithm-based model incentivizes Uber drivers to provide “a standardized service” (Rosenblat and Stark 2016: 3772). In the end, the gamification element in the Uber business model is distinctively and unambiguously a case of gamification-from-above inasmuch as Uber drivers are actively encouraged to participate in game-like competition that is supposed to be engaging and fun, but the divers themselves are not invited to participate in the creation of the rules of the game they eventually submit to.
- 4.
In scholarly circles, Virtual Reality (VR) technology was introduced in the early 1990s as the latest thrust in visual media technology. Steuer (1992: 74) defines virtual reality as the “[e]lectronic simulations of environments via head-mounted eye googles and wired clothing enabling the end user to interact in realistic three-dimensional situations.” A few years later, Zettl (1996: 86) defined VR as “a computer-generated three-dimensional image and stereo sound that displays events (objects and environments) and that is interactive with the user.” In this case, Zettl (1996: 86) adds, “interactivity means that we change from mere observers or viewers to event participants.” As such, the gamer exercises some control over “the event display” (Zettl 1996: 86). By and large, VR was introduced and marketed as an “immersive” visual medium, which means that the visual medium “submerges the perceptual system of the user in virtual stimuli” (Biocca 1992: 25). More simply put, “The more the system captivates the senses and blocks out stimuli from the physical world, the more the system is considered immersive,” Biocca (1992: 25) writes. Steuer (1992: 75) uses the term presence to underline that VR is not primarily the technological apparatus that needs to be assembled and integrated into a functional unity, but being a matter of a “human experience.” Presence here means the “the sense of being in an environment,” with which the subject interacts (Steuer 1992: 75. Original emphasis omitted).
The term “presence” underlines that VR technology is part of a long tradition of visual media, best characterized as “technologies of illusion,” whose purpose is “to convince the viewer that he or she is occupying the same visual spaces as the object in view” (Bolter 1996: 113). The perspectival trompe l’oeil paintings of the Renaissance period thus differ in degree rather than in kind from contemporary VR technology. Despite Steuer’s (1992) ambition to release the VR technology from the physical devices that constitute the medium, VR has been consistently associated with the failure to provide a sufficiently immersive, functional, and not the least affordable technology so that the VR promise can materialize. The technology has been successfully implemented in various forms of training, say, invasive surgery (e.g., Gallagher and Cates 2004), but the technology has, on balance, failed to live up to the hype of the early 1990s. Consequently, few of the indie developers and other video game industry functionaries addressed VR as a serious contestant to, for example, PC or console-based video games.
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Styhre, A. (2020). Expanding the Video Game Concept: The Perceptual and Epistemological Bases of the Digital Objects. In: Indie Video Game Development Work. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45545-3_7
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