I found out about one such experiment through Nels Anderson, whose blog Above 49 got me thinking about this last trio of posts on the appeals of game narratives. Nels joined in a Far Cry 2 “permadeath” experiment led by Ben Abraham and Michel. Normally, when your protagonist dies in this game, you start anew from a “save point,” losing whatever progress you made since you last slept, completed a major mission objective, or passed by a tin on the wall with a floppy disc icon. The “permadeath” experiment is an attempt to experience the game in a more tense, dramatic way by deciding that when your protagonist dies, you stop playing the game entirely with that character. In theory, knowing that your character will stay dead, death will have some real meaning.

Even more interesting to me, however, is that Nels and company decided that if any of the non-player characters in the game die, they stay dead, too, without resorting to reloading form an earlier save. This is a real risk in Far Cry 2, as your protagonist meets “buddies” who will come to your rescue when you run out of health. Just when you think you’re dead, your vision blurs and darkens, and some associate you met in a bar appears out of nowhere to drag you out of battle, stick a pistol in your hand, and fight by your side. And, eventually, your buddy’s life may well be in your hands as well.

One might argue that this experiment is about making the game more like a traditional story, and less like a game of trial-and-error. Commenting on this experiment, however, Far Cry 2 designer Clint Hocking disagrees, suggesting that there’s a certain irony to this: “It is not the combination of Far Cry 2 + authored narrative irreversibility that is making the permadeath experiment meaningful to Ben and to others, it is the fact that he is able to manipulate the game to create this experiment that is bringing meaning.” (Careful of the spoiler in that link, prefaced by, “I’ll tell you what will happen.”) In other words, according to Clint, being able to fiddle with a game, experience it in terms of the appeal I have referred to as “tomfoolery,” is what makes us appreciate it more, not the appeal of the story itself, the feeling of loss you experience when your in-game comrades die in your arms.

I agree with Clint that this is part of the appeal, but I disagree with the dismissal of the narrative element. Partly, he’s dismissing this because he feels that war movies already handle the emotional “war buddy dying in your arms” moment pretty well already, and thus we may question why we should bother replicating that in games. The simple answer to this question, though, is that there’s a big difference between watching somebody else lose a buddy and feeling like we ourselves played a role in that loss. Movies can make you identify with someone else’s sadness, but, as I’ve heard others point out, games can make you feel guilt, pride, and other emotions based on your own performance. That’s worthwhile distinction in itself, and there’s no shame in stepping up onto the shoulders of filmmakers from time to time to reach greater heights with familiar tropes. It’s part of a process of exploring not just how games can do entirely new and different things, but how games can do the same things as before, but potentially better.

Nels’s and Clint’s posts got me to start Far Cry 2 myself in the last few months, and I’m finding it both fun and fascinating in the few hours I can steal for it here and there. I’m not good enough at it yet (my first play-through) to allow my own death to be permanent, but I have tried it both ways with my buddies, insisting upon irreversibility and reloading from recent saves depending on the situation.

Twice, I found it pretty affecting when I refused to reload, allowing my buddies to die, though I was definitely more attached to the ones who had actually saved my protagonist’s life already. In one case, for instance, I had been getting aid from a fellow who was really a selfish, deplorable arms dealer, but who had saved my bacon on numerous occasions, twice getting badly wounded himself. I didn’t realize then that three such wounds would be all he could handle. When I started pumping syrettes into him, I realized with a sense of loss that I wasn’t saving his life, but easing my compatriot into a peaceful death.

In another case, I brought my rescuer back from a mortal wound, after scrambling around a guard post to restock on syrettes to inject her with. Enemies were still shooting at us, so I tossed off a molotov cocktail as I made my way back to her crumpled form. My ally was saved, but only for a moment. She wasn’t quick enough to follow me to safety. That molotov spread faster than I expected, and she started screaming as the grass and trees around her were engulfed in flames. I tried to get close, but there was no button to drag a person out of a brushfire even if I thought I could withstand the heat. I watched her die, and I felt sad and frustrated—not the kind of frustrated from when you have to replay a level, but the kind from feeling helpless. And, reflecting on this, I found that really interesting.

I’ll admit it: The way I related this story later to my friends was told in the form of, “Oh my gosh, this was bizarre and hilarious.” That’s because it’s amazing that the game allowed this level of variation, detail, and disturbing content. As Clint says, part of the appeal of retelling these stories is in admiring how much variation the game allows for—but a great piece of the appeal of playing these stories, refusing to turn back time, is in the emotional experience itself.

That said, it would have been even more affecting when buddies died if I had been able to interact with them through any means besides taking bonus missions and being dragged out of fire fights. After one of them rescues your protagonist, you don’t even have the option to offer thanks. They just kind of stand there, looking vigilant, while you drive off in a truck. They are a tool, and it’s sometimes easy to treat them that way.

On one occasion, I did opt to reload from an old save to “protect” a buddy from my own carelessly thrown grenade. This one had never actually pulled my fat out of the fire, but I was hoping that he would start saving my life, rather than just giving me bonus missions, if I kept him around. He never did. When I had the chance to save him again later at the expense of others, I opted just to leave him. What’d he ever do for me?

In retrospect, I realize that it’s probably pretty telling that I only reloaded for the one I was emotionally unattached to. Before saving me, a “buddy” felt like a potential tool, a thing; after saving me, however, a “buddy” felt somewhat more like a comrade-in-arms. And if there had been some way to interact with them with greater depth, I suspect it wouldn’t take a life-saving situation for me to care just a bit more.

If Far Cry 2 does have some limitation in offering an emotional experience, then, I’d say it’s not through anything lacking in the ability to play with it like a toy, but with the depth of the narrative design. As Clint says, they are a “limited resource […] ‘disguised’ as a real human character”—much like in Grand Theft Auto IV, as observed by Duncan Fyfe. And, as a resource, there’s some expectation that they should be an asset, somehow rewarding to us. But good stories aren’t necessarily about winning prizes. Sometimes, we can feel encouraged to do something for narrative purposes without necessarily involving a reward (a distinction that probably deserves its own post, now that I think on it).

I don’t think that authorial irreversibility is the only way to encourage a more emotionally narrative in games, but my own experiences with Far Cry 2 suggest to me that perhaps we shouldn’t dismiss it so quickly. Some gamers are very concerned that irreversibility is what will drive Heavy Rain; the best David Cage can do is assert that he hopes to “convince” players that they should keep playing. I think that the trick here may be in making sure that wherever you lead players, you end up at something meaningful, purposeful.

Watching a buddy die in Far Cry 2 can feel poignant and meaningful, and it may even fit into some overarching game mechanic that I have yet to discover, not having finished the game. Letting your protagonist die in Far Cry 2, however, only has the meaning we ascribe to it ourselves, with nothing more than a “game over” screen offering to reload from our last save. It is pretty anticlimactic if you’re not doing the “permadeath” thing—and even if you are, as Nels points out. Any meaning that results from the death is entirely what we bring to it, not in what the game offers.

Irreversibility in narrative game design should not be something that players feel forced to do, but something that feels more emotionally satisfying to allow to happen. If the main emotion a game shoots for is “the thrill of victory,” irreversibility will not ever be desirable. Games need to reach for something more in order to encourage us to let our characters die.

Why not make up our own difficulty adjustments and imagine our own stories, then? Why not play “hardcore” or “permadeath” style, deciding that when our protagonist dies, it stays dead? Why not reject using the best weapons and skills available to our hero? Or, if a certain degree of variation is actually built into the game—such as the ability to play in a way that disagrees with our initial inclinations, perhaps as a villain rather than a hero—why not replay that way?

In fact, many gamers do just these things—and sometimes, I’m one of them. I had originally planned just one more post in this series on blending story and mastery appeals in games, but I’m going to have to spread it out over a couple more. In this post, I’ll discuss some ways I’ve tried to spice up replays by limiting my actions according to things that might make sense in the context of a story. I’ll discuss another recently blogged experiment in the post that follows this one, focusing on the narrative potential of irreversible actions. (And I’ll probably write another post after that, too, as I actually wrote this post on the next one months ago, and have new thoughts on these matters developed since then.)

Though I’ve tried replaying more than one game with an eye to enriching storytelling (back when I had time to finish games at all!), I’ll focus here on a couple experiments I tried with Fallout 3. In summary, I find that some experiments can indeed inject something new and interesting into a game, but more often than not, games that offer story-oriented appeals tend to let me down when I try to make up my own story, and sometimes even when I accept one of the story paths they actually offer.

I do face a hurdle right off the bat with such experiments. Playing a game that offers a story-oriented appeal means putting myself in a character’s shoes, and so taking on arbitrary limitations on my behavior often feels like going against the natural inclinations of a rational character. Why do anything but the most efficient thing to defeat everyone in the room? Wouldn’t you try to be as powerful as possible if you were trying to save the galaxy/the planet/the Wasteland/an underwater city full of innocent little girls? Why compromise?

The answer to that “why” may be found in the protagonist him or herself. The “permadeath” experiment is one way of attempt to graft another level of narrative into a game, but it requires an extradiegetic (or out-of-game) explanation for the alteration we’re imposing. I figured I’d try a few experimental gaming styles that actually kept my limitations coherent within the narrative, and the easiest way to do this may be to view arbitrary limitations as quirks of the protagonist. After all, games like Bioshock and Shadow of the Colossus have raised powerful questions in-game about whether the player should be questioning the morality of following orders and killing others without hesitation. They encourage us to ask whether efficiency and forward momentum are the only forces driving us. People aren’t actually wholly rational in their decision-making, but face moral and personal complexities.

Along these lines, then, one experiment I’ve tried is seeing if I can complete Fallout 3 with a pacifistic merchant. I made a character who stinks at combat, focusing on all the skills and perks that power gamers reject as pointless, like Barter, Fortune Finder, and Master Trader. I was determined to reach the (original) level cap and the end of the main quest without actually killing any fellow human beings. The game keeps track of how many people you’ve killed (on your Pip Boy), so it’s easy to be wary of this.

I found that this was indeed an interesting way of adding a new sense of challenge to the game after I’d already figured out how to decimate all my foes, and it offered some encouragement to try out some of the interesting perks that are functionally useless if you’re focusing on being a killing machine. (I don’t actually need to have Lady Killer and Child at Heart when my Speech skill is so high already, but what the hey, I’m playing a smooth-talking master trader with a fortune at his disposal. Why not stay “in character”?)

This is not an experiment the game was really designed to support, however, and it shows. Yes, you can go pretty far without actually being credited for taking someone else’s life, but no, you can’t make an omelette without someone in the kitchen breaking some eggs. There are a few scenes where may face serious problems unless someone around is willing to kill for you, which means you’d better have a hired gun to do your dirty work for you. For a little while, I even had two followers (through a certain exploit), which meant I never had to lift a finger when attacked.

Before this point, however, I faced some serious problems. Only my second or third foray into the Wasteland required some creative reinterpretation of my own pacifistic rules, as I got accosted by a group of armored mercenaries with a contract out on my life. I fired some “warning shots” into a car, and then ran away, “inadvertently” luring the AI-controlled enemies toward the burning vehicle just in time for it to explode and kill most of them instantly. I didn’t get credit for the kills on my Pip Boy—it’s not like I forced them to chase me past an exploding vehicle. The last of them chased after me on a crippled leg, however, so I just kept shooting guns out of his hand. He limped away in fear for just long enough to find another gun and repeat the whole exercise. Eventually I ran away from him and found someplace else to go for awhile.

The funny thing about this experiment is that the game is almost designed to let you do this, but not quite. Yes, you can focus your skill building in such a way that you are pretty useless in a fight, but no, you can’t really avoid fights forever. Perhaps that’s an appropriate message for a tough world like post-apocalyptic DC, a commentary about the brutality of the world and inevitability of kill-or-be-killed situations. Nevertheless, it ends up being taken to an unrealistic extreme that ruins any sense of narrative immersion. If Fallout 3 had really been designed to support the kind of story I was trying to explore with my character, warning shots might have had some effect on hopelessly outgunned opponents. It strains credibility that all hired guns would be so willing to die in the face of impossible odds.

On the other end of the spectrum, I’ve tried playing Fallout 3 as very evil. I know this isn’t an experiment for some—it’s actually built into the options offered by the game. And I really went all-out on this one, using it as an excuse to impose a number of limitations on myself and come up with far-out explanations for different abilities. My evil character would be also be a violent drug addict, only picking up stimpacks and looting corpses so he trade the goods for more Psycho, Jet, and Med-X. The “Mysterious Stranger” perk—in which a man in a trench coat occasionally appears to finish a fight for you—can be an immersion-breaker in some circumstances, but it makes perfect sense for a character who is likely to hallucinate. At first, he only healed himself with water and stolen food, but later, his taste for flesh grew insatiable, so he limited himself to blood packs (which healed extra thanks to the Hematophage perk), human corpses (eaten thanks to the Cannibal perk), and “Strange Meat” (acquired through fellow cannibals). He completed quests that required enslaving innocent people and killing everyone in not just one, but two entire towns, each in a spectacularly violent fashion.

This is one of those “experiments” that is actively supported by the game design itself, but I still found it unsatisfying (not to mention disturbing) because having a coherent narrative isn’t the same as having a meaningful one. Quite simply, the protagonist’s behavior—and not just the stuff I came up with—is reprehensible. The game even declared “You bastard” at one point, after choosing to kill a patient on an operating table—one of three results openly offered in a multiple-choice scenario. There’s no real reason to do such things other than the humor value of how wrong it is, the sense of experimentation in trying to see what you can get away with, or the sense of completeness in seeing content you’d otherwise miss. But there’s no real meaning behind it, no theme, no message, just action and reaction. If you’re looking for story-oriented appeals, there isn’t much to find.

Every other storytelling medium that provides a despicable protagonist does so for a reason. In movies about mobsters, for instance, even the most heinous actions can offer a sense of psychological complexity, thematic depth, or even old-fashioned, didactic moralizing. Granted, there is some disincentive to do horrible things in Fallout 3 in the form of interpersonal interaction. Assuming you have a heart at all in real life, for instance, you’ll probably feel like a jerk for selling a cute little kid into slavery (who proclaims, “I’m going on an adventure!”). Even so, that’s not really the same as making evil deeds purposeful or thematically meaningful in their own right, in terms of the story and world as a whole.

Admittedly, I have yet to finish the game with either of these experiments due to time constraints, so perhaps I just haven’t gotten far enough to really experience the ultimate payoff. So far, though, some aspects of these story-oriented replaying experiments worked better for me than others, such as coming up with diegetic (in-story) reasons to restrict the use of healing supplies. It does make the game more interesting and challenging when you don’t have hundreds of extra stimpacks around, and it can feel perfectly sensible to sell them if you’re putting that money toward something else. “Alternate readings” are relatively easy to apply when they don’t run against the core gameplay of combat, then, but they tend to fall apart when you’re not interested in killing people, or when you want such violence to have some narrative purpose in its own right.

In (what will probably be) my last post in this series, I’ll talk about another kind of experiment practiced by others: an attempt to infuse the death of the protagonist and its own allies with meaning.

On August 12th, I defended my dissertation, Geek Cultures: Media and Identity in the Digital Age, and passed with only a few minor requests for revisions. I’m currently looking into options for publication, but in the meantime, feel free to email me directly (jason @ this domain) if you’d like a copy.

So, finishing the dissertation probably means I’ve had plenty of time to blog, right? Well, not so much, but I aim to remedy that now. Shortly after the defense, I started my new job as an assistant professor in the Communication department at Pine Manor College in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts (not too far from where I grew up, in Newton Upper Falls).

It turns out that designing and teaching three entirely new classes (plus committees and advising) is something of a handful, though certainly an improvement on the Morlock lifestyle that dissertation writing encourages. Now, in November, I’m finally getting to know the ins and outs of the new campus, figuring out what motivates and interests my students best, and carving out some time to do things other than course prep.

My new (academic) year’s resolution, then, is to get back to blogging. I’ll soon finish that three-part series, and I’m going to try to get back into the blogging routine at least once a week. I may not be doing new research on geekdom itself for the time being, but I suspect I’ll still have things to share for a while. Plus, I think you’ll find that my other research interests are plenty geeky in their own right. After all, someone has to babble on about the theories and usage of video games, web design, and science-fiction. I wouldn’t want there to be a shortage of voices opining on these topics in the blogosphere, so I now solemnly return to perform my duties.

I don’t know what the term for this type of play should be. Personally, I’d like to see it become more the norm for games with narrative pretensions, but it’s tough to pull off. Even story-oriented games seem to have a hard time pulling it off. And, notably, it’s usually absent in replaying a game. I’m not sure it has to be, though.

Replaying a game can rob it of this blend of narrative and perfectionist appeals, but not just because you know the story. Many of us re-watch movies we love from time to time, and those are the same every time we watch them; games, meanwhile, can actually offer different “stories,” from those explicitly presented in the paths they offer to those we make ourselves. No, the problem I’d like to focus on for now is how the way replaying a game can ruin the way that we enjoy a game’s story and realism because of the concessions made to challenge, rather than recognizing that mastery and story can work hand in hand even the second time through.

To be sure, replaying a game can offer its own sort of enjoyment in the sense of mastery it gives the player. In many story-based and role-playing games (like Dead Space, Prototype, and Mass Effect), there’s a “new game plus” option that allows you to restart the game with all the items and powers that you had when you beat it before. Why? Well, it’s fun to start things over feeling powerful already, and to build a character into something unstoppable. Sometimes this even fits into the story better than starting from scratch. Considering that the dialog in Mass Effect indicates that you already start the game with a reputation as an interstellar badass, it feels a lot more intuitive to start with a leveled-up character than with a first-level character who can’t even access most of its own powers and couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn with an assault rifle.

The problem, however, is that the second time through a game often feels a lot easier, or a lot more goal-oriented, and that throws the useful cooperation between story and mastery into imbalance. It becomes about making a beeline for where we know the best weapons and power-ups are waiting, skipping dialog just so we can get back to leveling, allocating points to be the most powerful at one ability, knowing that this means the game will be hyper-repetitive.

Fallout 3, for instance, doesn’t allow for “new game plus,” but it does become a lot easier to feel powerful when you restart it with a new character after learning the ropes. It’s fairly easy to carry around a huge supply of health packs, ammo, and money; to never worry about radiation poisoning; to max out all your skills; to wipe out a room of enemies with a series of laser shots to the head before any of them even get a chance to pull a trigger. Again, that can be fun, sometimes. But it feels fundamentally different from that first time you play, when you’re never sure what effects your actions will have, when there’s always a slight tingle of danger and thrill of the unknown.

This is where difficulty adjustment presumably comes in. The most obvious response is to suggest that you just raise the game’s difficulty from “Normal” to “Hard,” “Very Hard,” or “Insanity,” tempering your own invincibility. And sure, I do this myself. But that brings me back to the issue of game appeals: Raising the difficulty level preserves a more satisfying feeling of mastery, but often makes it much harder to enjoy on the basis of story. Sometimes the little things that signal to the player that this is a game can really pull you out of the story, like needing to shoot enemies in the head four times before they fall over, or needing to play conservatively because enemies can kill you with a single punch.

It’s telling that my examples keep returning to a sense of mastery or challenge in combat-oriented situations. This is because that is what contemporary narrative games tend to focus on, and what designers see fit to adjust in the difficulty settings. That isn’t all that contemporary games offer, however. They’re also about managing scarce resources, planning careful strategies, potentially even avoiding fighting whenever possible. These are things that often contribute to the sense of playing in a story, rather than a series of action-movie fight scenes. It would be nice to see these things highlighted in replay opportunities.

Sometimes, then, I find myself wishing for a kind of “new game minus.” It wouldn’t be the same as that first time you play because you’d still know so much of what’s to come. Still, there are ways to encourage the game to be played the way you can play it that first time through, with that sense of danger and the unknown, blending the mastery appeals with the story appeals. When I say I’d like to see a “new game minus,” I mean I’d like to see a replay option that makes the practices of “power gaming” itself less feasible, removing the power-ups, making even the skills and powers that seem less crucial feel worth developing in some way, encouraging the player to find challenge in systems other than (or in addition to) combat.

Again, take Fallout 3, for instance. Consider a mode where there are no more skill books or Bobbleheads to boost your abilities; you need to improve by gaining new levels (and recall that you can gain experience not just in combat, but by hacking computers, picking locks, completing non-violent quests, and discovering new locations). It’s a mode where damage isn’t strongly tweaked—because a head shot is a head shot—but where radiation is a real danger, healing supplies are harder to find, and the amount you can carry more closely corresponds to what a real human being could reasonably carry (e.g., the equivalent of a couple six-packs of beer instead of 150 beers). In other words, I’d like to see games get harder with a mode that makes them more realistic.

I know I’m not the only one who feels this way: Fallout 3 has a whole community of modders who put such variations into practice, but not every game can be modded. The fact that the game itself needs to be altered to see such ideas implemented is an indication of how rare it is that we see the appeals of storytelling and immersion treated on more equal footing with the appeals of challenge and mastery.

Does this need to be done for every game? No, of course not. I wouldn’t really care if it were there for games like Dead Space, which have a story element to them, but one that isn’t necessarily strongly integrated into the gameplay experience to begin with. The reason I want to see it in games like Fallout 3 is that the context implies that storytelling is kind of a big deal in the game as a whole. The quests present something like a narrative arc with actual attention to pacing and continuity. Dialog has its own front-and-center mechanic, with its own experience rewards. The protagonist’s personality is customizable, and his/her behavior has ramifications in terms of social interaction with other characters and other elements of gameplay (including who decides to attack you and which missions you have to complete at all). We are told that our actions mean something, with moral implications, beyond a straightforward life-or-death struggle. The game already hints to you that character, performance, and story are a major part of the experience, but it doesn’t necessarily follow through with it as far as it could.

The next obvious response to such concerns is that you, the player can always impose your own difficulty adjustments through arbitrary rules outside any the game has set for you. You don’t need to use all the health packs the game provides; you don’t need to traverse an entire game world through a click on a map; you don’t need to shoot every enemy in the head with the best weapon in the game; you don’t need to keep playing after your character dies, but can decide that your character is now dead. And, indeed, I have tried some such “imaginary adjustments” or “gameplay experiments” myself—hey, let’s aim for the legs this time!—but this presents some narrative distractions and frustrations of its own when the game isn’t designed to support such decisions.

My next post, then—the third (and tentatively final) in this series on how narrative games do (and don’t) encourage story-oriented appeals—will describe how we might actively go looking for narrative meaning in games. I’ve had mixed results with it myself, which is why I discuss this now in terms of what games actively to encourage us to feel. Not every game is a narrative game, and not even every narrative game really encourages us to treat the story as a kind of gameplay itself—but those that do are teaching us some new ways to think about narrative, and still have some room to explore how that could go further.

It’s very tempting to categorize players into “types.” Probably the most heavily researched typology is the one described by the Bartle Test of Gamer Psychology, which breaks players down into Achievers, Explorers, Killers, and Socializers. Some have contended that a well-designed game is one that offers content to satisfy each of the different Bartle types. This presumes, however, that play styles represent a diversity of characteristics among the players themselves, which kind of minimizes the influence that the game itself plays in guiding or supporting certain behaviors. If I may just quote Nels directly:

Rather than designing toward supporting each Bartle type, it might be the case that we need to provide the context and reward for a specific type of behaviour and then find ways to attract different types of players. Some of the most beloved games (e.g. Portal, Shadow of the Colossus, Mario) aren’t successful because they support a great diversity of behaviours, but rather because their context and the behaviours they encourage are harmonious.

As one who doesn’t design games, but studies them (and their players), this taps into an issue that’s been on my mind quite a bit in the last several months. More generally speaking, what do we gain by distinguishing between types of players instead of play styles? It may be useful to consider that different players bring different biases, interests, and levels of experience to each game, but it’s also important to recognize that the same person might play in different ways for different games. This was precisely what I found, in fact, in my ethnographic study of arcades (soon to be online; I’ll keep you posted), where some players explained that they play arcade games for different reasons and in different ways from how they play games at home.

Such complexities are hinted at, I think, in another kind of player typology, Mitch Krpata’s “New Taxonomy of Gamers.” Some of Mitch’s distinctions resemble Bartle’s, like in the duality between “Skill Players” (who play as Perfectionists or Completists, like Bartle’s Achievers) versus “Tourists” (who want to see and explore, like Bartle’s Explorers). As a proposed alternative to the “hardcore” versus “casual” distinction commonly used among critics, however, it also more explicitly recognizes market forces, such as in the distinction between “Wholesale Players” (who want games to be long to justify monetary investment) versus “Premium Players” (who want games to be short but excellent to fit into a busy schedule). Different games are designed in ways that satisfy different kinds of players.

As Mitch acknowledges, however, players can exhibit behaviors associated with other player types, such as when he notes that some games “have so much to offer my Tourist nature that I play them as a Perfectionist without even realizing it.” For this reason, I’m sometimes tempted to refer to Mitch’s “Taxonomy of Gamers” as more of a “Typology of Gaming Styles.” I find myself unsatisfied, however, with both this system and the Bartle types in their ability to describe what gets lumped under “Tourists” and “Explorers,” a type of play that likely has as much variance and nuance as the different reasons we play games for skill. Moreover, understanding such concepts as a “taxonomy” implies (even if unintentionally) mutual exclusivity between categories, when the best games may be those that don’t just support multiple styles of play, but actively blend them into working together.

It’s for this reason that I’ve long tried to describe gaming styles as a number of potentially overlapping styles or “appeals” rather than as something inherently tied to personality. Personally, I tend to play more like a Tourist than a Perfectionist or Completist, but some games encourage completist or perfectionist impulses so effectively—often by tying them into my Tourist-oriented goals—that I’m happy to play that way. In Fallout 3, I was sometimes willing to hunt down every bonus item in part for its own sake, and in part because this was also a means to explore the world and see new content. In Mass Effect, I was determined to get every Xbox Achievement in part because I wanted to play the game into the ground as a Completist would, and in part because I liked seeing the story from different angles, seeing the characters in different ways.

I think Nels’s idea—focusing on what a game encourages us to do based on social and environmental context—offers a really useful way of considering how to design overlapping appeals into games. I’d like to revisit this over (at least) a couple more posts in the near future, giving some specific examples of how this has informed the way I’ve approached (and pined for changes in) some games myself. In the meantime, I encourage you to read up on the Above 49 archive, as it is features some additional insightful musings.

Over at Wired, Steven Leckart redoes the Food Pyramid for a “media diet” totaling nine hours daily. Click through for the full-size image. (Link via Dan.)

The proportions between different types of media were foreign to me (I guess I free up relatively more time for gaming by skipping Facebook), but the sum total kind of blew my mind. Perhaps the combination of research, writing, and teaching has thrown off my notions of how much free time normal people have. Do people—or even just the kind of geeks who’d be reading Wired—really spend that long consuming media for pleasure every day?

I think it sounds neat—and, much to my surprise, so do most of those offering comments on Chronicle, it seems. A former student of the class also chimed in to offer some positive reflections and a link to her course blog, which links to other students’ blogs. That should give a sense of the conversations that these technologies encouraged.

In unrelated news, I have about a dozen drafts for new posts that I am dying to complete and post, but they’re going to have to remain drafts until I push through some of my real (i.e., deadline-bound) work. Blogging is my own personal “disruptive technology,” I suppose (but usually in a good way). I expect to be posting a lot come August, the month I defend.

Sexist, racist, and homophobic sentiments may be amplified by the somewhat anonymous and depersonalized format of internet venues – an “online disinhibition effect” (Suler, 2004) in psychological terms, though well known to geeks under such terms as “the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory” (Kruhulik & Holkins, 2004).

The phrase is indeed well known, and I offer an endnote to expound upon that a bit. But it still looks like a weird sentence. (And yes, the lowercase “I” in “internet” is intentional.)

My dilemma today is how to cite an article by Iroquois Pliskin. Citing people by handle/screen name is usually no big deal for me. Because I’m quoting heavily from comments on blogs and publicly viewable forums, I already have plenty of citations like “(CmdrTaco, 2007).” This gets trickier when citing someone using a screen name that takes the form of a pen name. If I’m to treat this like a screen name, I’d cite it as “(Iroquois Pliskin, 2009).” On the other hand, this has a first and last name, so should it be “(Pliskin, 2009)”? “Mark Twain” was just a pen name for Samuel Clemens, but I think you’d still cite him as “(Twain, 1876).” And I haven’t even addressed how I decided to cite the Penny Arcade strip noted in the quote above as “(Krahulik and Holkins, 2004)” rather than “(Gabe and Tycho, 2004)”; citing when you have a screen name and a real name associated with a work presents its own challenges as well.

I’m not going to let something so silly hold me up right now, so I’m just going with citing as a screen name for consistency with the other online sources I’m using in cases when no real name is given on the work itself. Perhaps I’ll revise after defending if need be.

I have a question for my fellow Slashdotters, and yes, I realize I am entering the lion’s den covered in tasty meat-flavored sauce. I have never been a very social person, preferring to throw myself into technology; therefore, I’ve been spectacularly unsuccessful in developing any meaningful interpersonal relationships. Lately I have begun to feel that this situation is not tenable, and I would like to fix it. But I really don’t know how and haven’t the faintest idea where to start. I know that I am in the minority and that there are many different kinds of Slashdot readers, most of whom have more experience in this realm than I do. So please tell me: how, and more importantly, where do you meet fellow geeks — preferably including some of the opposite gender — in meatspace?

The asker acknowledges that s/he is going to get flamed (and eaten), which seems exacerbated by wording that seems to have been interpreted as genuinely detached rather than playfully self-mocking (e.g., using terms like “meatspace” and analytically concluding that having no friends “is not tenable”). I’m not sure which I find more interesting: the frankness of the asker in trying to find a solution to this dilemma, which is presumed to result in meeting one of our own kind (so to speak); or the variety of answers that Slashdotters offer, ranging from specific things to try to get geeky and non-geeky women alike. (Everyone assumes that the person posting is male, though I’m not sure that was ever stated outright which was eventually revealed later but omitted from the original post so as to be more useful for a wider range of future readers.)

I’m too far into the dissertation to really be incorporating new data, but this seems interesting enough to at least warrant a footnote. Maybe I’ll come back to this if I ever get around to writing a paper on the role of dating in shaping geek culture and identity, as has occurred to me repeatedly as I write this. And in that case, I’d like to also note that this post has directed me to Sex Tips for Geeks, and has reminded me of an Escapist article titled “My Big Fat Geek Marriage” and a potentially relevant xkcd cartoon.

And as for the original Slashdot post: As easy as it is to mock someone for asking this question, you’ve got to give this person credit for recognizing solitude as untenable, and taking the first step toward finding an alternative.

I was particularly interested in writing up a quick post about this piece because of the last few paragraphs:

Munn’s knows that part of why Playboy came calling, and was cool with her not doing nudity, is she has a fan base that’s highly coveted by advertisers. Gamers are easily separated from their dough, after all. But the positive response she’s gotten for not taking it off tells her that her fans do care. “They’re not going to say, ‘Oh, titty! Oh, that’s Olivia’s vagina, let’s go buy it!’” she said. “They’re supportive, not just because it gets them off.”

But she doesn’t worry about being typecast for the geek demographic. To the contrary, it gets her plenty of work. She’s just finished up a role in Iron Man II, and got an offer for another from producers who said they wanted someone who isn’t the kind of pedestalized-hot that Megan Fox represents.

“I love this world I am in,” Munn said. “If I could stay in this world forever, the nerd world, I’d be happy. I’ve been here for three years, and I can confidently say this is a world I feel comfortable and welcomed in.”

I thought it was really nice that she describes her fans as supportive and welcoming. Predictably, Kotaku’s comments on the article include many crude responses, though I was interested to see several people commenting that this makes them respect Munn even more. I’ll leave further commentary aside for now (must focus on more pressing writing tasks), but I thought this might be of interest to some readers here.