Pearce’s Coda and the Influence of Game Design On Emergent Cultures

For the last section of the book, Pearce highlights the future of the Uru culture, the future of game design, and the future of game play. In terms of the Uru, Pearce tells of a reopening of the environment and the community’s reaction to it. Instead of adopting a cannibalistic approach, where the community completely left the old environment in exchange for the new, TGU used the new game space for new purposes, but kept their community in There.com. This highlighted the way communities can exist across platforms in certain circumstances, and that gamers aren’t perpetually looking to jump ship as much as to continue the cultural significance from the previous environment.

It seemed that the idea of cannibalism arises more out of a procedural element in game design than in the way that the players commit to the game. Designers, in what can be either seen as a short-sighted blunder or a capitalistic institution, will create a new game which doesn’t offer any difference in game play. This means that the players will be forced to buy the new game, and play it instead of the old game. But, as we have seen in Pearce, players can and will use games for different sets of uses, and, given an array of platforms, gamers will possibly locate across platforms instead of by cannibalizing all media into one specific game.

In the second chapter of the section Pearce speaks to the game designer, and wonders how to approach game design with an encouraging stance to emergent cultures. This was an especially necessary chapter for our class and for our program, as so many discussions attempt to look at games from a designer’s perspective. I have been involved in several good philosophical discussions on game design which revolved around the relationship between the designer and the creator.

Pearce relates how it is important for designers to consider the culture of the game when creating the game, but also when making changes to the game play part-way through the game’s lifespan. While emergent cultures might develop regardless of the choices of designers, it seems that they are more likely to arise in instances where the game play is open to possibility. It was also interesting to consider how a change to the existing game play might alienate the existing fan base if done incorrectly. The lesson is to allow for cultures to develop, and to adopt a sensitive stance to what the culture finds important and as a part of their specific game play style.

Pearce also mentioned that the appearance of the creator made it seem like the “gods” approved of the game culture, and were ready to be on board with what the group was doing. I find this interesting, especially since the Minecraft creator “Notch” is infamous for making in-game appearances and giving off a similar attitude. Notch also runs a blog and a twitter account to reveal game operations, and takes a seemingly open stance to embracing his community. This could be a reason why Minecraft is able to capture a large contingent of players, not only because of the open game play style, but because of the culture of Minecraft in general.

This culture, to move into the very last chapter of the book, shows signs of play far outside the reaches of the game. Minecraft has it’s own set of Memes, videos, and other RL types of activities that bring the group together and create as open a community as it is an open game. Pearce, who even breifly touches on meme culture as a form of RL play, points to games that are played in RL as a way that play systems are making their way into the streets as a way of expanding our concept of games, or even virtual worlds.   

This opens up what Pearce might mean by the “ludisphere” in a way that will probably come about when we learn more about Ulmer’s concept of “electracy” in the Fall. As a committed member to an online comedy community, I see a great deal of similarity between the way that gamers play and the way that comedians play with language. There is certainly a different underlying procedural rhetoric, but the narratives of community formation and distribution are easily related to the online comedy community, especially when it comes to the growth of comedy through podcasting in recent years. As we move forward in the creation of the is game, and as I proceed into the social media class in the fall, I would like to further explore the idea of fan culture on a more general level, thinking about the cross-over of play and community in ways that don’t necessarily exist in game environments.       

Questions:



Have you ever seen or been a part of a RL game? How do these games differ than the RL games that we might consider to exist in the classroom, such as “ice-breaker” or “informative” games?”



How do we understand the relation between the out of game fan material and in-game fan material? For example, what is the relation of Machinma or memes to the greater ludic community?



Do certain types of games lend themselves to “game cannibalism”?






http://www.minecraftwiki.net/images/1/1e/Notch-skin.png

http://www.deathtomusic.com/artists/8bc.gif

http://s3.amazonaws.com/kym-assets/photos/images/original/000/080/954/FREE-HUGS-TSSSSSSSSSS.jpg?1288898883