“Huizinga’s writings influenced the work of other prominent mid-to-late-century theorists of games and play (Elias and Dunning 2008; Morgan and Meier 1995; Suits 2005; Suits 1995), as well as more recent specialists on digital¹ games (Dyer-Witheford & de Peuter 2009; Juul 2003; Juul 2002). It is on meaningful play in digital games that this article focuses. Though Huizinga obviously did not have the chance to comment on digital games themselves, I, like those listed above, think that his work can be relevant to understanding this newest form of games in interesting ways.”
¹ “I prefer the prefix ‘digital’ to more clearly define these games in media terms from their analogue counterpart, but for all practical purposes I mean the same thing as the more colloquial ‘video games’ or ‘computer games’.”
“There have been a growing number of games produced in recent years which are particularly well designed to foster insightful gameplay, digital games which engage with and raise awareness for important real-world issues by being played. Titles like Among the Sleep and Papo & Yo deal in an emotive way with the weighty issues of domestic abuse from alcoholic parents (Caballero 2012; Ugland and Jordet 2014). In Among the Sleep, players see through the eyes of a two year old boy as he flees from a dark monster who turns out to be his mother when she drinks; in Papo & Yo the protagonist flees his abusive father into an imaginary, magical favela where he solves puzzles with the help of a monster. In This War of Mine players control a ragged group of civilians clinging to life in a war-torn city, needing to manage scarce resources and make difficult ethical decisions, like whether to steal food from the needy to feed one’s own starving group (11 bit studios 2014). The game is inspired by the Yugoslav wars and is a departure from the far more commonly seen perspective of the soldier in war games. In Don’t Look Back players are exposed to the emotions of loss and grieving, playing through a game inspired by the Greek tale of Orpheus and Eurydice (Cavanagh 2009).”
“In Elude players navigate between 3 emotional landscapes, normal, happy, and depressed, striving for the ever ephemeral happiness and being habitually dragged into all-consuming depression. The gameplay offers players an emotive window into what living with depression can be like. As the developers note, ‘It is specifically intended to be used in a clinical context as part of a psycho-education package to enhance friends’ and relatives’ understanding of people suffering from depression about what their loved ones are going through’ (Rusch, Ing & Eberhardt 2010). Depression Quest follows a bleak choose-your-own-adventure style of gameplay, as the player navigates the life of a mid-twenties person with depression (Quinn, Lindsey & Schankler 2013). And the conglomeration of games For the Records deals with an array of mental health issues, from eating disorders to depression (Rusch & Rana 2014).”
“It is worth noting, however, that while heavily issue-driven games like those discussed above are growing in prominence, they are still in the minority, and are generally produced by smaller-scale, indie developers — though bigger budget titles exist as well: for example the third-person shooter Spec Ops: The Line prominently engages with post-traumatic stress disorder (Yager 2012). And while at best this explicitly meaningful approach to game design harnesses the power of play that Huizinga discusses and uses it to help players to specific real world insights, at times in striving to make these games meaningful, developers create gameplay that may not be as ‘fun’ as is found in commercially-successful, mainstream games. This is something of which their developers are often acutely aware and even accept based on propriety.”
“Others argue that even such mainstream games are meaningful, albeit worryingly so. In this interpretation, while the content and gameplay of most mainstream games may be trivial or meaningless to observers, its effects certainly are not. (…) Others put forth normative arguments about how digital games can warp players’ minds, obfuscating their view of the real world and causing them to withdraw from it.”
“China has banned soccer games that list Taiwan as a country (Krotoski 2004), Germany has prohibited games which depict Nazi symbols (Rawlinson 2014), Iran banned Battlefield 3 for depicting an invasion of Iran (Stuart 2011), and Venezuela issued a moratorium on violent games altogether (McWhertor 2010). Meanwhile, the effects on minors of violence and nudity in digital games has been debated at the U.S. Supreme Court (Supreme Court of the United States 2011).”
“For a counterpoint which sees gameplay in general in a far more positive light, see (McGonigal 2011)”
“The strongest recent articulation of digital games’ potential to inculcate worrisome real-world viewpoints came with the Gamergate controversy. The controversy was complex (…) for a good chronological summary see Stuart 2014 — but one undeniably salient part of it was a strong thrust of misogyny amongst some proponents of the Gamergate movement. Interestingly, considering the topic of this article, another key component was many Gamergaters claiming to be defending ‘ethics’ for their stance on purported unethical collusion between games journalists and developers. These [Gamergaters’ ‘ethics’] were often disguised as a rejection of what they labelled ‘social justice warriors’ purported incursions into the world of digital games, which brought with them an overemphasis on socially themed gameplay like that found in the abovementioned insightful games. Indeed, Zoey Quinn, the main creator of Depression Quest, was a central target of the Gamergate attacks. Many drew links with these views and the negative, often objectifying depictions of women in mainstream games (Sarkeesian 2013), and pointed to the new influx of women playing games caused by the emergence of casual, mobile-based games as a demographic shift that challenged the status quo (Ernst 2014). For some scholars, the vitriol exhibited by some members of the Gamergate movement marked a challenge to the distinct identity of the ‘gamer’ (Chess and Shaw 2015). Dan Golding summed up this sentiment well in a piece titled ‘The End of Gamers’ in which he wrote ‘From now on, there are no more gamers — only players’ (Golding 2014).”
E eu que achava que era o contrário: gamers sendo a degenerescência do tipo antigo, não-reacionário e aberto a inovações, mais ou menos perceptível como uma comunidade de interesses, de fato (o player engajado – não em questões sociais, mas no playing – das revistas de videogame dos anos 80 e 90 no Brasil). Com o advento das questões sociais de facto, hoje esta ‘comunidade’ cingiu-se em duas: a dos responsáveis e a dos gamers esquizofrênicos. Não raro os esquizofrênicos são da nova geração e os gamers responsáveis (players) são justamente players antigos que não enxergavam games como ato político mas agora amadureceram para acolher essa nova função da mídia – games não são apenas games. Social players vs. mysanthropic players. Estes últimos curiosamente alinhados com visões sociais conservadoras, já que afinal é preciso ter uma ideologia de vida ainda que se seja refratário a tudo além do gaming per se – esses garotos e homens barbados (nalguns casos) escolheram os valores do neoliberalismo e do fascismo, avatares arcaicos, em franca e paradoxal oposição ao fetiche tecnológico de que também compartilham. São gamers passivos, quase apenas espectadores. Acríticos noveleiros.
Observação incidental: Incrível como o artigo do Wikipédia sobre o GAMERGATE é absolutamente tendencioso, disfarçado de “cobertura do ponto de vista dos dois lados da contenda”, revertendo acusações de misoginia de grupo a grupo, quando é muito claro que os contrários à tag são os verdadeiros misóginos e troublemakers.
“Golding and others have depicted gamers as an exclusive, predominantly male group weaned on mainstream games that are low on insight and high on violence and misogyny.”
“As for the professionals…it is clear that they are not players but workers. When they play, it is at some other game.” (Caillois 1961, 6)
“I have seen people, running the gamut from diehard to casual, refer to themselves in one sentence as gamers, and in the next as players, to what they are doing as gaming, and then describing it as playing. There is even the frequently used and problematic, for those who seek to decouple games and play, word gameplay.” Você está confundindo análise filológica com semântica.
In this article’s second half, to which I will presently turn, I take this notion of a medley of meanings from its current highly theoretical and perhaps still somewhat opaque enunciation and ground and articulate it through an ethnographic recounting of an instance of gameplay in the mainstream, ostensibly meaning-light game League of Legends.” Amigo, é o melhor que você faz. a discussão teórica estava um porre (salvei os leitores do meu blog dos momentos sacais).
* * *
“Allow me to start with Morgan. It would be easy and I think fair to classify Morgan as an anti-social player of the type recounted by other anthropologists (Kou & Nardi 2013, 2014); akin to the antagonist in conflicts found in the foundational texts of New Games Journalism between players who sought propriety and respect and those who thrived on slurs and hurt feelings (Dibbell 1993; Gillen 2004; Shanahan 2004). Or, for those who prefer the more classical categorizations recounted near the beginning of this article, Morgan was very much being a spoilsport in Huizinga’s sense.”
“Should we challenge Morgan’s racist remarks, not knowing whether it would stop them or encourage more? Hold fast in the pre-agreed positions or acquiesce to Morgan’s insistence on taking the jungle? Encourage team-play or treat Morgan as a lost cause? And equally importantly, how would each decision play out? Thus in a sense, to use Sicart’s terminology, Morgan posed a wicked problem for the other players. This was a problem that struck to the very heart of each particular player’s subjective gameplay experience, and, with Donath [1999, sobre trolling] in mind, I would venture to say that the posing these uncomfortable questions, witnessing the reactions to them, and then responding in turn was more integral to Morgan’s own subjective play experience in LoL than the technical gameplay itself.”
“Robin reacted in a similar way to how most experienced LoL players reacted to players like Morgan. Robin was more than willing to make it known that Morgan’s actions were unwelcome, continuing to verbally challenge Morgan throughout the game. Nonetheless, Robin did bend and played the top lane, rather than allowing Morgan’s actions to drag the whole team to a defeat from an undefended flank. I propose that Robin’s approach to playing is quite similar to what Huizinga had in mind with the ideal player: Robin plays the game for fun, and reacts in a strong and negative way to spoilsports like Morgan.
Terry explicitly stated a desire to be a professional gamer, but it was the cool patience of Terry’s reactions to Morgan’s insults and incorrigibility that truly reflected somebody striving to imbue their gameplay with a strong degree of professionalism. This is not to say that adopting such a disposition made Terry somehow less of a player than the rest of us. Terry was obviously neither the snarling, exclusive, and victory-obsessed “gamer” brought forth by Gamergate, nor Caillois’ working professional devoid of the play spirit mentioned in the previous section. Rather, a part of Terry’s professional attitude to play was being able to weather with a cool head the wicked problems put forth by fellow players, in order to make the decisions which would maximize our team’s chances of winning the match, something Morgan’s actions drew out rather than suppressed.
It is harder to speculate about the largely silent Alex. One might take Alex’s initial claims to being a novice at face value: that in learning a new game Alex was focusing mostly on the technical rather than social aspects of gameplay. However, skilled moves like Alex beating Morgan to a kill seem to imply a greater deal of experience than was being admitted. It could be that Alex’s self-referral as a novice was simply a way of tempering the team’s expectations. If Alex was that experienced and cunning, then perhaps staying largely quiet and outside of team’s arguments was part of a broader strategy to rob players like Morgan of the validation and satisfaction that angry responses to impropriety can bring, a sentiment grasped in the gaming maxim ‘don’t feed the trolls’. Or the answer could be far simpler: Alex might just be a quiet person.
Finally, I brought my own particular disposition to gameplay into the medley. I was in part reacting in my normal way as a player to Morgan’s actions, which I viewed negatively. Conversely, I was also holding my tongue more than I might otherwise, remembering my role as a researcher and attempting to observe as thoroughly as I participated. And all the while, I was trying not to let the team down by performing poorly in the technical side of gameplay.”
Seclusão Anagógica 