Introduction

Computer games that move beyond the static screen and into the real, social and tangible world, as well as those that rely on massive networked, virtual spaces are becoming increasingly wide-spread. In Human PacMan the player collects virtual bits of cheese in a real, physical space (see Figure 1). Dance Dance Revolution Ultramix (2005) is a home version of the popular arcade game, in which the players follow dance instructions on the screen with their feet on touch-sensitive tiles. Breakout for Two (Mueller, Agamanolis and Picard, 2002) is a physical interface the size of a large wall that allows two players to play a soccer-like game together, communicating via a body-size videoconference. Both players are kicking a real ball, targeting virtual bricks, similar to the old arcade game Breakout, and aiming to break out to the other side, i.e., to the other player (Mueller, Walther et al., 2005). Recent massively multi-player online games, or ‘synthetic worlds’ as they have been called (Castronova, 2005; Liboriussen, in press), such as World of Warcraft, Second Life, and EverQuest, join hundreds of thousands of users in shared quests, mystery solving, and guilding. These games even have their own currencies and real estate markets. Massively multiplayer online games are not pervasive in the sense that they offer an exertion interface or allow the user to play in a physical, real world; and yet they obviously exceed the traditional confines of level-oriented game design. Interestingly enough, contemporary best-selling computer games like The Sims and Grand Theft Auto 3 clearly blur the difference between ‘gaming’ in a closed, rule-based environment (the “board”) and ‘playing” in a much more open, story-driven universe (the “game world”).

It is characteristic for these new pervasive games that they expand the gaming space, obscuring the demarcations between the real and the virtual. They also raise questions about the notion of time in games. World of Warcraft (WoW) never rests. WoW is a persistent-world game. One may pause the game, yet still it continues ‘off-screen’ due to events happening on the servers, or due to other players’ interventions in the game world. Whether or not pervasive gaming (PG) is a sign of the next key shift in computer game business and culture is hard to judge. There seems, however, to be a real need to elucidate the theoretical and analytical impacts of pervasive gaming (see also Walther, 2005a; 2005b).

Pervasive Computing

The term ‘pervasive computing’ is IBM’s re-phrasing of Xerox’s expression ‘ubiquitous computing’. Literally, ‘pervasive’ means ‘totally penetrating’. The word is derived from the Latin pervasus, the past participle of pervadere (‘to go through, pass through, or pervade’). If something is ‘pervasive’ it means that it is spread throughout our physical environment. In the age of information technology, not only are computers (and the like) everywhere, all the time; we also have access to digital information and networks from almost any location we choose. Wireless technology and the Internet are steps towards increased, seamless communication and the convergence of advanced electronic media. However, this kind of ubiquitous access is largely confined to urban areas. Pervasive computing devices can be embedded in almost any type of object imaginable, including cars, refrigerators, heating systems, clothing, and appliances, not to mention various consumer goods. Pervasive computing technologies connect to worldwide networks without boundaries and provide quick and secure access to a wealth of information and services (Hansmann et al., 2001). In a few years from now, computational devices will have become so naturalised within the environment that it is likely that people will not even realise that they are using computers. Examples of pervasive computing hardware include mobile phones and smart phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), digital cameras, web cams, interactive whiteboards, interactive TV, laptops, and tablet PCs. On the software side, one could mention groupware systems (a subset of ‘social software’), simulation software, business intelligence systems, SRS (Social Recommender Systems), Instant Messaging, peer-to-peer file-sharing systems, level editors, and much more. When it comes to traditional computer games (Half-Life, Quake, Doom, etc.) it should be noted, however, that while there are a few third-party level editors that are open source, the bulk of software is protected by a proprietary licence.

Fig. 1. Human PacMan

Two essential characteristics of the pervasive computing evolution that relate strongly to pervasive games stand out:

(1) the explicitness of computational tasks; and
(2) the overall importance of physical space.

The former implies that actions are carried out in ways that transcend the traditional Graphical User Interface (GUI) . Mobile devices and many forms of wearable or embedded computing shifts our attention from metaphorical data manipulation to simulated, hands-on, and direct interactions with physical objects. This aspect interweaves with the second aspect of pervasive computing, namely, that objects obeying the laws of physics are responsive to digital manipulation, and thus take on a double meaning: they are objects in the outside (nongame) world, yet they can also simultaneously be objects within a simulated world.
A growing number of games already run on mobile devices such as cellular phones or PDAs, but only a few of these devices can sense their physical environment. Massively Multi-Player Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs) such as Everquest and The Matrix Online, clearly aim at being pervasive in the sense of incorporating a wide spectrum of information and communication technologies. However, they do not fully exploit the potential of combining physical and virtual space.

In addition, we witness a growth in the design of game systems that use ubiquitous computing techniques to propel forward player experiences that connect objects within the real world with objects of the virtual world. SuperFly, by the Swedish game company It’s Alive Mobile is a good example. The player’s aim is to become a virtual celebrity The projects Can You See Me Now? and Uncle Roy All Around You, both created by the UK performance group Blast Theory, use hand-held, digital devices, GPS location tracking, and online agent technology in an attempt to use location and mobility as game features from within the real world (Figure 2). While one player stays at home and moves a virtual character around a representation of a real city, other players speed around the real streets, trying to hunt down the virtual quarry. These systems do not, however, integrate the production and technological amalgamation of robotics and cybernetics (also called adaptronics), artificial life, and complex adaptive systems in the game design as well as in the game design process.

Similarly, the preponderance of hardware and software currently made for the game market is restricted to the field of graphics, game and AI engines, 3D rendering techniques, and real-time motion control, all of which relate more or less to either output interfaces (visual presentation of game worlds) or game mechanics, i.e., any part of the game’s rule system that covers possible modes of interaction during gameplay. In order to increase attention paid to game machinery, beyond the static mode of immobile users and/or stagnant, screen-based interfaces, it is vital to observe the interactions between humans and computers and the mediation of human communication by computers through naturally established interfaces which are, in turn, supported by technology built into our surroundings, or aimed at the mobile user.

Fig. 2. Uncle Roy All Around You Blast Theory

Pervasive Gaming Formats

I define ‘pervasive gaming’ as an over-arching concept or activity subsuming the following game formats and technologies (Lindley, 2004):

• A mobile game is a game using portable technology that takes changes in relative or absolute position/location of the player into account in the game rules. Although this general definition also applies to, say, chess, it still excludes games for which mobile devices simply offer a delivery channel where key features of mobility are not relevant to the game mechanics. Hence, one could distinguish between mobile interfaced games and mobile embedded games.
• A location-based game is a game that includes relative or absolute but static position/location in the game rules.
• A ubiquitous game uses the computational and communications infrastructure embedded within our everyday lives.
• Virtual reality games are games generated by computer systems with the goal of constructing wholly autonomous and completely immersive game worlds.
• Augmented reality games and mixed reality games seek to integrate virtual and physical elements within a perceptual game world.
• Adaptronic games are games consisting of applications and information systems that simulate life processes observed in nature. These games are embedded, flexible, and usually made up of ‘tangible bits’ that oscillate between virtual and real space.

Following this I will propose a general definition of pervasive gaming:

Pervasive gaming implies the construction and enacting of augmented and/or embedded game worlds that reside on the threshold between tangible and immaterial space, which may further include adaptronics, wearable, mobile, or embedded software/hardware in order to facilitate a ‘natural’ environment for gameplay that ensures the explicitness of computational procedures in a post-screen setting.

However, ‘pervasive gaming’ tends to be used as a buzzword. Some may typify massively multiplayer online games as authentically pervasive games, while others argue that only games that are (at least partly) played out in the real physical and tangible world, i.e., games which use both virtual and augmented reality computing techniques, count as truly pervasive games. How, then, is a pervasive game not a mixed reality or augmented reality game?

One answer to this is conceptual, the other technical. It is, indeed, difficult to distinguish precisely between various open-ended or augmented games and truly pervasive games since a main feature of all types (or genres) is systems that holds a constant invitation to transgress boundaries between fiction/reality, physical/virtual, quantifiable/fuzzy, etc. (Brynskov and Ludvigsen, 2006). If we use a more technical approach to differentiate between pervasive games and augmented/mixed reality games, we could suggest that while the latter games are often facilitated by technologies not necessarily embedded in the physical world, pervasive games most often include calibration or other forms of locality based measurements (GPS, signal triangulation, etc.). This means, essentially, that the role of physicality as well as the role of physical bodily movement is predominant in pervasive games, not only in the actual play, which involves the mobile user, but also in the design of pervasive game worlds and the technology that supports such worlds.

Further, we need to separate time, space, and presence (or immersion):

• Computer games can be pervasive in the sense that they belong to a set of persistent games. The game is always on. However, the user may log in and out of the game (and the game world). EverQuest, Guild, Ultima Online or other Persistent World-Games are good examples.
• The pervasiveness factor also implies that the physical and/or virtual play space has been expanded. We must distinguish between Alternative Reality Games that use a wealth of media artefacts and singular technologies (computer, fax machine, snail-mail, PDA, etc.) and games that merge physical and virtual space through other means, e.g., augmented and mixed reality technology. Examples of the latter include games designed in the Mixed Reality Lab in Singapore.[1] Also, a research and design group from University of Glasgow has developed Seamful Game: Equator[2] in which the search for wifi areas in the city – usually considered to be an activity outside of the boundaries of the game – is part of the gameplay itself. The lack of informational infrastructure, which is normally concealed and unexplained, is thus entirely present as an in-game feature allowing users to explore and understand it. In any case, pervasive gaming relies on more than just the standard input-output devices (screen, mouse, controller, keyboard, etc.) by incorporating wireless technology, head mounted displays, tracking and positioning systems, etc. into the gameplay.
• Finally, ‘pervasive’ might refer to the (psychological) fact that many games have an immersive quality, sometimes referred to as ‘flow’. Thus, the line separating playing in a real world and participating as a character in a fictional and virtual game world is, in some instances, blurred.

Inside The Pg Toolbox

The Four PG Axes

In order to refine the broad spectrum of the general definition above, we will zero in on four axes – or, rather, zones in a coordinate environment – that together mark what I call the possibility space of pervasive gaming. The four axes can be illustrated thus:

Fig. 3. The four PG axes

• Distribution. Pervasive computing is situated at the junction of information technologies and a networked digital environment that is always on, always available, and unobtrusive. Pervasive computing devices are frequently mobile or embedded in the environment and linked to an increasingly ubiquitous network infrastructure composed of a wired core and wireless edges. This combination of embedded computing, dynamic networking, and discrete information-sharing clearly affects and strengthens the distribution paradigm of IT.
• Mobility. New challenges for pervasive computing also include mobility, i.e., computing mobility, network mobility, user mobility, and context-aware (smart) and cross-platform services. Of particular interest to PG is the growth of mobile 3G technologies, and technology that allows bridging between two or more Local Area Networks.
• Persistence. The persistence factor touches upon the notion of temporality. Persistence means total availability all the time.
• Transmediality challenges the traditional model of the relations between sender, message, and receiver, as it emphasises the active role of the user. Patterns of media consumption have been profoundly altered by a succession of new media technologies which enable anybody with internet access to participate in the archiving, annotation, appropriation, transformation, and recirculation of media content (Jenkins, 2003). Transmediality works as unacknowledged support for bits and pieces of media material to create an aura of user-oriented amusement. It further indicates that, currently, no medium can be defined as a self-sufficient application that is based on partial groupings. On the contrary, the dispersal of multiple media spread out over large-scale networks and accessible through a range of devices is a good illustration of how media commune in circular, not linear, forms. This means both the repurposing of content in an intertextual web and the actual structure of media and their interrelations. These media carry information, entertainment, games, role-play, and characters in a non-stop circuit of jointly coupled citations and codes of utilization that can be promptly attuned and functionally altered. [3]

The PG Possibility Space

Combining distribution, mobility, persistence, and transmediality we enter what could be called the PG possibility space. This space has the potential as a locale for developing, consuming, and thinking about gaming in the years to come. It is a space that deals in networking, given its focus on nonlocality, nonmetric systems, and constant accessibility. It is a space that celebrates the freedom of device – games can be played on anything, and game devices may trigger anything, anywhere, anytime. It might be worth pointing out that what currently stands in the way of such convergence are rigid intellectual property regimes, and that these are rather more likely to become more pervasive in years to come. Further, it is a space that favours nonclosure; although pervasive games still cling to the law of goal-orientation (closure) to a certain extent, they nevertheless open up new ways of collaborative world building, as well as invite continuous structural expansion. Finally, the PG possibility space embraces transmediality and circular storytelling as the norm of mediated entertainment. Stories produced and consumed in bits or fragments may very well be the future standard of multi mediated narration.

Fig. 4. Four axes and the PG possibility space: networking, freedom of device, nonclosure, and circular storytelling.

The Three Key PG Units

In traditional computer games the player has a double role as both observer of and an actor in the observed representation. Pervasive gaming goes even further; in complicating the coupling of identity and structure, as these games are projected directly into the player’s reality and constitutes a second world within the world.[4] An important consequence of this structural coupling is that real objects become pervasive. They are real due to their tangible and physical qualities, and real in the sense of information-embedded devices open for manipulation, cybernetic control, and input and output feedback – i.e., they can be played with.

Games can be divided into three key units that are, however, strongly interlaced: (1) game rules; (2) game entities; and (3) game mechanics. How can we characterise them? How are they tested by the pervasiveness of pervasive games? And how can they be used to describe pervasive games? In the subsequent section I briefly list the basic characteristics of the three game units followed by some reflections on the PG ontology and epistemology.

Game Rules – A number of definitions for game rules have been suggested. In this context I will stick to Jesper Juul’s generalised model, in which there are six invariant parameters of game rules:

1. Rules: games are rule-based.
2. Variable, quantifiable outcomes: games have variable, quantifiable outcomes.
3. Values assigned to possible outcomes: the different potential outcomes of the game are assigned different values, some positive, some negative.
4. Player effort: players must invest effort in order to influence the outcome (i.e., games are challenging).
5. Players attached to outcome: players are attached to the outcomes of the game, in the sense that players will be winners and happy if there is a positive outcome, and losers and unhappy if there is a negative outcome.
6. Negotiable consequences: The same game (set of rules) can be played with or without real-life consequences (Juul, 2006).

It is evident that, with respect to pervasive gaming, some of these rule parameters were altered. Let me narrow the changes down to two issues:

1. Take, for instance, the vital concept of a variable, quantifiable outcome. To Juul, this means, among other things, that the outcome of a game is designed to be beyond discussion, and that this is an intrinsic token of game rules. This fits perfectly with practically all computer games excluding ‘sandbox games’ like The Sims, MMOG’s, etc.. However, when moving the logic structure of the digital computer into the tangible world, the quantifiability of a rule system seems to shift into a more fuzzy type of interaction between constitutive and regulative rules. In his book, The Construction of Social Reality, Searle explains that social rules may be regulative or constitutive (Searle, 1995). Regulative rules legalise an activity, whereas constitutive rules may create the possibility of an activity. Constitutive rules provide a structure for institutional facts. In the context of explaining the (extended) PG rule system, computation can be regarded as a conceptual framework or underlying system of norms that, in turn, may constitute a possible space for regulative behaviour. In pervasive gaming, constitutive rules are hosted by the virtual domain while the regulative rules spring from the social and physical domain. While the rules of a game may explicitly forbid an acitivity that is perecly legal in the real world, and vice versa, this further means that constitutive rules belong to the set of quantifiable norms, while regulative rules govern ad hoc player interaction with the game world. Another way of distinguishing the computational rule logic from the real-time interaction patterns of game-play is to differentiate between global regulations (provided by the computer’s state machine) and local operatives (controlled by the player’s behaviour with the physical as well as information-embedded game world; see Figure 5).
2. Next, we should consider the term negotiable consequences. In pervasive gaming, real-life consequences are exactly what drive the play experience forward. The entire teleology of game-play, in fact, rests on the outcomes that transpire and are enacted on the physical arena. A game of chess might have severe consequences if played out in real life, but since the movement of pieces across a board merely represents physical structures, it follows that the rules of chess apply to the discrete topology of pieces and plane of play, and not the phenomenological experiences that this topology may cause. In the domain of pervasive gaming, it is precisely negotiability that signifies the toggling back and forth between real-life consequences and discrete representations that pushes gameplay forward. Thus, the PG tangibility consequence brings out a level of uncertainty to the gaming phenomenology; this uncertainty becomes part of the rule structure, i.e., it must be inscribed in the computational representation.[5]

Game Entities – In line with the object-oriented programming paradigm, I define a game entity as an abstract class of an object that can be moved and drawn over a game map. There can be an enormous number of entities in a game: inventory objects in an adventure game; non-playing characters (NPCs) in a FPS (first-person shooter) game; or a text message in a strategy game. Since a game has many entities, the ways that they can interact increase geometrically.

Pervasive gaming further adds to the complexity of game entities. A PG entity can take three forms: (a) a game object, i.e., any object that can be encountered, seen, or interacted with during game-play; (b) the entity can be a human agent, since an essential part of a pervasive game is to collaborate and engage in conflict with flesh polygons; and finally (c) the entity may simply be a physical object (see Figure 5).

Again, it is the negotiability or uncertainty principle that does the trick. Pervasive game-play implies contingency handling, e.g., addressing questions such as, are the passing people on the street NPCs; is the elevator a token of the game’s passage from one level to the next, connected to a network of sensors, or is it simply an element of the building’s non-pervasive construction?

Game Mechanics – Lundgren and Björk define game mechanics as simply any part of the rule system of a game that covers one, and only one, possible kind of interaction that takes place during the game, be it general or specific. A game may consist of several mechanics and a mechanic may be a part of many games (Lundgren et al., 2004).

Thus, we can generally define game mechanics as an input-output engine. The task of this engine is to ensure a dynamic relation between game state and player interference. Furthermore, the engine is responsible for simulating a direct connection between the I/O system of computational, discrete logic and the continuous flow from initial to final state in a physical setting. In a certain sense, then, game mechanics postulates a deep transport from the laws of computation to the natural laws of physics. Note, however, that the latter laws must be implemented in the algorithmic system of the computer.[6] In pervasive games, the process of simulation (which always includes selection of the aspects of a real-world situation to be simulated) takes place in real time.

In relation to PG, the following issues of game mechanics are specifically noteworthy:

1. Physically embedded game mechanics. The frontrunner in pervasive gaming, the Fraunhofer Institut für Angewandte Informationstechnik (FIT), has designed NetAttack.[7] The game is presented as a new type of indoor/outdoor augmented reality game that makes the actual physical environment an inherent part of the game itself. The mechanics apply to the outdoor environment where players equipped with backpacks full of technology move around a predefined game field trying to collect items, as well as applying to the indoor setting in which a player sits in front of a desktop computer and supports the outdoor player with valuable information. In order to control the information flow that links physical and virtual space, the various components communicate via events and a TCP/IP-based high-level protocol. A central component guarantees consistency and allows the configuration of the game. Before starting to play the game, the outdoor game area must be modelled and the game levels configured. In other words, modelling the game means embedding the necessary mechanics into physical space.
2. Input-output engine with a dual purpose. Interaction with tangible objects in PG implies, as noted above, a certain level of fuzziness. Therefore, the input-output engine must be constructed to provide a probability algorithm for the actual interaction as part of the rules; however, the engine must also dictate a global, discrete, and binary rule (state) to the interaction. It is in this respect that PG mechanics could serve a dual purpose: on the one hand maintaining and stimulating the contingency of interactions with real-life objects; on the other hand, structuring the controlled set of actions embedded in the state rules. Hence, the input-output engine becomes a machine that frames both contingency and necessity.

One of the most promising descriptions of games and dynamic complexity are those by Holland (1998). Holland distinguishes among the following descriptions and definitions:

1. The state of the game, i.e., the arrangement of pieces on the board at any point in the play.
2. The state space of a game, meaning a collection of all arrangements of the pieces on the board that is allowed under the rules of the game.
3. The root of the tree of moves, which is the game’s initial state.
4. The leaves of the tree of moves, which are the ending states.
5. A game strategy that serves as a prescription of right decisions as the game unfolds.

In the design of computer games, a finite state machine (FSM) is frequently used to manage the execution threads and if-then-else statements in the course of game-play, i.e., as the tree of moves unfolds. One example of how an FSM functions is the operation of the damage trigger (particularly relevant to FPSs).[8] When a damage trigger is transmitted to another entity, the pain function pointer is called, thus triggering a state transition of the affected entity into possibly a death or attack state. The damage inflicted in the game is an input to the FSM, which may act as a trigger for a state transition. In pervasive game universes, possible states and state functions are exponentially multiplied. Each FSM can be considered an autonomous agent in a multiagent system involving trigger mechanisms from both the real and the modelled worlds.

Fig. 5. Rules, entities, and mechanics

PG Space

The formal architecture of pervasive gaming relies on the interconnection of social domain, virtual domain, and physical domain. Real world properties as well as public, shared or private properties of the social domain must be represented and, to a certain extent, controlled in the virtual domain, i.e., via computers. This domain is, in turn, accessible through a graphical user interface that further represents the game states (Magerkurth et al., 2004).

Players may share the same virtual domain while being physically distant from each other. In fact, one can benefit from this by envisioning and constructing new modes of gameplay. The Australian Sports Over A Distance augmented game Table Tennis For Three (which I am involved in) supports social interaction familiar from traditional sports between physically remote participants through an interaction setup that is only possible because of the distance: a table-tennis game playable by three players who are in three different locations (Mueller, Walther et al., 2005).

Fig. 6. Triangular half table setup in Table Tennis For Three

But what are the implications of this multiple space setup in relation to pervasive gaming? And how can we formalise the complexity that arises from the merging of different kinds of spatiality in PG?

First of all, the perception of space differs according to our perspective, whether from a human level or from a strictly mathematical angle (Walther, 2003b). The mundane space that a human subject inhabits is not by nature geometrical; rather, it is structured in accordance with matter-of-fact actions. In such a spatial environment, the various orientations are related to directions (practical vectors), places, ranges of space, and things, in contrast to dimensions, points, lines, and absolute objects. The space for action is a praxis-architecture – a phenomenological space, we might call it – that is not defined by length, height, and width, but rather by territory, proximity, and distance (Nielsen, 1996). A personal space zeroes in on the required equipment and relations to institute meaning, whereas a geometrical space is continuous and unbounded.

Second, the space of every day life is heterotrophic in its design of multiple layers with which it constantly confronts us with a surplus of potential strategies for spatial couplings. The space of mathematics is isotropic, where all coordinates are evenly spread in all directions. Thus, when a human subject navigates through space it is contingent – where to go next? – and intentional in the use of space through motives and affects.

The point here is that pervasive gaming space mixes isotropic and heterotrophic spaces. The teleological goal structure of a game necessitates a certain amount of accessibility by which the user can obtain information about space and proceed from, for example, one level to the next (Walther, 2003a). A PG space must amalgamate physical metric space and informational and networked nonmetric space and, finally, merge them into accessibility space (Bøgh Andersen, 2002). A metric space consists of a nonempty universe of points together with a family of distance relations that satisfy the axioms of distance (Bricker, 1993). A nonmetric space may be defined as a topological or nodal connected space. Real life as such would not by itself be interesting in a gaming sense. We need to organise and structure the nonteleological and open meanings of mundane space in order to make it playable (or actually game-able). Hence, accessibility is the portal to the information- embedded spatial game world (illustrated in figure 7).

Fig. 7. Accessibility space provides a passage to the tangibility space through the information-embedded space, which, in turn, is represented in the tangibility space.

Tangibility Space

An important aspect of PG, the whole idea of playability, is the player’s interaction with physical reality. Tangibility space, however, is not just the sum total of the available, real-time world and its vast amount of objects. Rather, it must be understood as the heterotrophic organization of potential spatial patterns of behaviour. This organization of space facilitates a playground, and is often aided by multiple information units located in material objects. These objects can be treated as ‘tangible bits’ (Ishii and Brygg, 1997), elements of reality that can be touched, altered, and manipulated – as in the real, non-game world – but nevertheless still belonging to the virtual realm as they are controlled by digital technology.

Fig. 8. Tangibility space: a runner interacting with real-life scenario (Blast Theory: Uncle Roy All Around You [Benford et al. 2003

Distributed Information Space

To a large extent, the epistemology of PG involves blending physical and virtual space. In spatial terms, this means that the information-embedded space is facilitated by and projected onto the tangibility space. This kind of space is the digital representation of tangibility space. Yet, besides serving as a map of the game-world, it may also function as a phenomenological space in its own right, i.e., it is experience embedded due to real-time changes, tracking of player motion, etc.

Fig. 9. Information-embedded space; the runner is represented in a digital environment (Benford et al., 2003)

Accessibility Space

Finally, we have accessibility space, which, as noted earlier, is the key to the oscillation between embedded information and tangibility in the pervasive game universe. One way of explaining the delicate relation between the triadic space structures is to say that accessibility space maps the information-embedded space system that is in turn mapped onto tangible reality.

Fig. 10. Accessibility space: a map showing wireless connectivity indicated by circles at The University of Southern Denmark. Accessibility information is embedded in the tangible space via the wi-fi network.

Conclusion

In this article I have tried to construct a conceptual framework to assist in the design and interpretation of pervasive games and pervasive gaming. In many ways, the PG paradigm transcends traditional computer gaming: its epistemology or molecular experience must be built into the ontology or atomic structure of the game map itself; a certain sense of openness, fuzziness, and uncertainty clings to PG; and the complexity of game states and state functions dramatically increases once a system of tangibility and random interaction with physical objects is tied to the virtual control apparatus. Although truly pervasive games and current augmented or mixed reality games often overlap – the virtual/real diametric, the blend of tangible, information, and accessibility space – the essential characteristics of pervasive games is still the focus on embedded (or simply physical) technology. In this respect we could call a pervasive game a mobile, context aware, location-based game. A great many challenges await us in the field of post-screen gaming. On the analytical side, it may be rewarding to think of PG in terms of axes, key units, and space modalities, as I have suggested in this context. On the technological side, it may be equally rewarding to focus on the field of adaptronics in computer game design when trying to bring ‘life’ and other modes of self-configuration and adaptation into play.

Author’s Biography

Bo Kampmann Walther is Associate Professor at the Centre for Media Studies, University of Southern Denmark (Odense) in Denmark. His research interests are computer games, new media, contemporary sports, and digital aesthetics. He has written and lectured extensively on these topics. His latest book is a book in Danish about the soccer club Real Madrid and the role of media and globalisation. See www.sdu.dk/hum/bkw for more information.

Email: bowalther at tiscali.dk

Notes

[1] See http://www.mixedrealitylab.org.
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[2] See http://www.seamful.com/.
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[3] A good example of this circular and self-reflexive media ecology is the TV series 24; it is a TV show, an action game, a website, a news forum, mobile content, and much more (Walther, 2005c).
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[4] Thanks to my colleague Lars Qvortrup for this insight.
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[5] An interesting critique of my view on quantifiability and negotiability in pervasive games can be found in Brynskov and Ludvigsen (2006).
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[6] In fact, we could claim that the success of game mechanics rests on the idea that it is possible to simulate computational physics.
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[7] See http://www.fit.fraunhofer.de/projekte/netattack/index_en.xml.
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[8] http://ai-depot.com/FiniteStateMachines/FSM-Framework.html.
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Lundgren, Sus and Björk, Staffan ‘Game Mechanics: Describing Computer-Augmented Games in Terms of Interaction’, Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment (Darmstadt, Germany, March 24–26, 2003), http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~lundsus/lundgren_bjork_game_mechanics.pdf.

Magerkurth, Carsten. et al. ‘Augmenting the Virtual Domain With Physical and Social Elements’ (2004), http://www.ipsi.fraunhofer.de/ambiente/paper/2004/magerkurth.carsten.domains.pdf.

Mueller, Floyd et al. ‘Exertion Interfaces for Sports over a Distance’, UIST 2002 – ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (Paris, France: ACM Press, USA, 2002).

Mueller, Floyd and Walther, Bo Kampmann. Table Tennis For Three. In press.

Nielsen, Arno Victor. ‘A space odyssey’, K & K 82 (1996).

Searle, John. The Construction of Social Reality, (New York: The Free Press, 1995).

Walther, Bo Kampmann. ‘Gaming and playing: Reflections and classifications’, Game Studies 3.1 (2003a).

____. ‘La représentation de l’espace dans les jeux vidéo: généalogie, classification et réflexions’, in M. Roustan (ed.): La pratique du jeu vidéo. Réalité ou virtualité (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003b)

____. ‘Reflections On The Methodology Of Pervasive Gaming’, ACM SIGCHI International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology, Valencia, Spain, 2005a.

____. ‘Notes on the Methodology of Pervasive Gaming’, in F. Kishino et al. (eds.): ICEC 2005, LNCS 3711 (2005b).

____. ‘A hard day’s work: Reflections on the interfacing of transmedialisation and speed in 24′, in K. B. Jensen (ed.) Interface://Politics. The World Wide Web as Democratic Resource and Cultural Form (Copenhagen: Samfundslitteratur, 2005c): 205-240.

____. ‘Art and Computer Games: A New History’, Aminima, 17, (2006): 132-139.

Globally, South Korea has become a bit of a fetish in the (global) games culture phenomenon. Games are a serious business saturating everyday life and many South Koreans prefer their PCs (with online multiplayer games) to TV (Cho 2005). Seoul is an exemplary model of the ubiquity of gaming culture; highlighting that games and the attendant social spaces and cultural knowledges can be part of everyday lifestyles, rather than a mere leisure activity of a subcultural group. With over 20,000 game rooms (known as ‘PC bangs’) scattered across Seoul, three TV channels dedicated to gaming, and pro-league players (professionals that can earn over US$2 million annually) treated as celebrity royalty, South Korea’s prolific designing, production and playing of games seems almost a dream come true for anyone remotely interested in gaming culture. Almost.

As a place where gaming is an integral part of social spaces and practices, South Korea has become a focus of global attention – both good and bad. On the one hand, it demonstrates to those passionate about gaming that such an industry has the potential to gain critical mass and be integral within everyday practices and socializing. On the other hand, South Korea has often, especially in Western-centric mass media, attracted the critical eye of the arm-chair, hypodermic, ‘media-effect’ advocates and been used as an example of a culture overwhelmed by modernity. Such incidents as the murder in June 2005 of a 15 year-old player by a 30 year-old player of a multiplayer online game, when the latter mistakenly began to believe the teenager had killed his game character, along with the recent death in August in 2005 of a player after 50 hours of continuous play, provide fuel for simplistic media-effect interpretations. If only it were that simple. If only violence was just the product of video games; in turn, if only confusions about what is real and what is a representation were only the side-effects of video games.[1] However, it is not that simple. Rather, gaming cultures need to be understood within the sociocultural context they are played; such notions as game play are inflected by the local. Certain games and certain types of game play are adopted by specific communities because they make sense within the cultural context; often South Korea is lauded as an example globally without the specific factors informing the pervasiveness of gaming being entertained, let alone understood. In this way, the culture of gaming needs to be understood as an integral part of technocultures – that is, contemporary cultures are mediated and saturated by technologies and technospaces (Green, 2001) – and subject to the forces of what Doreen Massey dubs ‘locality’ (1991). As Massey argues, the sense of place is defined through representational processes, a practice that is always mediated by the local (1995).

One of the terms that are in need of unpacking is game play. In particular, one needs to consider the relationship between play and locality; how what Mizuko Ito dubs communities of co-presence (2003, 2005) are often the microcosm constituting the contested notion of national cultures. As global technologies such as the mobile phone have demonstrated, the global is far from the utopia of McLuhan’s global village. Rather, the choice of games – and the motivations for playing them and via what type of interface (e.g., game consoles as opposed to LAN game) – is becoming more and more culturally specific. In this way, one could argue that whilst players from across the world can play the same games, they choose not to. This sometimes is due to technological differences (for example, the fact that South Korea has one of the most extensive broadband infrastructure affords the possibility for everyone to play online multiplayer games) but it can also be about a game’s relevance, which can be determined by aesthetics and theme. These factors are often constructed through what Benedict Anderson (1983) dubbed ‘imagined communities’. That is, the place of origin of a game, along with its associations with a particular culture constitutes how a player experiences a game. For example, Koichi Iwabuchi (2003) noted that Japanese global products such as Pokémon are odourless in comparison to American products such as Coca Cola. For Iwabuchi, Japanese products are made to be easily customized, easily adapted to another cultural context. This strategy of mixing the local and the global known as glocalisation, was pioneered by Sony (Robertson 1998). Such qualities as cuteness lend themselves, according to Anne Allison (2003), to multiple readings due to their postmodern nature. The pervasive nature of the cute is apparent in the Asia-Pacific region, and whilst Japan has dominated the production of cute and technology in the region, South Korea now presents strong competition. Currently, gaming seems to be taking two distinct directions – one lead by Japan, the other by Korea. And yet, in a Western press presenting itself as ‘global’, and in English language gaming forums, we can see some residual assumptions which align certain types of game play with specific cultures and values (see Chan in this issue).

In the case of Korea, with its quick rise into 21st century modernity, and assertive internal policies for technologically connecting itself (both pragmatically via broadband and metaphorically via global projections) to become a global centre of gaming and mobile culture, I argue that we can see a localized form of what Ito calls ‘communities of presence’ and ‘co-presence’ (as in PC bangs) that are being a-contextualised via Neo-Techno-Orientalism. As a Western projected concept, Techno-Orientalism was used by Westerners to devalue the role of Eastern technocultures and Asian ‘satellite’ modernity (Ma, 1999); often this was achieved by arguing that the pivotal role of Asian production (and consumption) of new technologies was a result of their ‘robot-like’, post-humanist ways (Morley and Robins, 1995). This is particularly the case in the ‘cute’ aesthetic and its history in Asian technocultures as noted by Brian McVeigh in his study of the rise of techno-cute (2000). For McVeigh, the use of cute customization sought to make friendly and humanize the coldness of new technology.

I argue that there is currently a Neo Techno-Orientalism proponent occurring within the “hyped” discourses surrounding Korean gaming and its export (of both images and actual products) globally as demonstrated by the way in which Asian games are being interpreted elsewhere, especially in terms of cute games and the assumed modes of game play and audience demographic; this new form of transference is not merely a projection on the behalf of the West but also part of the new imaginings attached to Korea’s role in producing and exporting new technologies in the Asia-Pacific region. Most notably, Korea has managed to draw attention away from Japan’s once reigning Gross National Cool (McGray, 2002) and, in doing so, has managed to re-orientate the residual gaze of Techno-Orientalism. However such a concept is no longer just a Western projection whereby Asian technocultures become a default setting for Western ideas of sci-fi as identified by Lisa Nakamura (2002) . Rather, technology industries in places such as Japan and Korea are selling products globally through advertisements that draw on Techno-Orientalist imaginaries identified by Shunya Yoshimi (1999). As Misa Matsuda noted in the case of the global mobile industries (which are quickly converging with gaming cultures), Japan worked actively to align itself as the global centre – often involving a self-perpetuation of Techno-Orientalism – with such innovations as DoCoMo’s i-mode dubbed as the keitai (mobile) IT revolution (Matsuda, 2005). After all, as Harmeet Sawhney (2004) notes, i-mode’s tag of mobile phone with broadband was a misnomer, its Internet architecture was more similar to the closed architecture of France’s Minitel system.

In opposition to Japan’s focus on mobile convergent devices, Korea’s focus on DMB (Digital Multimedia Broadcasting which has seen the birth of mobile phones with TV) has seen a concurrent rise in the global focus on Korea as mobile gaming centre. The consumption of Korean cultural products – from Korean TV dramas to online multiplayer games – in the Asia-Pacific region seems unstoppable; a current wave of Korean pop has managed to question Japan’s cultural predominance in the region. In particular, markets such as Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Mainland China have become key consumers of Korean popular culture. The rise of new gaming genres as epitomized by the ‘cute’ game Kart Rider, which lend themselves to the multi-tasking (domesticity in the public or what Raymond Williams’s dubbed ‘mobile privatization’) characteristic of mobile convergent media, could suggest a threat to the PC bangs as social spaces. However, it is important to note that these PC bangs – or ‘third’ spaces (Chee, 2005) – hinge on the practice of communities of co-presence. That is, co-presence of being both virtually and actually present and being both ‘here’ and ‘there’.

Once tied to the stereotypical young or female user in the Asia-Pacific region, the politics of the ‘cute’ are no longer so simplistically categorized – especially as women become more active creators and players of games as is the case in South Korea. It is this endurance of the ‘cute’ and its emergence as a supposedly new burgeoning genre that raises some questions about the changing nature of Korean game play and the social spaces in which it takes place. In order to take up some of these issues I will turn to a case study of the new Korean game, Kart Rider, that has managed to do the once unimaginable, surpass the reign of Lineage.  Kart Rider is an online multiplayer game merging two popular genres – driving and cuteness. The ‘cute’ aesthetic, once identified with low-resolution, highly pixilated retro games such as Mario Brothers, could be arguably seen as no longer an aesthetic but a burgeoning subgenre that plays on the cultural capital of nostalgia. With big Lolita eyes and balloon-like heads, the characters are hyperbolic par excellence. The game is simple in nature, drive the kart as fast as you can and beat the others. It allows for playful game play whereby players can easily socialize simultaneously online and offline as opposed to the serious games such as Lineage. Kart Rider can be easily accessed by young and old and is a great game to be played in PC bangs where players can be co-present both online and offline. In the rise of DMB technology on the mobile phone (called ‘hand phone in Korea), a game such as Kart Rider lends itself easily to media recontextualisation.

By exploring the Kart Rider phenomenon that has – by no accident – occurred during South Korea’s shift towards convergent mobile gaming devices (Koreans have a history of preferring PCs to consoles), I will seek to contextualise some of the particularities of the Korean gaming industry and how the rise in cute games is being interpreted outside of Korea. By focusing on a forum discussion of Kart Rider outside Korea I will explore some the residual Neo Techno-Orientalism that shows that game play – and the consumption/ reception of particular products – are still very much subject to the localities of play culture. In this way, I argue that as cultural products, games and their culture of origin are implicitly tied to politics of consumption/ playing/ reception and this needs to be addressed in the critical discussion of game play culture. Contrary to the media-effects model, I argue that ‘global gaming’ is not homogeneous in the possible responses and effect; technocultures such as South Korea (with its plethora of PC bangs) are subject to the localization through which communities of co-presence replicate traditional forms of sociality.

In other words, the communities of co-presence as represented by online multiplayer games and attendant spaces of play are not a space without place. And whilst one may play games from various different cultural contexts, the spaces (from aesthetics to game play) are encoded by cultural particularities as they are also projected with the player’s own micro-imagined communities. In the global industries of gaming culture – especially online multiplayer games – that purport to connect players across different spaces and cultures, place does matter. This importance and persistence of communities of co-presence is addressed by Florence Chee’s study on PC bangs as ‘third spaces’ – in between work and home – predicated on sociality (2005).

The game of being mobile: the rise of new technologies and the persistence of place. In South Korea, the Net and mobile telephonic spaces are helping to drive the progress” of Korean forms of democracy Kim 2003: 325). For Korean sociologists Shin Dong Kim (2003) and Haejoang Cho (2004), the rise of a specific type of democracy in South Korea was afforded in part by new technologies such as mobile phones. [4] The South Korean telecommunication company Daum was the first Internet company in Korea and provided the first free email service in 1997. Daum established the first Internet cafes in 1999 and they now boast over 50 million users. The rise of online communities through Internet cafes from 1999 to 2002 was perhaps epitomized by pyeins (geeks) using Cyworld (a web community site that literally translates to relationship world, dubbed cypyeins as in cy-geeks) but by 2003 the general population were using PCs at home. As John Borland and Michael Kanellos note, in 1995 fewer than 1 percent of South Korean residents use the Internet but by 2004 more than 71 percent of South Korean households subscribed to broadband Net services.

Unlike the console-oriented industry of Japan, South Korea has been focused on online multiplayer games accessed via PC, mostly in the context of PC bangs. These PC bangs are social spaces, participating in ‘communities of presence’ (Ito, 2002) and co-presence. For Chee (2005), Korean PC bangs operate as ‘third places’ – places in between work and home spaces that offer psychological comfort and support. Drawing on Brian Sutton-Smith’s (1997) The Ambiguity of Play, Chee argues that social play needs to be understood in terms of ‘play culture’. As Chee notes in her ethnographic study, the PC bangs not only offer a place to play games but also a space for comfort and sociality. Gaming culture has become a meaningful part of everyday Korean life. Pro league gamers (professional gamers) are treated like celebrities, and pro-gamer tournaments are social events akin to boy-band concerts full of screaming youthful energy. With many young Koreans still living at home (usually until they are married), PC bangs offer a social space away from the watchful eyes of parents.

In her study, Chee interviews both male and female players to convincingly make a case for Korean gaming culture as a social activity, particularly in the context of the third places provided by PC bangs. One female interviewee, who plays about 15-20 hours per week of massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs) as well as Ragnarok and Kart Rider, states that her main reason for going to PC bangs is to be with her boyfriend, also a player. Here, her motivations for playing are clearly related to the play culture informing the social play of PC bangs. In one case, Chee interviewed two gamers who, having played Lineage together without knowing each other, eventually met offline and fell in love. Here, Chee argues that the games offer a ‘fourth place’ whereby strangers can become intimate and that this can overlap into offline forms of sociality (also see Taylor 2006). However, the co-presence between online and offline, third and fourth places can also have negative ramifications as was the case in June this year in the aforementioned killing of a player in the real after the death of a character. Here we see the co-present investment in avatar – communities of co-presence – is no trivial matter.

In Korea, cute avatars provide a vehicle for negotiating co-presence between online and offline spaces. The role of the cute helps to convey the mood and emotions of the user as was noted in a case study of Cyworld users in 2004 (Hjorth and Kim 2005). And, far from eroding the importance of place and actual contact, these avatars help facilitate traditional forms of intimacy. What is quite evident from the outset is the underlying force of traditional forms of sociality that sees PC bangs often not just a place to play online multiplayer games but also, and in some cases more importantly, as a place for connecting socially (Chee, 2005). The use of technology to reinforce forms of intimacy and contact is so prevalent that even co-present (virtual/ actual) spaces such as Cyworld’s virtual community minihompy are about a correspondence between online and offline identity and relationships. The virtual community of Cyworld began as a small independent network and has grown, since its buy-out by South Korean telecommunications giant, SK, to become a mainstream community network used by young and old. Each blog-like template consists of a cyber-room occupied by the user’s avatar, along with folders such as music, writing and photos. Users can invite friends’ avatars to visit their cyber-rooms, and many friends give gifts in the forms of furniture and items of display for the cyber-room. Whilst the avatars can be customized according to the users’ mood, one thing remains prevalent; all avatars are cute. Minihompy adopted and adapted the traditional Korean term ilchon to divide users between ilchon and non-chon. Once used to denote degrees of distance between family members (i.e., your mother would be one chon from yourself), Cyworld has re-branded its cyber-rooms with the notion of chon and ilchon to infer friends and non-friends. Chons can gain more access to their fellow ilchon‘s information and be invited to visit their cyber-rooms. Non-chons can only gain cursory access. Whilst one could see this as a cynical commercial exercise where not even family ties are sacred and nothing is left un-branded, users of the site see it as an integral part of forming communities that are intrinsically tied to real spaces and contact (Hjorth and Kim, 2005). As minihompy users noted in a survey conducted in 2004, the ‘cute’ aesthetics of their avatars allowed them to convey their offline moods and feelings online. However, there was a marked difference between male and female users with male users sometimes feeling uncomfortable that the cute character was not reflective of their offline identity, whilst female users enjoyed the multiple interpretations offered by cute avatars.

Avatars, as Cyworld’s minihompy attests, are quintessential in the investment – both financially and emotionally – of users and their maintenance of co-present communities. This importance of avatars for Korean online communities is, of course, culturally specific. And whilst Cyworld has just launched its highly successful minihompy in Japan, China and the US, it will be curious to see if it takes off elsewhere. In particular, in locations such as the US where communities such as MySpace dominate, arguably Cyworld’s cuteness will only attract young users that would also be the demographic for Gaia and Habbo Hotel. However, in South Korea, over one third of the population (18 million users in a population of 48 million) regularly visit theirs and friends’ minihompys. To return to Ito’s notion, games are ‘communities of presence‘ (2002) whereby presence can be denoted through practices of co-presence rather than a necessity to be physically present. The role of the cute is pivotal in the aesthetics of the avatars, playing into what Anne Allison (in the context of the Pokémon global phenomenon) characterized as the postmodern qualities of the cute that allow it to be open to polysemic readings, contexts, and re-appropriations (Allison, 2003). The politics of cute culture – as epitomised by the Kart Rider success – resurrects questions about sociality, co-presence, and the role of sociotechnology. In particular, to explore the role of the cute entertains issues about the persistence of Techno-Orientalism in the region, as I will demonstrate by an English language forum posting about Kart Rider.

The legacy of technocute: a Kart Rider case study

Kart Rider has been a sensational hit in the Korean market and has topped domestic game ranking since last December, pulling down the famous StarCraft from the top position. Now the company estimates more than 2 million individuals play it everyday, and up to 220,000 users are connected simultaneously during peak hours. (Cho, 2005)

In Kart’s Engine Still Hot, Cho Jin-seo recounts the fast rise of the Kart Rider phenomenon in South Korea. In revisiting earlier simple, but just as addictive, games such as Mario Kart, Kart Rider is symptomatic of a genre of game play that, according to Cho is still an under-explored genre; this genre, for Cho, illustrates that gaming is no longer a male dominated area. Made up of cute type avatars, each of the various racing games can have up to eight gamers competing against each other. Unlike the all-consuming and immersive online multiplayer games such as Lineage and StarCraft, Kart Rider is meant for in between periods such as office lunch breaks. However beguiling, behind its cute graphics and simple rules and game play are some not-so-simple politics about gendered modes of game play and ‘normal’ forms of social interaction. As I have suggested earlier, the cute graphics of Kart Rider are similar to another cyber social network in the form of quasi-home page communities as witnessed in SK’s Cyworld’s minihompy. Like the minihompy’s cute avatars, Kart Rider avatars are sold and downloaded. It is the continual need to update and change cute avatars according to mood or moment that is big business for SK Cyworld and Nexon’s Kart Rider. In 2004, Nexon made $110 million from avatar downloads and this year it is expecting $250 million. The cute is big business and no longer just the prerogative of young girls. And just because it is cute one shouldn’t necessarily assume it is harmless and non-addictive. As Cho Jin-seo notes:

Kart Rider popularity sometimes blurs the boundary between on- and off-line worlds. In a recent poll by Empas.com, the game’s (Kart Rider‘s) Solid Pro car beat real-world monsters Lamborghini Murcielago and Lotus Elise to be voted the second best sports car in the world, narrowly losing to Porsche Carrera GT.

Whilst Cho’s fears about the blur between virtual and real worlds are unfounded as noted by surveyed Cyworld users and their playful relationship to cute avatars, Cho’s argument does resonate with general anxieties around the healthiness of extended online game play and associated anti-social behaviour. In a media-effects model, co-presence is seen as an erasure of difference rather than an elastic dialectic between real and virtual spaces and contact. If we can take the phenomenon of Cyworld’s minihompy as any indicator, virtual representations and spaces have not superseded the real. In the case of Cyworld’s minihompy, these mini-home pages and virtual chat rooms are seen as helping to facilitate face-to-face relations. Arguably, the rise in virtual communities such as Cyworld and cute online gaming could be linked to the growth in female players and female content producers and designers in the industry.

In an online English-speaking forum subject about gaming (http://text.broadbandreports.com/shownews/64953) headed ‘The biggest broadband game you never heard of: Kart Rider‘, the discussion turned to the burgeoning gaming industry in South Korea. As one of the most connected (broadband) countries, online gaming culture is a pervasive phenomenon that is imagined and consumed differently around the globe. For cultures without the technologies and connectivity boasted by South Korea, gaming centres can seem like alien spaces akin to dystopian sci-fi film sets with the stories in the media over-citing examples of gaming addicts in Korea. Whilst I recognize that this case study of a forum discussion cannot be taken as indicative of the games industry in general, the forum posting is not un-characteristic. Rather, the overt clashing of cultural identification and interpretation occurring in this forum presents one inroad into understanding the discursive formations of various types of game play. The forum began with a discussion about Korean games with one participant noting that the venerable Starcraft had recently been dethroned by Nexon’s Kart Rider. The discussion quickly turned to a forum on the role of cute aesthetics in Asia with one posting stating Asians are such weird people. The proceeding posting continued:

Agreed. Asia has Shot Online! too — a MMO golf RPG. Yes, you read that right, a MMO golf RPG. They’ll play anything over there, apparently. (For the record, I played the game and it’s a good game, but… I can’t fathom playing it all the time).
Nexon makes Shattered Galaxy though too (definitely non-cute game), which was a pretty good game until it got to the point nobody playing spoke English anymore.
i played Shattered Galaxy for a long long time long time ago and even back in the beginning it was mostly singapore people playing it. The infamous Singlish i use to know but now have forgotten.

This was then followed by a debate that clearly demonstrated the politics of consuming certain game cultures. Here the discussion moves back and forth from a Neo Techno-Orientalist posturing (i.e. Asian relationships towards technology being post-human), to postmodern cultural relativity (reinforcing the ‘postmodern’ nature of cute culture as argued by Allison, 2003). The Neo Techno-Orientalist slurs, in their extreme ignorance, highlight the alignment of certain cultures with specific types of habits and thus modes of game play. What began as a discussion about cute aesthetics becomes a heated debate about types of morality (and lack); and one can’t help but think of the correlation with types of consumption and aesthetics with modes of morality. For a discussion about the relationship between morality and consumption in Asia see Chua Beng Huat’s Consumption in Asia (2000) anthology, where he discusses the shift in Asian values – and the correlation between consumption and Western amorality – after the economic bubble burst in 1997.

Respondent two replies:

what a racist. what are you going to say when they run the world? hello sir? the Chinese, a Communist country will own America in 20 years thanks to Mr. Bush and his deficit. how about smart. | 2005-06-27 15:29:15 |

Respondent one replies:

What makes you think I’m a racist?
They have weird culture and habits. Japanese sex culture is just freaking sick! They eat all kinds of ‘food’ and obviously they have a bunch of weird games that are so extremely popular in Asia but not anywhere else. I wonder why??
They are WEIRD.
I agree with the Bush remark but let’s leave politics out of it | 2005-06-27 15:38:06 |

Respondent two replies:

it’s all relative
The funny thing about statements like that is that they usually go both ways, i.e. they (Asians) could easily say the same thing about us Westerners. For example:
“They have weird culture and habits. (obsession with guns, religion and “reality” TV, celebrity worship, paying athletes and celebrities obscene amounts of money while say, teachers get next to nothing) American sex culture is just freaking sick (won’t go into detail)! They eat all kinds of ‘food’ (Twinkies, Thickburgers, purple ketchup, fried candybars, pork rinds, etc.) and obviously they have a bunch of weird games that are so extremely popular in America but not anywhere else. (Football, NASCAR, Beer Pong) I wonder why?? They are WEIRD.”
I just might have sushi for lunch. | 2005-06-29 14:06:45 |

Respondent one asserts:

True but I never said western cultures are perfect either. Even though people eat all kinds of stuff you can’t really compare Asian restaurant menus with the ones we prefer.
BTW this is mostly a western website. So we talk about other peoples and don’t care much about their opinions. | 2005-07-03 14:51:25 |

New respondent adds:

Asians are such a weird people.
Got that right. | 2005-06-27 18:19:04 |

This is then followed by respondent three adding:

Starcraft, I quit playing that game a long time ago.
I think the final thread for me was the backstabbing by asian players who’d insist I sent them a private message laced with epithets. The only joy I had after that was watching the rubes who believed him get backstabbed in turn. | 2005-06-27 11:03:17 |

Respondent four adds:

thats why asians like it…..easy to cheat on. | 2005-06-27 11:35:01 |

Respondent three replies:

True, most of the cheaters I ran into either spoke no English or pretended to speak no English. | 2005-06-27 11:41:40 |

Respondent five taunts:

you guys are just jealous we asians know how to break the system so well.
too bad it means almost every politician in asia is corrupted. | 2005-06-27 14:40:00 |

At this point in the forum, one can see that the discussion of games and game play is intrinsically linked to ideas about the ‘imagined communities’ of nation of origin. The forum clearly highlights that the gaming community is far from homogeneous, and that the values attached to types of game play are linked to forces of locality. What began as a discussion about MMO golf RPGturns into a debate about China versus American, English-speakers versus non English-speakers. This raises two interrelated issues, firstly, the role of aesthetics associated with particular games and its linkage between cultural identity and types of ethics (or lack of); secondly, that to talk about the tastes and values of games is to enter a world where conflicting notions of cultural capital collide. As Pierre Bourdieu noted, cultural capital denotes a type of cultural knowledge (1984). However, in Bourdieu’s case, his study was limited to the cultural context of France in the 1970s. In the case of the global gaming industry, there are many forms of cultural capital associated with types of game play that are linked to political, economic, and socio-cultural factors. The initial participant’s slandering of MMO golf RPG was linked to assumptions about hierarchies in the cultural capital of game play that are dependent on which ‘imagined community’ you are situated in. Thus, it is unsurprising that the real agenda of the discussion is uncovered to expose a fear about the Techno-Oriental imaginary of growing economies such as China and South Korea. The forum discussion continues with:

Respondent six retorts:

kekekekeke ^_^ | 2005-06-27 12:59:06 |

Respondent seven asks:

Show me some pics of this game
I wanna see some in game footage see if I like it. Probably not seeing how asian games try the weird cute hello kitty fashion which is creepy by my standard but what the hell, worth a try. Maybe its like Mario Kart (In a crazy asian hello kitty fashion).
Hey I was in your city today.. hehe
BTW Mario kart with online extension would be great game. was fun playing 4 players on a 27 in tv in the day imagine 16 player rumble over the net. | 2005-06-27 17:30:15 |

Respondent two, obviously fed up with the unbridled Techno-Orientalist discussion, adds:

English speakers are clueless about the international gaming world. Nearly 60% of fee based game play on the entire planet goes to Korean based NCSoft, generated by Lineage-1 & Lineage-2. I’ve been playing these games on and off since 1996 and it still amazes me when I walk into a game room internet center here in NYC and they don’t even have Lineage loaded. The Korean’s are 5 years ahead of America when it comes to wireless, and all you can do is scoff at them. Such insecurity is pathetic; no wonder all your outsourceable tech jobs are going to India. BTW, if you think the Korean’s are bad, wait till you go toe to toe with the Chinese…| 2005-06-27 21:52:34 |

Respondent one retorts:

They’re not ahead, they’re just different. Because 25% of the population plays one game says what? Here in the USA you have millions of people playing millions of different games…not just a few select ones. What does that mean?… not much. However yu choose to turn it into a USA bash-fest in regard to online gamers. Yes, the Koreans have more PC “bangs” in one square mile than we have Starbucks within all 50 states, but it’s their mentality of working together for one common cause that has made games like Lineage successful over there. …. Is one right and the other wrong?… absolutely not. Why you choose to make such a contrast maybe helps you ward off your own insecurities whatever they may be. I admire what the Koreans have accomplished because they have achieved something very different from us, not better…just different. | 2005-06-27 23:13:55

What can be ascertained from this forum is that the politics of cuteness – around production, consumption and reception of games – resurrects earlier models of Techno-Orientalism (Morley and Robins, 1995; Yoshimi 1999). I am not suggesting that all Western cultures view Asian modernities – burgeoning as gaming communities – through Techno-Orientalist filters, but what this post highlights is that to engage in the discussion of the ‘cute’ is to evoke political and cultural contestation. As current global circuits of consumption, regulation and production demonstrate, there are multiple modernities. In the Asia-Pacific region, one can see many examples of ‘satellite modernities’ (Ma 1999) that are not a version of a Eurocentric modernity. Within a Techno-Orientalist framework the West is seen as human, and the East is seen as robot-like or post-human (Morley and Robins, 1995). This ‘post-human’ view was invoked by the binary postings positioning Asia as homogeneous, weird and amoral (in opposition to the normality and morality of the West). For Shunya Yoshimi (1999), the production and representation (i.e., advertising) of domestic technologies such as the TV and the mobile phone (keitai) in Japan has often involved a grappling between innovative technologies and the need to humanize, personalize, and domesticize the new into more salient, remediated genealogies.

This need to personalize and customize the technology has often been in the form of what Brian McVeigh dubs ‘technocute’ (2000). For McVeigh, the cute makes warm the coldness of new technology. Often ‘technocute’ has been stereotypically aligned with young female consumption, however, with the rise of the ‘IT keitai revolution’, the cute is big business for both young and old, male and female consumers. This has to do with a number of factors, including the role of the cute in the 1970s rise of subversive youth cultures against the dogma of Japanese tradition (Kinsella, 1995), the rise of playful vernacular (creolising hiragana and katakana) akin to emoticons (emoji, known as kitten writing) from the pagers onwards, the role of animals in Buddhist and Shinto religion (Kusahara, 2001), and the way in which childhood is imagined differently than in the West (White, 1995). The differing relationship and identification with modes of representation can be also noted by the dominant role of manga and anime in Japanese popular culture that exists as a subcultural activity in the West. In Japan’s re-orientating of itself as a techno-centre, there has been a shift within Japan from the once negative depiction ‘s perception of the prime consumer of emerging forms of technocultures in the form of the male otaku (media obsessed geeks) and its female counterpart who was seen as intrinsic to the pager and keitai (mobile phone) revolution, the Kygyaru (females in their mid twenties that dress in non-conventional ways and are conspicuous consumers).

The role of cuteness, as epitomized by Kart Rider‘s popularity, has a different role in South Korea. However, as the posting notes, Occidental fusions often problematically deem the cute as a homogeneous aesthetic consuming (and being consumed by) this vast imagined community called Asia. So what can be made of the politics of cute and the pervasive role of avatars in Korean games and the image that is broadcast globally? What can be ascertained from the Kart Rider phenomenon and the seemingly East/ West divisions in its interpretation and reception? Most certainly game play, and the surrounding cultures, are subject to the forces of locality (Massey, 1991); highlighting that the spaces we inhabit both in actual game play and the discourses (such as forums) of communities of presence (and co-presence) are governed by a type of contestation akin to Benedict Anderson’s ‘imagined communities’.

Whilst for some the rise in such ‘simple’ and casual games could be read as devaluing ‘serious’ games such as Starcraft, I would argue the opposite. Rather, the rise of more genres reflects the increase in acceptability and access to gaming cultures in South Korea and is indicative of the importance of avatars (and the ‘postmodern’ possibilities of cute representation) in the politics of co-presence. Whilst some Western participants in the posting seemed to view the ‘cute’ as some weird phenomenon particular to Asian technocultures, we can see that the cute is far from benign in the way that Korean players identify with its playful possibilities. As the aforementioned posting highlights, the politics of cute culture are far from trivial. It is not by accident that the increase in female designers and players has seen the rise in forms of technocute games. Companies such as NCSoft have been active in hiring female designers and currently more than half of their designers are females; however in high management positions, male employees still dominate the ranks. Moreover, the Techno-Orientalist interpretations of the cute games such as Kart Rider and MMO golf RPG, Shot Online!highlight that gaming cultures are subject to the social forces of local play cultures.

The global rise of gaming cultures from a subcultural leisure activity to an activity that is integral to the lifestyles of technocultures could be read as a homogenizing of cultural spaces and places. However, as the discussions and interpretations of Kart Rider on the aforementioned posting highlighted, online multiplayer games are far from demonstrative of a global ‘homogenized’ village. Rather, we are witnessing a redefinition of place and the cultural specificities of game play in the context of social play. The rules of game play are contingent to the force of locality; certain types of games and modes of game play are enforced by the player’s cultural and social contexts. In the case of the pervasive gaming culture of Seoul, which is sold globally, what we can see is that spaces such as PC bangs are affording youth cultures a ‘third space’ in between work and home spaces.

As I have suggested in this paper, Seoul as one gaming centre highlights that cultures of play are shaped by social nuances. It is unlikely to be replicated elsewhere. But as the last posting on the forum highlights, it is important to celebrate the differences rather than brand Korean gaming activities as ‘weird’ or ‘exotic’; most importantly, there needs to be a critical discourse surrounding the fetishisation that places Korean gaming culture in a Techno-Orientalist slant. Moreover, one needs to be aware of the agenda of techno-nationalism that has seen locations such as Japan in 1970s and, more recently, Korea, position itself globally as a centre for technology (especially mobile and online gaming). In this paper I have outlined some of the many factors that have led to the importance of gaming – as part of broader discourses and genealogies of play – as a socio-cultural activity in Korea and other Asian countries. In this sense, the cute is not merely child’s play but a way of addressing culturally specific relationships to technology. The politics of the cute can also be a way of entering into the dynamics between game play and the ethics of aesthetics within imagined communities.

As the usage of avatars – and ‘cute’ ones at that – in South Korea highlights, the ubiquity of broadband and online presence may reinforce the importance of place and sociality. As Margaret Morse has noted, intimacy and contact has always been mediated – by language, by memories, by cultures (1998). As these communities of presence/ co-presence suggest in the form of PC bangs, sociality is integral to the play cultures of gaming in South Korea. Far from a Heideggerean conundrum, in which as we try to overcome distance, we actually overcome closeness (Arnold, 2003a), gaming spaces are communities of co-presence; even if home is located in the ‘third space’ of a PC bang or the less official, and more contingent, space of the mobile devices.

Author’s Biography

Larissa Hjorth is researcher and artist lecturing in the Games and Digital Art programs at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. Over the last five years, Hjorth has been researching and publishing on gendered customizing of mobile communication and virtual communities in the Asia-Pacific. Hjorth has published widely on the topic in journals such as Journal of Intercultural Studies, Convergence journal, Fibreculture Journal and Southern Review. Hjorth has been the recipient of an Australia Council Tokyo studio, Asialink Seoul residency, Akiyoshidai International Village Residency as well as receiving grants for cross-cultural art projects from Besen Foundation, Australia Council new media fund, Asialink-Japan Foundation, Pola Foundation and Noruma Foundation. Recently she was awarded $20,000 from the Australian Council Visual Arts Board to further pursue her research into new mobile technologies. Hjorth will be co-convening the International conference on Mobile media with Gerard Goggin in July 2007 (www.mobilemedia2007.net).

Email: larissa.hjorth at rmit.edu.au

Note

[1] There has been much work critiquing the media effect model, and all one has to do is look at the history of humanity, which has been predicated on violence and the fabrication of childhood (Ariés, 1962), as ‘passive’ and the binary of adults as a European post-abolishment of child labour to see the implausibly of such a position.
The cultures of play are very much invested by projections of what is deemed appropriate in a given culture. It is interesting to note that when the producers of Sesame Street were conceiving of the series they worked closely with child psychologists, educators and TV producers. The initial pilots to children audiences had the humans and puppets separated into different scenes. The result was that audience was bored and distracted when the adults were on screen, and interested and absorbed when confronted with the puppets scenes. When the producers suggested that they bring together the adults and puppets in certain scenes, the child psychologists voiced fears along the lines of But then we will have a whole generation that grows up mistaking adults for puppets! Since then many generations of Western children have been subjected to the hyperrealityof Sesame Street, and arguably the only locale in which this confusion between puppets and humans takes place is in the arena of politics. However, the broadcasting of Sesame Street from the 1970s onwards does coincide with the rise in co-present spaces such as cyberspace and the arguments around effects on corporeality in debates about online/offline presence.
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United States (U.S.) Army recruiting did not seem to be a problem after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. However, the ongoing war on terror calls for more soldiers and thus more recruits. Operation Iraqi Freedom in particular has put heavy strains on the available manpower of the Army. A significant part of the U.S. war machine is tied down in the cities of Iraq, requiring a steady flow of fresh manpower and material. The Bush administration has made it clear that it expects the war on terror will be a decade-long battle against a shadowy enemy (Gordon and Trainor, 2006). At the same time, government officials such as U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld pointed out that the war on terror is also a war on ideas’. According to him, it is a war to spread freedom and liberty, values appropriated by and associated with the United States.

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have become increasingly important elements in contemporary warfare (Toffler and Toffler, 1995). This trend labelled Infowar’ is giving way to the convergence of the technological transformation of the U.S. military with networked, ICT-based warfare (Der Derian, 2003). In all its forms, information warfare can use simulations as weapon systems: in its hard form as a component of a weapon, or in its soft form as (public) dissimulations:

More a weapon of mass persuasion and distraction than destruction, infowar nonetheless shares some common characteristics with nuclear war: it targets civilian as well as military populations and its exchange-value as a deterrent outweighs its use-value as an actual weapon. (Der Derian, 2003: 47)

Modern-day media have become powerful instruments of war, as many wars are won politically, not strategically (Payne, 2005). This political-ideological dimension of media was most visible during the first Gulf War. Before and during the war, television newscasts played a significant role in persuading U.S. citizens to support the war while distracting Iraqi officials with deceitful and distorted information about the war’s strategic objectives (Taylor, 1998).

Today new media complement the use of older, ‘mass; media forms. New media (technologies) have become vital tools to sustain the war on terror in two converging ways. First, games and webpages can act directly as recruiting tools or aids. For instance, the U.S. Army has various websites to assist parents with their children’s decision to join. Second, entertainment media such as games directly and indirectly provide context and justifications through simulations and dissimulations as to why and how the war on terror is fought. As such, the concept of infowar directly relates to the use of game technology by the U.S. military. This paper will focus on this dual capacity of new media technology, specifically digital games.

Contemporary media seem to have incorporated militarised themes in every way possible. Television newscasts show embedded reports live from the battlefield while retired generals act as experts on 24-hour news channels. Hollywood movies use every special effect at their disposal to depict an even more spectacular image of war using leased military equipment. A great number of scholars have analysed this symbiotic relationship between military communities and the entertainment industries, generally known as the military-entertainment complex’ (Der Derian, 2003; Lenoir and Lowood, 2003; Stockwell and Muir, 2003). Within this complex, countless television series, movies, and (comic) books are continuously being produced. And as the U.S. military uses the same simulation technologies as commercial game developers do, boundaries between commercial games and governmental military simulations are seemingly eroding. In addition, the historically strong ties between military and game technology are becoming more and more visible due to popular accounts of the military-entertainment complex (Chaplin and Ruby, 2005; Halter, 2006). More so than other media, digital games above all epitomise the military-entertainment complex.

Beyond the military-entertainment complex

To deepen the understanding of the expanding military-entertainment complex, the first state-produced recruiting game, America’s Army, will be discussed. The complex, which seems at first sight to be no more than a technological bond between Hollywood/Silicon Valley and the Pentagon, in fact has profound implications from a socio-economic and political-ideological point-of-view. Solely focusing on the mere fact that games are produced in cooperation with the military ignores the significance of the synergy between the military-entertainment complex and contemporary youth popular culture. The recent success of military-developed recruiting games impacts thinking about games and simulations and the use of these interactive texts for advertisement, education, and propaganda. Similarly, the appropriation of a global game culture seems to result in a reciprocal relationship between the hierarchical nature of the U.S. military and the participatory character of numerous game community clusters.

The U.S. military in particular benefits in various ways from a global game culture playing war-themed games. Military recruiters are able to use interactive entertainment as a valuable asset in their expansive toolbox. In what follows, the appeal of military games as objects for military recruiting will be discussed. Through the use of games the U.S. military deliberately chose to directly interact with the ‘Internet generation.; With America’s Army the U.S. Army tapped directly into game communities, and was able to harness the creative and symbolic capital produced by gamers. Whereas with commercially developed games, fans collaborate with the cultural industries, the players of state-produced games such as America’s Army aid, however indirect and minimal, the U.S. war effort by spreading the U.S. Army’s symbolic capital. The core of America’s Army‘s ideology is not primarily based upon the cultural industries’ profit motive or on providing entertainment only. Where America’s Army differs from a similar First Person Shooter (FPS) PC-game such as Counter-Strike, is that the former is a game with a clear agenda. Namely, the dissemination of the U.S. Army brand through popular culture.

In this paper I will argue that the commodification of play is now, by way of the military-entertainment complex, supplemented by the militarisation of play. Next, the two main reasons why games have been able to become viable recruiting tools will be discussed. First, there is the technological and economic dimension of contemporary game development and distribution. When comparing game technology to the development and distribution of Hollywood movies, it becomes clear that linking militarised interactive recruiting with digital play results in the alteration of the rules of engagement. Second, it will be argued that it is not a giant leap to build military-themed computer games for recruiting purposes, considering the rich shared history of military, academic and entertainment communities. The second part of this paper will consider the relationship between military communities and digital play using America’s Army as a case study.

Branding the U.S. Army

Recruiting soldiers for the U.S. Army has never been an easy task. In the late nineties, partly due to the favourable economy, the U.S. military’s annual recruiting goals were missed one after another. Then in 2000, the tides seemed to turn and for five consecutive years enough recruits were drafted to fill the ranks. In early 2005 however, the U.S. Army again failed to meet its annual recruiting target. Today the U.S. military has to rely on its recruiting efforts more than ever before. Because of full-scale troop deployments the U.S. military is stretched thin. Newspapers report of soldiers refusing to report for duty and U.S. politicians made clear that reinstating the draft is out of question.

One of the biggest problems faced by contemporary military recruiting efforts is its lack of effectiveness, and something had to be done to re-establish a long-term connection with the American youth. Mass media have been used for recruiting purposes since the 1970s, and today a quarter of today’s 600 million dollars military advertising budget is spent on TV commercials (General Accounting Office, 2003). Advertising money used to maintain and expand the U.S. Army brand is also spent on sponsoring events and sports teams and on other promotional activities. In a report by the U.S. Army Research Institute, the media habits of America’s youth were examined and two important media for individuals who might possibly join the Army were identified: television and the Internet (Morath et al., 2001). An icon of youth popular culture, the music channel MTV was identified as an outlet to reach the core recruitable audience of 18 to 24-year old males. To improve Army recruiting via the Internet, the functionality of the U.S. Army recruiting website GoArmy.com was enhanced. But besides hip TV commercials, recruiting offices, recruiters visiting high schools, and various other ways to attract new servicemen, the Army acknowledged the enormous potential of digital games to spread the message that: The U.S. Army is the most powerful, most respected and most feared ground force in the world’ (Army Game Project, 2003a: 3).

As mentioned earlier, military-developed or -sponsored games are as much weapons in the war on ideas as they are interactive recruiting tools. This dual role of advertisement (recruiting) and persuasion (spreading U.S. ideology) makes games capable candidates for the dissemination of propaganda. This holds especially true in regard to the U.S. military’s own definition of propaganda:

Any form of communication in support of national objectives designed to influence the opinions, emotions, attitudes, or behavior of any group in order to benefit the sponsor, either directly or indirectly. (Department of Defense, 2004: 427)

While the focus in this paper is primarily on the role of simulation technologies and digital games, it is worthwhile to look at the place of Hollywood movies within the military-entertainment complex and Hollywood’s linkage with the U.S. military establishment. Why is the military establishment so eager to use game technology for propaganda purposes in the first place, and why has there never been a state-produced movie with a similar (dual role) as America’s Army?

Propaganda and popular culture

Communication scholars Garth S. Jowett and Victoria O’Donnell argue that the Hollywood film industry never lent itself to overt propaganda’ (1986: 72). Apart from the preparedness films’ made in the 1930s, Hollywood never made a commissioned war movie to deliberately and systematically shape the perception of the U.S. military. While the U.S. military refrained from producing a blockbuster propaganda movie, it did have a significant influence in shaping many war-themed movies. David Robb’s Operation Hollywood: How the Pentagon Shapes and Censors the Movies (2004) provides a detailed and well documented insider’s look at the relationship between the movie industry and the U.S. military. Robb explains how Hollywood movie studios have only gained access to expensive military material and expert knowledge if they were willing to put up their scripts for editing. The U.S. military makes sure that a sponsored movie informs the public about the U.S. military and that the military is authentically’ portrayed in order to help military recruiting and retention’ (Robb, 2004: 44). The indirect dissemination of military propaganda may be a common practice and profoundly shape many box-office hits. Robb also demonstrates that military-entertainment collaborations are in many instances the result of tough negotiations.

Jowett and O’Donnell present three reasons why the military seems to be reluctant about the in-house development of a propaganda movie (1986: 81-2). First, a global audience is used to high standards and, thus, to fairly expensive movies. It seems highly unlikely that U.S. Congress would authorise the U.S. Army to spend a hundred million dollars on a recruiting movie, in the obvious absence of any guarantee of success. A second factor is the convention of a fictional narrative complete with (expensive) Hollywood stars. The medium of the motion picture is therefore totally limited to the values and ideologies that are an integral part of the plot structure’ (Jowett and O’Donnell, 1986). These limiting values could seriously hamper the accurate portrayal of the complex and often tedious tasks of U.S. Army soldiers. Equally, a hero’s singular point-of-view, think of Tom Hanks’ Captain John H. Miller character in Saving Private Ryan, conflicts with the U.S. Army’s Army of One recruiting message. Third, the distribution system for films is tightly organised and difficult to break into as an outsider. On the other hand, producing and distributing a Hollywood-like U.S. war movie is easier than in the 1980′s. As we are entering the age of media convergence’ the means of movie production have become cheaper and easier to use while the Internet can function as an inexpensive and open distribution channel (Jenkins, 2003). Nevertheless, making a successful Hollywood movie is even for the U.S. military a risky and expensive adventure.

Comparing these factors to the development and distribution of digital games, it makes all more sense why developing a full-blown propaganda game is far cheaper and easier than producing a high-profile movie. New game formats such as the Grand Theft Auto series and The Sims franchise, show that game design conventions are continually being altered. Even in the somewhat formulaic FPS genre and the sub-genre of tactical shooters, experimentation with certain design elements is commonly praised by gamers. Another obstacle, the factor of distribution, can be bypassed because of the near-ubiquitous Internet access in the United States. Gamers have proved to be willing to download large files and to share content through digital and physical peer-to-peer networks.

In addition, in contrast to Robb’s analysis, Hollywood military-themed movies are seen by America’s Army project director Wardynski as stereotypical and sensationalist representations of the military’ (Li, 2004: 40). Also, movies are an ineffective way to spread information because they are external, independent intermediaries beyond Army control’ (ibid). Jowett and O’Donnell came to a similar conclusion two decades ago, claiming that: movies never became the powerful propaganda vehicle that its critics thought it would be’, despite having the greatest potential for emotional appeal to its audience, offering a deeper level of identification with the characters and action on the screen than found elsewhere in popular culture’ (1986: 72).

Conversely, contemporary game culture seems like a perfect place to exert full Army control. The U.S. Army already has a vast marketing apparatus to spread their U.S. Army: An Army of One’ message, and games fit perfectly in the marketing mix of Army recruiters (van der Graaf and Nieborg, 2003). Digital games have been, and increasingly will be, used for various marketing purposes (Nieborg, 2006). While popular culture may be largely outside the direct control of the Pentagon, the dissemination of propaganda via military-controlled game communities has become a valid and attractive option. The U.S. Army does not have to make an expensive movie or produce their own television series; they are able to tap directly into existing technological and socio-economical frameworks of the military-entertainment complex.

Good morning soldier, welcome to the U.S. Army!

The representation and simulation of modern war in computer games shows that there is already a common understanding about (virtual) war (Nieborg, 2004). The war on terror is both explicitly and implicitly simulated in a wide range of FPS PC-games such as Battlefield 2, Kuma War, and Counter-Strike, and in budget action titles as Desert Fury, Airstrike II: Gulf Thunder and Terrorist Takedown. The ubiquitous availability of war-themed games is not solely industry-driven, nor can it be set aside as the result of a lack of imagination in game designers and publishers. Gamers themselves display an unequivocal need for the simulation of past, present and future military conflicts. Take the user-created total conversion modifications (mods) of the World War Two themed FPS PC-game Battlefield 1942. Every significant conflict involving a Western country has its own mod, from the Korean war to the Falklands war to the conflict in Somalia (Nieborg, 2005a). Similarly, only a month after the release of Battlefield 2 there were already over fifty military themed mods in some state of development.[1] If gamers do not like the original game’s conflict, they simply recruit people that have a shared interest and develop a mod of their own. Therefore, most gamers will not be the least bit surprised by a military-themed game, even if it is developed by the military.

The demographic composition of FPS game culture matches the main pool of potential Army recruits. The militarized masculinity’ of FPS games exhibits a strong gender bias where violent themes are ubiquitous (Hall, 2003; Kline et al, 2003: 246-68). And, almost as a natural progression of the military-entertainment complex, the U.S. Army ordered the development of the first publicly available, state-produced military entertainment game in 2001. The army’s move to venture into games proved to be worthwhile when the game was eventually released. On July 4, 2002, the first version of America’s Army was made available on the official website.[2] Within days, servers were swamped and the game proved to be an instant success. For over four years the game has ranked high in the list of most played FPSs, attracting and retaining a considerable group of a couple of hundred thousand dedicated players. Every couple of months the game is significantly updated, with bug fixes and the addition of new maps, weapons and training elements. America’s Army is part of the sub-genre of the tactical FPS, which means that gamers in online multiplayer sessions fight each other in a setting modelled after a place in the real world. The inner workings of America’s Army have been explained in detail elsewhere (Li, 2004; Nieborg, 2005b).

Militarised play

It is important here to address the game’s multi-modal character. What makes America’s Army fairly unique and sets it apart from commercial games as well as military simulations, is that it is an advergame, edugame, test tool and propaganda game (Nieborg, 2005b). The game constantly balances between the expectations of gamers (shaped by FPS genre conventions) and the game’s design rationale (shaped by its four dimensions), not to mention, numerous technical design constraints such as hardware and software limitations. Although the game is part of the sub-genre of tactical FPS games, America’s Army is more than ‘just a game; or only a ‘sophisticated advergame;. The official America’s Army-brand definition is revealing in this respect:

America’s Army is the only official Army game designed, created and developed by the U.S. Army. As such, it is the most authentic Army game ever made, as it strives to provide an accurate, comprehensive and dynamic portrayal of the Army experience. Based on the seven fundamental values embodying the U.S. Army – Loyalty, Duty, Respect, Selfless Service, Honor, Integrity and Personal Courage – the game teaches players about personal growth and teamwork, while immersing them in real-life training and combat missions (Army Game Project, 2003a: 3).

America’s Army has been carefully designed to propagate the U.S. Army ethos. This ethos simulates the rationale and legitimisation of U.S. foreign policy, giving the game its propaganda dimension. America’s Army shows that the U.S. Army is a highly trained professional force, willing to fight against terrorists. This is achieved via its interactive dialogue with gamers worldwide through both the game and its community.

The Army harnesses the collaborative nature of online game communities and uses it to its advantage. On the one hand it spreads the Army’s symbolic capital and ideology, and on the other hand it attempts to recruit possible military enlistees. With the introduction of various semi-commercial, military endorsed games (e.g., Full Spectrum Warrior, Close Combat: First To Fight) or even military produced games, the U.S. military directly taps into the very fabric of popular culture. This process of acquisition seems to be taking off right now and, as discussed earlier, this modus operandi entails much more than a technological collaboration. With continuing reports live from the battlefield, war has become an intertextual commodity’, cross-promoted by the Pentagon and global media conglomerates on television, the Internet, in movies and in games (cf. Marshall, 2002). Therefore, military themed games have become part of the long history of the synergy between the political and domestic sphere (Hall, 2003). The efforts of the U.S. military to invest in the military-entertainment complex is a major leap forward in the merging of the military and the domestic spheres in the realm of audiovisual cultural forms’ (Crogan, 2003: 279-80). By developing or ordering the development of military-themed games for educational, advertisement or even propagandistic purposes, the U.S. military can directly appropriate a global youth culture.

A militarised participatory media culture

To get hold of this process of militarisation and to critically approach the Army game as well as its relation with FPS game culture, Joost Raessens’ (2005) notion of participatory media culture’ will be used to reflect on the game’s political-ideological implications. Participatory media culture, according to Raessens, encompasses three domains of participation: interpretation’, ‘reconfiguration’ and construction’. The three domains have a political-ideological dimension which refers to: […] the tension between the dominant and the critical, social and cultural practices in the realm of computer games’ (Raessens, 2005: 373). These tensions are then defined by three elements. The first of these is top-down’ versus bottom-up’, referring here to the question concerning the results of the access to the practices of the media culture’ (Raessens, 2005: 383). The second pair, homogenization versus heterogenization’, discusses the question of the reproduction of ideologically charged values through games. And thirdly, there’s a distinction between the real versus the possible’. Next, I will elaborate upon Raessens’ three domains and subsequently analyse the political-ideological presuppositions of America’s Army before I end this paper with a discussion of whether America’s Army contributes to culture participation’ or a more desirable participatory media culture’.

The first domain of participation deals with the interpretation of a game and is based on the notion of an active audience as conceptualised by cultural studies scholars such as Stuart Hall and John Fiske. Interpretation as a mode of participation can be heavily regulated, trying to facilitate what Stuart Hall would dub a dominant reading’ or what Sherry Turkle calls simulation resignation’ where gamers surrender to the seduction of the simulation’ (Raessens, 2005: 377). America’s Army´s simulation model as well as its external discursive framework, are meant to let gamers internalise the rules of the game, to the extent that the Army-dictated rules of play are seen as natural. Through the process of what Ted Friedman (1995) calls demystification’, America’s Army is deconstructed in a way that is dictated by its regulatory and strict rule set, seeking full simulation resignation. The notion of authenticity plays an important part in this process as many choices in the game’s design are justified, by both designers and players, as being ‘realistic;. For realism’s sake, the gameplay is much more structured and bound by the rules of physics and warfare compared to similar games in the genre. Players become soldiers with a persistent record. Shooting team members is ruled out, and maps, weapons and player roles cannot be changed. Friendly fire always results in punishment.

Gamers seem to wilfully accept the many ideological preconceptions in America’s Army‘s simulation model. An important element in this respect is the fact that gamers seldom question the fact that they are not able to play as ‘terrorists;. Via a software trick online, players see themselves always as a U.S. soldier and their opponents as ‘terrorists;, a unique feature for online multiplayer FPSs. The simulation of the us-versus-them’ dichotomy is present in almost every war game with a contemporary military theme. There is only a binary choice, coalition versus Iraqi Forces, U.S. Forces versus Arab/Muslim terrorists, good versus evil. The America´s Army player however is ‘embedded; with the U.S. army and thereby deliberately loses the viewpoint of ‘the other; (cf. Hiebert, 2003). The loss of context and the subsequent vilification of ‘the other; is a well-known propaganda instrument (Taylor, 1998). Players may deconstruct the game’s simulation model only to find a regulated and explicitly singular, or homogeneous, perspective: that of the U.S. Army.

The propagation of U.S. Army values is an important part of the ideological construct underlying the game’s simulation model. The attention the values receive in both the game and the game’s community may seem strange to outsiders, but reciting the seven values within the non-virtual U.S. Army is seen as just as vital as learning how to properly throw a grenade. Soldiers are expected to live up to the values around the clock, even when they are off duty. The developers explain how they tried to simulate the Army values in the game:

[America's Army] rewards soldierly behaviour and penalizes rotten eggs. This works out in practical ways. In basic training, for example, you can opt to become a combat lifesaver. Doing so reflects duty and selfless service, so you get points and expanded opportunities for going through training. Out on mission, your buddy collapses in front of you. You can attend him, which earns points for loyalty and honor, or keep running, which scrubs points. If you do stop, you become a target yourself, which takes courage, and if you’re hit, your health will suffer, so you need the integrity to inform your actions with sound judgement. Doing your duty and saving both your lives wins the most points. Just like in combat. (Davis, 2004: 11)

It seems that pointing out the seven values and giving them constant attention within as many elements in the game as possible is the only way to make the Army values an actual part of the game. From my own observations I would argue that the primary reason for the vast majority of gamers to become a combat lifesaver (which would reflect selfless service) or helping a wounded teammate in the heat of battle (which would reflect integrity) has more to do with peer-pressure and game conventions than Army values. The valued actions are to be seen in many other online games. Most notably Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) are rich social spaces where actions such as sacrificing’, which a gamer would dub helping, nurturing or role-playing, provide meaningful play. Through the appropriation of common in-game player actions the Army emphasises its values. This rationale directly corresponds with the process of homogenisation.

The ideological struggle of the U.S. Army against FPS game culture and youth popular culture is an extremely uneven ‘war;. Because of its high production values, familiar design, and by virtue of the game being ‘official; and freely available, the U.S. Army rapidly created a large fan base of young men who wilfully subjected themselves to the U.S. Army’s ideology. The game’s vibrant and vocal community may discuss the lack of updates or the rampant cheating, but gamers who openly question Army values are yet to be seen.

Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony is useful to frame the notion of America’s Army as a realistic game (cf. Raessens, 2005). On the one hand, the developers of America’s Army use their intellectual and moral power as the exclusive authors of the text to enable a hegemonic status where the game could be seen as the most realistic shooter available – explicitly marketing the game as the Official U.S. Army Game’. On the other hand, by tapping into FPS design conventions the U.S. Army maintains a discursive consensus where America’s Army is seen by many as ‘just a game;.

When comparing America’s Army to, for example, Counter-Strike, the former can be characterised as a FPS having a very strict simulation model with rigid in-game rules. The second mode of participation as discussed by Raessens is the process of reconfiguration’, again in the case of America’s Army a severely limited domain of participation. Players are not encouraged to freely interact with the gamespace. Instead, players seem to be controlled, not the world. As a game of emergence’, the exploratory nature of many gamers leads to behaviour never intended by game developers (Juul, 2002). Exploiting bugs and learning tricks by creatively repurposing the rules of the game is a relatively innocent act and is intertwined with modern-day online gameplay. Gamers of the Battlefield-series, for instance, produce the wildest stunt movies with tanks and planes crashing through carefully placed explosive charges.

The developers of America’s Army, on the other hand, try to rule out this kind of exploratory, or ‘unrealistic;, behaviour. Every new patch shows constant tweaking of the placement of spawn points and the weapon layouts of various maps. Some maps became nearly unplayable after investigative players found ways to precisely throw grenades or shoot rockets in order to kill players who just began a new round – emergent behaviour called spawn killing’. In order to play the game, players have to adhere to the U.S. Army’s Rules of Engagement (ROE) if they want to play the game with their peers.[3] Similar to the domain of interpretation, in the domain of reconfiguration the real’ is clearly favoured over the possible’.

Construction: FPS Military Mod Culture

Recent research shows that U.S. teens with access to the internet generate original content on an unprecedented scale, creating blogs and webpages, as well as sharing and remixing all sorts of digital content (Lenhart and Madden, 2005). As content creators, gamers easily move in and out of participatory communities, which function inside commodity culture. The profit motive has never been absent during interactive play, as it always has been present in mass (media) culture: The fundamental imperative’ of new media remains the same as that which shaped the ‘old; media: profit’ (Kline et al., 2003: 21). Many gamers, or fans, make wallpapers, distribute game files, host servers and develop game modifications, all adding value to the game. Even play itself, within the proprietary spaces of MMORPGs, adds value and becomes profitable to game developers and publishers (Humphreys, 2006).

Raessens’ third domain deals with construction’. This mode of participation encompasses the addition of new game elements to existing proprietary commercial titles. The construction mode is integrated into many games such as The Sims, Unreal Tournament 2003 and Neverwinter Nights, but is again severely limited in the case of America’s Army. Commercial game developers actively encourage and take advantage of the modding ethos of sharing resources and knowledge. Such value-adding practices are beneficiary to the game industry and are an enrichment of game culture. Developing mods for FPSs has become a worthy, institutionalised practice (Kücklich, 2005, Nieborg, 2005a). Still, modding practices are seldom fully bottom-up and heterogeneous as they are delineated by various legal, economic and technological boundaries.

America’s Army‘s strict policy against modding is surprising when one takes a look at the way gaming is implemented in military training. Since a significant part of the game industry that develops FPS games is also part of the military-entertainment complex, the U.S. military is prone to take advantage of this collaborative game culture. Military contractors for their part are eager to take advantage of user-created content. Custom versions of Microsoft Flight Simulator are widely used for defence pilot training by the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Air Force at Naval Reserve Officer Training Courses (Macedonia and Rosenbloom 2001). Similarly, the research of two U.S. Navy lieutenants (Debrine and Morrow, 2000) shows the active involvement of the U.S. military in the implementation and appropriation of FPS game technology and mod culture.

Debrine and Morrow describe how the commercial online FPS Quake III Arena could be used within a military setting for the exploration of 3D architecture and for use as a primitive team trainer. Their analysis emphasises the low costs of modding a FPS. Those who are in some way affiliated with the various military communities all seem to agree: a player-driven culture of continuous, relentless, distributed innovation is the industry’s greatest asset, far more valuable than the technology-driven popular games’ (Herz and Macedonia, 2002). At first sight, mods and the military seem to form a perfect relationship.

Knives and pistols

The various socio-economic and technological advantages for the U.S. military of interacting with FPS mod culture may seem clear. However, as far as modding is concerned, America’s Army could well be the exception to the rule. The first Official Army Game does not allow any changes to its software whatsoever. The Army is not secretive about its intentions. An online FAQ makes this clear: Will the editing tools be made available?’. The answer is: No. The Army is not planning on releasing any editing or modding tools for America’s Army. However, the U.S. Army is planning on supporting America’s Army over the next few years with additional content and features.’[4] Recently there has been talk about an official map editor, but when and in what way it will be implemented has yet to be seen. There are two reasons why full-scale modding is not allowed. First, and discussed hereafter, America´s Army is carefully constructed to portray the U.S. Army in a particular way, and the game’s educational, marketing and propaganda dimensions will most certainly be lost on modders. Second, it would open up the game to cheaters, (culture) jammers, artists, academics and disgruntled gamers.

The ongoing discussion of adding knives and pistols to America´s Army is an example of the game´s homogeneous emphasis on the real’ versus the players´ bottom-up need for processes of heterogenisation by opening up a wider range of possibilities. The discussion started on the day the game hit the net and has never reached its conclusion. Knives as weapons are standard in many popular tactical FPS games and many gamers regard a knife-kill as a sign of so called l33t-skills’ (elite skills) – because the ability to manoeuvre one’s character behind another player character in order to stab him in the back is seen as the sign of superior playing skills. The Army’s reluctance to include knives is based on the rationale that in the U.S. Army, knives are used as tools, not weapons’. The inclusion of pistols suffered a similar fate. In a forum, discussion developers expressed their fear of gamers duelling, which was seen as unrealistic soldiering, and their concerns about: Messaging issues (we don’t want to simulate activity that can easily be duplicated on an American street)’.[5]

With the introduction in the game of Special Forces soldiers the Army suddenly-and much to the surprise of the community-added the M9 pistol to one of the maps. When, during the release of a follow-up patch, soldiers other than the sniper on the SF Hospital map unintentionally received pistols as well, the developers were troubled by gamers using pistols as their primary weapon. From a military standpoint, the need to express Army values and authentic Army missions and gameplay prohibits civilians from coming up with realistic scenarios or additional material. The addition of a simple female soldier skin would undermine one of the main pillars of the Army Game Project-educating male gamers about a possible career in the U.S. Army. The specific military occupational specialties’ (MOS) currently playable in the game, such as U.S. Army Special Forces, are not open to women. The explicit educational goals, part of the recruiting role of the project thus severely limits involvement in the game’s development.

No Velvet Army

Most mods are meant as pure entertainment and are made with no other goal in mind than to give gamers a fun experience: Fan culture is dialogic rather than disruptive, affective more than ideological, and collaborative rather than confrontational’ (Jenkins, 2002: 167). Yet, the U.S. Army brand is, through America’s Army, under constant attack because of the bottom-up practices of a mixed group of (culture) jammers. Besides concerns about sending the wrong message’ and concern for the authentic portrayal of the Army, the game’s propaganda dimension attracts continuous attention. The U.S. Army as a way of life and America’s Army as a branded experience are high-profile targets for those who oppose the U.S. Army message or see in America’s Army a reflection of U.S. foreign policy.

In an age where the decision to join the military is influenced by advertising in various media, the importance of America’s Army as a marketing and recruiting tool is substantial. From this perspective, the collective power of a vocal group of disgruntled gamers may, considering the target demographic, be more damaging to Army recruiting efforts than a far more serious matter such as the Abu Ghraib scandal. Where a broadcast message, such as a television ad, may result in a reading of the commercial text opposite to its intended meaning, the interactive character of games and the fluid character of gaming communities open up a window of opportunity for culture jammers, anti-war/corporative activists, pacifists, artists, academics and bored teenagers.

Both commercial games and mods can be confrontational and disruptive in various ways. Intended as training modules, ideological messages or (offensive) entertainment, mods can serve as spoofs or satire (e.g., the Castle Smurfenstein-mod for Castle Wolfenstein), critique (e.g., Escape from Woomera for Half-Life) or art. An example of a controversial art game is the Unreal Tournament 2003 mod 911Survivor, which simulates the attack on the Twin Towers. The mod’s only objective is to get the avatar out of the burning building and by doing so jumping to ones death.[6] Gamers on their part seem eager to use contemporary combat themes and conflicts. They do not hesitate to name their online characters Osama’ or KillBushjr’ and just as well create Islamic’, Al-Qaeda’ or Chechen’ avatar skins. There are numerous Half-Life or Counter-Strike maps set in peculiar places such as a McDonalds or a Wal-Mart, scenarios the Army developers want to avoid at all costs.

The Quake 3 modification Political Arena combines many of these aspects. The satirical mod features leading U.S. politicians such as George W. Bush with his main weapon being lethal injection. The game’s objective is to steal the presidency with the help of the Supreme Court by picking up a U.S. Flag.[7] The Army Game Project’s worst nightmare however may well be an America’s Army equivalent of Velvet Strike. Artist Anne-Marie Schleiner (2005) developed this Counter-Strike mod, or to be more precise a set of in-game graffito’s and intervention recipes’, which in the end proved rather unsuccessfully. The recipes were meant to disrupt gameplay in order to point towards the masculine and militaristic character of the game. Even so, despite the ban on any America’s Army game modification, the game’s community resembles that of many other participatory game communities.

The Appropriation of Game Culture

Over the years, the Army Game Project managed to gather a large group of devoted fans around America’s Army. The game provides access for anyone with an Internet connection and a decent PC to one of the most fetishised aspects of contemporary war-the adrenaline rush of man-to-man combat. The Army taps into existing social networks, building up trust and peer-to-peer communication. The U.S. Army is able to institutionalise a pool of semi-organised and enthusiastic gamers, using their collective intelligence’ to produce all sorts of fruitful interactions (cf. Jenkins, 2002). The Army harnesses the collaborative nature of online game communities, and of course the America’s Army game community above all, in order to facilitate the spreading of the Army’s symbolic capital. This explains the contradiction of banning or frustrating user-created game mods while, on the other hand, institutionalising a militarised fan community. A closer look at the products and services that fans provide, such as videos, wallpapers and the organisation of LAN-parties, demonstrates how the Army facilitates, endorses, and appropriates an increasingly militarised game culture.

Many games have their respective fan communities creating short clips with in-game material. The MMORPGs Star Wars Galaxies and World of Warcraft have their dance videos, Halo inspired the humorous Red vs Blue and the Battlefield series has its wild stunt movies. The production of video clips is a common practice within the America’s Army community. Clip developers seem to take a particular liking in showing their skills on the virtual battlefield and displaying their knowledge of the intricate game mechanics. In itself, this does not set America’s Army fan videos apart from other FPS fan material. Yet, the great majority of clips additionally feature the U.S. Army slogan and logo, as well as the America’s Army‘s values and its patriotic theme. Interestingly enough, official America’s Army promotional material includes two videoclips marketing America’s Army: Special Forces (2.0) which bear an odd resemblance to user-created videoclips.[8] The promotional clips use in-game material, intersecting it with real world military footage. And, consistent with fan conventions, there is the unavoidable heavy metal soundtrack and the equally unavoidable use of U.S. Army slogans and America’s Army brand material.

In addition to videoclips, gamers also produce more narrative-driven clips consisting of gameplay sequences. Further, America’s Army movies draw heavily on the representation of war itself. These mini-productions are longer than the two minute videoclips and are dedicated to telling specific war stories, such as rescuing a hostage or eliminating a terrorist leader. Because of the lack of characters and intrigue in FPS games, gameplay movies tend to focus on spectacle, lavish cinematography and the integration of music and particular gameplay sequences. Plotlines are displayed by silent-movie conventions such as the inclusion of full screen intertitles and focus on protagonist´s hand gestures. Dominant modes of television show rewriting, such as character dislocation, genre shifting and refocalisation are absent in gameplay videoclips (Jenkins, 1992: 162-77). Not so surprisingly, ‘slash; videoclips are non-existent in the America’s Army community. Subversive elements and critique towards the game are absent in many videoclips and gameplay movies. Gamers are very limited in their efforts to recontextualise material from the game since ‘the set; only encompasses 30 plus maps and no civilian characters (except from some nurses), hindering non-military scenarios. As a result, user-created material appropriates and internalises an Army discourse, Army values and symbolism, further delimiting a heterogeneous participatory media culture.

Mock swear-ins

Besides user-created content, the actions of players themselves can be appropriated as well and put to use by the military apparatus. An element of contemporary game culture that is incorporated and explicitly stimulated by the Army is clan culture and tournament play. The (manufactured) need for team play and the militaristic structure of FPS games motivates aficionados to get organised to both survive and win. Many clans follow the same philosophy, structure and training principles as the U.S. Army (cf. Li, 2004). Clans, similar to sports teams, differ in size, nationality and involvement. On the popular community website AAOTracker more than 9000 America’s Army clans are listed with over 80.000 members.[9] In a paper for the annual Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference (I/ITSEC), four members of different military communities explored the various methodologies to incorporate in what they call cyber gaming culture’:

Just as the creation of Air Shows in the 20th century led to both successful civilian airport shows and military air base events, the future of large scale and small LAN party gaming competition can include both events with a civilian focus and those with a military orientation (Maguire et al., 2002).

The authors argue that there are many benefits to be reaped from military sponsored location based’ game competitions as well as online gaming tournaments. It seems that the argument by the authors has been fully acknowledged by today’s military. Clans are prominently featured on the official America’s Army homepage, the place to be for dedicated players. The official forum counts over 200.000 members and an impressive 2.2 million posts. Two community driven tournament initiatives, TeamWarfare League (TWL) and the Cyberathlete Amateur League (CAL), are openly endorsed and their results are included on the homepage. Two years after its introduction the game itself has been geared towards tournament play by adding several admin functions and tools for clan play.

And in order to fully benefit from the recruiting potential of America´s Army, the U.S. Army urges Army recruiters to stage their own America´s Army-related recruiting events. To support this, there is a special website where recruiters can order their recruitment kit, which includes posters, free T-shirts, extensive set-up plans and a video explaining how to stage the event (tip: let gamers do a mock swear-in before starting the tournament!).[10] Non-U.S. players who cannot attend these events have their own mock swear-ins. The loading screen of the game shows the Soldier´s Creed, which opens with:

I am an American Soldier.
I am a Warrior and a member of a team. I serve the people of the United States and live the Army Values.

In the included America’s Army Game Instructions and Event Support booklet, recruiters are given numerous suggestions about how to use the game for recruiting purposes: The game is a great icebreaker because young men and women love games and are always happy to talk to anyone about a ‘cool; new game’ (Army Game Project, 2003b: 17). LAN-parties in particular are explicitly designated as: [...] a prime arena for Recruiter activities’ (Army Game Project, 2003b: 19). The booklet gives tips for additional activities at Army-sponsored LAN-parties. There, recruiters can provide haircuts by an Army barber’ and camouflage face painting’, or decorate the location with camouflage netting, standees and sandbags’. It becomes clear that the increasing militarisation of game culture, as an extension of the military-entertainment complex, has never been so ‘cool;.

Conclusion

At the height of the Cold War, Terri Toles reflected on U.S. military recruiting efforts at the time: There is even talk of recruiting soldiers in arcades, the argument being that video game expertise may be transferable to the needs of the Army’ (1985: 220).[11] In more recent times, with the ubiquitous access to PCs and consoles, military recruiting and propaganda entered the domestic sphere. Within a branded world where the Army is ‘cool;, where games are developed by the military and used as training tools, gamers are eager to play with any military-themed game as long as it is fun. As a result, war has become increasingly delightful to those who have never experienced it. The military-industrial complex is more powerful than ever before. And as weapon systems and U.S. Army doctrines transform, so does the complex, only to become more pervasive. As the war on terror drags on and upcoming wars are presumably already being discussed, America’s Army is not the only medium simulating and representing war. Television series, newscasts, movies and documentaries all contribute to an overall view of ‘what war is like;, but what no other program, game or movie can claim is that they are officially developed by the U.S. Army. The expert knowledge of the Army about its own organisation gives America’s Army an aura of objectivity needed to sell its product-the values of the U.S. Army.

Raessens reflects on the role of gamers within the cultural industries and distinguishes between culture participation and participatory media culture:

Culture participation is a broad concept that refers generally to the fact that we participate in the surrounding culture, be that in a passive and consumptive, or a more active and productive way. I consider participatory culture, the latter, more active attitude that, as we have seen, makes special demands concerning the interpretation, the reconfiguration, and the construction of computer games. (2005: 383)

From this perspective, the U.S. Army through America’s Army clearly favours culture participation over a participatory media culture. The military is not unique in aiming for culture participation. Raessens discusses the cultural practices of gamers interacting with the cultural industries. The U.S. Army brought into existence a vibrant military-led game community serving a wide range of participatory actions by gamers. Yet, only those aspects of game culture are appropriated which adhere to a mode of participation which is top-down, homogeneous, and prefers the real over the possible. Despite the emergent character of online gameplay, the regulatory and top-down gameplay of America’s Army, coupled with a specific marketing message, make America’s Army a controlled environment with ample options for intervention. Developing mods as a common fan activity is replaced by the encouragement and appropriation of clan culture, LAN-parties and content production such as wallpapers and fan videos.

In the branded world of America’s Army players may acquire various bits of trivial information about the U.S. Army. The knowledge and information which is picked up by gamers can be directly related to an external reality. Why do we fight in America’s Army? To defend freedom! How? With my friends from all over the world, online. Within the one game of America’s Army many, if not all, characteristics of the changing relationship between the U.S. military and popular culture seem to come together. The official Army game turned out to be not just some experimental Army project, but a game which young kids play for hours each day, sometimes over a period of a year or more.

The dedication and appreciation of gamers shown towards the game might seem strange for those critical towards the U.S. Army or violent shooter games. Yet, many gamers see America’s Army as ‘just a game;, and gamers may be unaware of any of the game’s four dimensions or simply not care about them-in the end, it is a free (gratis) game. The Army brand is widely dispersed around the globe and the Army Game Project is expected to expand widely over years to come. New genres and forms of gaming, such as Massively Multiplayer Online FPS games, are also being explored by the military. All of this has been possible not despite, but because of, America´s Army players and fans. They directly contribute, little by little, to the expansion of the military-entertainment complex and the militarisation of popular culture.

Acknowledgments

My sincere appreciation goes out this edition’s editors and anonymous reviewers. A ‘Hooah’ to Jet Mok, Shenja van der Graaf and Ruud Oud for support and feedback.

Author’s Biography

David B. Nieborg is a PhD student at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) and lecturer at the University of Amsterdam. His publications explore the interaction between commercial game culture, technology, marketing, and military communities. He writes on game culture for various Dutch magazines and newspapers. David is a gamer.

Email: D.B.Nieborg at uva.nl

Notes

[1] List taken from Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlefield_2.
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[2] See the official website http://americasarmy.com. February 2006 version 2.6, also known as America’s Army: Special Forces (Link-Up), was released for Windows PCs.
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[3] See http://www.americasarmy.com/support/roe.php.
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[4] America’s Army Frequently Asked Questions, http://www.americasarmy.com/support/faq_win.php?p=1&t=3.
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[5] An interview with one of the developers is located at the America´s Army fansite ArmyOps-Tracker: http://aaotracker.com/thread.php?threadid=73961.
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[6] One could question whether 911Survivor with no apparent conflict, follows the definition of a game.
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[7] The mods homepage is located at http://welcome.to/politicalarena.
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[8] See http://www.americasarmy.com/intel/makingof_videos.php
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[9] For example, http://aaotracker.com/trackerstats.php.
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[10] See http://events.americasarmy.com/.
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[11] Toles refers to: Greene, B. Army sees a Use for Video Games’. San Francisco Chronicle (1981), 8-21.
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Hall, Karen J. ‘War Games and Imperial Postures: Spectacles of Combat in U.S. Popular Culture, 1942-2001′, PhD Thesis, Syracuse University (2003).

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Collecting and Interpreting: Walkthroughs, CliffsNotes, & IMDB

As a new medium, video games can be analyzed under some of the similar rubrics of other media. However, because of the fundamental differences between video games and older media, including the requirement of skilled user action, alterations to this categorization prove necessary. The study of games has been approached from many aspects, including the study of narrative in games and the study of game play. Both of these aspects complement each other and additional studies, such as studies of video game audiences, further complement game studies as an emerging field. Because video games require skilled user interaction, studying games requires game play. Game play in turn necessitates that players and students studying video games use additional resources to play particular games, and especially to complete particular games or to explore the games as texts to even a reasonable degree needed for study. Essentially, because games are interactive or mutable texts- in the sense that game play is open and a stable text is not available in the manner in which it would be for most films or novels- game play and additional resources are necessary for players and scholars. The additional resources offer a sense of how a particular game functions for various players and for repeated game play through its many permutations. This is particularly important for game studies because, while games often include stories, games are first predicated on game play. Because the emphasis is first on game play, the gaming walkthroughs and other resources offer a sense of the manner in which the games are played, and a sense of how the games operate for different players. For the many games with narratives, walkthroughs also offer plot points and information on the narrative progression. Additional resources for play can often be found on the official websites of games and in official game walkthroughs, like those published by Bradygames and Prima. However, many older and even many current games do not have enough information available through official sites or through official walkthroughs. For these games, fan sites provide needed academic resources in much the same way that databases do for scholarly studies of films and literature and in the same way that CliffsNotes – printed books and now an online site with notes for use in studying particular literary texts – do for students studying literature and that the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) does for students studying film. As Donna E. Alvermann and Margaret C. Hagood argue, students can often benefit from producing fan works and connecting to fan cultures (2001: 436-446). While scholarly databases, CliffsNotes, and IMDB all differ from each other in important ways and cannot replace the engagement with particular texts, just as fan sites cannot replace actual game play, each of these does often serve as a necessary complement for scholarly studies and for pedagogical purposes.

Firstly, gaming fan sites aid academia by serving as ‘museums or archives, collecting and sharing information about the games, and providing information that is contextualised within a gaming culture’s perception and reception of the games. Despite their intention to archive and collect materials, these sites are often unstable; however, the fluidity of the sites often leads to their archival on other sites. This is akin to the function of Nintendo Power‘s early Nintendo cartoons, and gaming paratextual materials like gaming memorabilia, free games, and game websites.[1] Fan sites often include information on the place of a particular game in gaming history along with the importance of particular gaming culture artifacts in shaping the game and its reception. Fan sites also act as appendices and archives, collecting press releases, game screenshots, hints, clues, and mentions of particular games in different media. As Henry Jenkins demonstrates, fan communities have relied on the internet as a means for discussion within a large, geographically unbounded community with, ‘the Web as a means of annotation. The succession of new media technologies since the late 1970s has encouraged the emergence of a culture based on the archiving, annotation, transformation, and recirculation of media content’ (2001: xvi-xvii). Jenkins shows that online fan communities serve several functions. They create a culture of collection and annotation that operates with a larger interpretive community. In doing so, I would argue, they create resources that are archived, utilised, and reviewed by the gaming community in such a way as to function as a community-based peer review, especially given the forums wherein players and fans discuss the games and the sites supporting the games. The forums provide a format for discussion that can encourage sites to alter their information based on commentary from readers. The resources facilitate interpretation, and the multiplicity of voices producing the resources eschews simplistic readings of a single ideal text. These gaming resources- as collections, archives, and peer reviewed resources- can be seen in the fan walkthroughs and websites for Fatal Frame.

Game walkthroughs and fan sites are useful resources for game studies because they provide information on game play permutations, lists of game items, character lists, lists of in-game texts, and more. In exploring a possible methodology for game studies, Espen Aarseth cites walkthroughs as one of several types of game studies resources (2003). Aarseth notes the problem that players may miss certain critical game elements. However, fan sites and walkthroughs ease these problems, aiding academic game studies by analyzing games, particularly because they often do so in an academic, albeit informal, manner. In games like Fatal Frame and Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly, the abundance of text- photographs, the camera’s background, notes, stones used in spirit radio, video clips – all add up to an abundance of data. Each bit of data resituates the game during game play and with game studies. Because the pieces add to the patchwork to create a cohesive narrative world, but are often unnecessary to the game play and game progress, the array of pieces informs both the individual game and game studies as a field, as games and game studies balance issues of narrative and game play. The data is not necessary for much of game studies- as the incompleteness of the texts is part of game studies- yet these resources do serve other studies. While the walkthroughs themselves are invaluable resources, the larger fan sites within which the walkthroughs are often contextualised provide additional material and insight for game studies. Thus, the data archived and created by fan sites inform game studies, as do the process of creation for fan sites and the cultures that create and foster the fan sites.

Two of the more popular and more extensive fan sites for Fatal Frame are Beyond the Camera’s Lens (http://cameraslens.com/) and Chou (http://www.akaichou.net/chou/). Beyond the Camera’s Lens covers all of the Fatal Frame games, including the recently released Fatal Frame III: The Tormented (released as Rei shisei no koe in Japan, and as Project Zero III: The Tormented in Europe). Chou - the Japanese word for butterfly and the title of the opening song for Fatal Frame II with its narrative and game play elements that follow the ‘crimson butterfly – focuses more closely on the second game. In both cases, these fan sites can act as archives and sources for research, including academic research. The emphasis on the collection and archiving of materials can be seen clearly with Chou, which has neither a section for fan fiction nor a forums section for fans to discuss the games. Instead, Chou acts as an archive of game materials that can only be edited by fans who contact the site owner to have the material reviewed and edited for accuracy or completeness. Chou does have one page of fan art work. However, this is obviously not the site’s emphasis because the site has dozens of pages on various topics: lyrics from the games; music from the games; screenshots; background information on the characters; background information on the locations; lists of the game memos, scrapbooks, photos, maps, and spirits; and more. As an archive of materials, Chou aids academic researchers and students studying games by providing material that researchers would otherwise have difficulty accessing, like the lyrics for Fatal Frame II‘s opening theme.

The lyrics for Fatal Frame II would be difficult for researchers to find, especially in both the English and Japanese versions. However, Chou provides both versions and provides them within the context of a fan website where many other fans would collectively provide comments so that the site creator can correct any errors in the lyrics in much the same way that Open Source software is shared and critiqued, and in much the same way as academic articles are critiqued within the academic community. Even simply collecting elements like the texts of each of the in-game notebooks, diaries, and reports would prove a tedious task for game researchers because the Fatal Frame games are available only on consoles. This means that an academic game researcher would not be able to access the notebooks without playing through the entire game – or downloading game saves which are now available for some games – and finding all of the texts, a difficult task in itself. Then the researcher would need to type up the text from each of the notebooks, diaries, and reports. Computer games often allow for cheats that allow players to access all materials, so that would immediately lessen the time demands for this sort of collection. Other games also have ‘official game walkthroughs, so the text would be accessible through those. Official walkthroughs and guides present valuable benefits to game scholarship; however, scholarship on other games is bereft of these. Fan websites both satisfy the limited needs for the archive materials while also providing additional resources on the games. Not all of this archival research and interpretation is useful to game studies; however, much of the material is needed for different studies of gaming and for the overall development of different analytical communities.

While Chou offers many resources for those studying Fatal Frame II, Beyond the Camera’s Lens offers even more resources, resembling a scholarly archive and research project in its complexity. Like Chou, Beyond the Camera’s Lens acts first as an annotated archive of material on the Fatal Frame games. It covers all three of the Fatal Frame games and has little fan fiction material. Beyond the Camera’s Lens has a page for fan images; however, the page links to only three fan fiction stories and only a handful on fan artworks. By comparison, the dozens of pages on the Fatal Frame games themselves are clearly the site’s main emphasis. In addition to the gaming materials that aid fans and researchers in studying and playing the games, Beyond the Camera’s Lens also offers supplementary information on aspects of the game. This includes information on ritual suicide in Japanese culture, since this is a large theme in the games, and pages on the cultural influences on the games. It also includes information on the term ‘camera obscura and the relevance of the term as it is used to label the camera in the game. The information listed under the cultural influences includes such information as the importance and relevance of the butterfly symbolism in the games. Further, Beyond the Camera’s Lens includes information on the determination of the elder twin in Japan, information that directly impacts aspects of game play and game narrative, ‘December 13th, 1874 – Meiji law passed deeming the firstborn twin is eldest’ (2003: timeline.php). On the page about the butterfly symbolism, the web creator even includes references to other resource materials (2003: butterfly.php). Both Chou and Beyond the Camera’s Lens provide material that is otherwise inaccessible or difficult to find. As such, they act as extremely useful academic and pedagogical resources for the play and the study of the Fatal Frame games.

Beyond the Camera’s Lens also hosts game walkthroughs and hints. Gaming walkthroughs are common game paratexts that can be consulted during, prior to, or after game play. For more strictly action-based games, the walkthroughs often include more focused information on how to defeat particular enemies or where certain enhancement items can be found. For games with an abundance of embedded media like the Fatal Frame games, the walkthroughs also provide narrative information, information on where to find particular notes, audio, and video files, and information on how those files contribute to game play and to the game narrative. In cases where the walkthroughs would be far too cluttered with all of this embedded information, fan sites tend to emerge as a complement to the informative aspects of the game walkthroughs. In these instances, the walkthroughs serve as abbreviated versions of the fan sites like Beyond the Camera’s Lens because the walkthroughs provide the information most pertinent to game play, but not to the overall gaming experience as it is explored on the Beyond the Camera’s Lens and Chou sites.

As CliffsNotes or IMDB aid in providing, collecting, and connecting information on books and films, fan sites provide players, students, and academics with a sense of the games.[2] Similarly, fan sites and walkthroughs cannot supplant the actual gaming experience, yet fan sites and walkthroughs do aid in making even difficult games- in terms of game play and cultural information- more accessible for players. While CliffsNotes and IMDB are study guides and a database, respectively, the increase in access they provide aids in the creation of analytical communities. Fan networks aid accessibility and then build on that accessibility to create internal communities of review. While doing so, fan sites and walkthroughs aid external communities- including academic communities- in the teaching and studying of games. Further, recognizing the importance of gaming fan sites and gaming walkthroughs acknowledges their place in the history of gaming and in the instance of game play. In his foreword to Interacting with Babylon 5, Jenkins notes that the current generation of scholars have grown up with interactive fictions like those found in the pen-and-paper role-playing games that Kurt Lancaster mentions in his study of Babylon 5, Interacting with Babylon 5 (2001: xix). Likewise, game studies scholars have grown up or into using gaming walkthroughs and fan sites in their game playing. Using these resources allows game studies scholars to create a more fully fleshed-out study of game play with its many peripheral components, including the importance of fan culture, fan communities, and the archives and arguments they produce. Fan sites may also afford other game studies scholars better sense of the game by which to assess the scholarship when reviewing articles on a particular game with which they have less experience. With games like those in the Final Fantasy series, which may each take over forty hours to complete, gaming walkthroughs and fan sites can give a greater sense of the game so that game studies scholars may more easily respond to game specifics of unfamiliar games, even if only to pose questions.

Canon, Fanon: Fan Sites and Peer Review

In addition to an emphasis on the skill required to play games, and the walkthroughs and shared knowledge resources that follow from that, the interdisciplinary and audience driven nature of gaming requires immediate engagement and discussion with other fields that shape games and gaming. As Matteo Bittanti contends, ‘it is necessary to rethink the cooperative interplay between game scholars and game designers, game journalists, game artists, and, last but not least, game players, whose importance is systematically neglected in the ongoing debate’ (2004: para. 14). Studying players aids not only in analyzing how the players play and use games, but also in analyzing how players shape game studies and game design.

Bittanti’s argument for an emphasis on the players is mirrored in much of the work on fan cultures for various media. For instance, Matt Hills demonstrates that the majority of scholarship on fan cultures divides fans and scholars even when fans are operating as scholars. Hills shows that studies of fan cultures position fans both within and outside of academia, stating that most fan studies assume that, ‘Elite fans are scholars, yes, but they are still not quite academic scholars: they are not systematic or sustained enough, being only capable of flashes of theory’ (2002: 17). Like many fan culture scholars, Hills argues for the authority of fans as scholars and for their skill at academic analysis. Fan cultures themselves exist within what Jenkins has termed ‘participatory culture, and which he argues derives from the connection between several aspects, including new tools that are available for fans to manipulate media and fan cultures that promote media production (2002: para. 4-5). While Jenkins examines these tools more closely in relation to fan fiction production, the same structures of participatory-culture resonate within gaming cultures and their production of fan sites and walkthroughs.

Within gaming’s participatory cultures certain community rules shape the creation, review, and distribution of fan materials. The gaming materials covered in this article are the non-fiction archives created on gaming websites, and these are essentially ‘fanon. For fan communities and studies of fan writing, ‘fanon is a term that refers to the canon of fan works within a particular fan community as canons exist within particular academic cultures. While the term fanon itself is generally read as a combination of ‘fan-fiction and ‘canon, it also more generally combines ‘fan writing and ‘canon to cover the non-fiction works created by fans like the science of Star Trek, the geography of Twin Peaks, and the description of the characters in the Fatal Frame games. In order to exist as fanon the works- whether they are fiction or non-fiction- must be accepted by the fan communities according to the fan community’s rules. Academic study on fan-produced texts often focuses on the fictional works created to extend source texts. Rebecca W. Black studies fictional fan creations in language learning (2005), as do Kelly Chandler-Olcott and Donna Mahar in their analysis of the acquisition of multiliteracies (2003). However, fan creations are also valid texts in themselves; and, both fiction and non-fiction fan creations operate within their internal review communities akin to academic communities.

The participatory culture of fan sites like Chou and Beyond the Camera’s Lens becomes increasingly valuable for academic studies when researchers note that the sites themselves are fanon, meaning that they are effectively peer-reviewed via the members of their participatory cultures, thus assuring the quality and accuracy of the information. The peer review operates within the community discussions, links from one community member site to another, explicit webring links, and through the community interaction in the development of particular sites. Like walkthroughs, fan sites generally list acknowledgements and generally list corrections and the people who submitted the corrections; thereby acknowledging the community and the importance of community review.

Both Chou and Beyond the Camera’s Lens belong to SPECTRE, the web ring for Fatal Frame fan sites. Other sites within the web ring focus on specific aspects of the games, like Faces, which focuses on the dolls in the games, and Drifting Away, which focuses on the relationship between the two sisters in Fatal Frame II. While SPECTRE is a webring that connects the Fatal Frame sites, it also stipulates rules and directions for those interested in making their own Fatal Frame fan sites. Citing the problems many people have in finding information about Fatal Frame, SPECTRE states that it seeks to collect the Fatal Frame sites so that players can more easily find the sites and information and so that site owners will easily be able to find other sites about Fatal Frame (2003: para. 5). It continues on to list the rules for any sites wishing to join the webring:

1. You must own a website with Fatal Frame or Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly concept.
2. You site must be original in content and design. Give proper credits when needed to. Stolen works are inappropriate.
3. Your site must be user-friendly. Meaning no sticky caps, long loading time, confusing navigation, flashy/pastel layouts and hard to read context.
4. No content regarding to sex and nudity.
5. Please put up the code on your main page or webring page (where it can be seen easily) before applying. (2003: para. 6, emphases in original)

The rules for SPECTRE‘s webring members illustrate that the fan sites are regulated by the webring as well as by the fans reading and using the sites. The rules for SPECTRE also parallel the typical rules in academic discourse. The first rule is that the text must be on topic, as any academic journal would require an article that is pertinent to the journal’s theme and to academic discussions. The second stipulates that the site must be original, as with academia’s requirements for proper attribution, articles that add to the current discussion, and for articles that are written by the author and not plagiarised. The third and fourth rules state the proper format, in much the same way this article has citations in a manner required by the Fibreculture rules for formatting. The final rule is perhaps the most interesting because it requires that those applying to the webring must, before applying, acknowledge their place within the webring’s community. The writing and submission of academic articles to journals inherently, and often transparently, assumes the writer’s place within academia, just as the webring code immediately places a site creator within the fan community, and with the possibility of being accepted or rejected by that particular community.

Regulation by the fans is part of a much larger process of fan community building. As Jenkins contends, ‘Fandoms were virtual communities, ‘imagined and ‘imagining communities, long before the introduction of networked computers’ (2002: para. 9). Matt Hills shows that fan culture is a community and a hierarchy based on fan placement within that community, stating, ‘fan culture [functions] not simply as a community but also as a social hierarchy where fans share a common interest while also competing over fan knowledge, access to the object of fandom, and status’ (2001: 46). As a community and a social hierarchy, fandoms have standards for both behavior within the fandom and standards for fan works. As Jenkins notes, ‘fandom has long maintained an ethical norm against producing erotica about real people rather than fictional characters’ (2002: para. 11). Jenkins continues to explain that newer fans have sometimes created fan erotica, and that this causes a rift between the older and the younger fan communities. For gaming, fan communities may include or forbid erotica, as SPECTRE determines that its webring of Fatal Frame fan sites forbids erotica.

For gaming sites, the community rules and social hierarchies also establish a system of review for placement of fans within the gaming hierarchy. Placement is determined largely by contributions- contributions that are then reviewed by the fan community, with the reviewing process itself as a measure of fan contributions. Illustrating connections between fan communities and academia, Lelia Green and Carmen Guinery argue, ‘Fan communities thrive on the power of the individual fan to project themselves and their fan identity as part of an ongoing conversation’ (1998: para. 12). They continue to state, ‘fans become famous and recognised within their own community for the quality of their work and the generosity of their sharing with others’ (1998: para. 23). While Green and Guinery are discussing the Harry Potter fan fiction phenomenon, these same principles also apply for the non-fiction archives that are created with gaming fan sites. Like Green and Guinery’s analysis of the Harry Potter fan fiction, Kristi Lee Brobeck studies one fan community where all fan fiction is reviewed in a systematic manner:

a member can access other writers’ particular knowledge about geography, warfare, poetry, food [...]. Writers can find beta readers, or proofreaders, to look over his/her work, as well as post comments about one’s stories and await criticism or enthusiasm for one’s works. [...] one can read stories which have been accepted into the public realm of the archive after going through a nine-person, self-selected reviewing pool and have been accepted by at least five of the reviewers. (2004: para. 3)

While most gaming fan sites do not have such a systematised version of peer review, the sites do still undergo peer evaluation and review using forum, email, webrings, and general fan discussion. Fan sites are generally reviewed more informally through fan networks and fan communities; however, the larger sites do undergo a more formalised system of review. GameFAQs, as the largest online compendium of game walkthroughs and hints, requires that walkthrough and hint writers be registered with the site in order to submit any information. The major component of this registration is the writer’s email address so that GameFAQs and other players can contact the writer. Then, GameFAQs requires that all contributors follow strict guidelines and then have their material reviewed before the material is posted to the site (2005: ‘Contribute’ ). The guidelines for submission stipulate the ‘golden rule of writing, which is, ‘Provide credit where it is due’ (2005: ‘Help’ ).[3] Like GameFAQs, the fan sites and fan resources rely on the power of the fan and gaming communities to both provide and review content.

The use of webrings and links from site to site further encourage review by bringing more players to the sites to evaluate the sites. Jenkins shows that fandom is often intertextual, a process encouraged by the internet and by webrings, ‘While some fans remain exclusively committed to a single show or star, many others use individual series as points of entry into a broader fan community, linking to an intertextual network composed of many programs’ (1992: 40). The intertextual nature of fan communities leads to an increase in information from multiple sources and leads to a great number of voices contributing to any particular fan text. Like Wikipedia and other online compendiums, the intertextual connection between these sites increases the number of readers and thus their ability to contribute to the sites. This also means that the skill set for any fan site is augmented through the many voices of the fans, some who can translate Japanese fan pages, some who can provide computer coding information on the games, some who can provide historical information, and some who provide information on gaming cheats or on difficult gaming maneuvers. The linked nature of the internet allows other fans with those particular skills to access and then evaluate the work done by other fans.

Fan sites encourage other players to play the games and to have a relationship with both the games and gaming communities. Accordingly, the games industry itself encourages fan sites and fan works because, ‘The games industry, which sees itself as marketing interactive experiences rather than commodities, has been eager to broaden consumer participation and strengthen the sense of affiliation players feel towards their games’ (Jenkins, ‘Interactive Audiences? The ‘Collective Intelligence’ of Media Fans, 2002: para. 21). This drive to strengthen consumer participation leads to official game websites that provide images fans are allowed to use, or are at least not strictly prevented from using, in creating fan sites. The official sites, like Fatal Frame II‘s official site, retain a copyright notice, but they do not include a notice stating that others cannot use the images. Additionally, they do provide image galleries, desktop images, and other media files that are available for fans in their creation of fan sites. However, the official sites, as in the case of Fatal Frame II‘ s official website, prove lacking in the quality and quantity of material that interests fans. In examining Babylon 5, Kurt Lancaster notes that fans, ‘also create fan clubs online, which usually revolve around particular characters and the actors who perform them. Entire Web sites with multiple pages and links may be devoted to one character or theme’ (2001: 132). Like the Babylon 5 sites, gaming sites often include detailed information on particular characters or themes that augments the often inadequate official resources. Lancaster also posits that, ‘The formality of these [the official Babylon 5] sites lacks the creativity of fan-designed Web pages’ (2001: 136). While gaming fan sites are very creative, other aspects are highly formalised, like the format for walkthroughs and the structure of the sites. Fans thus create their own sites by drawing on the resources provided by the official websites, and then supplementing those with resources created and gathered by themselves, all of which are reviewed by the larger fan community.

Conclusion

In the creation of walkthroughs and fan sites, fans often raise interesting questions about the particulars of a single game, about gaming as a whole, and about game players or game communities. While this article has directly addressed the value of walkthroughs and fan sites as resources for game scholars studying and teaching games, fan sites also often present academic arguments of their own, including arguments about the value of open discussion taking place on fan sites. As a new field, and as a field developed alongside the expansion of the web, one of the great promises for game studies is that it could allow for fully interdisciplinary scholarship both within the academy and with others outside of the academy, including fans and those in the gaming industry. Bridging the gap between different discourse communities often proves difficult because of different methods and different terminology. However, fan sites offer a nexus point in that they operate by similar means as academia and to develop similar texts. Thomas McLaughlin has argued that non-academics often present valid theories and questions for academia:

I claim that individuals who do not come out of a tradition of philosophical critique are capable of raising questions about the dominant cultural assumptions. They do so in ordinary language, and they often suffer from the blindness that unself-conscious language creates. But the fact that vernacular theories therefore do not completely transcend ideologies does not make them different in kind from academic theories. They manage in spite of their complicity to ask fundamental questions about culture. (1996: 5)

In the same vein as McLaughlin’s argument for the validity of discourse from outside of academia proper, game studies itself could in turn argue for the value and significance of voices from outside of academia. The peer reviewed nature of fan sites both mirrors peer review in academia and serves as a model for academic work. It serves as a model for academic work because it shows how communities can create peer reviewed texts that are resources for their own communities while also creating texts that affect communities outside their own. While peer review can be seen as a means of setting academic discourse apart from other discourses- because it requires its participants to use specific codes- the level of and criteria for exclusion is the primary difference between traditional academia and fan sites. The differences in exclusivity for writers also correspond to the differences in reader exclusivity, with fan sites more easily connecting to readers. Game walkthroughs and fan sites are an essential part of game studies both as resources for studying games and as models for the potential form that game studies could take in connecting academic game studies with scholars, game players, students, and the gaming industry.

While fandoms began prior to the use of networked computers, networked computers have made fan cultures easier to access for both members of the fan culture and for those outside of the fan culture; ‘Internet fan cultures are user friendly; fans don’ t need to seek out and subscribe to obscure fanzines, they don’ t need to travel to meet other fans, and they don’ t have to negotiate the negative stereotype of the nerdy Trekkie’ (Sara Gwenllian-Jones, 2003: 185). This is particularly important because it shows how fan cultures can connect to fans, students, and academics using the same model. Academia can utilise this model because, ‘Online fanfiction has, ‘ as Julianne Chatelain argues, ‘a culture of relentless reviewing that is frequently supported by customised code and tools’ (2003: para. 1). Other fan culture scholars argue from similar positions. Hills calls for ‘academic commitment which is modeled on fan commitment’ (2002: 184). Green et al. claim:

Academic work on popular culture pays a price for its insistence on isolating itself from other kinds of critical discourse: We sacrifice both the ability to understand experientially and the ability to more fully participate in public debates about popular culture. As the academy turns toward a reassessment of the role of the ‘public intellectual, ‘ we need to accept that not all expertise resides within the academy. We, thus, urge a more open dialogue between academic writing and other modes of criticism. (1998: 14)

Game studies in conjunction with fan cultures has the potential to explore new areas, to break down boundaries, and to more fully explore the role of the public intellectual.

Game studies remains uncodified. At its current stage of development, it parallels the early days of film studies. Film studies, Robert Ray argues, has lost much of its impact because film criticism itself cannot compete with the power of Hollywood’s stories. In order to do so, Ray suggests ‘experimenting with the forms of criticism’ (1995: 9). For game studies, experimenting with the forms of criticism has already begun. The same fan site discussions are being emulated in the game studies blogs which also connect academia to players, students, and game fans. The prevalence of academic blogs on gaming and of academic web journals that include articles on gaming are only part of the large transformation and expansion of game studies taking place. Not only do blogs like Grand Text Auto, Terra Nova, Gameology, and others use formats similar to fan sites to study and discuss games, they also do so using language that is both accessible to non-gamers and is presented in a format that does not restrict access. Even when the discussions use technical terminology and jargon, the open discussion format allows for clarification. Like the movement of fandom publications from zines and newsletters to online discussions, academic arguments can also move from the more limited print journals to online journals and blogs. In turn, game studies scholars could continue to utilise walkthroughs and archives while academic game blogs could offer fans, game players, and the game industry insight into game reception, representation, and critique. However, in order for true cross-domain discussion to occur, academia would need to support fan and fan-like endeavors, offering some sort of publication or service rewards for scholars who publish blogs, and offering support to archive and maintain the often too ephemeral fan sites. Until then, game studies and game fan cultures will continue to operate as parallel processes with frequent, yet often unacknowledged, cross-over.

Author’s Biography

Laurie N. Taylor studies games, comics, and visual rhetoric at University of Florida. She is the author of multiple articles in edited collections and in Game Studies, Works and Days, and Computers and Composition Online. She also writes for The Gainesville Sun and GamesFirst! She serves as an editor for ImageTexT and Gameology.org.

Email: laurientaylor at gmail.com

Notes

[1] For discussions of Nintendo’s creation of a fan culture, see David Sheff’s Game Over: How Nintendo Zapped an American Industry, Captured Your Dollars, and Enslaved Your Children (New York: Random House, 1993), and Chris Kohler’s Power Up: How Japanese Video Games Gave the World an Extra Life (Indianapolis, IN: Brady Games, 2004).
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[2] The value of CliffsNotes, like Wikipedia, as pedagogical tools is contentious because these resources can be used to avoid engaging with the original text. The particular resource, for instance a particular CliffsNotes or particular literary text with scholarly readings, also tend to suggest a certain way of reading a text – often through specific theoretical approaches.
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[3] Along with the several lengthy pages on composing and submitting walkthroughs, GameFAQs provides pages for hints, cheats, and game credits submissions. As a new media form, games often do not provide full attribution in the games themselves or within the game paratextual materials. Thus, if a researcher were interested in looking at all games made in connection with a particular conceptual artist, that researcher would have difficulty operating through the normal academic channels like the primary texts and game journalism. However, the fan networks through sites like GameFAQs, Moby Games, and Wikipedia provide a partial solution because they allow fans to research and submit this information. Thus, game studies students and researchers can work in concert with thousands of fans who are all researching and compiling information. Similarly, if a game studies scholar finds information on a particular conceptual artist or game developer, the scholar can submit that information to sites like GameFAQs so that fans and researchers can mutually benefit.
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The East Asian online games boom started in South Korea in the late 1990s. Following unqualified domestic success, South Korean games were subsequently exported to other regional markets throughout East and South East Asia. During this time, game development companies specialising in online games for the Asian market also emerged in China and Japan. This essay proposes that one of the key features in this networked gaming context is the relationship between the adaptation of regional East Asian aesthetic and narrative forms in game content, and the parallel growth in more regionally-focused marketing and distribution initiatives. East Asian online games design and marketing play to notions of perceived cultural proximity within the region. By encompassing these considerations, this essay aims to offer a contextual analysis of intra-Asian games networks in terms of production processes and related emergent concerns. How have these online games networks evolved? What are the cultural politics inherent in present-day games networks within East Asia? How may ongoing developments in these games networks contribute to an understanding of contemporary transnational Asianness and its signification within regional cultural flows? To what extent are intra-Asian game networks reflective of imbalanced power relations within the region?

A basic chronology of key moments in the cultural history of intra-Asian games networks is presented in this study. The essay begins by mapping the development of this mode of cultural production and concludes by chronicling specific issues that have recently transpired within these networks. At the same time, however, this is not a simplistic narrative of exponential progress – or incremental decay, for that matter. Production processes and their attendant problematic aspects overlap in the middle section of the essay where I address the cultural politics of East Asian online games and the constituencies of intra-Asian cultural flows. Chinese farming (a term that refers to the activities of certain types of Chinese gamers believed to be proliferating in online game worlds) serves as a detailed case study for analysing how these issues coalesce. My hermeneutical agenda is explicit: what general lessons might be drawn from this relatively short – but rapidly evolving – cultural history in order to advance current understandings, and inform future research on games networks in East Asia?

My analysis of intra-Asian games networks centres on the production and circulation of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). MMORPGs enable thousands of players to simultaneously engage in group-based interactive gameplay in evolving virtual worlds. They are also known as persistent world games in the sense that such virtual worlds continue to evolve even when an individual player logs off. Lineage attracted significant international press attention from 2001 onwards for being the world’s most heavily populated MMORPG at the time, with over 4 million subscribers worldwide (e.g., Levander, 2001). This South Korean designed MMORPG is still regarded as one of the most popular persistent world games, even warranting the launch of its follow-up Lineage II in 2003. Most of the subscribers are located in East Asia, particularly in South Korea, Taiwan and China. Even though World of Warcraft, a persistent world game launched in November 2004 and developed by the North American studio Blizzard Entertainment, had reached over 6.5 million subscribers worldwide by July 2006 (Mmogchart.com, 2006), it must be noted that a significant number of these subscribers are based in China and South Korea. World of Warcraft had reached 1.5 million subscribers in China by July 2005 (Blizzard Entertainment, 2005), increasing to an estimated 3 million in July 2006 (Schiesel, 2006). The game continues to perform strongly in China where it attained peak and average concurrent users of approximately 630,000 and 330,000 respectively for the second quarter of 2006 (‘The9 Soars’, 2006).[1] Indeed, if anything, this example clearly shows that networked games have become ensconced as a key mass popular cultural form in this region. How, and why, did this popularity develop in such a short period?

The Development of Online Game Networks in East Asia

Japan’s role in developing console-based videogames culture is unquestionable. The Nintendo Corporation was responsible for the global distribution and mass popularisation of NES, SNES and Nintendo 64 videogames as well as portable GameBoy games in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Sony entered into the videogames market with PlayStation in 1994; and currently enjoys nearly unrivalled international market dominance with the PlayStation 2 console and its associated games. This continued emphasis on developing videogame consoles and videogames for both domestic and international markets has arguably come at the expense of both stand-alone PC games and online computer games in the Japanese context. By contrast, online games currently tend to dominate in South Korea, Taiwan and Mainland China. There are a number of factors contributing to the rise of online games in these territories. Console games were never officially marketed in these locations on a mass scale. South Korea, for instance, had placed restrictions on the import of Japanese popular culture following the Second World War when Japan occupied Korea. These restrictions were only officially lifted in 1998. Moreover, international game companies have been reluctant to focus on the videogames market in these East Asian territories because of widespread games software piracy. Local PC game developers in South Korea, Taiwan and Mainland China similarly experienced limited success in the 1990s (e.g., Liu, 2001).

In the meantime, online games culture was already steadily evolving especially in South Korea. Imported games such as Blizzard Entertainment’s StarCraft (1998), a real-time strategy computer game with networked multiplayer capabilities, proved to be an early success and was a contributing factor in the mass popularisation of computer games, particularly in relation to networked games. Over the years, StarCraft has achieved a wide following in South Korea (e.g., Herz, 2002); and its iconic status is ratified by the fact that it continues to feature regularly in televised player competitions as well as government and corporate sponsored tournaments (K. Cho, 2006; Kanellos, 2004). While the appeal of such eminently playable imported game titles – together with the explicit domestic acculturation of computer games as a form of mass culture – undoubtedly helped cultivate local audience interest on a mass scale, there are other factors to consider as well.

The rapid uptake of persistent world games in South Korea in the late 1990s may be further attributed to two inter-linked infrastructural conditions, namely the expansion of national broadband networks and the proliferation of Internet cafés (known in Korea as PC baangs). Both of these may, in turn, be linked to the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98. The intensive governmental focus on developing the domestic information technology infrastructure as a means to rebuild the national economy, together with an attendant interest in supporting local cultural industry initiatives like the fledgling games industry, soon produced tangible results (Yoshimatsu, 2005: 17). By 2003, South Korea had the highest usage of broadband connections in the world. As persistent world games generally rely on high-speed Internet connections, the comprehensive national broadband infrastructure was undoubtedly a contributing factor in enabling the widespread uptake of these games. Indeed, by 2003, South Korea also had the highest proportion of online gamers per capita in the world (Chou, 2003).

In addition, the Asian financial crisis had created a situation where many retrenched middle managers turned to making a living by setting up their own Internet café businesses, often with the aid of government subsidies to connect to broadband networks (Yoshimatsu, 2005: 17). The Internet cafés, in turn, provided a cheap form of entertainment for students and the unemployed alike, thereby cultivating gamer usage at these locations. Despite increasing rates of personal or home computer ownership, Internet cafés continue to be significant social locations for playing online games. According to the Korea Game Development and Promotion Institute, 84 per cent of Internet café users play online games (KGDI, 2004: 22). Game companies such as NCSoft derive up to 72 per cent of total sales from Internet cafés (Yoshimatsu, 2005: 18). By 2003, there were over 20,000 Internet cafés in South Korea, where online games are played using a variety of micro-payment schemes including pay per play, hourly charges and pre-paid billing cards (KGDI, 2004: 30). Such payment schemes act as a means of getting around the problem of software piracy and offer a measure of revenue protection for the game companies. Needless to say, this commercial model has acted as a determining factor in fuelling the exponential growth of the online games development industry, and in the subsequent proliferation of similar online games industries and networks in East Asia.

There are strong parallels among East Asian games network economies in terms of the development of key infrastructures that support the continued growth in online games usage. In China and Taiwan, for example, broadband usage continues to grow, while Internet cafés are also increasingly being used for playing online persistent world games (Chou, 2003; Tambunan, 2004: 4-6). The South Korean games industry exemplar remains dominant in East Asian creative industry contexts. The online games development industry in South Korea has been consistently supported by extensive government intervention and preferential cultural industry policies. As Hidetaka Yoshimatsu notes, ‘the government offered comprehensive and integrated support for creating favourable environments for the development of the industry in broad policy areas ranging from technological upgrading, managerial and human resource development, global connections, and education’ (2005: 23). Such extensive and programmatic governmental endorsement of the online games industry has seen it rapidly grow to become an extremely lucrative export sector. Indeed, the Korea Culture and Content Agency reports that in 2005 online games accounted for 43.3 per cent of total entertainment and culture-related exports including music, movies, TV dramas, books and animation (J. Cho, 2005).

Comparable levels of governmental backing are now being replicated in China, where comprehensive efforts are being made to seed the growth of the local online games development sector. The Chinese government is reportedly investing US$242 million in the local Chinese games development industry with a view to developing over 100 original online game titles (Feldman, 2004). The Japanese government started to actively support its domestic games industry from 2001 onwards by assisting in key areas such as media content development and export-oriented initiatives. According to Yoshimatsu (2005: 9-15), the market-led growth in the 1980s and 1990s had to give way to more programmatic government-coordinated development in the Japanese game industry because of specific contextual considerations. Owing to a combination of factors including local videogames market saturation, declining domestic sales and Japan’s persistent economic recession, Japanese companies are now increasingly concentrating on international markets and starting to expand into online games development (Japanese Economy Division, 2004: 13-15). Perhaps the most significant example to date of ongoing troubles in the Japanese games industry is the domestic and international distribution of Square Enix’s Final Fantasy XI (2002), a persistent world game that is notably part of an already well-established and lucrative console game franchise. Final Fantasy XI is also the first cross-platform MMORPG in which both PC and PlayStation 2 console versions connect to the same servers. The official mass distribution of Japanese consoles and videogames in the South Korean and Chinese markets in 2002 and 2003 respectively was initially successful but market stagnation soon followed (KGDI, 2004: 13; ‘Spoiling the Game’, 2004). Current schemes to improve the console games market in these territories centre on the introduction of videogame network services and the introduction of networked videogame rooms as an equivalent to Internet cafés (KGDI, 2004: 13-14). These scenarios are collectively indexical of the virtual hegemony of networked games and networked gaming culture in the East Asian context.

The Cultural Politics of East Asian MMORPGs

South Korean-made online games feature prominently in East Asian games networks. In 2002, South Korean products had a 65 per cent share of Taiwan’s online games market (Lin, 2002). In 2003, South Korean companies controlled more than 70 per cent of the Chinese online games market (Embassy, 2004). While East Asian online games development will continue to evolve and diversify over time, South Korean games currently act as paradigmatic models for the development of East Asian MMORPGs. What are the main characteristics and distinguishing features of South Korean MMORPGs? How are South Korean games influencing the design, production and marketing of other East Asian MMORPGs? These questions may be briefly explored with reference to the three iconic South Korean designed online games within intra-Asian games networks, namely Lineage (1998), Ragnarok Online (2002), and Legend of Mir II (2001). The design elements in these games underscore the common practice of indigenising imported Western idioms by infusing and hybridising them with East Asian aesthetics, narratives, and histories.

As part of the early wave of South Korean-designed online games in the late 1990s, it is perhaps unsurprising that Lineage relied on the then established gameplay and thematic conventions for online games. The game was closely modelled after European and North American paradigms for medieval fantasy role-playing games. Even then, compared to North American online gaming contemporaries like Ultima Online (1997), Lineage presented some cultural variations in terms of gameplay design. First, there is an emphasis on in-game quests that can only be completed by highly organised groups of players (teams referred to as blood pledges). Second, the player avatars are characterised by their allotted places within strict social hierarchies, where only members of the Prince/Princess character class can recruit groups of followers and form blood pledges. These features appear to be especially conducive to the Internet café gameplay context, so much so that it is not uncommon for leaders of blood pledges to arrange with members to congregate in real life and play together as groups in Korean PC baangs (Levander, 2001). In the words of J.C. Herz (2002):

What makes Lineage a distinctly Korean experience is that when players assemble to take down a castle, they do so in person, commandeering a local PC baang for as long as it takes. In the middle of a battle, these people aren’t just text-chatting. They’re yelling across the room. Platoons sit at adjacent computers, coordinating among themselves and taking orders from the Blood Pledge leader. Lineage has a fixed hierarchy, unlike American role-playing games, in which leadership structures emerge organically. At the outset, you choose to be either royalty or a commoner. If you are a prince or princess, your job is to put together an army and lead it. If you’re a commoner, your job is to find a leader. You pledge loyalty and fight to take over castles, and no matter how great you are at it, you can never be in charge. This kind of tightly defined clan structure, which mirrors the Confucian hierarchy of Korean society, would be anathema to American players, who generally want to be the hero-king Lone Ranger. (Herz, 2002)

A closer analysis of Lineage reveals an additional element of local acculturation. The back-story and game-world settings are derived from Il-Sook Shin’s popular manhwa (Korean comic) with the same title. Ragnarok Online shares a common point of origin. While the Ragnarok story has its origins in Norse mythology, the in-game narrative and settings are loosely based on Myung-Jin Lee’s Ragnarok: Into the Abyss, a successful manhwa adaptation of the Norse legend (e.g., GameDaily, 2004). In Lee’s work, the original Norse stories and characters are altered in order to reflect local South Korean social mores, particularly in the depiction of male-female relationships and peer group dynamics. Lee has also taken considerable creative liberties with the descriptions and roles of Norse gods. Loki, the mythological trickster figure, for instance, becomes recodified as a heroic young assassin. The manhwa-MMORPG interface occurs at various levels. For example, the original manhwa storyline revolves around competing guilds, thus linking it to generic MMORPG dynamics. It is also unsurprising to note that Lee retained considerable creative control in building the game. He professes to being ‘heavily involved’ in the back-story and original art design of the game, as well as its development process, to the point of even creating the in-game job class system (GameDaily, 2004). Hence, Ragnarok Online is a persistent world adaptation of a manhwa adaptation of Norse mythology; and, like Lineage, it is indexical of the creative inter-cultural and cross-media transformations that are implicit in many South Korean MMORPGs (e.g., Cosplay Lab, 2004).

Intra-Asian games networks also partly depend on regional cross-media literacy in the sense that the online games often build on or cross-reference other popular cultural forms such as comics and animation. The settings and characters in Ragnarok Online are very cartoon-like especially when compared to North American game-worlds – partly to reflect its manhwa origins, but also partly to cater to the taste for cute graphics with bright pastel colours that have become synonymous with much East Asian popular culture, particularly those which are distributed within regional markets. The successful expansion of Korean online games networks to North East and South East Asian markets from 2000 onwards may therefore be, in part, attributed to a perceived sense of cultural proximity among these territories. This term may also be used to refer to the use of regional cultural signifiers and themes as markers of cultural affinity in transnational Asian games networks. Legend of Mir II provides an example of how cultural proximity is manifest in MMORPG design, particularly in its use of visual and narrative elements considered marketable within Asia. Legend of Mir II was the most popular online game in China in 2002 and 2003, attracting over 700,000 peak concurrent users in 2003 (Actoz Soft, 2003). Legend of Mir II features a fantasy Oriental game world complete with traditional Asiatic design elements in architectural and dress styles, as well as a Taoist character class. The overarching objective of the game is to unify and restore a once great civilisation, thereby simultaneously mining a core role-playing game narrative trope as well as referencing a familiar narrative trope in classical Chinese literature. Given the unqualified commercial success of this game in China, it would seem that such generic visual and narrative design elements resonate with the present generation of Chinese gamers.

This design ethos is replicated even more explicitly in Legend of Knights Online (2003), touted as the first Chinese-made online game. The storyline of the game is based on Chinese martial arts narratives, in particular tales of knightly chivalry known as wuxia. According to John R. Eperjesi (2004: 30), wuxia stories, characterised by action featuring armed combat as opposed to hand-to-hand combat, were ‘considered superfluous at best, regressive at worst’ by the Chinese government for the most part of the twentieth century. Although wuxia stories circulated in the form of serialised novels and were incorporated into Peking Opera in the nineteenth century, censorship laws were passed in China in 1931 to prohibit films that promoted a belief in superstition, while mainland Chinese film-making was directed towards the project of nation-building. Thus, from the 1930s onwards, popular culture forms based on wuxia were produced primarily in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Accordingly, PC games developed in these territories in the 1990s set the precedent for Martial Arts RPGs based on wuxia narratives (Liu, 2001). Many of these were based on the popular martial arts novels of Louis Cha (a.k.a. Jin Yong), and with the present turn to online games in the region, Taiwan in particular has continued to develop games such as Jin Yong Online for domestic and regional audiences. According to one report, wuxia-themed games constitute one third of the online games market in China today (‘China busy’, 2004). As Jung Ryul Kim (2004b) notes, ‘The emerging strength of Chinese Wuxia-style (martial adventure or chivalry) online games demonstrates that Chinese gamers are hoping to see their own traditional values and specific historical artifacts in the new cyber-realities.’ At any rate, what kind of tradition is being engaged here? Eperjesi (2004: 37) contends that ‘[a]s economic reforms in China continue to repress the revolutionary dreams of Mao and nurture the growth of middle-class Chinese public spheres, we can expect to see an increased circulation of politically vacant signifiers of traditional culture that aim to foster smooth cultural and economic relations’. This scenario is arguably evident in the reclamation and recirculation of wuxia in China today. As Liu Shifa, a spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Culture asserts, ‘[Legend of Knights Online] proves the charm of homemade online games, which have begun to serve as a catalyst for the rebirth of the whole information industry’ (cited in Xinhua News Agency, 2003). In other words, these narratives are now proactively recuperated in China as a sign of indigeneity and fashioned into a marketable aesthetic.

The circulation of marketable versions of traditional culture is becoming commonplace in East Asian MMORPG design. 1000 Years (2001), for instance, is described as an Asian Martial Arts MMORPG by its South Korean developer Actoz Soft (2003). The promotional blurb for this game, which is simultaneously distributed in South Korea, Taiwan and China, reads as follows:

Set your clock back to 100 decades ago, when the most notable historic changes occurred in the Far East. Masters of Martial Arts spread out rapidly among the three newly born dynasties of Korea, Japan and China. In this era when Kingdoms fell and new dynasties were born, players start their own journey to become a Master and rewrite the history of eastern Martial Arts (Actoz Soft, 2003).

Such visions of a shared Asian martial arts history (however questionable) are suggestive of the manifest desire to commodify and market a depoliticised sense of shared East Asian cultural lineage and regional identification. This game has consistently ranked among the Top 5 most popular online games in China between 2001 and 2003 (Actoz Soft, 2003); and it is indexical of the current cultivation of Asian-specific transnational cultural networks in East Asian MMORPGs. Cultural proximity is now conscientiously invoked as an essential component in local and regional game development and marketing. Wang Jinbo, general manager of the Taiwan-based Soft-World International Corporation, maintains that Chinese online game makers have their own advantage against foreigners. As he succinctly puts it: ‘Our products have cultural proximity with customers’ (cited in ‘China Busy’, 2004). Nevertheless, while the term cultural proximity infers notions of commoditised cultural affinity, it may also simultaneously invoke problematic essentialist tropes of cultural convergence, equivalence and homogeneity. At stake here is the need for a closer examination of how Asianness or pan-Asian identification is modulated and marketed in Asian MMORPGs circulating within the East Asian region.

The Constituencies of Intra-Asian Cultural Flows

Contemporary pan-Asian regional discourses stem from a much broader history. As Kuan-Hsing Chen points out, ‘one has to be extremely careful with the celebratory aspects of regionalism; the [Japanese] imperialist Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere project, for example, launched in the 1930s, was able to operate under the name of regionalism’ (1998: 27). Furthermore, ‘when questions are asked – Is Asia one place? What are the Asian values? – then a universal Asian identity collapses, and differences of tradition, history and past hatreds resurface’ (31). Yet, regionalism continues to circulate in present discourses on East Asian economies, particularly in relation to consumerist-driven forms of Asian modernity. The regional identification of East Asia since the 1990s may be attributed to the global intensification of transnational capitalism. Consequently, as Leo Ching argues:

Asianism no longer represents the kind of transcendental otherness required to produce a practical identity and tension between the East and West. Today, Asia itself is neither a misrepresentation of the Orientalist nor the collective representation of the anti-imperialists. Asia has become a market, and Asianness has become a commodity circulating globally through late capitalism. (Ching, 2000: 257)

Ching’s statement has significant implications for an understanding of the commodity function of Asianness in newly emergent intra-regional networked cultures. Asian antiquity (imagined or otherwise) acts as a common reference point for in-game narratives, characters and imagery in Asian MMORPGs. Given the kinds of transnational border crossings enacted in, say, the production of Oriental style South Korean games for distribution in the Chinese market, what seems to be happening in intra-Asian games networks is the generation of ‘a sense of temporal (antique) and spatial (exotic) longing for authenticity’ (Iwabuchi, 2002: 567). At the same time, however, authenticity is used as a means to distinguish locally produced games without necessarily disavowing the significance of imported forms and borrowed styles. In this sense, Asian MMORPGs may be regarded as modern popular cultural forms that are simultaneously marked as local and international, as specifically Asian but always already hybridised in orientation. These machinations are underscored in Actoz Soft’s (2003) promotional blurb for Legend of Mir II: ‘While most RPGs are focused on North European Fantasies, Legend of Mir II strongly emphasises…an original story with oriental background, mixed with western type RPG elements’. Thus, following Kaori Yoshida (2004), ‘[r]ather than an essentialized sameness of Asian culture, what may enable … [the generation of] a ‘regional imagined community’ has more to do with the shared experience of ‘Asian modernity’ that results from indigenising Western modernity’. At any rate, the shared experience of Asian modernity has not resulted in the levelling of differences. Differing registers of Asianness are taken into account in the regional distribution of online games, so much so that the same game may be played and experienced somewhat differently in each territory.

Intra-Asian games networks are sustained by the standard East Asian online game development practice of providing customisable territory-specific content and extensive localisation services for products that are distributed regionally. Jung Ryul Kim (2004a), the Chairman of Gravity Corporation, the South Korean developer of games such as Ragnarok Online, describes the formula for successful regional distribution as follows: ‘(1) make it [the game] familiar to the target users, and (2) get someone who knows local users well to deliver it.’ In other words, there is a twinned process involved in intra-Asian games distribution – namely, localising in-game content and gameplay mechanics to make the game familiar to target users, as well as using local hosting partners to assist in the ongoing provision of game services. Regional localisation processes are thereby also contingent on the establishment of collaborative transnational ventures within intra-Asian games networks. For instance, Japanese games publisher Square Enix entered into partnership with Webstar (an affiliate company of Softstar Entertainment, Taiwan) for its first foray into the online games market in China in 2002 with Cross Gate, a MMORPG developed specifically for the Asian market. At issue here is the significance of localised cultural knowledge.

As Toby Ragaini (2004), the Online Creative Director at Monolith Productions, notes: ‘[T]here’s a tendency to oversimplify the significant regional differences between the various countries. Singapore, Indonesia, Japan, China and South Korea should all be considered separate marketplaces with distinct needs, expectations and system specifications.’ At the most basic level, localisation requires both the straightforward linguistic translation of the game text and the provision of territory-specific content. For example, Kim (2004a) points out that Gravity utilises ‘region-specific updates that allow players to enjoy replicas of historical buildings, wear traditional indigenous apparel, fight creatures inspired by local myths, and collect culturally themed items.’ Moreover, in Ragnarok Online, players may visit and congregate in different cities designed in ancient Korean, Japanese, Taiwanese, Chinese and Thai styles. It is no coincidence that this sample is reflective of the main markets for this particular game.

Preferred gameplay styles are also different in each territory. Terence Tan, CEO of Phoenix Games Studio, provides an account of the rationale for territory-specific variations in Fung Wan Online, a martial arts persistent world game based on a popular Hong Kong comic:

We found important differences between Korean, Malaysian, Singaporean and Taiwanese players. Developers who lump all Eastern players together are in for a rude shock. For example, many Taiwanese hate losing belongings, while Southeast Asians don’t mind if the risk/reward is high enough. So, we had to disable a pick-pocketing feature in Taiwan, while leaving it for Southeast Asia. Both regions enjoy PvP [player versus player combat], but the magnitudes of punishments and rewards were different. (Tan, 2004)

Such localised interventions ensure a degree of cultural familiarity and relevance in different territories. The processes of regional localisation therefore provide insights into the intricate modulation of Asianness within intra-Asian games networks. Asianness is crucially not mobilised as a singular and unchanging referent. Instead, the plurality of Asian audiences is tacitly underscored in intra-Asian games localisation.

At the same time, however, it must be acknowledged that intra-Asian game networks do not presently operate on a level playing field. The present hegemony of South Korean MMORPGs raises the question of whether it constitutes a new type of media imperialism within the region. The current situation in Mainland China provides a case in point. According to a report published by China Media Intelligence (2004), ‘[t]he problem for Chinese developers with the Korean stranglehold on the sector is overcoming the inertia of the Chinese industry on the one-hand and trying to temper the momentum of the Korean industry on the other.’ The South Korean market dominance impacts on licensing issues, intellectual property, and profit margins for Chinese developers and games operators. ‘The predominance of Korean games means that Chinese online games operators are constantly faced with high intellectual property payments which can take away as much as 50 per cent of online gaming revenue’ (China Media Intelligence, 2004). Ian MacInnes and Lily Hu offer a sobering demystification of the economic success of the Chinese online games market by pointing out the weak bargaining position of Chinese online game operators who often have to bear considerable operating risks:

[S]ince the Chinese game operators were so eager to obtain the licensing right of popular online games from abroad and operate them in the local market for quick profits, bargaining power rested almost entirely with Korean developers as they controlled the scarce resources – popular game titles – in the Chinese market. As a result, Chinese online game operators usually have to pay a large upfront licensing fee, which can be as high as $1-2 million US, plus a large portion, as high as 50%, of later operating profits…The weak bargaining position of Chinese online game operators also has meant that bugs have marred the licensed games. The Chinese game operators are not given access to the source code. Troubleshooting problems with licensors abroad has been time-consuming and ineffective. (MacInnes and Hu, 2005)

Comparable scenarios have arisen in Taiwan. Chieh-yu Lin observes that ‘Taiwanese online game companies are still heavily dependent on the South Korean game development companies and this has become the main reason why the industry has not been growing well on its own.’ For example, ‘Gamania Digital Entertainment Co Ltd…survived purely on its agent rights and has made the most revenue (nearly NT$3 billion) among all the local companies out of Lineage, the most popular online game in Taiwan. However, the real profit Gamania makes is only around NT$10 million, due to high royalty fees’ (Lin, 2003).

At issue here is the broader question of the degree to which ‘increasing intra-Asian cultural flows newly highlight structural asymmetry and uneven power relations’ (Iwabuchi, 2004: 19). One case study that deserves closer analysis in this light is the emergence of Chinese farmers in the regional and global digital game-item trade.

The Case of Chinese Farming

The increasing convergence between persistent world economies and real world economies is not unique to Asian MMORPGs. A real-world market has arisen for virtual-world goods. Global transactions in virtual properties were estimated to be worth about US$880 million in 2004 alone (‘Interview with IGE’, 2004).[2] Suffice to say, there is now an established global secondary market in virtual commodities, which has in turn created a situation where gameplay is becoming commodified and instituted as a form of work. This convergence between play and work has given rise to what may be termed the gamer-worker.[3] My discussion focuses on the discursive evolution and circulation of the gamer-worker phenomenon colloquially known as Chinese farmers. I analyse the term’s present significations in networked persistent world economies, particularly as an index of asymmetric power relations both within and without intra-Asian games networks.

In generic MMORPG contexts, farming (or gold farming) refers to the acquisition of in-game items or currency (gold) usually by repeatedly defeating lower level enemies and collecting the resulting treasure or currency. This term does not always carry negative connotations. Generally speaking, it is not unusual for the average player in most persistent worlds games to spend at least a few hours on gold farming in order to gather sufficient items and currency to facilitate smooth progress in the game. Chinese farming, by contrast, is a specific term used within online gaming circles to refer to the perceived proliferation of Chinese gamer-workers in persistent world games. It is believed that they are employed for a nominal fee by game-item traders to play a particular game for several hours a day, amassing virtual wealth in the form of game-items or in-game currency, which are then subsequently sold by the traders for real cash. Once the virtual characters created and used by the gamer-workers reach a high enough level, they may be sold as well (Tambunan, 2004: 19). In this respect, the issue of grinding or the laborious task of levelling up a playable character comes partly into play as well; however, I will focus on aspects of farming in this discussion.

The term Chinese farmers evolved from an earlier term Adena farmers, which originally referred to the mainly Chinese gamers employed by South Korean and Chinese in-game item traders to specifically farm the in-game currency of Lineage known as Adena (e.g., Steinkuehler, 2004). As these farmers grew in both reputation and visibility among international gaming circles, and especially when they started farming in other game titles and offshore game-worlds, there was an accompanying shift in the naming of these gamer-workers as specifically Chinese. Common complaints levelled against Chinese farmers include the belief that they affect both the social dynamics and the economy within the game-world. They are generally considered to be spoiling the game experience for other players because they tend to strategically position themselves in areas where monsters are known to re-spawn or re-appear shortly after killing them. In this manner, gold farming becomes a relatively straightforward procedure of simply harvesting the gold dropped by the slain monsters. However, these places subsequently become no-go zones for other players. As Steinkuehler (2004) alleges, these farmers ‘often declare – in both word and deed – whichever hunting area they currently occupy as their own property, ostensibly off limits to anyone else on the game. Should you challenge them on it, they will kill-steal you, drop-steal you, heal whatever monsters you are hitting, and if necessary PK [Player Kill]‘. Recurrent gripes are encapsulated in this all too familiar refrain: ‘The Chinese farmers have utterly ruined the economy and unbalanced any sense of fairness in the game. So I am certain these Chinese farmers are making a pretty decent living in China’ (cited in He, 2005). These presuppositions warrant further exploration.

Commentators such as James Lee (2005) believe that Chinese farming is starting to become a highly organised large-scale commercial activity resulting in the emergence of farming centres run by local Mainland Chinese and off-shore multinational agencies. According to him, Chinese farmers are now the main global suppliers of game-items for online games such as World of Warcraft. Chinese farming practices are also evolving. Lee reports on the current use of Chinese farmers to monitor game macros or waigua software programmes that run automated bots within the game-world environment. The Chinese farmer therefore acts as a kind of virtual babysitter who is required to watch over these bots:

The macros for World of Warcraft, for example, control a high-level hunter and cleric. The hunter kills while the cleric automatically heals. Once they are fully loaded with gold and items, the farmer who’s monitoring their progress manually controls them out of the dungeon to go sell their goods. These automated agents are then returned to the dungeons to do their thing again (Lee, 2005).

The main role of the farmer is basically ‘to fend off the occasional player itching for a fight or game master who’s hunting for…automated farming programs’ (Lee, 2005). In short, the farmer is a form of low-skilled cheap labour used to monitor the bots. At issue here is the question of whether the farming centres described in Lee’s account are equivalent to sweatshops, especially when it is pointed out that a Chinese farmer in Lineage II earns the equivalent of US$0.56 per hour. One might argue that these farming centres are functioning more like so-called cottage industries that are paying their gamer-workers relatively well compared to average local wages. One might even make the case that the farmers ‘aren’t exactly working in sweatshop conditions … [and that] there’s a world of difference between making sneakers and watching bots fight all day’ (Lee, 2005). Similar concerns – and justifications – have been issued in relation to the emergence of these virtual [but not quite] sweatshops in places such as Romania (Thompson, 2005). At the same time, however, the core question of exploitative organised labour remains.

Following his pioneering empirical studies conducted in 2005 and 2006, Ge Jin (2006) confirms the widespread proliferation of gold farming centres in Mainland China. While he concedes that the work conditions he has observed at some of these farms might justify their label as ‘gaming sweatshops’, it is also ‘an oversimplifying term that obscures the complexity of this phenomenon.’ Jin proposes an alternate reading. He suggests that in the gold farms ‘exploitation is entangled with empowerment and productivity is entangled with pleasure.’ His interpretation foregrounds the relative agency of the gold farmers:

Most of the gold farmers I talked to love the job. In the gold farms, you can see they are enthusiastic about their job and they got a sense of achievement from it, which is rare in any other sweatshops. Most of the gold farmers I met do not have better alternatives. All the gold farmers I met are male, usually in their early 20s. They were either unemployed or had worse job [sic] before they found this job. Many of them were already game fans before they became ‘professional’. In some sense, they are making a living off their hobby, which is an unachievable dream for many people. What’s more, the game world can be a space of empowerment and compensation for them. In contrast to their impoverished real lives, their virtual lives give them access to power, status and wealth which they can hardly imagine in real life.

Jin crucially stops short of romanticising this putative agency. After all, he is bearing witness to an arguably circumscribed form of self-actualisation and socio-economic empowerment. As Jin acknowledges, ‘[The gold farmers] are proud of their achievement in the game world but they are also sensitive to the fact that they are playing to provide a service to some wealthier gamers. In the game world they are simultaneously the master and the servant. Power relations do cut across the virtual and the real.’ Jin’s research findings are echoed in other recent reports. For instance, New York Times writer David Barboza cites a Chinese gold farmer who appears to confirm Jin’s initial observations. The farmer states, ‘For 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, me and my colleagues are killing monsters…I make about $250 a month, which is pretty good, compared to the other jobs I’ve had. And I can play games all day’ (cited in Barboza, 2005). Nevertheless, contrasting viewpoints need to be factored into consideration. Writing in the South China Morning Post, He Huifeng quotes a Chinese farmer who acerbically points out, ‘You try going back and forth clicking the same thing for 12 hours a day, six or seven days a week, then you will see whether it’s a game or not’ (cited in He, 2005). In short, the gamer-worker remains a worker.

Emergent understandings about the sociology of Chinese gold farmers need to be highlighted. Attendant questions about class and economic mobility need to be raised. For whom is gold farming profitable and at whose expense? What are the local socio-economic machinations involved in organised farming practices? Barboza offers an example that affirms the need for such deliberations. In his words:

The operators are mostly young men, like Luo Gang, a 28-year-old college graduate who borrowed $25,000 from his father to start an Internet café that developed into a gold farm on the outskirts of Chongqing in central China. Luo has 23 workers, who make about $75 a month. If they didn’t work here, Luo said, they’d probably be working as waiters in hot pot restaurants, or go back to help their parents farm the land; or more likely, hang out on the streets with no jobs at all. (Barboza, 2005)

The it’s better than nothing rhetoric starts to sound rather hollow, especially when spouted by entrepreneurial middle classes presuming to speak and act on behalf of others. He Huifeng provides a corroborating example:

Wei Xiaoliang, 26, owns the Shenzhen Red Leaf technology company and focuses his business on wholesaling Warcraft gold to overseas brokers. We prefer to hire young migrant workers rather than college students. The pay is not good for students, but it is quite attractive to the young migrants from the countryside, Mr Wei said. He is thinking of moving his company to Gansu or Shanxi provinces, where he could easily find scores of rural migrants to become farmers at lower costs. (He, 2005)

This intricate national sociology of rural-urban engagement, economic mobility, and rural migrant labour obviously warrants further detailed study. At any rate, the symbology of migrant labour has already been utilised by Ge Jin and Nick Yee to interpret the transnational social standing of Chinese farmers. For Jin, ‘Chinese gold farmers are in some sense a new kind of immigrant workers, disembodied through the Internet, then reembodied on a foreign territory as the mythical warriors, magicians or priests – virtual bodies that are the bread earners for real bodies’ (2006). It is important to emphasise that these virtual bodies are also specifically marked as racialised bodies. The Chinese gold farming phenomenon thereby offers a situated context for examining how racial tropes play out in an online environment.

Nick Yee’s essay Yi-Shan-Guan (2006) provides an incisive account of how present-day discourses on Chinese farmers belie a range of historical assumptions, generalisations, and judgements about racial Otherness. Yee mobilises a trenchant critique of the racist subtexts in descriptions and discussions by online gamers that centre on, and vilify, the Chineseness of the gold farmers in question. For him, the overriding ‘theme of immigrant worker being harassed by Westerners who feel they own the land and can arbitrate what constitutes as acceptable labor is one that is hard to escape.’ For example, in analysing gamer statements about Chinese farmers and farming practices, Yee discerns that ‘it’s hard to not interpret them as the digital variation of go back to your own country. And beneath all that is the eerie undertone of this land belongs to us and we prefer to keep it that way – a digital country club where language fluency is the membership fee.’ Humphrey Cheung (2006), likewise, reports on the use of English language tests among some players in World of Warcraft as a way of weeding out possible Asian gold farmers. Broken English arouses suspicion. In short, collective anxieties about Chinese farmers have seemingly occasioned acts of boundary policing premised on English language competency as a marker of racial and ethno-national lines.

In Cyber-Race, Jerry Kang (2000) makes a compelling case for harnessing the Internet’s intrinsic qualities, such as its capacity for anonymity, pseudonymity and social interaction, in order to challenge and disrupt dominant racial meanings. His key propositions are as follows: ‘Specifically, we can adopt a strategy of abolition, which disrupts racial mapping by promoting racial anonymity; integration, which reforms racial meanings by promoting social interaction; or transmutation, which disrupts racial categories by promoting racial pseudonymity’ (2000: 1153). The case of Chinese farming complicates these potentialities if only because it demonstrates how racial meanings can be insidiously re-mapped in cyberspace. The affective dimensions of such contemporary power dynamics also cannot be underestimated. Yee sums up the predicaments generated by these imbrications of power, class and race in the poignant conclusion to his essay:

As I recovered and pondered how to exact revenge against these 3 gold farmers [whom I had just encountered in the game], I realized that in my mind I had instinctively cast them as Chinese gold farmers. And in return, they had probably instinctively cast me as the white leisure player. And in this mesh of historical and contemporary racial narratives where we all suddenly seemed to be playing out our expected racial roles, I found myself pondering what it really meant to be Chinese-American… because somehow, in this land of Elves and Orcs, I suddenly felt more Chinese than I usually do in the real world. (Yee, 2006)

Conclusions, Projections and Introjections

The varied constituencies of intra-Asian games networks draw attention to the complexities inherent in transnational East Asian cultural production, regional cultural flows, and pan-Asian identification. It is crucial to retain an understanding that the Asianness of Asian MMORPGs and the Chineseness of Chinese farming are discursively – and economically - produced. Intra-Asian networks simultaneously highlight structural asymmetry and uneven power relations within the region. Attendant concerns include Chinese farming and the current situation of Chinese and Taiwanese online games operators who have developed an over-reliance on servicing imported South Korean games. The Chinese government started enforcing protectionist policies in 2004 in order to foster the domestic games development industry, and it is becoming harder for foreign companies to obtain a license for distributing foreign-made online games in China (Embassy, 2004). In this respect, intra-Asian games networks offer a rapidly evolving context for continued study and further critical examination. This is therefore a timely moment in the evolution of these networks to evaluate how Asian MMORPGs have contributed to the virtual hegemony of networked gaming culture in East Asia, and to anticipate the inevitable next generation of Asian-designed persistent world games in the very near future. By the same token, the assumptions implicit in any attempt at analysing online games as a popular cultural form must also continue to be interrogated. As Koichi Iwabuchi notes, ‘emerging transnational connections through popular culture are predominantly ones among relatively affluent youth…and among media and cultural industries in urban areas of developed countries’ (2004: 19). This is certainly a point worth taking on board but at the same time there are other absences and sites of critical quietism: namely, the poor rural youth who appear to populate gold farms in China have thus far largely gone unnoticed in many international reports and commentaries. Such awareness must temper euphoric accounts of the ascendancy of game networks in East Asia, and their ancillary industries such as the trade in digital game items and currency. To this end, contextual studies that are aimed at analysing topical developments in this dynamic field need to be simultaneously focused on how these networks might be complicit in ‘reproducing cultural asymmetry and indifference’ (20) in the region.

Acknowledgements

The Faculty Small Research Grant that I received in 2005 facilitated preliminary work on this vast and rapidly evolving East Asian field of cultural production. I am especially grateful to Ernest Koh for providing exemplary research assistance on this project.

Author’s Biography

Dean Chan is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the School of Communications and Contemporary Arts, Edith Cowan University in Perth, Western Australia. He is also the cluster convenor of visual arts and new media in the Asian Australian Studies Research Network. His current research focuses on East Asian console and multiplayer online games, diasporic Asian gamers, racialised representational politics in videogames, and digital game art.

Email: d.chan at ecu.edu.au

Notes

[1] While MMORPG subscription figures are useful in providing a snapshot of the estimated number of players on a comparative worldwide basis, it should be acknowledged that East Asian MMORPGs usually rely on peak concurrent user (PCU) and average concurrent user (ACU) statistics because these players typically pay by the hour, rather than monthly.
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[2] The CEO of IGE (a company that deals with the buying and selling of MMORPG currency and items on the Internet) provided this estimate at the State of Play conference in October 2004 and in various media interviews. Nevertheless, there is considerable ongoing debate – and uncertainty – about the actual worldwide volume of real-money trade (RMT). As Edward Castronova (2006), who specialises in the study of online game economies, states: Putting the pieces together, a fair guess as to the size of Asian, US and European [RMT] markets combined, including growth into 2006, would be at least $100 million, more likely closer to $200 million, and quite possibly over $1 billion if industry figures are to be followed.
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[3] Other scholars have coined different terms. For example, Julian Kücklich (2005) uses the term playbour to describe this and other forms of conjunctions between play and work.
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Schiesel, Seth. ‘Online Game, Made in U.S., Seizes the Globe’, The New York Times (September 5, 2006), http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/05/technology/05wow.html?pagewanted=1&_r=3&ref=technology.

‘Spoiling the Game for Console Makers’, Sydney Morning Herald (June 4, 2004), http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/06/03/1086203556999.html?from=storylhs.

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Thompson, Tony. ‘They Play Games for 10 Hours – and Earn £2.80 in a Virtual Sweatshop’, The Observer (March 13, 2005), http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1436411,00.html.

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As a few scholars of media have begun to note, Actor-Network Theory is uniquely suited to unite the disparate models of the social role of media presented throughout the past century. Where some social constructivist scholars worry that Marshall McLuhans work attributes too much agency to media products themselves, ANT welcomes this idea and suggests we look at how human power is in fact invested in and extended through these products, as Joost Van Loon and Matthew Fuller have detailed in their work (Fuller, 2005; Van Loon, 2005). Where a Chomskyan or Bagdikianian view assumes that media monopolies and other hegemonies retain all power in determining the interpretation of a message, ANT keeps the construction of these hegemonies power in perspective while at the same time considering the repurposing of their messages by fans which is described by audience studies scholars (Hills, 2002; Jenkins, 1992). Rather than insist on a monolithic causality – either on the part of new technologies or of those who use them – in understanding the effects of a medium in society, ANT suggests we need more studies like Ronald Deiberts description of the mutual development of the printing press and Renaissance society, or James Careys elaboration of the relations between the telegraph, railroads, commodity standardization, and the rise of the futures market (Deibert, 1997; Carey, 1988).

It is this ability to support a more ecological sense of media which makes ANT an ideal methodology for a world in which media increasingly cross-promote each others contents, are owned by the same companies, and come to us through the same pipes. And it is also ideally suited for media which contain multiple references to other media forms such as video games. One of these is Dance Dance Revolution (DDR), the large-motor, rhythm-based video game which I will discuss in this paper.

Dance Dance Revolution is one of the most visible of the rhythm games, a genre popular enough in Japan that at its peak, DDR manufacturer Konami claimed there was a DDR machine in every arcade in the country. The game has since spread throughout much of the rest of the world, and has appeared in a number of television shows and music videos. In DDR, players stand on a raised stage, pressing buttons with their feet in time to cues on the arcade machines screen. Some players choreograph dance routines to go with the steps specified by the machine.

One of the few other investigators of dance games, Jacob Smith, notes,

even when media technologies leave a gap for a very specific audience behavior, that gap can always become the space of an astounding range of active and creative response and that music and dance are powerful vehicles… for the performance of identity. (Smith, 2004: 81)

While many game texts make multiple references to other media texts, players of dance games have a great deal more agency in referencing other texts during play. It is the activity of the human body in DDR which makes this possible. Arcades have always made video games a performative medium by dint of being public spaces, but in most digital game spaces, even massively multiplayer online games, there have traditionally been few affordances for original creativity (beyond a small system of binary choices) which affects subsequent play. Indeed, much of the games industry seems ill-at-ease with the possibility of turning over creative control to players.[1]

DDR takes creative intertextuality out of the virtual world of the game. It gives us play writ large in a range of forums. The connections players make to other texts are visible on their bodies, not just on the screen, as they choose different dance moves and styles. Arcade visitors stop, watch, and comment on their style. Players also share videos and ideas about the game in forums online, sending the activity of creating the games meaning far from arcades and home consoles. Beyond everyday activities such as these, decisions about how to play dance games are also made at dance game competitions and in the scoring of their judges. All of these sites to a greater or lesser extent inform the paper at hand.

While my research confirms Smiths claim that DDR has left a large canvas on which its artists may creatively express themselves, my own investigation of how playerstalk about the dancing element of DDR play indicates that the dominant forms of DDR dance are shaped, and often limited, by conceptions of dance and play and associated identities external to DDR, and by global cultural and economic flows. I find Bruno Latours conception of antiprograms (see below for an explanation of this term) of great use in understanding why players reject some of the features of the game and accept others. Contrary to some critics complaints that ANT cannot explain broad social forces, I also find Latours concept of black boxes (see below for an explanation of this term) useful in modeling how players tacitly accept homophobia and racial stereotypes, especially when coupled with Castellss ideas about global cultural and economic flows.

This paper traces successful and unsuccessful attempts to control the meanings of the game, specifically with reference to what dancing means in this context, as the game moves between various interested parties – game developers, players, Internet forum participants, and other media producers. Who decides how DDR players dance, and at what times? Are the decisions about play made in the development meeting, the arcade, competitions, online, or around the home console? Globally, how do some regions or groups emerge as experts or leaders in play style?

Methods

While an understanding of media construction as large-scale as Deiberts or Careys is beyond the scope of this paper, I will attempt to reconstruct the forces shaping players stylistic decisions by doing an analysis of dance game machines and software, and of a single forum thread on DDRFreak.com, a major website in the dance game community.

This thread, titled ‘Freestyling Tips, is a site in which players negotiate the ideal ways to perform freestyle, a style of DDR play in which players engage in more creative movement than they do when simply playing for points, and may in fact sacrifice points for the sake of style. It involves putting significantly more thought and effort into movement in the torso, arms, head, etc., or using the feet and legs more creatively. There has been some discussion as to whether freestyle implies improvised dance, or routines; it has been used interchangeably for both, though a distinction between routines and improv is sometimes made at competitions.

In addition to following the references that players on the Freestyle Tips thread make to external cultural sources, and the references to these sources made within the game itself, I draw on external points of triangulation. The first is an earlier survey of players I conducted, as well as interviews of players at an international DDR competition. I also draw on my own knowledge of dance after ten years of casual learning in a range of styles, from jazz and tap to West African and bhangra, not to mention playing DDR myself. Finally, I make use of the findings of other papers on DDR and the related medium of karaoke. Using these triangulation points, I hope to sketch out a map of the multimedia, international, social network in which the game is positioned (Smith, 2004). To better illuminate the international dimension, I will make a brief digression along the way to discuss the location of DDR arcade machines in a Castellsian space of flows.

Textual analysis and network mapping

As syntagms and programs (see below for an explanation of these terms) are composed of arguments made by those engaged in a network shaping the use of technologies, a textual analysis of the Freestyle Tips thread seemed likely to yield a snapshot of players conceptions of the game. I did not have time to look at the complete Freestyling Tips thread, though I would have liked to. At the time this paper was begun, over a year ago, the thread was over 55 forum pages of text, or 1114 posts. This article, then, represents an analysis of the beginning of the community’s wrestling with the idea of “freestyle. The thread began July 26, 2002 with a post by staff member Miss Toy; I followed through post 299, a little over a quarter of the discussion on this topic.

Simple grammatical analysis of the thread was performed on the utterance (sentence) level. Statements about specific players, dance styles, musicians, and other cultural actors enroled by players into DDRs network were judged as having a positive, negative, or neutral attitude toward that actor, based on simple linguistic judgement (looking to negatory or charged words). I then literally drew out a network of these statements, linking the poster and their referent with a single line indicating the semantic charge of their statement – positive, negative, or neutral.(Figures 1,2) Subsequent references to the same actor were added as additional links. To make it easier to visualise this propositional networks relation to traditional centers of power – the persistent centers of capital and media power, which Castells notes have carried over from the Industrial Revolution to the Information Age – I then overlaid this network over a rough map of the United States and other relevant countries, situating posters and their referents in the geographical places from whence they were posting (Castells, 2002).

CLICK FOR LARGER IMAGE Figure 1. Partial study data mapped out as a network.

CLICK FOR LARGER IMAGE Figure 2. Vignette from map of study data.

I am assuming players truthfully register where they live in the profile information DDRFreak lists to the left of every post (they are not obligated to, this being the Internet, where nobody knows you’re a dog; but why else would a kid cop to living in Scranton, Pennsylvania?). Using this self-reported information and other clues (mentions of location in posts, etc.), the locations of only about one third of commenters could not be identified. The two thirds who did report mostly identified as residents of the United States, reporting from (or referring to players in) California, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Missouri, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Texas, Virginia, and Washington State – interestingly, all of these states with borders either on major waterways or another country, historically raising the likelihood that residents have more exposure to international cultural flows. One poster hailed from Norway, one was from Northern Ireland, and a few were from Canada. Additionally, a few references were made to DDR performers from Korea.

While DDRFreak‘s forums are open to visitors from all over the world, and have specific boards for other countries and regions, the bulk of commenters on this thread appeared to be American (certainly among players reporting their location). My discussion will thus focus on American styles of playing DDR, and specifically American freestyle.

Background

Relevant elements and applications of ANT

A brief discussion of key ideas in Actor-Network Theory (ANT) which I will make use of is in order. Readers familiar with the work of Bruno Latour will quickly notice that I am sticking closely to the ideas he initially put forth in Science in Action, without making much reckoning of his later revisions to his overall project. This is in part because I am new to ANT, and Science in Action is the text I know best. However, I also do not find that Latours revisions, which are largely philosophical, substantially affect the simple yet usefully abstract tools he laid out in this first sally. I add to my toolbox a few extra tools developed by users of his work.

Chesher (2003), for one, has suggested that media offer potential avocations for their users, harking back to Weber’s use of the word (Weber, 1946). Avocations are akin to identities, though they imply additional legitimacy imparted by the machine and a distinct set of actions related to this identity which the user may invoke to operate the machine. Chesher also discusses affordances, or the features of a technology which offer users the opportunity to act on it in various ways. The avocations and affordances offered by DDR machines will be the first things I describe following a description of my methods.

Chesher also draws on Latour’s ideas about the ways humans and objects become linked in chains and networks to support particular arguments, technologies, or ways of being. He calls these chains associations or syntagms, the latter referring to linguists’ term for the syntactic structure of a particular sentence (Latour, 1999). I will most often use this latter term. I generally take as my syntagms the ideas of how to dance, and what it means to dance, put forth by players, game designers, and a broader range of cultural commentators on this issue.

Latour has stated that these arguments rarely remain the same as they move out into the world and are adopted by others; rather, other people change them to fit their purposes, modifying their affordances and the avocations they offer. The original idea he calls a program. The conflicting interests of those it passes on to he describes as antiprograms (Latour, 1999). Changes to the order or content of syntagms or associations Latour calls translations - say, a change from video games are for boys to some video games are for boys but some are for girls or video games can be played by anyone, with associated supportive changes to game objects themselves, the contexts in which they are played, the places they are sold, the people who develop them, etc. (Latour, 1991).

But the originators of an argument have at their disposal a number of tactics to try to prevent excessive translation and thereby maintain their initial arguments intact. One of these which I will discuss is framing, or the specification of an argument’s intended audience by the text containing the argument (Latour, 1987). Framing will be briefly considered in the discussion of the machines hardware and software.

Another idea from Latour which I will make use of is that of an obligatory passage point (Latour, 1987). Obligatory passage points need little explanation; essentially, they are the claims made in any argument or the affordances of any technology which must be reckoned with if one wants the benefit of the argument or technology. In playing DDR, the only obligatory passage point is pressure on the buttons, as I will discuss later.

One last idea of Latours is that of the black box. Latour borrows this phrase from engineering, using it to describe a machine whose inner workings are unknown but whose output can be expected to be consistent given a consistent input (Latour, 1987). He alternately uses it to describe arguments (programs or syntagms) which are generally taken to be factual, and are not exposed to questioning or investigation when brought in to support other arguments.

I will, finally, also make use of Brandt and Clintons work using ANT to bridge the divide between globalist and localist traditions in the field of new literacies (Brandt, 2002). New literacies, concerned as it is with both the technological changes to and human construction of practices of reading and writing, is not far from a consideration of media ecology (and is, as it happens, also the theoretical framework with which I am most familiar). From their article, I have gleaned two more Latourianisms: localizing moves, which encompass actions of humans and things in framing or partitioning particular interactions, and globalizing connects, which serve to connect people and things on a larger scale through the creation of abstract categories, fictional worlds, text-delivered imperatives, or engagement with other places or times (Brandt, 2002). These ideas come into the picture particularly as I consider the ramifications of the global media market and other economic factors on the historical shaping of freestyle play.

Arcades in international perspective

The distinction between American and other play styles is important for a couple of reasons. Patterns of arcade and console game use have been demonstrably different across national boundaries (Suess, 1998). Console play in the United States has historically been the domain of males, often for reasons of access (Lenhart, 2001; McNamee, 1998). In recent years, much has been made of an increase in women playing games; however, these have tended to be puzzle and card games on home computers or handhelds, not games on consoles or in arcades (IGDA, 2004). But anecdotal evidence from some other countries, such as Japan and England, shows that DDR players in arcades there are more often female. DDR‘s initial success in Japan has been attributed to the fact that in that country, arcades are a place to take your date rather than a masculine preserve.

I focus on arcades rather than the games home version because DDR first made its way into the United States in arcades. The first legal version released for the home console did not appear until a few years later. So DDR was subject to arcade demographics and arcade culture first. Additionally, the arcade space fosters a performance dynamic which is simply not present in the home, where strangers are not likely to happen by and watch people play or try it out themselves.

I make the distinction that the first legal version appeared in 1998 because DDR culture appears to have spawned in U.S. arcades before Konami officially shipped machines here. Some arcades have had illegally imported Japanese DDR machines for years. Players were also burning discs of the console versions for each other and buying mats from Asian sources so they could practice at home before the first American home versions of the game were produced. While I do not have statistics to back up this observation, anecdotal observation suggests these illegal machines, which appeared in predominantly Asian immigrant communities, seem to have helped shape the rise of DDR culture on the Internet around the wealthy technopoles discussed by Manuel Castells, following trends in global society as a whole.

On DDRFreak, production of DDR culture is largely mapped around major urban areas on the Pacific Rim. DDRFreak‘s founders, and a number of its current operators, are Californians. It is likely there were more DDR machines in Californian arcades earlier than anywhere else in the States. Perhaps as a result of this abundance of resources, DDRFreak was one of the first websites on DDR. Tens of thousands of players have also contributed to the stability of the sites reputation, becoming enroled in its discussions. It has become Googles number one hit for the phrase dance dance revolution, which means that a preponderance of links from other sites, particularly other popular sites, link to DDRFreak when referring to the game. DDRFreak is also one of the most complete sites; where other sites may only have forums, DDRFreak also includes a listing of machine locations, unlock codes, news, song listings, step pattern printouts, videos of competitions, and other supporting materials for those looking to improve their gameplay.

To this day, the volunteer-developed list of DDR machines still lists a disproportionate number of arcade machines in California (402) while the number in Texas is less than half that (153) and the combined number listed in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut (considered by the US Census to be the New York City Metropolitan Area) is only 173. To make this proportional imbalance clear, there are approximately 35 million people in California, 31 million combined in NY, NJ, and CT, and 22 million in Texas.

Interestingly, the Census numbers which most closely resemble the proportion of DDR machines to players in these states are those for the populations of resident people of Asian descent. Asians and Asian-Americans make up nearly 11% of the population in California, between 2% and 5% in the New York Metropolitan Area, and close to 3% in Texas. Asians appear to have been largely responsible for bringing machines into arcades in the US. For example in the games earliest days in New York City (circa 2000), the two arcades in Queens which had DDR machines, as well as at least two of the four most popular arcades in Manhattan, were run by Asians. Two of these arcades were located in the neighborhoods with the largest percentage of Asian capital flowing into local banks – Flushing and Chinatown (Kuang 2002).

A number of the DDR players participating in the DDRFreak forum on freestyle, and a number of the players featured in the sites videos, are of Korean, Philippine, Chinese or Japanese descent. Some wear their ethnicities as a badge of pride, choosing handles like Tsinay Butterfly (tsinay being Chinese Filipina) or asian invasion 2000.

In addition to imports of illegal machines, Smith (2004) has noted that the availability of videos of DDR performance teams in Japan and Korea has also informed DDR play in the States. Citing Condry (2001), he notes that ‘movement of the body moves easily across linguistic and cultural boundaries, and that movies and videos are a primary channel for this exchange. Players in the United States were thus able to judge moves in Asian players routines and adapt them to their own style without needing to know how to speak Japanese or Korean, or the context of the culture in which their dances arose.

Interestingly, as Smith describes in depth, both the music and graphics programmed into the game and the styles of dance performed by Asian players were heavily influenced by the popularity of breakdance in Japan (Smith, 2004). The cultural flows in which DDR participates are ultimately circular: Japanese youth became interested in American breakdance; the style became enroled in Konamis production of DDR; and, finally, the game returned breakdance to the States, in deracinated form (Smith, 2004).

These patterns suggest DDRs connection to the larger patterns of global flows of labor, capital, and media between the United States and Asia. As Castells notes, these flows are to some extent built on pre-established patterns of commerce. Large cities of earlier eras – the aerospace city of Los Angeles, the port city of San Francisco, and the world commerce center of New York – continue to be where capital flows and immigrants gather. As Castells describes, they also continue to provide resources to support the cultural life, outside of the workplace, sought and prized by professionals in the new economy. And it should be noted that DDR seems to be most popular in these (immigrant) communities. There might be more support overall in them for related ideas about dancing and martial arts which were initially foreign to American culture. Various black boxes of DDR‘s main tenets – dance, urban and foreign music – would not likely have been as welcome outside of these major nodes on the network, for example, in the American South..

Indeed, an initial survey of players yielded more concerns about non-players heckling DDR players in the American South than in other parts of the country (Andrews, 2005). Additionally, Southern players who travelled to the DDR National Championships in New York reported having to defend themselves from criticism at arcades.

Players awareness of global power centers was illustrated for me at one point on a trip to Barstow, a desert city little more than a glorified bus stop halfway between Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Stopping through a video game store there, I asked the twentysomethings at the counter whether there was a local arcade with Dance Dance Revolution. ‘Pssh, we wish, they responded. ‘Where do you think you are, Los Angeles? DDR players are aware – as so many on the periphery are – that cities which are not major nodes fall through the network mesh; this likely impacts who they look to when attaching their dance styles to others’ aesthetic arguments.

It may be telling that when one player whose profile indicated he was in Norway suggested on the freestyle forum that other players should look to boy bands N’Sync and the Backstreet Boys for moves, he was soundly ignored, aside from one tepid comment. It was made by a player in Ohio. (‘[E]veryone has there [sic] own little way of dancing, the Ohio player said. ‘[...] if you can do other stuff like nsync/bsb stuff very good, stick with that.) In an earlier survey of players, most dismissed the possibility of doing moves performed by these groups, who are usually associated with a fan base of preadolescent girls (Andrews, 2005).

Findings and discussion

A textual analysis of the game Dance Dance Revolution

Because ANT follows the arguments passed around in communities of practice, I begin here with an analysis of those aesthetic arguments inherent in DDRs software and hardware, then move on to the arguments about dance/play made by visitors to the Freestyle Tips forum. The former stand in as residues of the practices of those creating and distributing the game – programmers, designers, marketers, and arcade machine vendors – which shape players play practices. A more complex and accurate picture of the affordances and avocations of dance game software might emerge from an investigation of the practices of coding, marketing, and distribution. This would present a longer history of the programs of dance games in the Latourian sense of the intent of their developers: how the ideas of the developers were translated in the process of development cycles and sending the game to market (Latour, 1999). As is so often the case, however, with academics running up against industrys interest in maintaining proprietary control of information, , such an investigation was not within my reach at the time of writing.[2]

A more accurate understanding of DDR might also be reached by beginning not only with DDR, but with its dance game contemporaries In The Groove, Pump It Up, Para Para Paradise, and Dance With Intensity as well. This would give a clearer picture of the game’s comparative affordances, meanings of the game evident in choices made by players and arcade owners as they select one game over another, and the position of the game in the global market. However, within the United States, dance game culture seems to extend to these other games without significant translation. And while the name of the website I will focus on is DDRFreak, the other games are discussed on the site as well.

Hardware and its effect on the shape of DDR play

Knowing which of the arcade machines avocations and affordances are picked up or ignored – and which limitations are circumvented or obeyed – by the players is the beginning point of understanding the translations made as the game makes its way into the cultural landscape. In the following discussion of the features of a DDR arcade machine, I will focus on those relevant to the discussion of key norms agreed upon by the DDR community, and to a few dance moves which come up most often in the early discussion about freestyle.

Players generally encounter Dance Dance Revolution in one of its two main forms: either as an arcade game or as a home version played on a video game console (Playstation or XBox). Because I will focus here on freestyle play as public performance, I will consider only the hardware affordances of the arcade version. The softwares affordances and avocations are the same across the home and arcade versions.

An arcade setup consists of a fairly traditional arcade console with a few major additions: flashing stage-style lights mounted around the monitor and speakers, and, most importantly, a raised metal-and-plexiglas platform big enough for two players to stand on, with safety bars rising behind them. (figure 3)[3] . The platform is made up of two controllers with four directional buttons interspersed with metal squares where each player can stand without triggering a button. The buttons are spaced so players with their feet on Left and Right (or Up and Down) have a slightly spread stance, depending on how tall they are. The only hand-operated buttons on the machine are used in menus to select songs and play modes.

The core gameplay mechanic of classic DDR is quite simple, sort of an inverse Space Invaders: arrow icons indicating the four stage buttons – left, front, back, and right – rise to the top of the screen, and the player is supposed to step on the correct button when the corresponding arrow hits a target.

Figure 3. A Dance Dance Revolution arcade machine.

Considering the hardware on its own, DDR seems to suggest only a few of what Chesher calls “avocations, and simple ones at that: that of dancer, that of star, and that of game player (Chesher, 2003). These avocations are culturally very generic, with the arcade hardware implying any form of dance which might be performed on a stage with electric enhancements like lighting and a stereo. The only culturally specific reference which could be read into the arcade machine itself is to the disco-era movie Saturday Night Fever (Badham, 1977);when the player steps on one of the plexiglas buttons, it lights up much like the dancefloor in the club depicted in the movie does.

Aside from these generic avocations, no part of a players dance style is explicitly defined by the hardware itself. In DDR gameplay, the only obligatory passage point is pressure on the buttons. Even the line of sight may be foregone as competing players memorise foot patterns the way concert violinists memorise sheet music, and sometimes play backward or blindfolded. There is a great deal of leeway in how a button may be pressed – with a flat foot, heel, or toe, or even an elbow, hand, knee, or buttock. Players could bob their heads like pigeons, do the Macarena with their arms, shimmy their hips, and go knock-kneed; they are at liberty to adopt any style, so long as they press the buttons. In freestyle competitions, points only make up part of the overall score; the rest is scored by human judges.

While the simplicity of the step as passage point allows for diverse step styles, it does encourage players to avoid foot movements which do not make a hard impact on the buttons (especially in arcades, where heavy players often stomp the buttons into insensitivity). Simply on the level of physical affordances, then, DDR is not an ideal stage for jazz dance or ballet. It would hypothetically work fine for stomping dances like clogging, flamenco, or tap. However, players generally ignore these styles and choose moves based on other cultural frames instead, as I will explain in a later section.

The arrangement and spacing of the buttons also have their effect on what may be performed. While there is nothing stopping players from placing their feet on the corner metal spots which do not have buttons, they wont get points for stepping there. In order to hit the buttons with the greatest ease it is advantageous for a player to stand in the middle of the platform, on the metal plate there, if not on the buttons themselves. Thus, videos show DDR players use less of what in technical dance language is called the diagonal – movement not going forward, backward, or sideways. This is not a hard-and-fast rule; while doing the Running Man or C-Walk, two sliding moves which come from hip-hop, players may well step on the metal plates. However, the hardware does generally constrain movement in this case. When players’ feet are seen touching a corner spot, it is more for efficacy than to make dramatic use of a different angle.

Travelling across two pads, meanwhile, is difficult. The buttons of the two pads put together are not evenly spaced for the natural human strides of which most dance forms, from Greek folk dance to ballroom foxtrot to West African celebratory dances, make use. Thus this awkward configuration shapes the dance in its own way: doubles routines where one person plays on both pads are marked by what looks like stumbling as players move to step on buttons which are right next to each other rather than a stride away. Grace may be hard to achieve.

The spacing of the buttons around the metal square in the middle of the cross also tends to lead to certain postures. Players rarely have their feet together, again because it’s harder to score that way. Dance styles based on a broad stance look good (as do martial arts), while narrower-stance dances like ballet may look awkward or be hard to perform.

The safety bar behind the players and the stage’s proximity to the console in the arcade also constrain what is possible. The platform size leaves players 2.3 square meters each in which to perform. Still, players get creative with the amount of space they allow themselves to use; this limited space does not rigidly determine play.

Software and its affordances for diverse styles

While the hardwares avocations tend towards the generic, the software, by contrast, offers a multitude of specific ways of identifying with the game.

If the player does not immediately begin to play, the game cycles through demo clips and advertisements. During these clips, the player becomes acquainted with the ubiquitous voice of the Announcer. In the Japanese import versions of DDR games first brought to the United States, this was an enthusiastic-to-the-point-of-naïve male voice who judged your score. His diction made it clear that the developers’ first language was not popular English, and suggested these voiceovers may not have been developed for English native speakers (his most elaborate exclamation was ‘I can see a dream in your dance! I can see tomorrow in your dance! We can call it Our Hope.)

Later mixes of DDR seem more tailored to speak to an American audience. The announcer (still male) affects the kind of growl cereal advertisers use when trying to convince children that their product is totally radical, with urban or black English pronunciations and mannerisms (‘yo!, ‘It’s a new rekkid [record]!, ‘Game ovah) thrown in. As the game begins, the announcer punctuates the music with comments, shaping expectations of how one should play. He speaks as if the game can see the overall movement of the dancer, not just judge the feet on the pad (‘I love your style – show me how to do it!).

Most importantly for the subject of freestyle play, in recent versions the announcer directs the player’s attention to a new game feature, saying ‘Go towards the full combo! at the beginning of certain songs. Bonuses for full combos (a score of perfect or great on every step) are a relatively new incentive for DDR players who play for a high score rather than to show off their skills and look good. The presence of the full combo bonus may have an impact on the number of players who choose to dance freestyle, as I will discuss later.

Players choose a mode, then in some versions get to choose an avatar. The earliest avatars were an afroed black man in a suit, named Afro, and a skinny, scantily-clad blond white woman named Lady. Over time, players have been able to choose from a broader range of white, black, and Asian characters, as well as robots, abstract male and female symbols, girls dressed as animals and devils, and a baby. Echoing Smith’s comments about the ways in which disco, rap, and other musical forms in the game become divorced from their original cultural referents, and following what anime commentators call mukokuseki (nationlessness), many of these characters are without distinguishing ethnic or cultural features (Baigent, 2004; Smith, 2004).

However, a few distinct subcultural references are present: the union-jack-jumpsuit-wearing punk; a 50s-looking dude in a black leather jacket; a male character named Astro who wears a futuristic spacesuit; a few characters who dress in the baggy clothes of ravers; Izam, a light-skinned male who wears a large rastafarian dreadlock hat; and an avatarization of DDR singer Naoki, who wears cowboy gear. The presentation of this broad range of avatar identities could be seen as framing the audience for the game: just about anybody, both males and females, from a range of cultures and subcultures, is invited to play. And yet, as I have explained, the audience playing this game in the United States has a distinctly skewed gender balance and has gravitated to only a few of these available avocations.

It is notable that selecting a character is the extent of control that DDR players have over their avatar. Nothing else a player does affects the avatar’s movement; they dance on until a player wins or fails. This is in contrast to some other dance games where avatars begin to stumble when players do poorly or execute special moves when players do well. In DDR, avatars are merely (distracting!) window-dressing, spinning and bobbing slightly on the screen. Like their appearances, and the party rap music they dance to, the avatars movements are generic, not really identifiable as part of a particular dance tradition (Smith, 2004). In these graphical elements, as in the games hardware, the game forgoes specifying exactly how it is to be danced to.

Players choose songs from a graphic menu which resembles a jukebox. (figure 4). The song selection has always been diverse. DDR has featured songs with influences as wide as Celtic music, jazz, classical, European children’s songs, Indian bhangra, Japanese traditional instrumentation, punk, ska, new wave, 50s American rock, TV and movie theme songs (including a remix of the theme from Bruce Lee’s movie Enter The Dragon (Clouse, 1973 #38)), various Latin styles such as salsa and samba, and reggae. A long-running staple in the game series has been the music of Captain Jack, a group consisting of a Cuban-American man and a Portuguese-Indian woman recording in Germany, whose lyrics and dance music are influenced by drill-sergeant chants. However, the music in DDR skews heavily towards Japanese and American pop, techno, R and B, disco, and hip-hop.

Figure 4. The menu screen from DDR Third Mix, an early version of the game.[4] The menu has since become much more complex.

Disco, hip-hop, R and B, reggae, salsa, samba, classical, bhangra, celtic, techno, punk, country-western; military, martial art, exotic, nationalistic, futuristic, athletic, surrealist, hot-rod, cosplay, cartoon, cyborg, rave, and of course, 8-bit (and later) digital games: DDR has laid out all these musical and aesthetic styles for its players. It is an impressive range of potential avocations. But between the software and the hardware, the game makes a few general assertions about dancing, some of which are contradictory: in DDR, dance is all about personal style, and yet can be reduced to a score based on where and how accurately your feet land. It should be done without touching someone else, pretty much standing in one place. You have to stand a particular way to do it. Both men and women can do it. People of all cultural backgrounds can dance, but dance is disproportionately associated with people of African descent and their cultures and music.

So which of these affordances and avocations do players actually choose when they develop their own expressions of playing and dancing, and why? At what points do they translate or accept these arguments?

Players comments in the forums

Now that I have laid out the landscape of possibilities made available to DDR players through the hardware and software of the game, I will begin to sketch out the avocations, affordances, programs, syntagms, and black boxes of the game with which they choose to work.

Safety and aesthetics

A great deal of commenters attention was concentrated on trick moves which creatively exploit the affordances of the machine. Early videos posted to DDRFreak feature a few in which players begin the routine off the pad, leaping onto it. A number of commenters expressed approval for routines they’d seen in which freestylers had walked off the pad in the middle of the song to get a drink, run all the way across the street, or flirted with a girl in the audience. Players push the limited space of the dance pad, to humorous effect.

Moves which exploit the openness of the buttons obligatory passage point included hitting the buttons with ones knee or hand, or performing what is called a Matrix Walk, a move in which players leap up on the arcade console’s monitor and push themselves off. These moves were widely seen in the early days of DDR arcade play. But by the beginning of the Freestyle Tips thread, commenters put a good deal of energy into fixing the correct ways and times to do these moves; the overall agreement was rarely. They agreed that these moves had been played out. There was a sense that there were appropriate moments and inappropriate moments for them; commenters wanted to see a player interpret a song sensitively, doing stunt moves like these for fast, energetic songs while sticking to slower ones for slow songs. In the case of these stunt moves, aesthetic syntagms have come to trump moves built on the raw affordances of the machine.

In addition, a few players warned others that these moves had a high risk of injury. This was the moment at which a commenter whose profile indicated he was a Konami employee spoke up:

I’m really sorry for the caps on this post, but I feel it has to be said:
DON’T KNEEDROP OR HANDPLANT CONSISTENTLY! TRUST ME, YOU WILL BE DOING YOUR KNEES AND WRISTS A FAVOR!!!
*ahem* Thank you. (comment #67)

This is consistent with a warning screen which Konami has inserted at the beginning of the game. ‘Extreme play motions are dangerous, it reads. No doubt for legal reasons, Konami seeks to limit players moves to keep them from bodily harm.

But commenters agreeing with the Konami staffer for safety reasons were outnumbered by those who claimed the aesthetic syntagm, condemning the moves as bad form. For example, the one poster who addressed the Konami staff member directly stated:

…yes my brother Ajay, it will do your knees and wrists a favor – but more importantly… it’ll do your Face a favor too…(minus the open-handed slap in the mouth!) you see, it’s ok to hand plant/knee drop – but it better be transitioning to something incredible to make up for it… it’s HOW you use it people!!!! not how MUCH you use it! :D (comment #70)

Konami also finds players to be its allies when it comes to the Matrix Walk. A wide range of players volunteered that the Matrix Walk was not OK to do in an arcade, a somewhat baffling assertion considering that many players said they had never seen anyone perform this move and there are no videos in the DDRFreak archives which feature the move. It may well be a myth. But apocryphal or no, players find the Matrix Walk distasteful not because it is likely to injure them, but because it is likely to destroy the machine, rendering it unusable by the entire community. Damaging the machine was described by participants in my first survey as a major taboo (Andrews, 2005).

So, in the case of knee drops, handplants, and the Matrix Walk, Konami’s interest in warding off lawsuits was coincident with players’ desires to see fresh, expressive dance moves (which could be said to draw on the global black box of [manufactured] consumer needs) and to maintain a machine which will continue to be usable by the entire community.

However, these moves attracted additional arguments beyond safety and aesthetic concerns. A handful of commenters said that doing knee drops and handplants didn’t even count as a freestyle routine. Some said the moves were gay, or weren’t real dancing:

I used to do all that knee drop, spinning, bar raping, and hand plant stuff then i noticed i didnt really remind me of dancing (how many peeps do u see in a club putting their knees or hands on the ground beside break[danc]ing (comment #108)

Looking at knee drops and hand plants from the perspective of other dance traditions – West African dance, or modern dance, and of course breakdance, as the commenter notes – these moves are perfectly recogniseable as dancing. It is worth delving further into the claim that these moves are not real dancing and into the shorthand epithet gay, as these accusations are echoed in other comments.

It’s not really dancing…

One popular syntagm in the comments was that DDR isn’t dancing at all, it’s a game. A number of the players participating in an earlier survey framed DDR in this way, saying they and other players in their areas didn’t freestyle at all (Andrews, 2005). Others made a distinction between DDR and real dancing. In fact, a majority of players seems to prefer playing the game for points (perfect attack or full combo play), as this earlier survey revealed, and there have been a few threads on DDRFreak since the Freestyle Tips thread in which players have begun to ask whether freestyle is dead.

Recent developments in DDRs software support points-play more than older versions. As I mentioned earlier, the announcer now exhorts players to ‘go for the full combo, and Konami has added bonuses when a player hits every step in a given song exactly on the beat. There are also now websites where players can post their top DDR scores.

Ultimately, the software of the game itself does not materially support creative expression, though it certainly does not squelch it. Like most digital games, DDRs scoring is binary, done by a computer; like other games which purport to be about artistic pursuits (Pokemon Snap, a photography game in which a picture is judged based on how well its subject is centered, comes to mind), DDR is not really programmed to evaluate an aesthetic style. So it is not a tremendous surprise that freestyle should be on the wane.

Players repeatedly implied there is a real way of dancing somewhere out there in the broader culture; dancing thus becomes a black box which players are unwilling to open or use DDR to contribute to or tinker with. This echoes my surveys findings, and also anecdotes related to me when I wrote a non-academic article about DDR in 2001. (Andrews, 2005). Few players identified themselves as dancers outside of DDR. One illustrated his distance from real dancing by noting he hadn’t even gone to his own prom.

Commenters were not necessarily in agreement, however, on what real dancing is. While the commenter in #108 above referred to dancing done in clubs, another commenter, I am ryc3, said DDR players should be looking to other styles:

Learn basic things like listening to the song and try to do things to fit the song. Also Learn basic steps, dancing has it’s foundation from somewhere. For example Marengae(spelling) [meringue -ed.]. The Advance dance moves in a couple comes from Jazz. (comment #273)

A small number of commenters suggested that players watch music videos for ideas for new moves.

So here DDR is subject not to Konami’s claim that it is a dance game, but to players’ belief that they are not actually dancing and that real dance mostly exists somewhere else: in dance classes, in clubs, and in music videos. Each of these spaces is governed by its own networks, of course, but the latter is notable, as again it indicates a way in which the broader media ecology, not just the syntagms and avocations brought in by the media text at hand, has a hand in shaping the meaning of gameplay.

… unless you’re breakdancing.

Not to overstate the case, however, there are a few dance traditions which generated immense amounts of discussion in the Freestyle Tips thread. Dances historically tied to hip-hop and rap music, including the C-Walk, Harlem shake, breakdancing, poplocking and its subgenres, such as ticking and strobing, received the largest number of positive comments. Forum participants were less successful in linking DDR to dance moves which did not come from these traditions. Comments on other styles were more likely to be ambivalent and significantly briefer, with only one or two peripheral commenters mentioning them and usually getting little response.

With Smiths help, I have already traced the popularity of breakdancing as a freestyle form back to Japan, and Asian DDR players in general (Smith, 2004). Rap-related styles were first employed by Asian dancers before the game came to the United States, and videos of these teams were available online as players sought more information on the new game. DDR itself suggests the use of breakdance through references to this Asian party-rap culture.

Breakdance or breaking has also been revived recently in videos by Usher, Ginuwine, NSync, and other pop acts. Additionally, there are references to breakdance in some DDR visuals, and some of the hip-hop songs in some versions of the game date from the early days of breakdance. So we may consider that there are a few arguments in the current media ecology which support a given player when he chooses to breakdance in freestyle play.

The C-Walk or Crip Walk is not mentioned in DDR, but there were a number of players who discussed the feasibility of working it into a routine. The C-Walk has come to be associated with rap music through videos featuring rap artist Xzibit, among others, but its origins are separate from those of breakdance. Both were developed in predominantly African-American communities, but the Crip Walk developed over the past few years in California, while breakdance originated in the late 70s in the Bronx (Gutierrez, 2001). The Crip Walk is associated with the street gang the Crips (and, some say, their rivals the Bloods). Breaking is historically associated with graffiti and rap crews.

If the C-Walk isnt mentioned in the game, why do players choose to add it to their routines? And why is breakdance one of the few styles considered acceptable for freestyle routines?

For starters, breakdancing, as a number of players noted in the forum, is cool. Styles unrelated to rap were largely ridiculed as uncool. Opening the black box of cool would likely lead us back to larger constellations and other black boxes of gender, race, class, and other historical influences which we could mine for better understanding of the attraction. Among these, gender seemed to be the most visible on the thread, so I will tinker with that black box now.

Arms and the man

On the freestyle forum, the subject of what to do with one’s arms elicited a lot of concern from players who worried they were moving unevenly, or stiffly, or looked retarded. Generally, though, commenters had fewer specific ideas for arm movement than for footwork. Small surprise, considering the games scoring mechanism doesnt care whether you move your arms. Players rarely discussed arms beyond saying it looked weird if you didn’t move them at all. A few referred to the lack of arm movement when doing Riverdance, the shorthand name for Irish stepdance which Americans have taken from the nationally touring musical revue widely publicised in the media. Some players danced this style to a DDR song featuring bagpipes. Two commenters found this textually appropriate, but a third thought the lack of arm movement in Riverdance was weird, perhaps relying again on black boxes of real dancing or cool dancing.

Many players – predominantly those focused on playing for points – said they preferred to conserve their energy, forgoing arm movements entirely. Players shown in freestyle videos on the site do use their arms, but they almost never raise them above shoulder level. These arm movements often have poor definition, are done hesitantly, or seem to simply be an afterthought.

The freestyle guides posted elsewhere by DDRFreaks administrators recommend using very animated arm movements, but these comments elicited disdain in the initial survey (Andrews, 2005). Echoing the freestyle guides, a few commenters on the Freestyle Tips thread suggested shooting out your arms, provided it matched the footwork. These comments were shot down, with one commenter saying that in his area, ‘[o]ne guy actually keeps his hands open and swings his arms wildly. IF you do that I guarantee people will think you’re gay.

Gay was an epithet casually thrown around in the freestyle discussion. As the word is often used in the United States with only a faint implication of homophobia, it was not always clear whether that was a commenters explicit meaning or whether he simply meant lame. However, the meaning of the epithet should not go unnoted. It is also worth noting that poplocking and other forms of breakdance would provide welcome instruction on how to move one’s arms – specifically, in a muscular, sharp way which could not be interpreted as effeminate. Hip-hop affiliated dances emphasise daring, athletic moves; breakdancing requires a great deal of upper body strength. The Crip Walk is an even more macho dance, with some players arguing that it is not a dance at all, but merely another medium for communicating gang signs.

Elsewhere on the thread, fear of non-masculine sexuality became more overt. Michael Jackson, for example, drew some disgust. He was cited as an exemplar of the moonwalk, a move which originated in his breakdance background but has since been associated with him as a sort of signature. Jackson’s style sent one player into paroxysms:

Even though Michael Jackson studied and performed some pop and lock… PLEASE don’t look to him for instruction… He will influence your style TOO MUCH… trust me, it happened to me… before I knew it, I was popping my shoulders while making my legs go crazy, saying ‘uh! and grabbing my pelvis and thrusting!! It’s a frightening revelation… (comment #208)

Here again, the range of acceptable avocations is limited by syntagms made elsewhere in the media ecology. My earlier survey suggested that the style of dance performed by groups like NSync and the Backstreet Boys is rejected by most DDR players because of these groups popularity with younger teen girls (Andrews, 2005). And, as I noted earlier, there was no support for the commenter who spoke up from a peripheral part of the global network (Norway) to encourage others to borrow moves from the Backstreet Boys.

This is not to say that masculinity is the only reason players choose hip-hop-related styles for DDR. Ballet, tap, and modern dance are not generally not acceptable or possibly accessible dance styles for men of this age. (How many classes for adults, much less men, are held at your local ballet studio? Is there a ballet studio in your area at all?) Availability of dance forms in other popular media, specifically music videos, seems to have a very strong impact on how DDR songs are interpreted.

Among the dance styles not mentioned at all in this part of the thread were, unsurprisingly, ones the players had likely never heard of or seen. Players did not talk about dancing samba, or bhangra, or the Japanese forms yosakoi or kagura, or the Madison, Mashed Potato, or Pony. None of these dances were mentioned in the mainstream media around the time these posts were made, but all of them are dance styles historically related to music in the DDR jukebox, including some songs mentioned in the course of the freestyle forum. Rap-related dances, by contrast, are the styles most often seen in music videos.

So the avocation breakdancer appears to join forces with the its not dancing syntagm in translating the meaning of the game away from Konamis central syntagm, this game is about dancing. This masculine not-dancing helps ensure that nobody passing in the arcade could call these guys gay. Two more avocations – those of martial artist and athlete – additionally combine to help strengthen this argument.

Everybody is kung-fu fighting[5]

There was a lot of talk in the thread about working kung fu and wushu moves into gameplay. Commenters enthusiastically discussed using nunchuks, blackjacks, swords, and drunken-style kung fu in their routines. Discussion of these and other athletic or combat moves, including pro wrestling powerbombs, was universally positive. It may be worth noting that like breakdancing, martial arts routines offer clear suggestions of what to do with the hands – shape them into fists or blades, requiring less grace, not to mention non-limp wrists.

Martial arts moves are to some extent suggested by the game itself, with some graphics featuring ninjas and samurai, and the song list including the remix of the theme from the Bruce Lee movie Enter the Dragon. A brief discussion emerged as to which song was best for a martial arts routine; two favorites were “Matsuri Japan” and “Tsugaru”, both of which employ Asian stringed instruments and flutes.

An additional affordance of the software is workout mode, where players can count the calories they burn based on the songs they complete. Whether players see this as supporting the syntagm “DDR is athletic” or not is unclear. Regardless, there has been much discussion in the American media of DDR as a weight loss tool. A few teens have published testimonial websites on how DDR has melted off the pounds. The state of West Virginia recently secured a grant to study the use of DDR in schools, and schools in Oregon are making use of In The Groove. Mainstream American journalists have seized on this conception of the game, which fits in well with rampant recent concerns over American youth obesity. The expectation-defying “here’s a video game which isn’t sedentary!” hook has proved irresistible to journalists (AP, 2004, 2005; Smith, 2004). This syntagm is a more recent development and may not have been a popular argument when these posts were made; however, players interest in martial arts moves dovetails with this sense of physicality which is more acceptable for male players.

Conclusion

In Latour’s terms, we see that Konami has successfully enrolled these young men into a new group: dancer-players, who are devoted enough to the game to spend their free time playing and discussing DDR. This materially supports the company, and in these cases supports the physically safe, competitive (rather than expressive) forms of play it would like to see. However, the company does not control all the ways the players use the machine, particularly in terms of defining its physical aesthetics. (Which, perhaps, will be the case with any video game; would a fully controlled play experience be fun? Would it even manage to enrol?)

The aesthetics which Americans draw on when playing DDR come from a range of sources in the broader media ecology. They come from black boxes stipulating what is acceptable for men, specifically from resources readily available through international flows of leisure pursuits – martial arts and rap culture – through major hubs of capital like Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York. They are drawn from commercially-produced music videos, as well as from homemade Asian websites showing how the game has been danced before. They are highly selective, avoiding the affordances and avocations of the game which might go against gender norms.

In revising this article for publication, I considered whether there were lessons to be drawn from this study of Dance Dance Revolution which could be generalised to other media. I agree in this case with ANT founder Bruno Latour, who in his latest book suggests that ANT is not suited for, if not actually diametrically opposed to, developing generalizations about social phenomena (Latour, 2005). The strength of ANT is that it is able to trace out the connections specific to a given situation, where other theories might lose sight of details in their dedication to presenting a unified conclusion.

If anything, I think the conclusion to be drawn from this study is the excellent fitness of ANT for research which aims to pinpoint the many locations where the meaning of media is constructed rather than seeking simplistic, one-sided answers. It allows us to see the autonomy of game players in deciding play norms, while keeping in view the limitations of the resources available to them through the public discourse of the media. It allows for consideration of the game console itself as an actor in the arcade, never losing sight of the fact that its parts have been constructed elsewhere by communities of practice whose agendas may differ from the players.

This ability to see how the local becomes global is of particular interest in cases like that of the Californian dominance of the DDRFreak website. Their influence clearly has much to do with the fact that they got to the web with their interest in the game first, had the technological resources to develop a site, and signed up to the forums in the greatest numbers. But it is interesting to note that, once this strength was established, the Californian gaming communities’ local preferences came to quietly dominate through globalizing connects (Brandt, 2002). As the thread was predominantly composed of Californians discussing how they would like to see the game played, this discussion amounted to a series of localizing moves even as it appeared to be globalizing – creating an abstract category of DDR players which is not explicitly Californian, in which any English speaker around the world could ostensibly participate.

Here we find the beginnings of insight about local and global media networks. Many media products begin as a local construction – a television production company, a band playing music, a community of actors in Hollywood or New York, a group of contributors to a magazine, a local NPR affiliate’s journalists, DJs, and supporters – whose localizing moves set generic conventions, provide affordances, and so on. This local community of practice becomes the basis for a global community when their activities are distributed to the broader public. Thus global nodes become black boxes unto themselves, carrying with them a location-based authority which those on the periphery may not question. What could be seen as other people’s practices might not ever be picked up if they were merely from somewhere else and not Live! From New York! (Even marginality becomes defined by these global hubs, with independent film or game producers gaining status among connoisseurs precisely because they are not from Hollywood.) One wonders what would happen if the fans of a TV show were brought face to face with the actors who seemed so friendly and approachable in their onscreen roles, only to find they were not at all part of the same culture.

Ideally, as I mentioned earlier, additional research on this or other media networks would delve into the local practices of game developers as well as players; there is no reason why this kind of analysis of power should be the sole province of sociologists of science. This would add richness to our understanding of global influence, filling in more black boxes, affordances, avocations, ignored or incorporated syntagms, and cycles of reciprocity in our understanding of media and audiences.

Author’s Biography

Gillian “Gus” Andrews is a doctoral student at Teachers College, Columbia University, in New York City. She is currently working on two studies, one on the differing literacy practices of low-income and high-income teenagers surrounding video and computer games, and the other investigating whether playing computer simulations prepares students for future learning. Her dissertation will focus on games, media literacy, and epistemologies.

Email: gus.andrews at gmail.com

Notes

[1] Among numerous panels where academics illuminated and extolled the diversity of player-created content, industry professionals speaking at the 2005 Digital Games Reasearch Association conference disparaged the products of player creativity. Among other things, they gave developers problems with copyright law. One speaker added that giving players free rein would lead to some good content, but a lot of content from twelve-year-old boys – ‘racecars with boobs, he scoffed (Developers in Play: Changing Views on Game Creation, 2005).
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[2] I did attempt to contact Konami in hopes of getting historical advertising material associated with the game. Also, I have myself been peripherally involved in the development of DDR‘s American-produced competitor, In The Groove, and have some understanding of the developers thoughts as they were developing that game.
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[3] Image from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:DDR_US_1st_alt.jpg
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[4] From http://www.akddr.com/
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[5] This is, as it turns out, a song which is remixed in a few versions of DDR.
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The result of this increased interconnectedness is a blurring of boundaries – between real and virtual, private and public, global and local. In the last year or so, we have seen a number of publications on the subject of games which address the difficult questions arising from this blurring of boundaries, and embrace the network paradigm, thus opening up new avenues of inquiry for future research. Books like Edward Castronova’s Synthetic Worlds (2005) and TL Taylor’s Play between Worlds (2006) are spearheading the second wave of game studies, characterised by an awareness of the social, cultural and political contexts within which gaming is taking place. Game Studies 2.0, as one of us has recently called it, has much more in common with Terranova’s research on network cultures than with, say, Janet Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck or Espen Aarseth’s Cybertext. As important as these books were for the birth of game studies as an academic discipline, their usefulness in the contemporary world of networked gaming is limited. While the likes of Halo, Grand Theft Auto and Metal Gear Solid will continue to deliver engrossing experiences for individual players, we no longer associate gaming primarily with single-player games.

In order to account for these developments, game studies must try to answer the question of how games create links between people, institutions, and cultures. It is undeniable that games create networks between players from different cultures, but this does not mean that the cultural differences between them are suspended. More often than not, these differences are highlighted, and may even become a source of conflict, due to the fact that games that are created for a global audience are not only localised for different markets, but are also appropriated by players in different ways. Take the example of Starcraft, an American real-time strategy game published by Blizzard in 1998, which subsequently became one of the best-selling games in South Korea. In the context of South Korea, Starcraft quickly acquired the status of a professional sport, complete with celebrity players, sponsorship deals, and games being broadcast on national television. Of course, this raised the stakes considerably, and it can be argued that the changes implemented in later updates of the game, such as stronger cheat prevention, and the option to ‘record’ games, are due to its lasting popularity in South Korea. As this and many other examples indicate, there is an ongoing, complex interaction between the local and the global. Finding ways of describing and analysing these networks of interaction is one of the challenges game studies faces.

Another, directly related challenge, is to develop ways of accounting for the variety of fashions in which games become embedded in everyday life. If we subscribe to the view that culture is not something that is simply passed on from one generation to the next, but something that is kept alive through practice, and we recognise that play is a cultural practice, then it is obvious that games cannot be described in purely formal terms. In the example given above, the game remains the same, but the manner in which it is played varies across cultures. It is important to note that play differs not only inter-culturally but also intra-culturally, as players find different uses for games in their lives. Cultural imagery and values may be understood differently in a different context, and the same is true for ideological messages. While games often come burdened with ideology, this does not mean players cannot find ways of resisting interpellation. There is a long tradition of playful subversion, from the Quake players who wrapped female ‘skins’ around male avatars and early game modifications like Castle Smurfenstein to the sophisticated ‘countergaming’ culture of today, which includes mods that act as a form of political critique (e.g., Escape from Woomera), games that engage directly with social issues (such as those created by Molleindustria), and satirical machinima like The Strangerhood. But this does not mean that simply playing a game off-the-shelf does have to be affirmative of the status quo. Modders, machinima makers and creators of ‘serious games’ started out as simple players too, but that apparently hasn’t stopped them from engaging with games in a critical fashion.

The multiple, active ways in which gamers perform both as consumers and, in many ways, producers of the games they play, draws attention to the question of technicity, whose significance for game studies has recently been highlighted by Helen Kennedy and Jon Dovey in their book Game Cultures. As they argue, technicity must not only be understood as a set of technological skills, but as a way of engaging with technology that impacts upon both the way we see ourselves and others. While it is significant that games are often one of the first access points to new technology for children, and that the skills required to play a game are remarkably similar to the skills required for most kinds of informational labour, it is also worth highlighting that games allow for an affective relationship with technology. In other words: games are where we learn to love machines. Games are also the sites where many of the first experiments in a post-human lifestyle are taking place: where fortunes are made selling virtual real estate, where people fall in love with other people’s avatars, where new algorithmic art forms are invented. Importantly, this also allows us to see how old these new lifestyles are, how virtual we have always been. Technology, understood as a combination of techne and logos, has always been at the heart of the social networks humans create.

Taken together, these four vectors – the increasing interconnectedness of games, games as a site of interaction between the global and the local, play as a cultural practice, and games as an apparatus of a technological subjectivity – point to a problematic whose surface has hardly been scratched so far: the politics of play. Recognising that play takes place within specific social, cultural, and economic contexts allows us to understand that it is interwoven with diverse political discourses, ranging from ideology to identity, from intellectual property rights to labour rights. First inroads into this territory have been made, most notably by Nick Dyer-Witheford, Ian Bogost, and Alexander Galloway, but much more work remains to be done. Ensuring the success of this work will require us to think about games in a new way, unencumbered by established theoretical paradigms, and it will also require us to come up with new methods of studying games. If we want to account for the myriad ways in which games are interwoven with everyday life, we will need to look at games much more closely than we have been doing. At the same time, we will need to learn to take a step back, and pay attention to the interplay between games and the large-scale processes that shape our world. Finally, we need to find ways of identifying correspondences between these micro- and macro-political processes.

The articles in this issue of Fibreculture Journal all contribute to this project in different ways. They all trace networks – between fans and academics, between institutions and players, between technologies and their affordances – but they do so in different ways, thus demonstrating the strength and flexibility of the network metaphor. One example that makes the usefulness of a network approach immediately obvious is Gillian Andrews’ article on Dance Dance Revolution (DDR), which uses Actor-Network Theory to tease out the often subtle relations between the affordances of gaming technology, the establishment of vernacular codes of practice, and cultural domains. Her specific focus is on the interaction between global and local influences on the dance styles of DDR players, and it is fascinating to see how arcade machines become the sites of cultural hybridisation. In the process of linking all these various factors together, Andrews touches upon questions of publicity and privacy, cultural hegemony, and the commodification of play, thus drawing attention to the fact that an aesthetic discourse is inevitably tied to political questions of visibility, dominance, and identity.

The interaction between the global and the local also plays an important role in the work of Dean Chan, who uses his article to map the cultural flows between Japan, South Korea, China, and Taiwan in order to outline the formation of a specifically Asian games culture. He reveals how traditional notions of ‘Asianness’ are translated into the new medium of gaming, and how the localisation of games across borders goes hand in hand with a renaissance of nationalism. This nationalism not only informs the production of games that draw on traditional mythology in East Asia, but also permeates the discourse of players of massively multiplayer online games. This is evident in the problems that have arisen due to the exploitation of virtual resources, which is often seen as the work of Chinese ‘immigrants’ to virtual worlds. While Chan is careful not to take the aggressive backlash that ‘Chinese farming’ has provoked as a sign of outright racism, he raises serious questions about what this development may spell for the future of online games culture.

Further adding to the variety of gaming cultures considered in this issue of Fibreculture Journal, Laurie Taylor explores the fan networks that have developed around the Fatal Frame series of games, highlighting the importance of fan-created resources for academic research. She draws attention to the fact that game researchers depend on sources such as fan websites to understand the way games become embedded in everyday life. While playing games is an important way of approaching game culture, researchers often lack the time and resources to immerse themselves fully in the culture of a game. Importantly, Taylor also draws attention to the fact that games research may often involve taking recourse to ‘walkthroughs’, which is often considered as a form of cheating. However, an intimate knowledge of game texts is sometimes simply unattainable without the help of such extratextual resources, which are themselves subject to a process that can be compared to academic peer review. At the same time, this perspective on games makes clear that their textuality is de-centred and fluid – and that the network metaphor is uniquely suited to account for these characteristics.

That networks are not immune to ideology is demonstrated by David Nieborg in his article on the recruitment game America’s Army. Portraying the game as a propaganda instrument, Nieborg highlights the connections between the entertainment industry, the U.S. Army, and the Bush administration’s War on Terror. It seems ironically appropriate in the light of American unilateralism that the game only allows players to play on the side of the Americans, even when they are perceived by other players as ‘enemy combatants’, and vice versa. But Nieborg also draws attention to the way civilian computing technology is being turned into a military training apparatus, thus revealing how technicity can feed into the ideological entrainment of the player. At the same time, the Army’s strong stance against cheating and modding may be read as a sign of a growing awareness that ideological messages my not be controlled as easily in games as they are in other media.

While America’s Army can be seen as a prime example of what Kline et al. have called the militarized masculinity of computer game culture, gender is constructed in an entirely different way in the culture of casual mobile gaming that Larissa Hjorth studies in her article. Focussing on the in-game representations of players, she employs the concept of cute culture to account for the way games like Kart Rider establish a gendered aesthetics, which allows her to outline the politics of cuteness that operates in Asian gaming cultures. Noting that the number of Kart Rider players has surpassed the number of Lineage players, Hjorth raises important questions about the future of gaming, and challenges us to reconsider our assumptions about gaming, gender, and technology. It is often assumed that gaming will continue to take place predominantly in the home (or in PC bangs), and that the number of male players will remain significantly higher than that of female players, but if we can take the developments in South Korea that she describes as an indicator, these expectations may turn out to be entirely off the mark.

Finally, Bo Kampman Walther invites us to imagine an entirely different future, one in which games blur the boundaries between real and virtual worlds to an even higher degree than today’s games already do. Looking at the emerging culture of pervasive gaming, Walther employs the network metaphor to deconstruct Huizinga’s notion of the magic circle of play, which is still prevalent in game studies today. Pervasive games allow us to see familiar places in a new light, establishing a virtual topology on top of the real one, and creating connections between real-world places that may remain invisible to the naked, un-augmented eye. Walther’s description of these multi-layered spaces as heterotrophic spaces is reminiscent of Foucault’s term heterotopia, and thus draws attention to the fact that space itself is transformed by political forces. Making these transformations visible may well be one of the ways in which future game designers create opportunities for meaningful play.

As the editors of this issue of Fibreculture Journal, we are pleased to see such diversity in the articles published here. While there are certainly many aspects of gaming networks that have not been covered, we hope that these articles will inspire others to follow the lines of thinking mapped out here, and to connect them with other perspectives and approaches. In other words, we would like to see that this collection of papers will itself become a node in a network that increases the connectivity between people, disciplines and institutions. As the articles in this issue show, a network perspective is not tied to a specific discipline or school of thought. It can be employed by social scientists and humanists, by ludologists and narratologists, by formalists and nonconformists. Thus, the increased connectedness of communication systems may work in our favour, opening up the possibility of a truly transdisciplinary approach to games.

The editors would like to thank the authors for their patience during the editing process, and the reviewers for their perceptive comments. Special thanks to Ned Rossiter for coming up with the idea for this issue, Andrew Murphie for his unfailing support even in times of crisis and Lisa Gye for making sure it all came together in the end.

Alice Crawford
Julian Kücklich
Chris Chesher

October 2006