Rationalization and Instrumentality in Play - Characters that don't feel "real"

The topic of rationalization and instrumentality in play is a particularly interesting topic to me, but only because I shy away from achievement systems myself. I am also not sure I understand the motivations of other players when they head straight into the “XLMMO”, the concept Mikael Jacobsson applies as a gateway to understanding what in the world is going on here in “The Achievement Machine”.

My WoW achievement sheet. Click to evaluate!

I remember a WoW player who once explained that she found the decision to change her main to her alt a very hard one to carry out. Not because it had ramifications for her spot in the raid or similar, but because the alt, the secondary character, didn’t feel as “real” until they have achievement points, pets, and mounts. She had been playing WoW before the achievement system was implemented, and now she was hooked and could barely explain why.

A dev version of Modelviewer being buggy.

I am nothing like this. When they announced they were going to add achievements to WoW, the most effort I put into my reaction was perhaps raising an eyebrow. Did these achievement-points act as a currency? Could you purchase nice stuff with these points? If not - meh!

Nope, you just accumulated them and they were, of course, on display (A small portion of them, however, did earn you stuff - titles, pets and mounts being the most notable, but these are few). 

Was this something I needed to work on too? How much of significance would this strange system have? 

Later I earned achievements, but never on purpose, I just randomly earned them out and about, except for the times I was unfortunate enough to be grouped with a guild member(s) who were very fond of them, and I would have to endure strange and elaborate tactics to fulfill an achievement that to me sounded like a bad joke. Of course to the achievement-player, these are not just extra challenges, they are more than that!

But I’ve seen the light, I understand better now, in a rational way (ironically), but not in an experiental way, I don’t know how it feels to be compelled to do them. But Jacobsson found a way to analyze achievements through the MMO terminology: 

“When we look at achievements as parts of the XLMMO, we see that they are more than just rewards.[…] The gamerscore can be compared to experience points, games become quest lines, and the gamertag is the character name.”

I now understand the WoW player with the mysterious and, to herself even, inexplicable sense of an unfinished and unreal alt that was to become her main. 

In the XLMMO, a character, regardless of whether its actual level is 85, has not really leveled that much. It needs more leveling, more experience in this meta system, before it can gain the appropriate status of a “real” main. And this player's meta system even included collections - both pets and mounts. I am telling all the non-WoW players, that completing such collections inevitably will be both very expensive in gold, time and patience.

Jacobsson explains (amongst other things - also my attitude): 

“The different strategies and ways of conceptualizing the system shows how players have appropriated the technology and socially reconstructed it to fit their gaming pleasures, while at the same time, many players remain deeply conflicted over these gaming habits and feel trapped in a deterministic system dictating to them what to do.” 

Besides Jacobsson and I at first having our confusion and curiosity in common, I think me and the achievement-WoW-player also have a lot more in common than we think: one of us has signed out the other signed in, but both can sometimes feel trapped by a system whose ability to be forceful traps us both.

As a final note, I find the expression that the character doesn’t feel “real” to be very interesting. Why the word “real”? It's a big word. What does this mean?

Well, it’s not like the feeling of “realness” doesn’t apply to me, I find the word “connection” to encompass more of the relationship I have with my characters/avatars. I tend to connect with my characters very quickly, and sometimes my sense of competence through the character is what makes it real. I can get a very tangible sense of a character at the level of 5 to be very real and with huge potential, despite the fact this character, in both the MMO and the XLMMO is far far from “experienced”. 

Could there perhaps be a relation between embodiment and achievements, at least for some?

Co-creative Culture and labour - "I Play Farmville, and You Should Too!!!!"

I’ve been trying to wrap my head around what Dyer-Witherford and de Peuter says in “Immaterial Labor”:

“Immaterial labor is less about the production of things and more about the production of subjectivity, or better, about the way the production of subjectivity and things are in contemporary capitalism deeply intertwined”.

Perhaps one of the ways of unwrapping that is the line “If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold.”. 

I started playing Farmville again. I started as part of the Digital Game Theory course back in spring. I then grew tired of the repetitiveness and I had at the same time reached the long term goal I had made – reach max level in my bakery (I produce very nice high level strawberry cakes!).  However, some people in the Game Culture class had me hooked again. I guess I do want to play Farmville with someone other than Linda D and Fredo, who by the way had broken up with me when I returned… He was never a good neighbour anyways. 

Farmville is also very good at putting me to work in ways I barely notice. First of all, it really wants access to everything me, preferably to be allowed to post on Facebook as me and it even succeeded once. It constantly tries to bribe me with extra goodies – “triple parts” - if I would just invite more of my Facebook friends to join. I have been clever though, I have created a separate list for Farmville friends, so that my Farmville shares do not become ever present and spammy messages to everyone I know on Facebook. 

I’ve tried not becoming the ultimate spokesperson and advertisement pillar for Farmville. It’s a constant temptation to give in. I am promised great treasures and upgrades if I recruit more friends.

I have not paid Farmville (Zynga) a dime though, but that’s not the logic of it, as long as the game is ever expanding – someone eventually will. And I have been secretly and silently employed to hire new people into this scheme and make sure to remind the ones already playing of all the nice things they can have. 

Farmville is also a highly commercialized game space. Planting "Dreyer's Fruit Bars crops" in this case. How can we understand this within the intersection of games and labour? Promotional play? (Magic Circle went *poof*)

Here’s the thing though, I am aware of it, and I pay attention to it so I can intersect. I’d argue that Farmville in terms of player labour is not as covert as it could be and the number of fake Facebook accounts specifically made to play Facebook games, I believe, is an attempt to divide the two, the game-network and the general network and avoid becoming this rambling street corner advertisement astroturf Farmville maniac. 

With the many examples of how games that put you to work, I also believe it can go the other way. Games can also teach and train us to become better workers. 

Think about how MMOG raiding produces accountable, competitive and highly achieving individuals. You need to be flexible and available, broad but specialized, always up to date and well educated on the class and spec you play and what encounter you’re about to face. Raid groups are further often hierarchical with raid and guild leaders, divided work tasks (tank, dps, and healer). If you signed to up to work on boss fights for the night and you are not able to make it, you are expected to inform raid leaders. You need to be able to work with others and take criticism – and of course constantly improve. You need good communication skills, a team-oriented attitude and the spirit of a fighter – you never give up until the job is done! And indeed the work ethic expected of you in for example WoW can become very demanding when you raid and prepare for raids at the equivalent to a part time job – in your spare time! I used to do this, three times a week for four hours each time when I raided the most.

 

It certainly fits within the Immaterial Labour definition as in labour that creates “immaterial products”:

“Knowledge, information, communication, a relationship or an emotional response”.

It was very regimented and your performance was constantly under surveillance and evaluation. Perhaps this is also why these laborious games has a tendency to "burn people out". This expression is at least something I've heard several times within WoW circles, especially amongst guild leaders who beyond the listing above, have extra duties on top and perhaps carry one of the biggest work loads, also in terms of organizational work and servicing guild members in their requests that is not directly play, but rather preparation for play.

Emergent Play & Control - Gold Farming

I was very captivated by Steinkuehlers Article "The Mangle of Play" where she depicts how chinese gold farmers destabalized the intended balance and play the designers had in mind in the MMOG Lineage II.

I think the case of gold farming and the impacts of such an industry is a good example of emergent activities and also acts of control by both the game company and the players themselves, as Steinkuehler also describes.

I remember being told about bots when I first started playing WoW. At the time, I had already been active in Guild Wars, but don't remember running in to the concept there, despite this game having many similarities to it's MMO brethren.
When I heard about bots in WoW, I found this notion both captivating but also mysterious - how did these bots look? I expected something spectacular that would make me recognize one immediatly, they were robots right, unlike the rest of us players, so they must look different!

Then one day, one was pointed out to me.
It didn't look like a robot at all, it was just a night elf hunter - a great dissapointment.
The only difference was the way the character moved, spun around on the spot and didn't react to other players interfering with it's course.
I proceeded to whisper this character which had an unusually silly name, I forget, but "Xvolkk" is a good guess. The character then stood still (bots don't stand still for long) and responded to my "Hello" with a "lol".
Hmmm, okay, I wrote back saying "what are you doing?" and got another "lol" and I was then certain this was not an english speaker and most likely a chinese gold farming player, who had checked the AI controlled hunter and then seen my message.

Gold farmers don't have as profound an impact on WoW as the one Steinkuehler described in Lineage, where a race and gender combination became the signature for a gold farmer and a whole race was made obsolete - for leisure players that is.

These are Dwarves???

The play style of the gold farmers in Lineage was also far more aggressive than I've ever experienced myself. Of course for them, it's all in the name of profit and they mean no personal offense. So while certain rules and design features can open up to emergent forms of play, likewise can they open up to new forms of monetary exploit. I wonder if issues of protecting the game against such huge potential imbalances is something game designers have to include in their design choices, besides just providing for a pleasurable game-play experience.


Diablo III has been announced to allow players to buy and sell in-game items for real currency via Battle.net. It will be interesting to see how this will work for Blizzard, the players and the gold farmers.

It makes me think of the blurred boundary between labour and play and how MMOG's have been famous for being "grindy" and work-like (raid management fx). How will Diablo III's Auction House insert itself into that history?

Is the Diablo III real money auction house a step in the direction of making gold farming an actual and legitimate job? Are game companies moving towards working with the gold farmers, instead of against them, giving up some of their control and trying to embrace this new reality?

Well, the reception of these news amongst game enthusiasts were polarized.

Some see it as a direct attempt at getting rid of gold farmers, or well.. perhaps just legalizing them and hoping the in-game market will be stable anyways.

Some players are rubbing their hands. This is their chance to really try out virtual trading big time instead of just "playing the Auction House" in fx WoW where spending all that gold meaningfully is pretty much impossible.

Some are being almost apocalyptic about it, echoing the Lineage story about imbalances and ultimately putting the (often) western player as the buyer and eastern player as the seller, instead of everyone being both, with the end result being a completely ruined game.

Never has it been so political to play an MMOG, markets arise when there's a demand and as such people are employed in China producing real currency out of the virtual currency they sell the players (who are both eastern and western as far as I know, although I suspect they earn better on the western players).

Gold Farmers at work

Do players feel as if their leisure spaces have been contaminated by real-world matters, is it a breach of the magic circle? Chinese labourers are at work in the same game where I spend my off hours playing around. Or even worse, (and this is high on the worse scale) imprisoned chinese gold farmers are working where I'm playing.... that's a very uncomfortable thought. These are the games where people sometimes log in to "take a break from 'real life'".

When people throw out the common expression "it's just a game" the next thing to say is perhaps  - "for whom?".