What forms of participatory culture are available in games?

Some games are designed to allow for new levels and characters to be created and thus affect how game play and narrative play out via new regulations, art work can be inspired by games, music videos. Players can now form strong online communities where they can participate in fan culture such as chat rooms and forums, facebook and twitter.

With games also converging onto mobile devices these games now allow users to participate in any time and space they so desire.

Games can be remediated into almost any other media type that users participate in.

What constraints are there?

·         IP and copyright restrictions

·         Limitations on tools provided by creators of the source materials

·         Digital right management and other type of software

·         End User License Agreements

·         Cultural limitations where games do not work within other cultural contexts

·         Time

How is the economic model of games different from other media?

The economic model for differs in that the games industry was born with piracy within it culture and flourished in any event, whilst other media were forced to face piracy as an alien threat to their distribution models that were originally based around analog media. Gaming has always been digital.

Many of the online games are subscription based as opposed to most other media types which are still one off single purchases, which means there is an ongoing financial return over a much longer timeframe than seen in other media.

Gaming is now both the source for derivates such as films based on games, as well as being a derivate such as game based on film or TV show and so can drive all kinds of remediation through the narratives they possess.

Gaming also more actively engages consumers through the narrative content they consume, and create. This enables game to hold the attention of consumers for a longer period of time it actively engages the consumer through social networks rather than passively supplying a one off piece of media.

Player of open design games can also directly profit from the creations they have within these virtual spaces.

How is the user production in games different from other media?

I think user production in game sis different as it seems to be done more often as part of a collective, whilst other user created media seems to be done as a solo project, or in a smaller group.

It also seems to be encouraged more within the gaming industry compared to other media industries  such as film, TV and music who seem to actively discourage it.

For my remediation I have settled on a YouTube Video which remediates an article in Cosmos magazine entitled “Starships Ahoy” from Feb/Mar 2010 issue. The article looks at a possible new method of deep space exploration.

My plan is to firstly summarize the article and then via the use of an animated PowerPoint presentation recorded in a video format using Camtasia Studio, combined with video footage filmed used a HD handy cam and audio dubbed over the top of these. To edit and create this video I will use adobe premiere and sound booth.

I intended o create an entertaining and informative remediation of a static magazine article that will transform the information in it to a more entertaining visual context. I intend to use a star wars based theme news presentation to create this video.

All audio samples that are used will be all sourced under appropriate creative commons licenses and any copyright material used under fair dealings for education purposes.

All content used will be credited in the closing credits and video description field in YouTube. All licensing information will be outlined and stated to avoid any copyright issues.

The video will then be appropriately titled and tagged and distributed on YouTube so that the intended audience can easily consume and share the video

Sarah Colman and Nick Dyer-Witheford (2007). Playing on the digital commons: collectivities, capital and contestation in videogame culture.  Media, Culture and Society 29 (6), 934-953.

·         Commons are resources for community use which no one can own, and are in contrast to commodities exchange for profit by private possession.

·         Digital media ease of copying, distribution and malleability across networks can create common pool resources that can overflow privatized property rights. Creative commons adds value I networked activities as it allows for use of pool material free of the restrictions of copyright and IP protection regimes. As mentioned in the TED video featuring Lawrence lessig earlier in the MED104 study materials, a world where the participants know that they are living against the law cannot be healthy for the culture which they’re a part of. Copyright restricts creativity by limiting access to the collective pool of information that would be possible under a commons environment.

·         There is a great quote from Steven levy which resonated to me – “essential lessons can be learned about systems – about the world – from taking things apart, seeing how they work, and using this knowledge to create new and even more interesting things”. I guess this is what copyright wants to restrict and what commons wants to promote.

·         In gaming, the development of the console meant that access to gaming was increased do the ease of economic and technical access it provided in comparison to expensive desktop computers. Thus took gaming to the everyday person and lessoned the barriers for entry. It was the point where gaming became popularized as they became artifacts of pop culture rather than of a misunderstood computing sub-culture. This popularization also commoditized them thus limiting their use by the audience for creative purposes.

·         After this developed a hacker culture of piracy in rebellion against game commodifcation, as in an online world the tool and methods to pirate materials was easily found and shared amongst communities online.

·         The gaming industry claimed massive losses in revenue. I disagree with this as gaming companies assume that each copy equates to a loss sale which would never be the case, thus the realistic figures would be much lower.  Pirate would have been unlikely to buy the game in the first place but they would be more likely to buy other title later as they become indoctrinated into gaming culture and it communities. There can be no doubt that there are losses due to piracy but there are also longer term gains for the industry as more people become involved and engaged. Trying to fight it may be problematic in that they may upset the culture on which they rely via bad word of mouth.

·         The games industry complacent in comparison to other media producers (film, music) as the industry emerged with piracy being a part of it and flourished despite its presence. Thus I think it could be said that piracy is a part of gaming culture that was not present in other media as they were previously analog media, when they were digitized these digital culture converged and piracy flourished a community where it was previously restricted by the distribution methods and thus unprepared for ho digitization would affect their business model.

·         Abandonware – where aging games go out of circulation. This to me seems to be a form of cultural curation as these games are like books written in a lost language (operating systems) thus need to be remediated for access by following generations.

·         For a commons to survive however it would have to also produce its own original materials rather than just rely on commercial remediation’s to grab user attention via new material.

·         Game modding is remediation of existing commercial products where new characters, skins, weapons, scenarios, levels and missions are created using an existing game engine.

·         Pirates want free games – Modders want to expand existing games.

·         Modding means games are easily recyclable for different cultural contexts and thus can hold an audience’s attention for longer periods as the game content is constantly renewed and recontextualised for the audience. Game producers now commonly give consumers the tools to do this to maintain their engagement with the games they produce over longer periods of time.

·         This convergence of users and producers also causes issues where IP right converge in remediation’s created by users as seen in the Quake ‘Aliens vs. Predators’ example in the reading where the creators of quake did not have permission to use the aliens or predator characters in the user driven content. I see this as a possible tactic by game producers to grab attention away from other media and attract a wider audience even if only for a short period of time and involve them within their particular community even if it is against IP restrictions.

·         The next remediation of games example given was that of Machinima which are movies made by filming game action with new voices and music placed into the footage and usually are seen to increase the cultural cache of the film. However these remediation’s can also damage the brand if they create messages going against the desired message of the original material allowing for culture jamming and hackivism.

·         However games are now being designed specifically to promote participatory culture within and thus the value of the media created by fans increase as commercial interest actually rely upon for ongoing success. Perhaps this model is something that other medias such as music and film could look at in order to reengage for effectively with fan bases and get them to more actively participate in the cultures they are consuming.

·         MMOGs are online gaming worlds which allow players to interact with persistent virtual environments.

·         MMOGs are commercially viable, not through the singular purchase of the game, but through the ongoing monthly subscriptions of their user bases as seen with the 11.5 million users of WoW who spend $15USd a month in subscriptions.

·         In MMOGs the game designers are the regulators of behaviors, social rules and institutions with the virtual world. Rules such as then seem to need to develop with the game as part of a collective intelligence of the user base to promote better game play as within virtual worlds it is the users who determine happens within them – not the creators of the game – as there is no set narrative to follow, players create the narrative.

·         This can be seen by some as free labour, as with YouTube, where the participants are creating the content which draws in more participants and the producers if the games are the sole profit from it. Unlike YouTube there is no mechanism like adverts etc for users to make money from the game of WoW. Thus MMOGs can be seen as co-creators of player communities and corporate game developers.

·         The actions within these games can also lead to social discussions and solutions where the collective intelligence of the players leads to real world social solutions and thus is another sign of media convergence between offline and online worlds.

·         Economics also converge with MMOGs where in game items are saleable in offline spaces for real world cash – separate from the virtual world.  Some people say this is unfair but I don’t know why players can’t buy right to materials like they would in the offline world.

·         In comparison open game designs allow players to maintain copyright within the virtual world and make money from them to encourage user driven content in the virtual space.

·         Copyright has replaced the collective traditions of an oral culture with rights for authors and publishers to whom these rights were sold.

·         However is an era of easy desktop creation with lowered barriers to entry, easy copying and networked circulation the line between produce and consumer is blurred and the issue of copyright can be seen as restrictive in a participatory culture driven by east access to media creating technologies.

REJECTIONISTS

·         Represented by media corporations

·         They see commons as threat to growth via IP violations

·         Desire to minimize this threat via production, surveillance, enforcement of user license agreements.

REFORMERS

·         Accommodate middle ground between commons and capital

·         Creative commons propose a formal assimilation between sources, users and adapters

·         As the games industry is the first entirely computer based entertainment industry it may be in a position to pioneer user rights negations for modders, artists and players as value adding partners to commercial industry.

RADICALS

·         IP conflicts signal a digital socialization of production incompatible with commodity exchange.

·         Commons logic as a yet to emerge “commonist” mode of production free of many IP conflicts present in wider digital culture.

Ornebring, H. (2007). Alternate Reality Gaming and convergence culture: The case of Alias. International Journal of Cultural Studies 10(4), 445-462.

·         ARGs are an internet game in which consumers are placed in a fictional world and engage in collective problem solving.

·         ARGs are games which use seemingly real world links to create an expanded narrative for a central story, such as seen with the TV series Alias where fans went to related external websites which contained clues to a developing background narrative to the TV program which cascaded across many websites, and the TV show itself, to give users a trail of clues to build the story. As McGonigal describes they are “interactive dramas played out in online spaces” that can take place over a number of weeks or months and require social networks to collectively solve the problems and move the narrative forwards. I have not heard or participated in these before so this was an interesting gaming genre and something that I would probably want to become a part of in the future as I would find it extremely engaging.

·         There are also grassroots ARGs develop by fan groups that would only be possible through the social networks capabilities of the internet. These seem to me a fan fiction remediation as discussed my Helen Merrick earlier in Med104.

·         ARGs are an example of media convergence, cross media entertainment and transmedia story telling. It is clear they are indicative of a wider media convergence facilitated by participatory culture and collective intelligence.

·         Jenkins says ARGs are indicative of a “convergence culture” and that the internet has created a media centrality  for circulation of tests across many media platforms, and that participants are important in  the convergence as it is they who interact, share and remediate this content with different cultural contexts as seen in vidding culture and in this case grassroots ARGS.

·         Films such as the Matrix formed narratives across many different medias such as games, short films, comics to build a larger richer narrative that that possible in the media of film. These pieces of media help build the overall narrative but also stand in the I own right as pieces of meaningful media. The matrix is thus a transmedia text where each part builds to overall narrative.

·         I agree with point Ornebring next makes about transmediation being a marketing tool used to promote other saleable media. From my point of view I see media such as the clone wars cartoon series from Star Wars as an example of this, as to be the associated star wars novels and computer games which are all designed to build back ground narratives and frameworks to the star wars universe. Star wars also much fan created content intended to build these background narratives in the form of artwork, videos and the collaborative ‘wookiepedia’.

·         Do ARGs blur the line between producer and consumer in a participatory culture? Ornebring seems to concede the positives present in ARGs such as socialized collective intelligences but argues that to ignore the marketing aspects present in ARGs is a mistake. I think these marketing concerns Ornebring has are over stated as I think most media is designed to grab consumer attention and in trying to achieve this is using marketing strategies. It is what effective media creations need to do to attract audience attention in an era of media abundance and thus the monetizing of this is a natural process in a competitive attention economy where viral marketing acts a recommendation system.

·         These thus also allow for hacktivism and culture jamming using these same attention grabbing strategies to remediate effective online media to tell another point of view which is why I do not agree with Orbebrings marketing angle.

·         Fan culture (grassroots) exists between commercial and non-commercial concerns as it is both creative and derivative, celebrating consumerism whilst also being a non-official method of consumption striving to hold true to the original source material as a way of paying homage to the creators whilst building a recognizable sub-culture.

·         This is why media is now made with specially design gaps in narrative for Fan culture to interact and develop new narrative ideas and why fan-produced and industry produced ARGs seem to form the same cultural function of build the narrative of an existing media brand.

·         Fan based ARGs actually are representative of genuine user driven creativity as they rely on a bare minimum of content from the original due to IP restraints that drive them to develop new characters and narratives that are faithful to, and relate back to, the original. This remediation of a industry created media theme seem akin to the re-telling of folk stories in past, passing along cultural information – this is due to the strong sense of owner ship over the content the consume and produce.

·         Overall I think the conclusions made can be questioned as they a drawn from an examination of too few ARGs which makes the information slightly less useful as an indicative examination of the subject. The paper focus almost solely on the ARGs derived from the Television show Alias. Thus the subject obviously warrants more study. The other issue I have with the analysis within this paper is that I think it would have been better to act as a participant observer within an active ARG rather than use analyzes ARGS retrospectively where some data is missing so it is impossible to get a clear picture of the ARG experience.

·         In reflection I think ARGs extend the narrative beyond that of the original source material to maintain brand integrity and acts as pleasurable forms of media that sit in-between game and film in the case of alias, which act to engages fans more deeply through active participation within online fan communities.

·         Games are a significant aspect of digital media but in an online world also show significant aspects of our culture. They will show both the positive and negative aspects of our culture and also allow us to politically, economically, socially and culturally reflect within such games.

·         World of Warcraft (WoW) has a subscription base of 11.5 million people who pay $15USD a month. This highlights the massive economic concerns within gaming media.

·         In comparison to games, movies as a media have a defined end point whilst gaming media is an ongoing involvement by the consumer, both within the game and other overflows media such and books, music, clothing, toys, cards, calendars, phone apps. Games can more commonly be played on the move thus freeing consumers from the constraints of time and space.

·         Fan bases can also construct their own media remediating and networking around games such as WoW and also affects mainstream media such as broadcast TV where WoW has been seen in shows such as South Park, in music clips. This demonstrates the convergence of media, discourses and cultures.

·         Feedback loops are formed where fan created content inspired by the original game affects the development of the original media forming a media feedback loop. This encourages further fan engagement as they see that they can have a meaningful affect on the media they are a fan of, unlike push media model which are a one-way communicative process,

·         Games are commercial media products which are consumed on a global scale free of the effects of the digital divide as they are also free of time and regional media restrictions unlike old media models where film, TV and music content is released in different time periods.

·         With gaming being a bigger industry than the movie industry one cultural issue within gaming is the dominance of men in the creation of the media. When considering this against the size and scope of the gaming industry and its cultural reach there is a clear cultural imbalance which needs to be addressed so it reflective of true society.

·         Open design games are ones in which the users can alter the world they play ion such as second life.

·         Closed designed games are those in which users cannot alter the world they play in such as WoW which is a highly regulated game space that has strict social and cultural guidelines for users.

·         These two designs create different user experiences and cultural results.

·         Commercialization of games. In WoW anything done within the realms of the game are owned by its creators, chat discussions, everything so they can maintain regulation of the economy, play experience, fairness etc. In open design games players maintain ownership over their creations as they would in real life and so is a much more realistic convergence.

·         Scarcity gives value within gaming worlds online and also in the offline real world. Thus economics online and offline converge in these cases as value is created out of scarcity.

·         Time is scarce in game play as it take time to build value to progress, thus “gold farmers “ who will save this time add value to these game spaces and generate real world money as people pay for this commodity with these virtual spaces. “Time is Money”

·         Authenticity of the world is important part of the player experience so that they feel an even playing field for all. Without the sense of fairness virtual world breakdown and player migrate to new games and communities.

·         Convergence of offline and online worlds can be found as result of gaming. Marriages, murders, funerals as a result of online game play all raise ethical questions in the real world that leads to critical analysis that a distinction between the two can longer be made as people increasing interact with online digital media and the communities that forma round them.