208B: Blog Assignment 2, this week readings

I'm posting all of this in an extended entry because it was quite long... you'll have to exit your feed reader to get the goods... sorry.

Blog Assignment 2

Assignment: Use key concepts from the readings to analyze the information model, cultural dynamics and/or dramaturgy of an MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role playing game) such as SIMS, Counterstrike, Evequest, There!, etc. If you are not familiar with any MMORPG, please explore one. There! has a free trial from http://www.there.com (requires a Windows box).

Logistical note: we really need more of an idea about what readings should be done by when. The syllabus has few dates around where we're at and a few dedicated students read the "presentation of self" stuff already. (Unless that's what was supposed to happen)

I tried exploring a MMORPG (is there a particularly phonetic way of saying that out-loud?)... unfortunately, I couldn't find a Mac-friendly MMORPG that had a free trial (I'm home sick... no PC to play with). I also sympathize with Carolyn's comment on Dave's blog about not particularly liking games that force you to talk to strangers. That's too bad, I wanted to test one out to be a sport... I guess I'll have to attempt to do this assignment from my recollection of a game I played this past Christmas vacation. It was "Grand Theft Auto: Vice City". (Note: this isn't a MMO-like RPG... it's a first-person shooter against computer algorithms... so I broke the social networking part, sorry).

First, a brief description of the game... you are a (male) car thief (like in all of the Grand Theft Auto games I believe). In fact, this is so much a part of your being that there's even a special button on the controller precisely for this... that is, you press the Playstation's X button, and, when near a car you will open the door, grab the occupant, throw them out of the car and get in the car. I don't quite remember what the objective of the game was... it seemed like you had these missions you had to complete involving gang warfare, car stealing, drug dealing and all-around killing mofos.

The Information Model: The screen is mostly devoted to what a camera-crew would see if they were following you... very much like COPS but not so much at night with floodlights. The only things on the screen besides the normal view is your "life" and your "wanted" level... if your "life" goes down, you die... if you're crazy as all hell and do a lot of illegal stuff, your "wanted" level goes up until you've got what seems like the entire Miami PD after your ass. As well, certain signals pop-up from time to time to signal something important: a huge red 3D arrow pointing to a punk indicating that you've got him in the sights of your Glock, or a "target" that you drive over to complete/start/complicate your mission.

The normal senses that you don't have are either gone (smell, taste) or made-up for in other ways (feeling, hearing). In terms of hearing, you often can tell the cops are close to you by how loud their syrens are (unless you've got the radio in your stolen car turned all the way up... which has a number of unique channels). In terms of feeling, you have an inventory menu that tells you all the insane weapons you're carrying (everyone with a bazooka looks completely normal in a 3-piece suit!) and provides a map of the City.

Cultural Dynamics: The cultural dynamics of this game are funny... they try to replicate a city pretty well. People will talk to you in their "lingo" according to their class. However, there are some culturally dynamical quirks that go so far as to cause protests in meatspace (the physical world). That last link was to a protest to one of the Grand Theft Auto: Vice City missions... where you have to "kill all the hatians" to get to the next level. The gansters of this country have yet to rise up in arms against little mini-missions where you're instructed to "kill as many gansters in the next 60 seconds as you can for a bonus". Naturally, the smart folk wip out the automatic weapons, grenades and bazooka... It's interesting that you can steal a car from almost anyone in this game... even the cops. However, some cars are harder to steal than others... the tougher the car (usually) the tougher the driver. But you can always cap their ass and take it anyway.

Dramaturgy: Well, you frequently have to act like an accomplished, very-rich (you have mansions) car thief. That is, you have to think like this kind of person to get ahead. For example, having trouble getting past a certain level/mission? Well, little did you know that the mission cannot be accomplished without using your gang members as human shields (hide behind them). It's also interesting how you start to love the .50 caliber sniper rifle... what I mean here is that most people are a lot more dangerous up close... if you can learn to shoot them in the head from a couple blocks away, then run away before the cops get there, you'll go far. The weird part about the dramaturgy of this game is that you actually start to think like this when you try to win the game... that is, you have your idea of who this guy running around stealing cars and killing people is. But that is consistently shattered by these little vignettes that happen periodically where your character (god forbid) actually talks, walks and acts like some designer intended a "professional car thief".

Readings for this week:

Yates and Orlikowski:
I hate the word structurational. It's dumb. But I get why it's important.

You know, I'm not so sure that there's anything all that novel or complex in this article. The idea of a genre of communication... that is, methods of communication change in time and form (physical and content-related) doesn't seem particularly novel. Peter says (his blog seems to now work),

Clearly there are a number of new genres emerging (like blogging) that are developing into genres and we'll want to be able to discuss how medium and culture are interacting. This article is an example of the way organizational theory analyzes online cultures.

Hmmm... so in the sense that Y&O proposed a diachronic network-theory typologoy for communication, it is interesting. So what do we do with it? They recommend examining how charateristics of genres spread (as in blogging) or are inherited as well as examining historical changes in genres. Cool...

Geertz:
You've got to love this article. It is a great illustration of how different cultures can be... I was really suprised how infused with norms Bali cock-fighting is (Beavis... heh, heh, he said cock). To think that you're supposed to bet with family and hometown! This is much different from Vegas, for example, where money rules... and family has been known to stab each other in the back here in the U.S. over gambling (not that this has happened to me).

Laurel:
This was more of a curiousity to me than anything else... not being a UI designer, I haven't been exposed to a lot of that. I do find it fascinating that one can take ideas from dramaturgy and apply them to design. Such an easy leap, but such stark consequences. I can't tell you how much I hated clippy and how hard to turn off he seemed. That in itself was enough for me to buy a Mac... why? Because he assumed I always needed help and way always there. It should have been more like an accomplished butler.

Salen & Zimmerman:
This was damn wicked. Right up my alley. I like to see everything in terms of signal to noise. This is what astronomy is all about and we spend days at a time calulating the signal-to-noise ratio of images we're going to take with respect to science we want to do. It's interesting to see that people (like Shane) think that noise is a very important part of playing games... especially that introduced by human players on the other side of the screen. It's interesting how well signal is dealt with in games compared to other types of computer software. UI peeps: are games just traditionally better at UI design? A notable exception: Sim city. That game was hard for me to figure out at first (when I was like 14)... it didn't read the directions and it was hard to tell exactly what was going on... some residential neighborhoods got better (taller) and some got shorter and less-detailed... then I learned that this was the pixelized version of a ghetto.

Posted by joebeone at Marzo 31, 2004 05:00 PM