First draft – please do not quote or distribute

Paper

Nordisk Medieforskerkonference Helsinki 16-19 august 2007

Workshop: Computer Games

Professor Nukem - communicating research in the age of the experience economy

Kjetil Sandvik

MA, ph.d. assistant professor,Film and Media Studies Section, Dept. ofMedia, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen, Phone: +45 3532 8119, Mobile: +45 2494 4770, E-mail:

Anne Mette Thorhauge

MA, ph.d. post doc, Film and Media Studies Section, Dept. ofMedia, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen, Phone: +45 3532 8133, Mobile: +45 6127 2097, E-mail:

Abstract

The experience economy, that is, the creative and communicative turn in today’s social, cultural and economic structures implies, as explained by Pine and Gilmour (1999), that consume is embedded in a communicational format that conveys some kind of experience to the consumer. The consumer in turn becomes more than just a passive user - she becomes an active participant in the experiential/communicational design. As such the mode of consume in the experience economy is an interactive and play-centric one. And the computer game embodies the very core logic of this experience economy. In the experience economy focus is not on consume of commodities and services, but on the consumer’s engagement in an experience which uses products, services and information as props and creative tools. Using the user-centered mode of consume as our point of departure, this paper examines how the computer game format may be used as a new tool for communicating academic research to a broader audience. By applying some findings from a recent project, we will focus on the ways academic research may be communicated in a format that makes the recipient take part in the process of communication and acquiring knowledge. This may include different elements of the academic process such as asking questions, posing hypothesis, working with complex and conflicting subject matters. Thus, this model for communicating academic research positions the recipient as an active participant in the communicational process and provides communicating academic research with an experiential dimension.

Professor Nukemis an experiment on the use of games in the communication of research about computer games. It is done in a relatively simple way by combining elements from two classical (computer) game genres: The quiz and the 1st person shooter. In the game, the player is confronted with an opponent in the form of a prejudice about computer games and graphically displayed as a monster. To beat the opponent the player has to choose a weapon in the form of a counter-argument. There are more counter-arguments to choose between and the player has to select the right one, that is, the one based on scientific inquiries and reports. Accordingly, this initial sequence has a classical quiz-structure and it is followed up with a sequence that has more in common with the shooter. In this sequence the player has to use her weapon to shoot the opponent. It has an evaluating function with regard to the quiz sequence as the player’s chances of overcoming the opponent depend on the choice of weapon. If the opponent loses life when hit the right weapon has been chosen if this is not the case the wrong weapon has been chosen. If this happens the player has the opportunity to put the game on hold and choose among the other alternatives. The shooting sequence ends as the player or the opponent runs out of life and it is followed up with an explanation that clarifies why a given counter-argument is right or wrong. These explanations represent the primary knowledge-content that is to be communicated in the game and they can also be found in the game’s “walkthrough” at the website.

Computer games and the experience economy

Using the experience economical user-centered mode of consume as our point of departure, Professor Nukem was an experiment on how the computer game format may be used as a new tool for communicating academic research to a broader audience. The project’s main focus was on the ways academic research may be communicated in a format that makes the recipient take part in the process of communication and acquiring knowledge.

The experience economy may be defined as an economy based on an increasing demand in today’s society for experience and which is building on the value of consumer creativity applied to both new and more traditional products and services. Computer games are characterized by a basic principle in the experience economy (see Arvidsson & Sandvik, 2007): the implementation of the consumer (which in this context rather must be termed user or player) as creative and productive agent in the economical circuit. Thus computer games illustrate thus the core logic of the experience economy in which focus no longer is on consumption of goods and services but rather the engagement of the consumer in an experience in which goods and services are used as props and staging tools (Pine & Gilmor, 1999) and which is characterized by mediatization of both production, marketing and consumption of experiences. Especially the digital technology – computer, mobile phones, internet – constitute new experience economical arenas in which goods and services are embedded in digitally mediated and mediatized experiences in which the consumer may be engaged and involved, often via several media platforms.

As Pine and Gilmor points out in their bookThe Experience Economy (in which the concept is introduced for the first time) experiences as mode of consumption is no so much about entertaining as it is about engaging the consumer, which may take place on different levels of participation. But regardless the level of participation designing experiences is about scripting structures of actions and events which are open-ended in order to make room for consumer participation. Computer games are characterized by this logic: the consumer (the player) is participating in a way that contributes to the very experience the computer game has to offer. As such computer games present themselves as performative in that they position the players as active subjects who have to take action in order produce and perceive the game experience.

The centrality of the computer game to the experience economy as cultural paradigm is evidenced by the spectacular rise in the size of the computer games industry (by now outstripping that of the film industry), by the dominant status of computer game aesthetics in films like The Matrix, Lola Rennt, Timecode,eXistenZ, andEternal Sunshine in a Beautiful Mind, by the computer game’s importance to military applications like flight simulators and other types of computer-based training systems, and by the general “conflation and confusion of war and game” that has lead to “the development and proliferation of wargaming in the United States’ defense and foreign policies” (Der Derian 2003, p. 38). But this paradigmatic status is also and perhaps primarily illustrated by the technological form of the game medium itself.

First, computer games are part of the contemporary process of mediatization by means of which new spatial and temporal dimensions of life are opened up for commoditization. This is particularly clear when the computer game spreads from the PC or the game console (PlayStation, Xbox and so on) to other technological platforms (the portable console, the cell phone or the PDA, or – even more significant – to the Internet) that make gaming possible in a much wider and more diverse range of situations, or when, as in the case of Electronic Arts’ adventure game Majestic, the gameplay includes taking clues from mysterious midnight phone calls, anonymous e-mails and faxes, and fake websites[1]. In these cases, the game platform tends to coincide with the contours of the life-world itself.

Second, computer games make user agency contribute to the production of the very experience that they offer, and ultimately, a substantial share of the value of the game-commodity. In short, computer games are performative, they position their users (that is, the players) as active subjects that must act in order to forward the gameplay. The performative aspect of gameplay is constituted by the fact that the player’s reception and interpretations produce the game fiction. The game evolves in the sense that these user interpretations constantly make re-entries into the game fiction enabling further player actions. Furthermore, computer games are operational in the sense that they create a more or less complete media environment in which that action can unfold and be pre-structured to varying degrees.

These two central components of the technological form of the computer game - the activation of users and the creation of artificial operational environments - are neither separate phenomena, nor unique to computer games. Instead, they mark contemporary media culture and experience economy in general, where they are intrinsically linked. The mediatization of the life-world, the creation of mediatic environments of action (or we may say: play), is directly connected to the promotion of user agency and is encouraged by the primary media technology – the computer – at work. As interactive media, the computer (in all its forms and shapes) facilitates communication processes that differ from traditional one-way formats, in that the user has to take action in order to keep the communication going. This is particularly the case when it comes to the interplay between the user and the fictional universe of the computer game. As Pearce (2002) points out, the computer as a dynamic two-way medium makes it possible for game designers to create a “new narrative ideology” in which the designer creates a narrative framework for the players’ own game-stories. He or she does not simply function as a storyteller in the traditional sense. This becomes particularly clear when it comes to so-called Massively Multiuser Online Role-playing Games (MMORPGs). These games, according to Pearce, include both a meta-story in the shape of a pre-designed fiction world that contains a variety of story-lines structured in a progressive form like a series of missions for the players to engage in, implying that the players attain higher levels of experience, and a story-system which enables the players to develop their own game stories in a variety of events and campaigns initiated by game clans within the framework of this world. What we have here is a kind of user agency that is constituted by collective, collaborative and improvisational story-production. It develops and evolves in realtime for the players who are logged on to the game. This ‘realtime-ness’ enables a blurring of the line between the fictitious world of the game and the world of the player, thus making the game transgress into the player’s life-world where social activities and communities are mediatized by means of chat channels, blogs, and clan websites related to the game.

Computer games’ educational potential

Using the experience economy as a cultural paradigm and how computer games embody its core logic, we will in the following put forward some thoughts on the educational potential in computer games which is of importance to how computer games may be used as a participation-oriented way of communicating knowledge. We will do so by focusing on computer games in a cultural and historical perspective, according to modern theory of pedagogy, as part of children’s culture (dealing with some prejudices and misconceptions), and finally computer games regarded as role-play.

Our point of departure will be an obvious yet important point: Computer games are games and thus related to play and games in a broader sense. When analyzing the educational potential of computer games we can start of with examining the role of games through out our history. In a cultural and historical perspective games have never played a role as just fun and entertainment (see Huizinga, 1963). The value of games has been both religious, political and pedagogical. In ancient Greece games had a religious value in confirming and describing the cosmology; the relationship between gods and humans. The political value was that games created the very space and format for political debate which constituted democracy (and at the same time had a practical-political dimension in the way that different games of contest and combat where used in e.g. the selection and training of the state’s soldiers). And finally: in a pedagogical sense games were playing an important role in the upbringing of children and cultivation of the population. The point is that games have not just been a part of the field of entertainment and leisure time activities nor limited to childhood activities.

Still, the invention of childhood in the 1700s has had an important impact on how we regard play and game (see Egenfeldt-Nielsen & Smith, 2000). Play and games got ‘colonialized and monopolized’ by children and were increasingly regarded as something children do and something that plays a role in their socialization: Play and game became means for training children’s ability to form social relations, and later on a cognitive-psychological perspective is added. Play and games are training children’s cognitive competences, as Jean Piaget points out (see Piaget, 1976): Play and games are training:

1. Areas of development: Senso-motoric, symbolic, concrete operations and formal operations.

2. Fundamental cognitive competences: Concentration, memory, perception, motoric, spatial, visual, analysis, coordination and creation of concepts.

3. Level of synthesis: Problem-solving, making priorities and combinations.

4. Level of knowledge: language, knowledge of history, names, places, math, reading, writing and so on.

Piaget puts forth three categories of play – play of function, play of symbols and play of rules – which exercises these competences in different ways. One of the credos of the cognitive psychology is that play is not just controlled by our instincts: it has to be learned and stimulated from the outside, as a stimulus for further learning. While play of function is aimed at developing knowledge about the world and play of rules is aimed at understanding as well as perceiving already fixed codes, the play of symbol (or the role-play) is a kind of play which teaches the child to conceptualize the world and to abstract its thoughts.

The role-play is a collective play in which the child not only sets up the rules and creates the frame of fiction inside which the child can play (see Krøgholt, 2001). The child also observe this framework and negotiates the rules during the course of the play and this playing with the rules plays an important role in the socializing as well as creative function of the play: It exemplifies how the child teaches itself to learn. At the same time as these rules frames the play they also have a creative function: The play becomes an oscillating movement between respecting the rules and commenting and negotiating them, and this playing with the rules, with the context of the play constitutes a level in the play which generates more play.

Piaget’s findings have had great impact on modern theory of pedagogy and different learning theories which proposes that we should regard learning as a) complex processes, based on b) construction of knowledge, which are c) taking place across different contexts, d) placing the child in the centre, and which e) primary modes are a combination between ‘learning by doing’ and ‘learning by reflection’ (see Sørensen, 2005). We will return to how these characteristics relates to computer games in an educational perspective later on.

However, one of the main obstacles for introducing computer games into the field of education seems to be the prejudices and misconceptions still flourishing around the computer game phenomenon (see Sandvik, 2006a). Even though computer games have grown to be one of the largest fields within today’s culture, computer games are often regarded with skepticism and debates on computer games often seem to evolve around questions about whether computer games have possible damaging effects on their users. This debate – led by politicians along-side scientists within the field of education and psychology as well as parent’s organizations, religious organizations and so on and fueled by news media being eager to reproduce dubious scientific and psychological studies claiming that computer games create violent behavior and are as addictive as narcotics – often depicts computer games as trashy entertainment which at best is of no value and which at worst may have damaging effects on its users. However, this is a misconception: It is an illusion to believe that violent computer games exclusively are played by lonely boys in dark basements (see Jessen, 2000). Children’s use of computer games is far more complex than usually anticipated and computer games thus play an extensive social role. Playing games covers a variety of different activities all of which may evolve around the game even though playing the game itself is just one activity while others concerns competition, exploration, exchanging of knowledge and so on. Thus the game experience – playing the game – contains much more than just the player’s interaction with the game universe, and in this light, computer games may be regarded as good tools for creating spheres in which social fellowship and play may emerge and where pedagogical processes may take place. Computer games are always part of a larger media circuit (see Thorhauge, 2004): Computer games encourage different types of play which again may encourage creative production or storytelling, which is why it is useful when evaluating computer games and their impact on children and young people as well as their educational potential to regard them as just a small part of a greater whole, and if we want to understand their importance, we need to consider the whole situation. The main point here is that use of media always is enclosed in a context in which the media is being used for different purposes like for instance a basis for personal reflections, creativity and, in the case of children, as a starting point for larger play communities and further play.