Now is your chance to become a part of this blog!

We have always been excited about inviting in new contributors. With that said, we are starting a new push to bring in some fresh ideas and new perspectives. The blog has lost a little steam and I think the best way to move forward is to get some new folks in here who care about games and the past to kick things off again.

The Mushroom Kingdom Needs you, as does Play the Past. Image from Mario Propaganda Posters.

Who Should Blog for Play the Past?

Anybody who wants to write about some aspect of history and the past (broadly construed) in games (broadly defined). Currently we all have an academic bent and humanities backgrounds. Some of us are graduate students, some are professors, some are K-12 teachers, a few of us work at Libraries and Museums. With that said, I would love to have folks get into this from different areas of interest and approaches. For example, social or computer scientists, game developers or writers, folks deep into modding communities, etc.

The only hard and fast requirements are:

1. That you are  interested in games and the past
2. That you have interesting things to say about games and the past and can put them into engaging blog posts
3. That you aren’t a jerk, and are excited to be part of an environment characterized by generosity, creativity, and (as corny as it might sound) kindness

Why Blog for Play the Past?

1. People will read your work: Over the last year Play the Past has gotten between 4,000 to 13,000 unique page views a month. Those are great numbers for something as arcane as a bunch of historians, archaeologists, anthropologists and classicists opining about history and video games.
2. People will talk about your work: There are a lot of great comment threads on many of the Play the Past posts. This is a great place to workshop your writing.
3. You own your work: You don’t get paid, but aside from being cool with letting your posts live here on the site you own anything and everything about work you put here.
4. This is a great place to hone your writing: Many of the authors have used Play the Past as a platform for incrementally and iteratively building essays for journal articles or book chapters.
5. Becoming a better writer is about the habit of writing: I’ve found that putting an idea on the calendar and forcing myself to come up with 300-1000 words on it is a great technique for pushing me to work things up and push them out there. Being a regular contributor is a great way to get into the habit of writing and writing for an audiance that gives you feedback is one of the best ways to hone your craft.

Pitching for Play the Past

If you are interested in pitching posts to us here is a quick rundown;

• Send a 50 to 100 word pitch for a post to us on our contact page. Wait for us to get back to you with any input.
• Write your first post (something between 300 and 3500 words, make sure it has some pictures in it.)
• Send us your post and await some input/feedback
• If you do a few good guest posts for the blog we will then set you up with a regular slot. Ideally, we would like each blogger to be posting something once a month.

What’s Play the Past about again?

Collaboratively edited and authored, Play the Past is dedicated to thoughtfully exploring and discussing the intersection of cultural heritage (very broadly defined) and games/meaningful play (equally broadly defined). Play the Past contributors come from a wide variety of backgrounds, domains, perspectives, and motivations (for being interested in both games and cultural heritage). More information on all of our current contributors can be found here. A full rundown of our community and commenting policy can be found here. Sound like something you are interested in? If so, point your browser here and drop us a line.

• a course in which freshman composition students save the world by playing characters who have to travel in time to persuade the powers that be that penicillin is worthy of adoption
• a course in which high-school civics students save the world by playing kids who are fed up with their parents’ failure to do anything about the world’s problems
• a course in which middle-school financial literacy students save their futures by playing characters who have just graduated from college only to have their parents tell them that they’re cutting them off. 

Certain things have remained the same over the four years I’ve been lucky enough to attend GLS: the beer is ever fine and plentiful, the food always puts every other conference to shame, and the passion to get game-based learning right is evergreen, though the disagreements about how to do that also persist, and make the almost-always sunny days all the more invigorating.

Certain things have changed. The session-formats have been fine-tuned to provide more opportunity for pushing the work forward through conversation. An emphasis on off-the-shelf video games has (thankfully, to my mind) given way to an emphasis on Jim Gee’s founding purpose of understanding and putting to work what makes those games great.

Above all, for me, veterans’ eyes’ brightness at the unlimited potential of games for learning has given way to a narrowing of eyes, and focus, and much more talk of learning objectives and transfer. Gamification is still a big word here, but most often in collocations like “Beyond Gamification.” The Hall of Failure sessions appear to be here to stay, and this morning the amazing Constance Steinkuehler will be moderating a panel about meta-discussion of the field.

To encapsulate: the transfer problem persists. But we all have ideas to solve it, and we come to the shores of Lake Mendota to share, and to fight, and to drink. We’ll get it right. Just you wait and see.

First of all, the converse of this formulation implies that humanistic rulesets allow variation in practomimetic performance as a fundamental condition of their provision of humanistic affordances. If I’m right about the meanings of the words I just wrote, that translates to: stories and ongoing storytelling are an absolutely essential element of what humanities does.

Over the Epic Life series to this point, and in the Rules of the Text series before it, I have maintained that the basic activity of humanism is performance within humanistic rulesets, which performance creates new rulesets for subsequent performances. My twin models for this kind of iterative performance, which I have called the Great Chain of Practomime, are the epic tradition and the modern digital RPG. Bringing the discussion of knitting into line with those models may help clarify the relationship of immersion to flow. I’m thinking that if knitting is in some sense the ultimate example of flow, providing as it does a kind of paradigmatic absorption with which we can all identify, even if we’re not knitters ourselves, to isolate its non-narrativity (that is, to ask “Why, exactly, doesn’t knitting tell a story?”) may let us ask other, more interesting questions like “What are the parts of immersion that do tell a story?”

Three of the candidates, as Peter Christiansen really helpfully laid out in a couple of comments on my last post, are “realness,” (which Peter calls “immersion”), engagement, and presence. Note that Peter distinguishes those from immersion, while I describe them as essential parts of it; in the end, that may or may not simply be a question of semantics, where we agree to call what Peter calls “immersion” by a name like “realness” or “virtuality,” and use “immersion” for the juncture of immersion, engagement, and presence. Only further discussion can settle that sort of thing, and I welcome it!

That’s enough for a Wednesday after Memorial Day. Next time, drilling down to the essence of the question “Why, exactly, doesn’t knitting tell a story?” I’m pretty confident that that post will include one of my favorite things: a ridiculous thought-experiment providing conditions under which knitting would tell a story.

What is the relationship of immersion to flow?

By flow, I mean of course Cziksentmihalyian flow. There are a great many critics of games who take it for granted that “immersion” and “flow” are two terms for the same thing: a participant’s complete absorption in an activity. With regard to games and, as I’m sure you won’t be surprised to hear me say, aesthetic experience more generally, we can call it the absorption of the player in the ruleset.

After reading me (as I’m sure you did) describe immersion as the experience of having a fictional world replace the player’s real world, through identification with a ruleset, you also probably won’t be surprised to read me now declaring that while flow clearly has an important part to play in the function of immersion, immersion and flow are different experiences, and that my analysis suggests that it is possible to experience immersion without experiencing flow, and (note the important distinction coming up here) to experience flow without the immersive, fictional dimension of the experience being obvious, or even useful to talk about.

So the wonderful, classic example of knitting. (Yes, I know that wasn’t a complete sentence. When I do up the academic version, the sentence will magically develop a verb; I promise.)

Knitting has a ruleset, I’m sure you’ll agree: to make a scarf, the knitter is constrained in the choices s/he makes with his/her needles and yarn. The knitter experiences absorption, and a limited awareness of the “real world.”

(Knitting actually poses a significant problem to the idea of the flow “channel,” where difficulty increases over time, because expert knitters maintain absorption even after they’ve mastered the craft entirely; but Csiksentmihalyian flow, on my reading, doesn’t actually depend on the idea of increasing difficulty.)

But the ruleset of knitting is not a humanistic ruleset, and thus the <b>immersive</b> component of the experience of knitting is not determinative, or worth describing in humanistic terms. The ruleset of knitting is not humanistic because its narrative varies so little.

That’s where I’m putting my marker, for the next two weeks. Feel free to tell me that I’m wrong.

Identification and metaphor are the same thing, described from two perspectives, psychological and literary. When I identify with Quico’s transformation of the space of the favela in Papo & Yo, the imaginary “space” of my psyche (itself a metaphor, of course, since it’s all happening in my nervous system) becomes a metaphor for that transformation. To perform within a practomimetic ruleset is to allow the metaphors that make up your self to be progressively reshaped by those rules.

The connection between 1) immersion as identification, 2) mechanics as metaphor, and 3) epic life through an awareness of the rulesets we are playing lies in the way we can see the metaphoricity of well-designed mechanics as a guide to aesthetic operations like catharsis. Catharsis actually means “purification,” and Aristotle in fact invokes it as a metaphor himself, in his Poetics, when he writes of tragedy producing a purification of pity and fear.

With catharsis as an embedded part of the ruleset of a fictive peformance, as Vander Caballero has embedded it in the ruleset of Papo & Yo, playing a ruleset is a ritual of performance that gives our actions meaning in “real life” as metaphorical mechanics do in practomimes, and especially in games. “Especially in games,” in that in games we have the chance both to choose and to be deprived of choice by the game’s ruleset’s constraints, as embodied in its mechanics.

The easiest way to grasp the special way game-rulesets (as opposed to, say, novel-rulesets or tragedy rulesets, but not as opposed to the oral-epic-rulesets within which the Iliad and the Odyssey came into being, where the position of the bard is equivalent to that of the game-player) accomplish catharsis is to consider the matter contrafactually–why does Papo & Yo have to be a game? Papo & Yo has to be a game because it’s specifically about being forced to make choices that are complicit in terrible actions (which I’ll discuss in a moment, below the spoiler-warning). The alternative of, say, a textual narration in which we see a character forced to similar action would not implicate the reader, because the reader’s identification with the character, no matter how strong, would not include having to make that character take action, the most basic aspect of game-mechanics.

SPOILER-WARNING: the next paragraphs discuss the end of Papo & Yo.

The terrible actions referred to above follow the revelation that the shamanistic ritual is the game itself, rather than the meeting with the shaman that the game has promised: Quico reaches a mountain-peak, where the meanings of certain moments in the game are revealed, as referring metaphorically to Quico’s real life. The section that follows–the final section of the game–is crucially important for the understanding of the game’s cultural effect. The player, to finish the game, must repeatedly feed Monster alcohol, and dolls that represent the young girl who accompanied Quico through much of the game (only to be killed by Monster): the player, that is, must ritually acknowledge Caballero’s own complicity in his father’s terrible acts, as well as the player’s own inescapable complicity in the similar acts that occur around us every day, and which we do nothing, or too little, to prevent.

The player’s immersion–his or her identification with the game’s ruleset and so its transformation of the autobiographical material Caballero has metaphorized in it–here becomes an assumption of what might be called a ritual identity–the same sort of identity assumed by members of a community who participate in a ritual like a wedding or a graduation. The repetitive nature of the mechanic, together with the symbolic significance indicated just before on the mountaintop, and the game’s exegetic references to ritual purification, transform the player into a participant in the game’s ritual, within which Caballero enacts a version of his passage out of his father’s influence. The ritual genius of Papo & Yo is that that passage is at the same time deeply implicated in the guilt we all share for the unending brokenness of our world.

RM: The only standard Rule in the game’s Record (the history of the island during a particular game) in Dog Eat Dog is: “The (Native People) are inferior to the (Occupation people).” At what point during development did you decide to base every game’s internal history on this one underlying Rule? How have players reacted to this rule? 

LB: You know, Dog Eat Dog only really had two stages of development — before and after. I was working at a logistics firm, which is both constantly stressful and constantly boring, and playing indie roleplaying games with Chris Chinn and talking about race, and the whole thing just kind of developed in my head, and I basically wrote it down as one piece, much of it while I was at work. This was actually before Google Docs, and I had to look busy the whole time, so I actually wrote it all in a draft email to myself in my Gmail account, and then went home and took it out and put it in a word processor. So the very first draft of Dog Eat Dog had the First Rule in it. Of course, once I’d written and playtested it I ended up changing some things, and I rewrote most of it when it came time to actually publish. But the First Rule never changed. I think it’s really the core of the game — colonialism implies contempt. If you go to somebody else’s country and try to change things, even if you do it politely and nonviolently, it necessarily means you think you know better than they do how to run that country. Interestingly, very few people have ever commented on it. Maybe it’s too obviously the mission statement! The most common question I’ve gotten about it is that people want to be sure it’s opinion, not fact.

In the “Full Disclosure” section of Dog Eat Dog you mention that the game is mostly about the Occupation, despite the fact that more players are Natives and that each individual has his/her own traits. How does the tension between the power of the Occupation and number of the Natives typically play out, considering the rule of Native inferiority? 

I like to think of it as demonstrating privilege in action. Each Native, of course, will pursue their own agenda, whether it’s opposing the Occupation or working with them. But when they come into contact with the Occupation, the scene tends to end up being about what the Occupation is doing and thinking in response to the Natives, rather than what the Natives are actually doing. This exemplifies the institutional nature of privilege — everywhere you go, the story’s about you being there.

Part of the reason why you started creating this game was because you were unable to have a deep conversation with a relative about racism. Have you been able to play Dog Eat Dog with that relative? Has the game facilitated better conversations?

Actually, I haven’t! I wrote Dog Eat Dog because of my experiences growing up with an Irish-American father and a first-generation Filipino-American mother. As I started to come to terms with my racial identity it became clear to me that I didn’t really understand what my mother had gone through in order to come to America and raise a family — I got all the benefits of her decision but didn’t see the sacrifices. So Dog Eat Dog was part of my attempts to understand the issue. The trouble is, I only see my family maybe once a year at Christmas, so it’s tough for us to actually sit down and play it. But she’s read the book, and writing it helped me understand her strength and gave me the courage to ask her about her experiences, so in that way it’s definitely helped.

Since you met most of your Kickstarter stretch goals, there was a supplement shipped with the game, Asocena [named after a Filipino dish made from dog meat], filled with alternative scenarios. How did you collect and edit these? Have you heard from other players that have created their own scenarios since the game’s release? 

I actually collected most of the Asocena submissions from my own Kickstarter backers! Which seems like cheating now that I think about it. I directly contacted a few people who I knew would be interested, and of course dragged all my friends into writing scenarios, but some of the best entries in the book turned up from people I didn’t know at all before starting the Kickstarter. I just wrote an update asking if anybody would be interested in submitting something, and a lot of very talented people came out of the woodwork and sent amazing stuff in. There have been a few people since then who have written scenarios of their own – Hans Chung-Otterson of wearelostinplay.com wrote a very nice piece on G+ using it to explore debtorship, for example.

Do you have any reflections on the process of creating a Kickstarter now that almost a year has passed? 

I’m actually just writing up a whole postmortem for my blog on what I learned about running a Kickstarter and what I might do differently. I would probably say the key elements are:

• Running a Kickstarter is a full-time job with unique skill requirements of its own.
• Find the people you know who have a lot of Twitter followers and rely on them.
• It’s going to take longer than you think even after you have modified your thought process to take into account that it will take longer than you think.

What advice would you give to people who have never played Dog Eat Dog before but are interested in playing it as a meaningful learning experience?

The biggest thing I’d say is give it time to percolate. Just sit down and play the game normally, then schedule in an extra hour and have cookies or something and talk about it. The purpose of the game is to try to duplicate and share an experience, so the best thing you can do is let that experience breathe.

Is there anything else that you would like to share with Play the Past readers?

I’d love to namedrop the Allied Media Conference, a radical participatory media convention where I debuted Dog Eat Dog last year. My game was featured in the Imagining Better Futures through Play track, a section of the convention devoted specifically to the transformative power of games in creating new narratives. In fact, it was such a good experience that this year I joined up and am working myself to organize sessions and pick new games to feature! I highly recommend the trip to Detroit for people interested in the power of games to create change. We have a very exciting set of workshops planned and we’re about to start fundraising so that we can bring in some well-known radical and influential game designers and offer support to new designers who want to present their exciting new projects.

***

Thanks again to Liam Burke for answering these questions for Play the Past. For those who missed the the Kickstarter, Dog Eat Dog can be purchased on the Liwanag Press Website for $10 (.pdf) or $15 (physical copy).

From one perspective, that formulation may seem like a needlessly complicated way to say “Jane Austen fans look for a boyfriend like Mr. Darcy or a girlfriend like Elizabeth Bennet” or “Star Wars fans play starfighter-pilot.” When we consider, though, the relation of the player of a game, whose position vis-à-vis the ruleset of the game is crucially different from the position of a reader with respect to a book or a viewer with respect to a film, to this model of immersion, its usefulness quickly becomes clear: the fundamental activity of performance for the player of a game, like the fundamental activity of performance for the homeric bard, is reproducing the ruleset: the phenomenon of immersion, when described in terms of identification, gives us a way to describe how the player can be changed by the experience of playing.

To be sure, that sort of change (or the attempt to effect it) is a fundamental part of some games while having a vanishingly small role in others, just as the corresponding manipulation of immersion has a large scope in the Odyssey, where playing bard is a huge part of how Odysseus manipulates his identity and breaking immersion is part of how the epic works, and a very small one in the Iliad, where there are a couple of cool meta-fictional references, but nothing immersion-breaking. Games like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 can also often have sections like the famous “No Russian” level that do revolve around manipulating identifcation through immersion, but then fail entirely to work that manipulation up thematically so that in the end it matters to the cultural effect of the game.

And then there are games like Papo & Yo, where the manipulation of immersion is thematized from the mechanics that comprise the game’s basic metaphors, through the narrative mechanics that elaborate those metaphors as story, into the cultural and personal resonances that give the player the ability to reflect upon his or her own immersion, and how that immersion may or may not have changed him or her. I’ll begin to try to describe that manipulation in this post and, I hope, finish the description in my next.

In Papo & Yo, the player controls the movements and certain of the actions of a boy named Quico, whom the player first meets in a small closet, hiding from his abusive alcoholic father. Quico’s skin is of a shade that indicates that his heritage is mixed European/South American, especially as compared to his father’s skin color, which would appear clearly European. The player controls Quico’s movements, and can by pushing and pulling also manipulate the environment in a magical way, as prompted by glowing white lines in forms evocative of South American tribal art. By having Quico manipulate the environment this way, the player makes it possible for Quico to escape from the closet and, as the game-performance proceeds, to travel to places that would realistically be impossible to reach and to do non-realistic, magical things with respect to the rest of the game’s ruleset, like trapping the metaphorical representation of Quico’s father, Monster, and squeezing the rage out of him.

Monster, by turns somnolent, hungry for bananas, and, when intoxicated on poison frogs, intractably enraged and violent until Quico gives him a rotten coconut, lies at the center of the game’s ruleset, whether we consider that “ruleset” as only involving the things we traditionally think of as game-mechanics (for example, when I have Quico open the pipe, a poison frog jumps out, which Monster will eventually eat, meaning that I have only a few seconds to throw said frog against a wall before it becomes impossible to do anything but give Monster a rotten coconut and start the cycle again) or as including the thematic elements of the narrative performance in which the player is engaged (for the most important example, I move Quico through the gameworld towards the objective, stated by my companion, a young girl, of finding a shaman who can remove the curse from Monster).

The name of the game, too, means “Dad and I.”

The essence of my reading is the importance of seeing the player’s identification not only with Quico but with the game’s ruleset as a whole as crucial to understanding the game’s cultural effect–what it does to us and for us, in our lives in culture–the game’s meaning, if you will.

The way immersion works in Papo & Yo is through the metaphoricity of the game’s mechanics: the player’s reality is replaced with the magical reality of the game’s ruleset because that magical reality represents the freedom that seems to the player to spring from the basic interactivity of the game: I can manipulate the controller in such a way as to move the favela around so that Quico can continue his quest for escape from the curse that represents his father’s terrible abusiveness.

Manipulating the landscape isn’t simply a way to move Quico around the screen; it’s a representation of the manipulation we are at the same time effecting in our own psyches by opening new paths for Quico towards the hypothetical expiation. Quico stands for the player, but so do the buildings he moves around, for it is Quico’s inner landscape that the player is actually moving.

This aspect of the game’s ruleset becomes fully apparent at the end, when it is revealed that each of the main sections of the game has been a representation of a real moment in the life of Quico with his father: the game’s power to offer an immersive substitute-reality to the player has stemmed from its metaphorical transformation of a psychic life with which every player is inivted to identify, since these iconic moments are powerful precisely through their capacity to be grasped by the player as the kind of terrible childhood we know from the world around us, even if we are lucky enough to avoid such moments in our own life.

The texture of those moments, representing Quico’s and our psychic realities, however, is what makes Papo & Yo into the kind of practomimetic ruleset I’m interested in reading here as an example of how seeing immersion as arising in identification can help us live more epically. The texture is ritualistic, and in my next post I describe how the game itself embodies an expiatory ritual, and turns its manipulation of immersion into an expiation for the player, in which, through that very manipulation, the player can expiate his or her own curses in an ineluctable partnership with Papo & Yo‘s designer, Vander Caballero.

More importantly, though, digital games have in the last 20 years, largely without it being noticed, raised that manipulation to the status of a defining element of the performances they enable. The deficiency in my opinion of previous attempts to describe immersion has been that those attempts have not taken into account this potential for manipulation. Either something is immersive or it isn’t, according to these previous treatments, and if one part of a ruleset is immersive and another part isn’t, the relationship between those two parts isn’t given artistic weight, but instead is usually considered a fault in the ruleset’s design.

The relationship between immersion and interactivity has been fairly well described, especially by Ryan, but, again, without note of the potential for manipulation. I am suggesting here in the Epic Life series that understanding immersion in terms of identification not only connects immersion securely with interactivity but also allows us to read the way rulesets manipulate both immersion and interactivity in integral relation to the work of self-fashioning that goes on in the cultural makeup of practomimetic performance–the way players become themselves by playing.

The concept of identification is a very slippery one. By it in this context I mean the creation of a likeness with the self. The claim that immersion can be described as identification with a ruleset, then, suggests that immersion arises in the performer’s/audience-member’s understanding of him or herself as a reproducer of the ruleset–as the ruleset generates the performance the performer/audience-member generates the ruleset for him or herself–indeed as him or self, while the performance is underway. We are immersed, that is, and for example feel that “we are there,” when we represent the story to ourselves, letting that representation serve as our reality in the course of the performance.

To demonstrate the potential benefits of looking at immersion this way, in this post I’ll look at the first of two practomimetic moments I’ll be treating in this post and the next, this one from the Homeric Odyssey (the one in the next post will be from Papo y Yo). Both these moments not only manipulate interactivity and immersion, but provide meta-fictional meditations on the nature of immersion and interactivity. As we’ll see in both instances, a reading that centers on the nature of the performer’s and audience’s identification not just with an avatar but with the entirety of the ruleset within which he and they are performing provides the most satisfactory description of the cultural effects (or, if you like, the meanings) of these moments of practomimetic performance.

In Book 11 of the Odyssey, Odysseus has narrated himself into the underworld as he tells the story of his wanderings to his hosts, the Phaeacians. Thus far, he’s seen a great many queens of the past, but none of his friends from Troy.

Unexpectedly, he decides he’s done for the night.

“And I would not tell the stories of all the women, nor even name them,
the number of wives and daughters of heroes I saw,
for before that immortal night would perish too. But it’s also the time
to go to bed, either on the swift ship, having gone to my companions,
or here; and my conveyance will be a care to the gods and to you.”
Thus he spoke, and they all were completely in silence,
and they were held by astonishment throughout the shadowy hall.

To put it succinctly: Odysseus is breaking the Phaeacians’ immersion. Their response demonstrates that that immersion turns on identification with the ruleset he has set up for his performance.

And Arete the white-armed began the words:
“Phaeacians, how does this man appear to you to be
in form and size and the balanced wit within him?
And he is my guest-friend, and each of you shares in the honor.
So don’t send him away in haste, nor withhold
gifts for one deserving. For many possessions
lie for you in the hall, by the favor of the gods.

To “get” this passage, really, you have to realize that Odysseus’ entire story, with all the monsters and the magic, is about xenia, ritualized guest-friendship, and is itself a sort of xenia gift (think hostess-gift) from a man who has nothing, and arrived naked on his hosts’ island. When Queen Arete responds to Odysseus breaking off the tale, and the immersion, by demanding that her magnates offer gifts (to which demand they comply) to this guest-friend of hers, she shows that she identifies with Odysseus insofar as she seems him as a paragon, but, more importantly, she also has internalized the ruleset of his tale: Odysseus is the master of guest-friendship, constantly turning it to his advantage both in the narrative to the Phaeacians and in the Odyssey as a whole; now Queen Arete’s immersion in that tale makes her follow its ruleset the same way that after a long immersive session of Tetris bathroom tiles look like they’re falling into place.

To put it another way, Queen Arete has identified with the cultural practice that conditions both narrative rulesets: guest-friendship and the gift-giving that constitutes its most essential element. The ruleset Odysseus outlined through his performance, much as a digital game reveals its mechanics in the course of play, Arete now declares to be a part of her own, personal cultural make-up.
What happens then confirms that the queen isn’t the only one who has experienced this kind of immersion: King Alcinous says

O Odysseus, we, looking at you, don’t guess you at all
to be a deceitful and thievish man, such men as
the dark earth feeds, wide-sown,
making up lies, from which no one might know anything;
for you there is a form upon your words, and noble wits are in you.
You catalogued a tale with understanding, as when a bard does it,
the griefs of all the Argives and of you yourself.

Then he asks Odysseus to come to another part of the story and say if he saw any of the other Trojan heroes in the underworld, and Odysseus continues the story, into the best part, where Odysseus meets Agamemnon and Achilles.

Just as Queen Arete has identified with the xenia in Odysseus’ tale, King Alcinous identifies with the renown of Odysseus for his lying tales, the other defining element of the story he has been telling. (The most iconic of the adventures recounted by Odysseus, the encounter with Polyphemus the Cylcops, for example, turns on both xenia and lying.)

Alcinous states here his immersion in the story in terms of what he thinks of Odysseus, but those terms are explicitly a reproduction of the ruleset, as ironic as they are (because of course Odysseus is in fact a liar): Alcinous has made a likeness between himself and the ruleset, in inserting himself into it.

Here we find the meta-fictional element I mentioned at the outset: Odysseus manipulates the immersion of the Phaeacians, breaking it at precisely the right point so that they can demonstrate their identification with his ruleset; Alcinous responds by comparing him to a bard, which is the ruleset within which Odysseus himself is performing. But just as Odysseus at the outset of his tale distinguished himself from a bard (Book 8: more or less, “I think it’s a great thing to listen to a bard, but now you want to hear about me”), Alcinous here draws the same distinction in the very act of making the comparison–the king’s immersion reproduces the ruleset, and at the same time calls attention, meta-fictionally, to that reproduction.

In the next post in the series, I’ll show how Papo y Yo does nearly the same thing through making the player repeat actions so as to reproduce the ruleset of the game as a ritual, in the pursuit of crafting another, “real” ritual to bring about the purification called for in the narrative of the game’s story.

One of the first things I noticed when looking over the original, 1996 Netrunner Corp cards was how focused the set was on depicting human labor.  Two of my favorites that demonstrate this focus on ‘humanness’ is ‘Team Restructuring’ and ‘Systematic Layoffs’.

Both of these cards would seem to be pulled straight out of Corporate policies that were quite rampant in the mid-90′s, a period where new technology was quickly displacing traditional jobs held in corporate offices for decades previous.  Each ‘operation’ gives the Corp player access to advancement tokens, which are required to score the victory point earning ‘agendas’, but the logic behind each action clearly links the shuffling of human labor in order to maximize efficiency and production.  Compare this attitude to the Corp cards in the new Android: Netrunner set, which predominantly favor biotic, or cyborg labor.

The flavor text still emphasizes efficiency, yet instead of shuffling human labor around the human is eliminated completely in favor of robotic labor.  While this sort of ‘replacement’ would have been primarily the stuff of science fiction for 1996, in 2013 the idea that human labor can be replaced with robotic equivalents is hardly shocking or out of place.  Android: Netrunner even goes so far as to make one of the Corporate ‘identities’ one can play a central player in this biotic labor production; Hass-Bioroid, with the flavor text tag line ‘Effective. Reliable. Humane.’

This leads me to my next comparison.  Whereas the original Netrunner depicted the Corporation player as a more blob like entity, meaning that it has not definite shape or identity for gameplay, Android: Netrunner gives the player four different ‘identities’ to choose from: the aforementioned Hass-Bioroid, the genetics super-corp Jinteki, the generic-sounding Weyland Consortium, and the media conglomerate NBN.  Consider what Bruce Sterling said at WELL in 2012:

“Stacks. In 2012 it made less and less sense to talk about “the Internet,” “the PC business,” “telephones,” “Silicon Valley,” or “the media,” and much more sense to just study Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft. These big five American vertically organized silos are re-making the world in their image.”

In 1996, the technology landscape was far less defined even as it contained some of the same players still in the game in 2013.  There was definitely Microsoft- but no one really knew what direction they were going to take in the face of growing pressure to adapt to the fast emerging ‘Internet’.  Yet in 2013, it would be silly to talk about the Internet and not mention a company like Facebook.  The designers of Android: Netrunner clearly picked up on this perception of the corporate structure in our daily lives and decided the Corp players in the game would be better suited if they contained their own highly differentiated identities.

Finally, (although this is only scratching the surface here), there is the issue of contemporary references that mark any game as a product of its unique temporal setting.  In the original Netrunner, nothing embodied that more than the card ‘Pocket Virtual Reality’.  Except for the occasional op-ed piece that attempts to make a distinction between online and offline ‘reality’, one never really sees the term virtual reality anymore.  This Ngram demonstrates that the term peaked in 1998, and has been in a steady decline since.  Android: Netrunner follows similar suit with its card ‘PAD Campaign’, a clear reference to Apple’s very popular consumer device- the iPad.  Now this might appear to be an obvious point to make, but my goal here to analyze the different card sets to see what marks each as a unique product of its time- and these two examples are definite temporal markers that cannot be ignored.

What makes the two Netrunner games perfect for this kind of comparative analysis is that both utilize almost exactly the same rule set.  Whereas many other ludic iterations on a similar theme seek to change the rules in order to provide a different experience for the player, the relatively long period between the two designs made this evolution unnecessary.  Moving beyond play-mechanic design (which, to be honest, would be worth its own in-depth analysis) allows us to, instead, focus on the social and cultural cues that go into the meanings the cards embody.  While this was only a brief foray into a storied universe, my hope is that others will attempt the same teasing out of the zeitgeist with other games that have a similar background.

My next task, as I see it, is to advocate for a particular response to the working of this great chain. Or, to put it another way, for a particular way of doing humanities. Or a particular way of playing games.

That response is to live an epic life–that is, to play humanistically, to perform reflectively, to do humanities and know that we are doing humanities, so that our games, and our lives, are always getting richer and worthier of our heritage. I want to suggest that living a rich life in our digitally-inflected world demands that we be able to analyze games, and their culture, humanistically.

To make my case for this response to the great chain of practomime I have first to propose a new way of describing a central phenomenon of the experience of play, the one that goes by the much-debated name “immersion.”

Who has not marvelled at the power of a digital game to engross the player, and so to afford the familiar sight of a person holding a controller gazing at a video screen, oblivious to the events going on around him or her? That engrossment is of course the phenomenon covered by the term immersion, from an “I know it when I see it” point of view.

Perhaps it is not as natural today–under the very influence of the culture of digital games–to make the corresponding formulations “Who has not marvelled at the power of television to engross the viewer?” and “Who has not marvelled at the power of a novel etc.” and “Who has not marvelled at the power of a storyteller etc.”

That it’s not as natural doesn’t make it less true–especially for anyone (like us) interested in the past and the ways it can help us understand the present. Marie-Laure Ryan raised this same issue with our understanding of digital immersion in Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media, a book that answers many fewer questions than it raises.

Despite attempts like that of Ernest Adams to separate out different “forms of immersion” the phenomenon is demonstrably unified across all forms of play. The social sciences come to our aid, here: asking the immersed performer questions like “Did you feel like you were listening to Elizabeth Bennet?” and “Did you feel like you were at Longbourne?” would net similar results whether the version of Pride and Prejudice under discussion were the novel, a film, or a digital game of any kind.

That unity may I think now be described much more emphatically in light of my arguments in The Rules of the Text. That’s part of the reason I think the phenomenon of immersion needs a new, humanistic description: this enormously important piece of the aesthetics of mimesis has never to my knowledge had anything like a systematic treatment, probably because prior to the advent of digital games and their culture the role of the performer’s interaction with the ruleset was so hidden that it could only be uncovered via theoretical works like Barthes‘ and Iser‘s–though of course as anyone who’s been reading along knows, I think Plato figured it out a long time ago, without the helpful image of a kid with a controller in front of a screen.

But the more fundamental reason for a new description is that the development of a thicker description of our relationship with our play practices–the kind of thicker description that will enable the epic life I want for me and for you–demands that we see our engrossment in our performances not as the goal of play (compare Adams’ piece, cited above) but as the basis of our psyches’ interaction with the practomimetic ruleset–the very point of our entry into the ruleset. As the point of entry, immersion is subject, in practomimetic (artistic, if you’d rather) performances, to creative manipulation, like the manipulation I’ve noted in BioShock and Mass Effect, which allows the sort of reflection I’m proposing as the basis for living an epic life.

I’m therefore going to make the case that immersion, defined as “any engagement with an activity in which a person loses his or her awareness of his or her actual immediate situation” arises, both in the specific case of engagement with works of art and in the more general case of immersion in activities like knitting and driving,in a player’s identification with a ruleset.

Obviously, it’s going to take several posts fully to make that case. For the moment, I’ll leave you with the aha-erlebnis that led me to this new description. Playing Super Hexagon one day, I realized I was immersed, but that although I had certainly invested myself in my tiny triangle it was the entirety of that triangle’s situation–its plight, if you will–that was immersing me. I didn’t feel that I was running around on a pulsing colored plain, dodging barriers that were closing in upon me; rather, I was taking actions in a way that characterized me as being the game–I was the triangle, but I was also the barriers, and the pounding music. My identification was with the ruleset. See how much your mileage varies, if you get a chance, and let me know.