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Reading Game/Text: EverQuest, Alienation, and Digital
Communities
Eric Hayot
University of Arizona
ehayot@u.arizona.edu
Edward Wesp
University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee
edwesp@uwm.edu
) 2004 Eric Hayot and Edward Wesp.
All rights reserved.
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1. A lot had to happen between 1915, when the U.S. Supreme
Court first ruled that cinema was not "speech" and was thus
unprotected by the First Amendment, and 1982, when the Court
decided that films were one of the "traditional forms of
expression such as books" and ought to be considered "pure
speech" (Mutual Film Corp. v. Industrial Comm'n).[1] The 1915
Court justified its decision at least in part through reference
to "common-sense," a category whose later reversal neatly sums
up the changed sense of film's legitimacy as a medium: today the
opinion that film is not speech would get its proponent laughed
out of the room, even if the film in question were silent.
2. The history of film's gradual acceptance as an expressive
medium--an acceptance mirrored in the academic reception of film
studies over roughly that same period--is worth keeping in mind
as one approaches new media today. Because while the issue of
film as speech has been settled for film and, on the basis of
their similarities, television,[2] the issue remains alive for
new forms of digital culture, especially video games, whose
legal history extends back only twenty years. In the early
1980s, courts reviewing cases involving the zoning and licensing
of video game arcades generally agreed that video games were not
speech, with one court asserting that "in no sense can it be
said that video games are meant to inform. Rather, a video game,
like a pinball game, a game of chess, or a game of baseball, is
pure entertainment with no informational element" (America's
Best v. New York).[3] The comparison to baseball or chess is
telling, as is the reference to "information"; the test applied
to video games in these early court cases draws explicitly from
the early legal history of film, in which the expressiveness of
the medium (and thus its ability to "inform" its viewers) was
deemed secondary to an "entertainment" value that disqualified
it as serious "speech."
3. But as video games have become more complex--a complexity
enabled by the exponential growth in computer processing power--
and as they have moved from arcades to home computers and the
Internet, it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish
them from other constitutionally protected media. As newer games
approach the conditions by which we identify mainstream
literature and film--that is, as they begin to express ideas,
develop characters, and tell stories[4]--the claim that they do
not "inform" their players seems harder and harder to make.[5]
Indeed, the difference between Pac-Man and a contemporary,
story-driven game featuring Hollywood actors (Christopher Walken
appears, for instance, in 1996's Privateer 2) might well be said
to redefine the scope of the entire genre. And the court record
reflects this shift in scope. In a 1991 decision, the Seventh
Circuit Court of Appeals wrote that there was no record that
might allow it to decide "whether the video games at issue here
are simply modern day pinball machines or whether they are more
sophisticated presentations involving storyline and plot that
convey to the user a significant artistic message protected by
the first amendment" (Rothner v. Chicago). In 2001 that same
court upheld a ruling that argued that "at least some
contemporary video games include protected forms of expression,"
even while it held that several of the games "described in the
record are relatively inconsequential--perhaps even so
inconsequential as to remove the game from the protection of the
First Amendment" (American Amusement Mach. Ass'n v. Kendrick).
Although neither decision ultimately settled the question of
video games' expressiveness, their ambivalence seemed promising,
and the 1991 decision's reference to "storyline and plot"
offered another dimension by which games might be judged to be
"speaking." Though neither film nor literature is currently held
to that standard (books that have neither storyline nor message
are still protected by the First Amendment), the demand that
video games express either information or a narrative remains,
in these decisions as it was in the 1980s, the sine qua non of
First Amendment protection.
4. But if the complication introduced by the Seventh Circuit
had seemed to open the door to video games' eventual acceptance
as speech (thereby giving them a trajectory to mirror film's), a
recent decision in U.S. District Court has closed it with a
vengeance. In April 2002, Judge Stephen N. Limbaugh issued a
judgment in which he declared that any expression or
communication "during the playing of a video game is purely
inconsequential," and that video games "have more in common with
board games and sports than they do with motion pictures." The
case in question, Interactive Digital Software Association v.
St. Louis County, involved an attempt by the St. Louis County
Council to restrict access to violent video games. Backed by
research showing that playing games incites children to violent
play and encourages them to identify with perpetrators of deadly
violence--and reacting in part to a series of school shootings,
most notably the ones in Littleton, Colorado committed by avid
players of violent video games--the Council voted in October
2000 to require parental permission for the sale of video and
computer games (and the playing of video games in arcades) rated
by the gaming industry's own system as designed for "mature"
audiences. The Interactive Digital Software Association sued,
arguing that the ordinance violated the First Amendment and was
unconstitutionally broad and vague. In April 2002, Limbaugh
rejected all of the IDSA's arguments, dismissing the case in
summary judgment, before it could come to trial.
5. Drawing on a case history involving both video games and
film, Limbaugh's decision is unequivocal about both the
standards it uses to judge video games and the degree to which
games measure up to those standards. When deciding whether a new
medium qualifies for First Amendment protection, Limbaugh
writes, one must find "at least some type of communication of
ideas in that medium. It has to be designed to express or
inform, and there has to be a likelihood that others will
understand that there has been some type of expression."
Limbaugh finds that video games cannot pass even this minimal
standard, and goes on to reject the Seventh Circuit's arguments
that some video games might merit First Amendment protection:
"The Court has difficulty accepting that some video games do
contain expression while others do not. [...] Either a 'medium'
provides sufficient elements of communication and expressiveness
to fall under the scope of the First Amendment, or it does not."
Limbaugh later claims that even though the plaintiffs presented
him with scripts of video games to suggest that the games
contained "extensive plot and character development," this
creative detritus, while itself expressive, did not confer any
of that expressiveness on its own final products.
6. Limbaugh's decision ultimately to deny First Amendment
protection to video games depends, then, on his judgment that
their expression is "purely inconsequential," that whatever gets
expressed during the game remains effectively extraneous to the
main "work" of the game experience. Strangely enough, although
the video games were initially regulated on the basis of their
degree of "violence"--which would appear to let expressiveness
out of the digital bag[6]--Limbaugh argues that "'violence' does
not automatically create expression," that violent games are no
more expressive than other video games just because they are
violent. This blanket rejection of the idea that video games
might have expressive content allows Limbaugh absolutely to
forego the ambivalence of the Seventh Circuit decisions;
instead, he classes video games with a group of cultural
activities that includes baseball, chess, and bingo: that is, as
games.
7. What the decision thus makes clear is that the status of
contemporary video games as a medium effectively hinges on a
comparison to two related types of culture: film on one hand,
and entertainment activities on the other. And the comparison is
definitive: if video games are like film, they are expressive,
constitute their own medium, and deserve First Amendment
protection (indeed the plaintiffs in the Limbaugh case ask the
judge to treat the game medium as "no less expressive than its
'motion picture counterpart'"). But if video games are like
activities (pinball, chess, baseball), they not only are not
covered by the First Amendment, but also may not even be a
"medium" at all (any more than baseball is a "medium"). The
decision therefore clarifies the degree to which status as a
"medium" confers a priori on a cultural object the privilege of
being assumed to mediate between an expressor of some kind (a
person or an idea) and the receiver of that expression; the idea
that video games do not "express" is thus tantamount to
declaring that they cannot transmit content at all.
8. One potential response to such an argument--one especially
tempting for scholars trained in reading texts--argues
insistently for expressiveness. Indeed, much work done recently
would insist not only that video games express meaning, but that
any number of cultural activities or objects not currently
granted First Amendment protection are expressive as well;
baseball, one might argue, teaches its viewers or players
something about teamwork, about labor-management disputes, about
geometries of space, and so on. As literature departments have
aggregated more and more of the culture to their own field of
study, and as the term "text" has come to mean any expressive
(or signifying) surface of the real, the drive towards a
consideration of everything as (at least potentially) expressive
has left less and less outside the category of meaningfulness.
9. Something like this defense of the "medium" of video games
has been articulated by Wagner James Au, who, writing for Salon,
calls Limbaugh's decision "a disaster for anyone who wants to
see games evolve into a medium every bit as culturally relevant
as movies or books." Au argues that Limbaugh's decision
demonstrates the need for a "preemptive attack" from the gaming
industry, designed to show that the expressions of ideas in a
number of recent video games are "inextricably woven into the
experience" of the games themselves. Au ultimately suggests that
the video game industry borrow a page from the history of motion
pictures, whose Hollywood studios, he writes,
regularly produced a few films every year whose main intent was
to dramatize social issues and give their more ambitious artists
room to breathe [...]. Imagine what could happen if the game
industry followed this example. Successful game publishers could
invest a portion of their profits into games conceived with
explicit social and artistic goals in mind.
Only by effectively making games as much like (serious) films as
possible (and thereby treating the game medium as "no less
expressive than its 'motion picture counterpart'"), Au believes,
can the game industry secure for its products the kind of legal
status and cultural respect that now accrues to film.
10. Au's plan may well be the best way to legitimize games as a
form of expression, but the impulse to develop a legal solution
out of a shift in video game production ought not simply to
carry over to video game hermeneutics; that is, while it may be
legally useful to make games as much like (serious) films as
possible, the legal benefits of such a move ought not to
determine in advance the interpretive strategies available to
the study of games as cultural objects. Video games are, of
course, expressive; they contain narrative elements. But they
are not exclusively expressive (in a conventional sense) or
narrative.[7] Evaluating video games exclusively on the basis of
those features--and inviting them to take their seat at the
First Amendment table by defining themselves largely in relation
to narrativity or expressiveness--ignores the other side of
their cultural position: the degree to which video games
resemble gaming.
11. This is where one learns something from the legal case:
though Limbaugh is wrong to decide that video games are entirely
like other games, his comparison opens up interesting
possibilities for anyone wanting to develop a theory of video
games as a medium because it suggests that any such theory ought
to deal with both sides of video gaming's cultural history.
Though many readers in English departments will be more
comfortable with the expressive aspects of games that
essentially resemble those of more familiar forms like film or
literature (even as they may be suspicious of the right of any
popular medium to claim for itself the relevance of those
forms), the present seems an opportune time for expanding the
range of what literary and cultural study might do with new
media.
12. In a recent essay on this issue, Jesper Juul notes that the
"narrative turn of the last 20 years has seen the concept of
narrative emerge as a privileged master concept in the
description of all aspects of human society and sign-
production." But he goes on to argue that some of the main
features of narrative analysis cannot be applied to the study of
games without substantial modification. For instance, he writes,
though narratives "rely heavily on [the] distance or non-
identity between the events and the presentation of these
events" (what Christian Metz calls "the time of the signified
and the time of the signifier"), any game in which the user can
act (by firing a weapon, by kicking a ball, by driving a car)
necessarily unites those two times as closely as possible. Even
when they present players with narrative experiences, then,
video games force an experience of that narrative that differs in
vital ways from getting a story through a film or novel.
13. That video games, even when narrative, present a
fundamentally different experience of that narrative's topology,
suggests that Limbaugh's decision--despite its somewhat
primitive notion of expressiveness and the odd logic of its
position on "violent" content--might point the way to one
possible mode of reading. Caught between entertainment "media"
like film and television and entertainment "activities" like
baseball and bingo, video games require an evaluation that
registers those differences without collapsing them. In what
follows we intend, in a reading of the online role-playing game
EverQuest, to develop a theory of reading video games that might
account for the legal bind in which they find themselves, that
might read in and through that bind rather than choosing one
side or the other. We would like this approach to EverQuest to
illustrate the potential for the apparently irreconcilable
elements of video games--their status as game, cultural
practice, narrative, or visual text--to be pulled together into
a coherent analysis, one that acknowledges both the ways
EverQuest is like a game and the ways its "game" elements might
lead to a reading of the "expression" of ideas.
EverQuest
14. EverQuest, the most successful "Massively Multi-Player
Online Role-Playing Game," is one of the most complicated video
games available today, involving hundreds of thousands of
players, an immense imaginary world, and large, involved fan
communities. Designed by Verant Interactive, a subsidiary of
Sony Online Entertainment, EverQuest has, since its release in
March 1999, set the standard for games of its type; the game
boasts more than 430,000 playing (and paying) customers[8]
spread across forty-eight servers, each of which runs a separate
version of the game world for up to approximately 3,000 players
at any given time.[9] EverQuest's visual- and text-based world,
a rough descendant of J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth, allows
players to choose an avatar and go out into the world to fight,
trade, make friends with other players, and explore the
expansive virtual geography.
15. Because our reading proceeds structurally, we will not be
taking on a number of promising approaches to the study of video
games, including sociological studies of players, questions of
masquerade and identification (when male players play female
characters, for instance), individual game sequences or
narratives, or the game's internal economics (the platinum piece,
the basic monetary unit in EverQuest, trades on the
Internet at a rate of about 1000 to the U.S. dollar). Rather,
our approach focuses on the aspects of EverQuest that make it
like a "game," namely the formal structures that frame player
experience. These formal structures include the rules of the
game that limit and direct players' actions, the goals and
obstacles set out for players, and the strategies and practices
adopted by players as they navigate the game's rules and goals.
Like visual and aural conventions of film, the interactive
circuit between game and player constitutes a register of
meaning independent from narrative content or the conditions of
a game's production. EverQuest's rules and goals constitute the
core of what defines it as a game, and what establishes the
terms by which it participates in the production of cultural
meaning.
16. While online, EverQuest players can freely pursue a wide
variety of in-game activities, including casual conversation
with other players about characters or places in the game world
or the fictive history that provides EverQuest's back-story.
Nonetheless, the vast majority of the interaction between
players on an EverQuest server focuses on issues more specific
to the achievement of the game's basic goals--defeating
monsters, acquiring powerful or valuable items, and traversing
dangerous territory. Though the pictorial or visual aspects of
the game constitute an important part of an EverQuest player's
experience, the vast majority of the detailed information
required to succeed in the game and to communicate with others
appears in a "text box" on the player's screen. In that box,
players receive automatic updates on their status and the status
of the monsters they fight (e.g., "You slash a drakkel dire wolf
for 24 points of damage"), but also spend a great deal of time
discussing strategy or the game situation with one another,
which would, for example, appear as "Braxis tells the group, 'I
need a heal now.'"
17. This fact in some ways confirms Limbaugh's argument that
video games resemble any other type of game or sport. Limbaugh
cites an earlier decision about the lack of "expressive" content
in a game of Bingo in which
the court went on to hold that Bingo may involve interaction and
communication between runners and participants, but any such
communication is "singularly in furtherance of the game; it is
totally divorced from a purpose of expressing ideas,
impressions, feelings, or information unrelated to the game
itself."
Limbaugh's sense that communication can happen solely "in
furtherance of the game" grants messages like "I need a heal" a
peculiar legal status: they do not count as "speech," perhaps
not even as "expression," even though they communicate meaning.
Inside the world of the game, Limbaugh seems to argue, all
speech happens in quotation marks, "divorced," in his phrase,
from any serious, real-world meaning. Though we are essentially
arguing against the conclusion Limbaugh and his judicial
predecessors draw from this fact (and it is worth noting that
much player-to-player communication does not serve so strictly
to further the game as in the examples above),[10] EverQuest's
design has a powerful structuring impact on the interaction of
the players and their experience of playing the game. But an
awareness that players engage in a specialized kind of discourse
that derives from the conditions of the game in which they are
involved doesn't close the door on an expressivist argument.
While the interactions surrounding games of bridge, soccer, or
EverQuest may share a structural similarity in that they are
primarily instrumental, the fact that those specialized modes of
discourse are so closely tied to their associated games suggests
that those discourses can be reasonably distinguished from one
another. That is, we do not follow the court's assumption that
communication "singularly in furtherance of the game" is
necessarily "divorced from a purpose of expressing ideas,
impressions, feelings, or information unrelated to the game
itself." Rather the specificity of the discursive exchange
surrounding activities like games carries with it the means by
which one can interpret the way a particular game structures the
experience of its players: the discursive exchange signifies. By
arguing that the game-like elements of EverQuest do not limit or
confound those elements of the game that mark it more visibly as
a mode of expression, we are in essence arguing that those
things that make EverQuest a game can be interpreted, and that
in so doing we can develop a more complete understanding of how
a video game might in fact express "ideas, impressions,
feelings, or information unrelated to the game itself."
18. In what follows, then, we focus extensively on the
interaction between the rules and practices of the game and the
in-game interactions that those structural elements inspire. In
the case of EverQuest, the rules of the game emphasize two major
ideas that establish the structure of relationships between the
players in ways that, as we will argue, centrally shape an
understanding of the game's place as a medium of cultural
expression. The first of these ideas involves a push for the
integration of the character within local groups, required by
virtue of the obstacles EverQuest creates between players and
the goals of the game, and by the nature of the game world's
geography and characters--a practice that in the game goes by
the term "grouping." The second involves the production of what
EverQuest designers and players term "balance"--an ongoing
effort to ensure that all characters of equivalent experience
are equally powerful and have the same ability to advance.
Grouping and Community Formation
19. The creation of local group identifications within
EverQuest represents a particular way of modulating the
"massively multiplayer" experience that defines it. While the
special appeal of EverQuest (and the cornerstone of its
marketing) is the large player population that can interact
within the game, much about the structure of the game itself
encourages characters to develop a sense of distinction and to
feel a part of smaller communities within the game. One of the
most basic ways in which this happens derives from the fact that
the game is conceived geographically. The action in EverQuest
takes place within a virtual geographic space divided into
connected but discrete "zones" that are modeled to represent a
variety of external and interior locales.[11] While players can
communicate with players in other zones, it is only with players
located near a character in the imagined space of the game world
that characters can engage in more complex interactions or work
to pursue the goals of the game (that is, defeating enemies,
gaining wealth or equipment for one's character). While the
creation of a virtual space for the game may seem like an
obvious approach for an interactive game, such a decision
carries with it a variety of implications related to the
interaction of space and personal interaction.
20. For instance, when a player creates a new EverQuest
character, he or she chooses a "race" for that character (from a
variety of Tolkien-esque choices including Elves, Dwarves, and
Halflings) that also determines where in the EverQuest world
that character will begin play.[12] Without assistance from
other players, beginning characters will not be able to travel
far from their starting locations, so characters tend to spend
much of their early careers near their home city in the company
of other characters of the same race.[13] As a result of the
game's efforts to enforce these geographic limitations, players
cannot help but encounter and become familiar early on with
characters of their own race near their "home" town, thereby
encouraging from the beginning of the player's experience a
sense of locality and distinction within an online community of
players defined by its vastness.[14]
21. In addition to the effects of the geographic nature of the
EverQuest world, the way the game structures its goals directs
the characters to form a variety of formal and informal groups
in order to progress. At the smallest scale, the design of the
game nearly requires that players band together in order to
venture into areas of the game world that would be too dangerous
to traverse alone, but which players must enter in order to
develop their character's skills and to gain wealth or
equipment. It is as a part of these groups that most players
engage in the central activities of the game. These groups may
be impromptu gatherings of players who are all interested in
exploring the same area or pre-planned groups of players who
know each other from previous experience in the game or
friendships outside EverQuest. Because obtaining power and
wealth in EverQuest requires killing monsters, players will
gather at known "camps," and the vast majority of these camps
require groups, either by virtue of the relative strength of the
monsters that appear there or the rate at which they "spawn" in
the game world. This structural encouragement to group increases
exponentially as characters become more powerful, with many
high-level encounters (at which players may acquire the most
powerful and valuable items in the game) requiring the presence
not only of one or two groups (each group with a maximum of six
people) but of as many as thirty or forty players. These large
group endeavors are undertaken by "guilds," long-standing formal
associations of players who agree to cooperate in all manner of
in-game activities.
22. The structure of the game in a variety of ways thus
encourages people to find smaller communities, conceived either
in response to local proximity within the imagined space of the
game or to the difficulty of the challenges the game presents to
its players. EverQuest therefore ought to be considered not
simply in terms of the numbers of people who are able to play
the game together simultaneously, but also by the degree to
which those people all experience the game as part of smaller,
more local communities. For instance: 100,000 people playing
simultaneously will be divided into forty-eight servers with
around 2,000 to 3,000 players each, further divided into
geographic "zones" containing as many as 100 people, many of
whom have organized themselves into groups composed of two to
six individuals. While this description does not make EverQuest
"about" the creation of local community in the explicit way a
film could be, the game's structure nonetheless leads players to
experience a necessity for organization at various scales and
gives them the chance to identify that imperative consciously or
unconsciously. Though we are attempting to argue for the meaning
of games as a medium apart from film, it is an instructive
analogy to suggest that if a film can convey an experience of
forming local communities through its visual depiction of
characters and events, then EverQuest can be said to communicate
these concepts through its depiction of such activities on the
computer screen and through the processes of actually playing
the game of EverQuest, bound by its design and its rules.[15]
This structural analysis of EverQuest, in which one sees and
reads aspects of the game that are like "grouping," might be
thought of therefore as an attempt to develop a "grammar" for
the game, an understanding not so much of its specific
expressions but rather of the modes through which those
expressions articulate themselves.
Balance, Homogeneity, and Alienation
23. While community formation is an important underlying theme
implied by the rules of EverQuest, "game balance" remains the
concept most explicitly central to the design of the game's
rules. EverQuest gives players a wide variety of choices in the
design of the character they will play in the game. In addition
to the aforementioned choice of character race, players assign
their characters a "class" or profession (classes include
Warriors, Wizards, Rogues, and Druids) that defines the
character's skills. Additionally, players may assign their
characters physical and mental attributes, choosing to develop a
character that is physically strong, agile, highly intelligent,
or some combination of those traits.
24. Bounding all of the diversity of these decisions, however,
is an explicit assurance that each of the individual races and
classes "balance" in terms of their effectiveness in the game.
While certain combinations may provide a short-term advantage--
physically strong races such as Barbarians or Ogres will start
the game as particularly effective warriors--the game is
designed so that these initial differences can be erased
(largely through the purchase of equipment) as the player
progresses through the game; in other words, the game
effectively promises that no class will, in the long run,
outshine its peers in terms of power or ability.
25. No concept contributes more visibly to the discussion of
what EverQuest is and how it should work than the idea of
balance; in message board discussions by fans and official
communiqu
s from the Verant Interactive team, "balance"
dominates the continued development of the game. Because it is
relatively difficult for the creators of EverQuest to predict
the effect of specific game rules on the dynamics of game play,
EverQuest is designed to be continuously altered and updated.
Periodically, players must download updates of the game software
that alter the rules of the game in various ways, making certain
pieces of equipment more or less powerful, or adding to a
class's ability to perform magic or heal injuries. The
overwhelming majority of these changes expressly address the
issue of balance, correcting some perceived weakness or strength
of a class relative to all others.[16]
26. This premise is repeated by the conditions in which the
character starts, outside the race's home city, with the same
rudimentary equipment as any other character of the same class,
and, like all other new characters, with no money. While it
seems reasonable enough to have characters start from the same
position, this is in no way mandatory or even conventional for
some of the sub-genres from which EverQuest borrows. Characters
in other video role-playing games, as well as pen and paper
role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, can start with much
greater differentiation both in terms of physical and mental
abilities and in terms of initial wealth, allowing the game to
model the advantages of class privilege or genetic
predisposition. As the EverQuest player begins play, the
pronounced equality of the character's starting situation
translates the structural concept of balance into the played
experience of potential or opportunity. Though EverQuest's goals
are open-ended, its players' most consistent long-term project
requires developing a character's abilities, enabling the
character to explore the game world more extensively and to
obtain items that both enhance the character's powers and serve
as a mark of status. In this context, the assurance of balance
and the equality of starting condition situate characters within
an apparently neutral conception of personal achievement based
solely on perseverance and effort.
27. Through "balance," then, the game conveys a set of ideas
about identity, community, and time that are central to the
game's participation in a broader cultural expression. By
effectively creating a situation in which everyone is "equal" in
game terms--and by making that situation a stated goal of the
software development--the makers of EverQuest establish a
framework that echoes an idealized vision of American, and more
broadly capitalist, culture; in turn, the player community's
visceral investment in "balance" as a game concept points to the
ideological drive towards not simply a form of consumerist
"choice" but rather more deeply held ideas about the kind of
world players want to "live" and play in.[17]
28. The disjunction between the game's combination of a
character system based on idealized equality and the high
fantasy setting of the game's imagined world produces a deep and
revealing irony. The latter carries with it a generic tradition
of heroic individualism: characters in popular fantasy novels,
as well as characters played in sessions of Dungeons & Dragons
or single-player computer fantasy role-playing games, are almost
inevitably depicted as uniquely heroic. Whether born with some
special gift or fated to play a pivotal role in their fictive
world, these characters do things that no others could do,
confirming their distinction from the ordinary with their
dramatic, singular achievements. But in order for EverQuest to
allow all of its players the chance to assume this kind of
heroic role, it must ensure that all players have the same
opportunities for heroism. This is the logic behind the game's
insistence on "balance," but of course it has the paradoxical
effect of eliminating the possibility of uniquely talented,
exceptional heroes who might play a one-of-a-kind role in the
unfolding of the game world's history. Thus, the promise of
developing one's character to greater and greater power,
defeating ever more powerful enemies and acquiring greater
wealth, is always undercut by the knowledge that there are in
the world other heroes exactly as powerful as your character and
a host of other characters who will be in time.
29. The drive towards balance and homogeneity means that the
only distinction between any two characters in EverQuest can be
understood simply as a difference in time. Because of balance,
the external limiting factor on a character's success is the
amount of time it is played: today's brand-new character can,
within a year or so, be as powerful as any other character. One
of the effects of this structure is to inspire many players to
focus intensely on "the furtherance of the game" so as to
translate their playing time into as much character advancement
as possible--and since advancement is always possible, no
structural feature of the game itself offers players a reason to
ever stop playing. Understanding the structural relationship
between time and game balance emphasizes the usefulness of
reading the game elements of EverQuest, since doing so
demonstrates one of the ways that the game encourages players to
focus on the furtherance of the game in preference to either the
development of narrative[18] or even the types of less-directed
online interaction (via the Web, chat rooms, message boards, and
so on) that have garnered more academic attention than have
video games themselves. Indeed, as the players interact, kill
things, advance their characters, and organize themselves into
imagined communities, it may be that they experience little that
is narrative at all.
30. The phrase "imagined communities" belongs, of course, to
Benedict Anderson, who uses it to describe the processes that
undergird modern nation-formation: that series of cultural and
political developments--particularly the development of print
capitalism as expressed in the widespread availability of the
modern novel and newspapers--that linked disparate individuals
to "socioscapes" providing a shared sense of time and space, a
"deep, horizontal comradeship" (7).[19] While such a concept
might have a limited application to the sense in which EverQuest
creates online communities of players, we want to bring a more
developed version of Anderson's ideas about community and the
socioscape to bear on the way EverQuest structures its players'
relationships to time and identity regardless of the relation of
those relationships to actual circumstance outside the game
because, as Anderson notes, "communities are to be
distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the
style in which they are imagined" (6).
31. For Anderson, the time of the imagined community of the
nation is "based on a conception of 'meanwhile,'" a neutral
temporality that a citizen might imagine sharing with his or her
unseen fellow countrymen. As Anderson writes of two theoretical
characters, A and D:
What then actually links A to D? First, that they are embedded
in "societies" [...]. These societies are sociological entities
of such firm and stable reality that their members (A and D) can
even be described as passing each other on the street, without
ever becoming acquainted, and still be connected. (25)
In the context of a cultural sense of "meanwhile," citizens can
imagine the simultaneous participation of thousands of other
unseen citizens; a temporal common ground comes to replace the
geographical proximity that united premodern, pre-national
communities, as citizens imagine themselves in relation to a
series of anonymous others to whom they are tied through
affiliation, not filiation proper.
32. Anderson's interest in the novel as a cultural form is
based on key formal elements of the novel that encourage and
illustrate the kind of thinking that makes imagining national
community possible. In particular, he argues, the structure of
the novel conditions its readers to accept an understanding of
social activity as embedded in a free-flowing, neutral
temporality that Walter Benjamin describes as "homogenous, empty
time." The novel's contribution to the cultural development of
nationalism thus derives not from its specific plots or
characters, but rather from its ability to schematize the
relationship between time, space, and community that induces
affiliation with anonymous others.
33. Anderson's reading of the novel's formal and temporal
structure makes his observations useful for a reading of
EverQuest without forcing an equation between computer games and
novels. By abstracting the premise of Anderson's observation, we
have a way to pursue a reading of how a game might be able to
reflect and shape its culture despite the fact that it lacks
those elements--narrative, literary or filmic symbolism,
allegory--that seem to be prerequisites for consideration under
legal or academic tests of expression. The arrangement of
characters, space, and temporality in EverQuest creates a
substantive instance of an Andersonian socioscape, the imagined
framework of social organization in time and space shared by the
fictional narrative and the real world of the reader.[20] This
is especially important to the way EverQuest structures
character development and relationships around time. Because
game balance creates a situation in which the primary goal of
character development depends almost exclusively on the amount
of time played, EverQuest presents its players with
"homogeneous, empty time" taken up only by segments of the
character's theoretically infinite progression. Similarly, the
distinction between characters of varied levels of power is
rendered, in large part, as a difference of time. Especially
powerful characters are the object of envy or admiration from
other players, but the temporal basis of characters' power
always allows a lower-level character to imagine that he or she
could at some future moment be as powerful as any other
character on the server. No EverQuest character can be so
singled out by fate or circumstance that it could present a
unique and unrepeatable model of heroism. Meanwhile, the promise
of game balance assures any player with a low-level character
that his or her character's rise to the highest levels of
development will be just as easy or difficult as it was for the
more powerful character that preceded it. This evokes a temporal
frame in which characters are to some extent earlier or later
versions of each other, at different points in the same
progression.
34. All of this happens within the temporality of EverQuest's
"persistent world"--a term used in EverQuest and similar online
multiplayer role-playing games to denote the fact that time
passes in the game world no matter how many players happen to be
online. Thus, during the time that a player is not playing
EverQuest, thousands of players are online, exploring areas,
gaining virtual wealth, and developing the power of their
characters. A player might return after a week's hiatus to find
that another player's character has in the interim changed
considerably, had any number of adventures, and relocated to a
distant part of the game world.
35. We see in this a remarkable manifestation of the temporal
logic expressed or implied by certain novels, films, and
especially television series in which it seems as if the viewer
is stopping in periodically to look at an ongoing timeline of
events. While this impression is a narrative illusion in the
case of a weekly television series (it would be difficult to
argue that the characters in ER are doing anything between the
times depicted by the show), in the case of EverQuest it is
essentially true that the game-time does keep moving when an
individual player is not playing.
36. EverQuest's persistence is thus a temporal persistence,
deepening the player's experience of a temporality so "empty"
that it proceeds unaltered by the player's presence or absence
within the game. Indeed, the player knows whether or not he or
she is playing, but the game-time of EverQuest does not honor
that distinction for any individual player. More than the
overwhelming scale of the online population or geographic
separation, the temporality of EverQuest offers the player the
very real potential of an existential alienation: one's
participation in the game forces one to confront the fact of a
virtually global indifference. This is true both while playing
the game, as players feel an obligation to use their time to
develop their characters, and especially while not playing, as
EverQuest players experience a very literal form of alienation,
entirely removed from the still-active game world while it
continues without them.
Balance and Grouping: the Dialectics of Online Community
37. This powerful form of alienation is absolutely central to
the experience of EverQuest, as it provides the dynamic tension
for the game's push toward grouping. In the context of a
fictional construction in which a player is always missing
something when not playing, the formation of group-based
identities provides the consolation that the player will be
missed in return. The importance of limited communities as a
resistance to the game's threat of alienation is thus repeated
in the way it modulates the player's development in the context
of game balance.
38. In the absence of uniquely heroic characters, the formation
of smaller communities within EverQuest provides at least
partial resistance to the homogenization of identity, as
interaction within these groups interrupts both the equality of
characters and uninterrupted flow of time that provides the
medium of that equality. At the smallest scale, for example,
characters in adventuring groups rely heavily on each other's
abilities to defeat enemies and avoid being killed. This
provides a context in which players can focus intently on their
own activities and accomplishments and provide each other with
an audience prepared to appreciate each character's vital
contributions to the group. The structure of the group
simultaneously highlights the capabilities and usefulness of its
characters and provides a more limited context in which a player
can measure his or her character's abilities. Additionally, as
the group discusses its strategies and recalls its successes and
failures, the players layer a narrative structure over the time
they spend together, shaping and distinguishing a segment of
EverQuest's otherwise empty time.
39. One might argue, then, that EverQuest allows its players,
indeed encourages them, to seek community in the face of a
spatial and above all temporal vastness that threatens their
character with dismaying anonymity. But at the same time, it
must be noted that the game is as responsible for providing its
players with the alienating temporal/spatial structure as it is
for providing them with the means by which to resist or avoid
it. This opposition or bind between alienation and community is
the central effect of the game elements on the players'
experience of EverQuest; that is, the relation between these two
fundamental structures in the game establishes, dialectically,
both the reason to avoid playing the game (the alienating,
temporal vastness of unheroic indifference) and the reason that
the game is so compelling to play (the opportunity to overcome
that vastness and indifference through community formation).
40. A more thorough analysis of EverQuest would have to explain
why designers engineered this bind at the core of the game, and
perhaps more importantly, why players find the experience so
compelling. For instance, one could ask whether EverQuest's
homogenous time is compelling because it creates a bridge for
players, matching the in-game experience of social time to
players' sense of time in the world around them, thereby
producing a subtle but compelling reality-effect that undergirds
the game's otherwise fantastic setting. Or one could ask whether
the representation of an "empty, homogenous" temporal structure
exists only to create the dynamic of its resistance through the
formation of small communities and whether players accept the
threat of alienation because it raises the stakes for the
pleasure derived from the formation of community within the game
(much in the way that the prospects of loss create the thrill of
gambling). In either case, there remain questions as to the
tenor of the game's central tension. Does the formation of
community in the face of alienation offer a cultural critique,
modeling social practices that offer solutions to the dilemmas
of time conceived under national and/or capitalistic cultures?
Or does the game's simulation offer a false confirmation of
community, defusing players' frustration with the very sense of
social dislocation in the real world that drives them to find
virtual community online?
41. The goal of this essay is not to answer these specific
questions, but to illustrate the way we might read the
specificity of the video game form by concentrating on formal
elements that distinguish these games from other expressive
media. This avoids the temptation to subsume the computer game
form under a generalized conception of "texts" or "culture" and
accommodates the unexpected paths a game like EverQuest might
take to intelligibility.
42. The fact that EverQuest is played online, over the
Internet, clearly makes possible many of the structural
qualities (continuous time, for instance) we have been
discussing. Our discussion of the game, and of Anderson's
Imagined Communities, has yet to substantially address the
implications of EverQuest's community formation for theories of
citizenship and identity that see the Internet as a potentially
revolutionary, or at least historically significant, development
in the possibilities of political being. While we are
sympathetic to the argument, our reading of EverQuest--arguably
one of the most complex forms of interaction on the Internet
today--suggests that the political question is complicated.
Though some elements of the game may well be pushing players
towards new forms of experience and identification, the
political value of those forms remains difficult to parse.
43. In a recent essay published as part of a special section in
PMLA on "Mobile Citizens, Media States," Mark Poster offers a
replacement for the term "citizen"--the neologism "netizen," to
denote what he calls "the formative figure in a new kind of
political relation, one that shares allegiance to the nation
with allegiance to the Internet and to the planetary political
spaces it inaugurates" (101). Though we agree with Poster that
"certain structural features of the Internet encourage, promote,
or at least allow exchanges across national borders" (101)--and
believe that EverQuest is one of those features--the kind of
political relation EverQuest's players are involved in, or
rather, the kinds of communities that the game structurally
encourages them to form, nonetheless remain readable within a
framework that resembles the one Anderson uses for the modern
novel (even if, as we have argued, there is no easy formal
equivalence between video games and literature). That is, though
the communities EverQuest forms (or encourages players to
conceive and form) may well be "new," the difference that
newness makes may simply be a difference we already know.
44. Poster dismisses comparisons between forms, arguing that
the difference between the novel and digital media is one of
kind, not degree; he writes that "a novel does not constitute
subjects in the same manner as a digitized narrative inscribed
in the Internet" and adds that "humanists too often diminish the
cultural significance of technological innovations" (102). While
we have been insisting on the importance of understanding video
games (and by extension, the technological innovations that
produce them) as culturally significant, our reading of
EverQuest suggests that in at least one important instance the
innovation in form might not immediately produce utopian forms
of citizenship or cultural experience--or rather, that it may
not create forms of citizenship that cannot be created by novels
or films. By virtue of its position as (one of) the most
extensively structured and complex forms of Internet experience,
EverQuest seems to present, if nothing else, a substantial
obstacle to Poster's claim that what is "new" about new forms
translates into something as radical as "bringing forth [...] a
humanity adhering not to nature but to machines" (103).
45. Poster argues that the Internet may introduce "new
postnational political forms because of its internal
architecture; its new register of time and space; its new
relation of human being to machine, of body to mind; its new
imaginary; and its new articulation between culture and reality"
(103). Certainly EverQuest players experience their communities
transnationally and outside traditional forms of the local--
there are large numbers of players in Western Europe and in East
Asia (especially Japan, Korea, and Hong Kong). But as we have
shown, the political forms suggested by the game's complex
register of time and space are, for all that, not necessarily
different than ones we already know. Though players may identify
with a transnational EverQuest community at the expense of their
local political districts, they do so within a space that is
busy constituting them in terms that are recognizably political
and national themselves (the drive towards "balance" draws, for
instance, upon a very clearly American ideology about equality
and opportunity, one likely to support bootstrapping over the
welfare state). Though the "digitized narrative" and form of
EverQuest do not "constitute subjects in the same manner" as a
novel, the game nonetheless seems capable of producing political
identities and experiences of time and space that resemble those
that novels can produce--even as it puts its players in a
complex and addictive bind. To say this is not to dismiss the
Internet's potential, nor is it to deny the possibility that new
identities might be created there. What the EverQuest example
suggests, however, is that liberating possibilities do not
inhere in digital forms, but rather develop out of the uses to
which they are put.
46. In a review essay of Poster's "Digital Networks and
Citizenship" published as part of that same PMLA section, N.
nature and value of technological change and its effects on
individual experience, suggesting that there exists a more
general "cultural heterogeneity, in which older cultural
formations exist side by side with the technologies that are
supposedly rendering them obsolete" (119). The word "supposedly"
is vital here, as it suggests that the perception of
obsolescence is simply an effect of (and coming to terms with)
technological change. Obsolescence in such a scenario figures a
more general acceptance of and discomfort with the passage of
time, the moving of the future into the present, and the present
into the past. One might say the same thing about the perception
of "newness," particularly as it gets described as utopian (as
is Poster's view) or dystopian (as in the many critiques of the
Internet's effect on local communities, or on video games'
effect on "genuine" human interaction): it is an effect of
coming to terms with technological change that insists on
absolute differences between the present and the past and which,
in doing so, forgets that such change will probably "take shape
as it has in the past, as heterogeneous striations overlapping
and interpenetrating areas of innovation and replication"
(Hayles 119).[21] Cultural change--and political value--
articulates itself at different rates, even in the same object.
47. EverQuest, we have been arguing, is one such object. And
its striations are multiple: formally, it juxtaposes a highly
visible form of technology as technology with a much older,
seemingly non-technological form of entertainment (most
elegantly articulated in the divide between video or computer
and game); it brings together an emphasis on text-based
communication (between the game world and players, and between
players themselves) with explicitly filmic codes that allow for
viewing in-game action through a number of different "cameras"
or "views"; it mediates its broadly transnational community of
players through divisions into smaller, local communities
defined by either "geographic," "ethnic," or goal-oriented
affiliations (that is, groups or guilds); it unites seemingly
new experiences of both space and time with older notions (as
Anderson describes them) of what those experiences ought to
mean; and it establishes at its most fundamental structural
levels an unresolved tension between the formation of community
and a powerful experience of cultural alienation.
48. As we have suggested all along, only by remaining aware of
the productive interactions of these differences (beginning with
the basic difference between "film" and "game" at the heart of
Interactive Digital v. St. Louis County) does such a reading of
EverQuest become possible. This is not to deny the utility or
value of other kinds of readings--one could read the game purely
in terms of its narratives, or its production of identification,
or the sociological makeup of its players (their gender, their
race, their class, their sexuality, their politics)--but rather
to suggest that converting new media to textual or other
analogous forms is not the only way to read. Within the terms
laid out by the discipline of English as it currently exists in
the American academy, one can take seriously the "game" in
"video game" and still claim it as readable within a framework
of (con)textual practices with which we are familiar. Such a
reading--and readings of cultural practices like games more
generally--will always tend towards the ideological, as readers
will inevitably want to evaluate how that practice makes people
act (in the "real" world) in political terms. But the material
here can be read in multiple ways, and one of our goals has been
to suggest that the complexity of a game like EverQuest requires
a specific and careful analysis (which is why we have left open
the question of whether it does "good" or "bad" work, in
political terms, to the people who play it). Beyond that general
proposition, however, the goal here has been to illustrate
through the reading of EverQuest not simply the degree to which
it represents and/or shapes the real experience of hundreds of
thousands of players, but also to suggest that those
representations (and the structures that make them possible)
constitute an important site for the articulation and experience
of cultural and political value, of broader understandings of
communities and what they mean, of time and its relation to
individual lives, and of one especially compelling form of
alienation and its endlessly present solution. That our
structural reading of EverQuest can be turned to make an
argument about the uneven development of new media and
technologies in the digital age, we take simply as evidence that
video games are (and are readable as) culturally significant
sites of the production and reception of capital, identity, and
their pleasures.
Eric Hayot
Department of English
University of Arizona
ehayot@u.arizona.edu
Edward Wesp
Department of English
University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee
edwesp@uwm.edu
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Notes
1. In 1952, the Supreme Court had already written that "it
cannot be doubted that motion pictures are a significant medium
for the communication of ideas" (Burstyn v. Wilson); the
decision, however, extended only limited First Amendment
protection to film. Film censorship lasted slightly longer--the
last censorship board in the United States closed its doors in
1993, some seventy-seven years after the Supreme Court's first
review of film's status as film.
2. At least legally--the academic place of television studies is
marginal in comparison to film and literature.
3. Other cases include Malden Amusement Co. v. City of Malden
(1983); Tommy & Tina, Inc. v. Department of Consumer Affairs,
(1983); Kaye v. Planning & Zoning Comm'n (1983); Caswell v.
Licensing Comm'n (1983).
4. Avant-garde work in any of these media is excepted from these
definitions, as Jesper Juul notes.
5. At some basic level, of course, even the simplest video games
express ideas and tell stories: Pac-Man tells the story of a
brave circular creature chased by evil ghosts; the arrival of
Ms. Pac-Man places the characters of both games within an easily
recognizable conventional narrative. This may well be said to
express the idea that heterosexual marriage, even for non-
humanoid creatures whose major form of existence is to be chased
through mazes, is the end-point of all play. But in something
like Privateer 2--which includes cut-scenes, dialogue, and a
large backstory involving one character's mysterious parentage--
narrative elements are much more visible as such to an "average"
reader.
6. The ratings systems used for video games specify that to be
considered "violent" the game must include violence done to
humans or human-like creatures; in such a scenario Pac-Man is
not "violent" even though it involves "eating" ghosts. This
seems to require recognizing that video games can have
"content," though Limbaugh disagrees.
7. Neither, for that matter, are books or films.
8. At $12 per month each, EverQuest's 430,000 players generate
some $62 million in annual revenue.
9. No matter which server a player chooses to play on, they will
encounter exactly the same geography and computer-controlled
monsters. However, players can only encounter other players who
are on that same server.
10. Players tell jokes, discuss their (real-life) social
situations, politics, and sports, or gossip about other players
in both private discussions and larger groups; none of these
furthers the game, strictly conceived. Or, if one adopts a
broader view of what a "game" is and does--if one imagines that
games exist for social reasons furthered by phatic
communication--then such communication does indeed further those
purposes. The fact that EverQuest players simply cannot have
such discussions unless they are actively within the game world,
unless they are connected to the Internet and running the
EverQuest software, suggests something of the need to more
broadly consider what the "furtherance" of the game means in
this case.
11. For instance: cities, open plains, dungeons, mountainous
regions, deserts, and the like.
12. Each player is allowed to create up to eight characters to
play on any of the EverQuest servers. It is very common for
players to alternate their gaming sessions between one or more
characters, and players will often create extra characters in
order to experience the geography and "culture" of a different
region of the game world.
13. Or similar races: home cities for "good" races like dwarves
and elves are near each other, but far from home cities of such
"evil" races as trolls and ogres. Recent changes in the game's
structure, through an optional software expansion known as
"Planes of Power," have given low-level characters a much higher
degree of mobility.
14. The sense of community encouraged by the geographic division
of the game space is often very persistent. It is a common for
players to recognize each other's characters from their early
days and hail each other as old friends might. Thus, for
instance two players playing Wood Elf characters might express a
sense of expatriate community upon encountering each other in a
distant city that is home toHalflings.
15. To be sure, it is possible to play EverQuest
idiosyncratically--refusing to group or communicate with other
players, or to otherwise advance a character. One could, of
course, do the same in other games; a soccer player who insisted
on always heading the ball rather than kicking it might achieve
some personal pleasure at the cost of team success. But
EverQuest, like soccer, will not reward idiosyncratic players in
the game's terms.
16. It is worth noting that these changes are generally called
for by the community of players. In general, players seem to
accept the concept of balance enthusiastically; some portion of
the agitation for game changes in the name of balance, however,
simply conceals lobbying efforts to increase the ability of
players' own preferred character types.
17. In fact, on the face of things, it is not clear why
"balance" would be a problem--if warriors are more efficient or
fun to play than wizards, a purely consumerist chooser would
play a warrior every time. But players on message boards not
only articulate their insistence on playing a certain class
(combined with a directive to Verant Interactive to balance the
class fairly) but also a refusal to play other classes that they
feel uncomfortable with. What the players therefore want is the
opportunity to make a "choice" that does not have to be based on
in-game efficiency but can stem from other (cultural, emotional)
factors.
18. The structure of such a feature can be translated, to be
sure, into narrative terms (the game is, in some conceptions, a
"neverending" story), but it seems to us that such a reading
might make the structural importance of "balance" harder rather
than easier to see, while a reckoning with EverQuest as a game
brings it into relief.
19. As Anderson notes in his preface to the second edition of
Imagined Communities, the original edition deals primarily with
the problem of time; the second edition (1990) adds a chapter on
space and "mapping" (xiv).
20. In an essay offering a revision and extension of Anderson's
"socioscape" designed to remark the degree to which the
imagination, in late capitalism, functions as a "social
practice," Arjun Appadurai writes that "the imagination has
become [...] a form of work [...] and a form of negotiation
between sites of agency ('individuals') and globally defined
fields of possibility" (327). In Appadurai's terms, EverQuest
occurs at an especially intense node of the global "mediascape"
(it is, after all, owned by Sony) but, by virtue of the kind of
world it invites players to spend time in, maps that mediascape
onto a landscape involving ideologies, technologies, and the
flow of money.
21. Hayles thus insists that striation is not so much a new
condition as one which new situations make easier to see. In How
We Became Posthuman, Hayles argues against the idea that the
digital age is creating an entirely new type of human and
destroying the older, Cartesian model, that the "becoming" in
question has been ongoing and diachronic rather than the product
of any recent, synchronic break in the fabric of human
experience (283-91).
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