As a designer of multiplayer games, attractions and “themed” public space for over 20 years, I’ve devoted my career to the craft of experience design, or what performance artist Joseph Beuys calls “social sculpting.” There is a unique craft to designing multiplayer mediated experiences that integrates a number of disparate disciplines; it is a design field, yet it exercises elements of what I term “applied cybersociology.” Early in my career I was responsible for playtesting games and learned quite quickly that many a well-meaning concept can end up being highly ineffectual in practice. I thus learned to take a player-centered, practical approach, and this sensibility has followed me into academia. My dissertation, Playing Ethnography: A study of emergent cultures in online games and virtual worlds (2006), was a design research intervention that entailed what anthropologist George Marcus would call “multi-sited ethnography” across multiple virtual worlds. This research concerned the immigration patterns and emergent cultures of refugees from the Myst-based game Uru after its beta test closed in early 2004. My principal interest was in understanding the influences of specific design affordances on large-scale emergent behavior. Currently, as director of the Emergent Game Group {EGG} at Georgia Tech, I am applying these principles to the design of actual games. My group recently showed our MMOG Mermaids at the Multiverse booth at the Game Developers Conference 2007. This game is being developed with a team of students around the core research question: Can we actually design for emergence by creating games and features that promote it.
When I first met Ron Meiners at E3, he was still wearing the nametag of “Uru Community Manager,” even though the game had been closed for over a year. That our paths have subsequently continued to cross should not be a surprise. We share a common interest in reflexive design and research; for the sort of work we do it is essential. It requires what I would characterize as responsive design. MMOGs and virtual worlds present a new paradigm for media production. Unlike traditional boxed games, they are not a “product” that is ever finished. They are living organisms that change over time. Some of our practitioner colleagues have evolved to fit this new paradigm, but others may yet fully grasp the business they are in. World of Warcraft, for instance, closes its customer service lines at 5pm, even though it is most heavily trafficked in the evening hours.
Developing an online play environment is not dissimilar from creating a theme park. There is a design and production process entailed in creating the “world,” but there is also an elaborate “soft” infrastructure of guest services, special programming, etc., to accommodate the lived experience and changing requirements of guests. These public spaces cannot be construed simply as new real estate entities. Rather they must be viewed as what I characterize as “play ecosystems,” borrowing from complexity researcher Yaneer Bar-Yam. Play ecosystems need to be social, they need to be procedural, they need to be responsive. Not every problem can be solved with software. A dynamic intervention by both designers and community managers needs to take place. When it doesn’t, we see emergent outcomes such as the Warrior protest in WoW, in which masses of warriors on multiple servers staged a large-scale civil disobedience to demand changes to their character class, in some cases crashing the servers. A recent planned Dwarf action, on the other hand, was squelched by Blizzard Management with threats of immediate account cancellation.
What designers fail to realize is that once they are inhabited by players, our games are no longer ours, as T.L. Taylor has eloquently pointed out. Inhabited games are as much the property and creation of their players, if not more so, than they are of their designers. Often the dynamics that take place expose designers’ issues around control. Disneyland, like World of Warcraft, is a very controlled environment. Yet it does a far better job of responding to guests and taking their needs into account. At the opposite extreme, co-constructed worlds like Second Life become organic sandboxes that change from day to day, hour to hour. A whole team of people and set of services exist to facilitate this dynamic organism.
My goal in instigating this blog with Ron is to begin to engage in a discussion about these issues, and in particular, to build a bridge between research and practice, and also “practical research.” I think more so than in almost any other branch of game studies, those in the industry have a great deal to benefit from the research being done in this space. Researchers are doing quantitative and qualitative studies that has real and palpable ramifications in terms of game design, and even business. Some of us are wearing multiple hats as researcher/practitioners. This environments creates a forum for discussion of research for its own sake, as well as its practical application to the creation and management of distributed play spaces, including games, virtual worlds, and even ARGs and “Big Games,” all of which share in common that they entail the social sculpting of public space. As touched on here, we will also look at models from non-digital play communities, ranging from Disneyland, to Burning Man, and everything in between. Please join us in this adventure!
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