"There is no there there."
Weblog assignment 2: Use key concepts from the readings to analyze the information model, cultural dynamics and/or dramaturgy of an MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role playing game) such as SIMS, Counterstrike, Evequest, There!, etc. If you are not familiar with any MMORPG, please explore one. There! has a free trial from http://www.there.com (requires a Windows box).
I'm fine with calling there.com a “game” because it’s something that people do for fun that’s not necessary for survival or procreation. Some of our game readings mostly concerned games that have winners and losers and stated formal objectives. Nonetheless we can use these readings to learn a few things about there.com and its players and designers.
I think Salen, Zimmerman and Laurel might have clever things to say about there.com so let's pay them a visit. Sit back, pour yourself a scotch on the rocks and remember to fasten your seat belt.
There.com: The Information Model
Salen & Zimmerman [reading notes here] describe the concept of balance between “noise” and redundancy in games: a successful game poses enough uncertainty to keep things interesting, to prevent the game from becoming overly confining or predictable, but it avoids making the information transmission so uncertain and inefficient that play seems arbitrary and pointless. Veer too far towards either end of the spectrum and the game becomes a drag.
There.com strikes me as clearly situated somewhere on the the noisy/uncertain side of things. Consider the game’s lack of a formal objective. Even within the smaller games that I saw within there.com that include objectives (the hoverboard racing game, for instance), pursuit of the objective is not strictly enforced or encouraged and players can use bits of the game for other purposes. For instance, when I got bored with the hoverboard race I just jumped one of the racetrack ramps a few times repeatedly for fun, then raced off the game track and took the hoverboard with me for the rest of my stay in the there.com universe, riding it when I wanted fast medium-distance transportation, carrying it around the rest of the time.
Of course there are clear constraints too; I couldn’t eat the hoverboard and I couldn’t sit down with a few other players to bet on a cockfight or smoke a crackpipe. At least not in the gameworld. I couldn’t teleport to the places that banned teleportation, I (apparently) couldn’t walk into the paintball arena without a gun, and so on. But the constraints were a lot fewer and less severe than in more formal games. This was clear from the beginning. The game is about exploring and socializing more than it is about racking up high scores or vanquishing enemies.
Regarding games as being either “perfect information” games in which all information is known to everyone (like in chess) vs. “imperfect information” games (like poker) wherein some information is hidden, I suppose there.com should be considered clearly an imperfect information game because so much of the game involves social interaction and nobody knows what other players will say or (within certain limits) do from moment to moment. But in the case of an exploratory social game like this, the perfect vs. imperfect information classification doesn’t seem like a very useful or meaningful one.
Salen & Zimmerman could write entire books about how there.com embodies the concept of game as cultural rhetoric. Players must choose from very specific forms of interaction. In particular, the body types and clothing styles and the gestures and other available conversational devices all fit a particular style. You might call this style "wealthy young Western urban hipster as portrayed by turn-of-the-century Hollywood." To some extent this is unavoidable - as Salen & Zimmerman write, “beliefs, ideologies, and values present within culture will always be a part of a game, intended or not.” To accommodate every conceivable human style of appearance in a game like this would be impossible, but I tried making my male character put on a skimpy woman’s top that Janet Jackson would be proud of, and sure enough, this wasn’t allowed.
There.com as Theater?
At first glance there.com seems a fine embodiment of Brenda Laurel’s view [reading notes here] of computers as theater and of her ideal computer design as one that supports action and drama. After all, users take on avatars, actors who undertake action and interaction with one another on a beautiful fictional backdrop. Users can and (I thought) do use gesture effectively to reinforce their verbal messages as well as to convey messages on their own. I think that Laurel would praise this as the sort of “close coupling” of multiple interface modalities that she encourages (even if those modalities take place between multiple human players and are never translated between human and machine).
But I think there.com misses the boat by trying to staple a clunky, standard Windows drop-down (or drop up, in this case) menu bar onto this immersive world. It doesn’t fit. Rather than mapping most input actions directly to the people and objects they involve, there.com makes the classic Windows-and-Mac mistake that Laurel hints at when she writes that coders mistakenly view the computer “as a tool and not a medium.” (A sidenote: I don’t think Laurel chose the best terminology because for many tasks people –do- use computers as tools and that –is- an effective way of looking at them, and tools don’t necessarily reduce drama or stifle action. Tools don’t kill drama, people kill drama. More specifically: designers who shove tools into our faces inappropriately kill drama. But don’t get me started.)
The there.com user has to keep redirecting her locus of attention from the important things (the objects and people in the game) to care and feeding of the tools (sifting through the drop-up menus to figure out how to trigger the most basic action, for instance; navigating between game window and game Web pages; configuration of tools). Rather than just hammering the nail into the board, the user has to break her focus from the nail and spend five minutes configuring and checking the status of the hammer before anything can happen. Then one of the hammer configuration screens spawns an error message and by then our player has lost interest or, more tragically, has lost a priceless piece of serendipity in motivation.