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August 10, 2004, 11:47 AM
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Load, ****, Fire: A MMOG Researcher Shares Her Opinions
By Louis Bedigian Quote:
You won’t find this to be the case with Constance A. Steinkuehler. Constance is a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She’ll take it from here. [size=18px]Introduction[/size] My name is Constance. I'm a massively multiplayer online gamer. I also research them. Officially I do cognitive psychology at University of Wisconsin-Madison, and I'm currently finishing my dissertation - an online cognitive ethnography of Lineage (first Lineage I now Lineage II). I've been studying cognition for six years, games for the last two or three. I started off designing online learning environments. And then I logged onto my first MMOG. And, ugh! Realized that the stuff we were designing here in education was a decade or two behind the times and that all the smart 'stuff' I had worked so hard to see happen in our own digital spaces was occurring naturally in MMOGs. I changed my line of research to focus on them immediately. Tell us about your studies regarding games. What interesting things have you learned? Constance: Well, overwhelmingly MMOGaming is incredibly intelligent play. It's a digital intellectual playground, truth be told. I've interviewed kids who are disengaged in school and failing basic coursework turn around and do high-level complex thinking and learning in the MMOG they play: write sophisticated arguments over ethics and social structures/relations, collect data and build mathematical models of the game dynamics in an effort to find the best exploit, research topics in history as a way to craft engaging fan-fictions related to the game. The irony is that these are all highly valued practices in varying academic fields (philosophy / sociology, science, history / creative writing) yet gameplay is treated in many circles as barren play (as Solomon put it in his recent editorial in the New York Times, such digital activity is torpid' and 'by and large invite inert reception') or, worse still, a root cause of social ills – like violence (Anderson's studies), anti-social behaviors (Provenzo), you name it. I'm suspicious of these sorts of diatribes against technology (gaming, in particular, MMOGaming especially) given our culture's tendency to meet nearly every new invention with the rhetoric of salvation (they will change the world as we know it in all ways good) or the apocalypse (they will be our downfall). Neither is ever true. In my work, I try to ask the question: What ARE people doing in games, and in what ways does it align (or fail to align) with forms of intellectual work we value outside them? And what I'm finding contradicts what's often claimed in the popular press. When the game industry started everything was new and exciting. There weren't any gender issues – you'd play as a hero and save a princess. Then in Mario 2 you got to play as the princess. The games were fun for everyone. Then things changed. By the mid 90s, almost all games released were made specifically for men. What do you think sparked this change? Constance: Two comments. First, does the chance to play the princess mean that games were then fun for everyone? I'm not convinced. I actually do play a princess (clan leader) in Lineage, but it’s hardly the standard helpless Barbie model (which I've been accused of being from people [who] don't know the first thing about a PvP, siege based game) and it's surely not for everyone. My point here is that my hunch is that women want a wider range of characters to play – not just the princess but maybe also the evil villain, the kick-ass tank, you name it. Second, I think the attitude toward girl gamers in the industry is really comical. Though I hate to admit it, maybe the whole theory that gamer guys grow up to design the very games that they want to play is true. There doesn't seem to be much emphasis on design for other people, other populations, etc. As Kurt Squire has pointed out before, much of the game industry is really just engineering rather than design: Building something and making it work rather than building something with someone else in mind. I can't speak with much authority here, but I wonder if it’s not a matter of the industry finding its easy audience and simply sticking with what they already know works. When I've had open conversations with designers in the field about disparity between genders who play, it's often treated like a non-issue. I've been told, straight out: Girls are not an important market to target. Are you personally trying to get more women involved with the game industry? Constance: Because I'm in academics, it’s hard to really pull that off. However, I work in a games research lab that is 90% women, 10% men. I game with other women online. And I do my best to be visible and vocal as a woman in the field. More than anything else, I'd like to see more Brenda Laurels, TL Taylors, Betsy Books out there. I read their work, cite it, and circulate it. Not because they're women, because they're great researchers in games. Are you going to be attending the Women's Game Conference this September? Constance: No, I have a real ambivalence toward separate conferences for women and games. I'm not sure it's a solution, but then I can't come up with any better idea. I'm a gamer, a games researcher, and then woman gamer/researcher. I would hate to see gender and gaming treated as a wholly separate conversation from the broader industry. All that said, though, I do admire what the organizers are trying to do. Shifting to a broader topic, how do you feel about the current state of broadband and online gaming? Constance: There's a lot of hype about the sky falling in on online games. It's not. Online games are just a niche market and we may be hitting the saturation point. The reasons are fairly mundane: Ever play an online game? They require substantial, sustained time to really 'get into' the social world that makes them what they are. I research the da** things and therefore MMOGaming is what I do 24/7, and even I can't play more than one (Lineage) and a half (SWG) at a time. Game development costs go up every year. Will this become a problem for game developers? Or has it already become a problem? Constance: Read Eric Zimmerman's work here. Yeah, it's a massive problem. We need a strong independent games industry, but the entry costs are rough. The Christian games market has been getting a lot of attention lately. Do you think Christian games – which are normally free of guns, swords, and even Goomba-stomping – will ever have the power to go mainstream? Constance: I think games are going through a proliferation of niche markets. This will be one market among many. The designers of these games realize that, by their very nature, games are an incredibly efficient media for communicating ideological messages. If there was one thing you could eliminate from the game industry, what would it be? Constance: Oh! Tough question. Microsoft. At GDC this past year, their attempt to sponsor a 'women in gaming' social hour was obnoxious. After showing clip after clip of interviews with gamers in their keynote without a single woman gamer included, they then hang posters everywhere with this silly avatar (all T&A and the only facial feature showing being a big red puckered mouth) and claim they are 'promoting women in games.' I was embarrassed for them. How do you feel about the game and film industries converging? Constance: It's great! So is the convergence between history and games and literature and games and all the rest. Why not? As long as we don't see the market become nothing more than licensed games. Do movies that are based on popular games do more harm than good for the game industry and the game franchise? Constance: Well, in theory no. Unfortunately, many of them were just plain bad films. As a game player, what would your dream game be? What kind of a game would you personally love to develop, or have someone develop for you? Constance: Lately I'm fantasizing about a law/crime/mafia/who-done-it sort of multi-player game where you have some complex case to sort out, and you have to play a forensic scientist or a mafia criminal or a lawyer or whatever. But, then, I'm very interested in education so I dream of games that get kids/adults into professional practices in ways that can spark their interest in the fields and enrich their future experience more broadly. Here in Wisconsin, our research team includes designers and design work, but it will be a while before I try my hand at that. Incredibly complex and creative work. I really deeply admire the people who do it. Where would you like to see the game industry be 10 years from now? Constance: I'd like to see a wider range of games and game play out there, but I think that's coming. I'd also like to see the whole dried up debate of player generated content versus designer generated content subside. It's futile IMHO. And, as someone studying games but not building them (yet) per se, I'd like to see richer cross-connections there (right now at GDC and elsewhere it's always reduced to the issue of how university programs should 'train' students for the industry. Instead of more interesting issues such as “how can research in anthropology and psychology [help us improve], etc.,†“inform design,†and “how can designers have a stronger voice in the forms of research being done.â€). Thank you Constance for an eye-opening interview. For more information on Constance’s research, visit: www.sit.wisc.edu/~steinkuehler/ First read at : Gamebunny
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