Möring/Leino 2016

Referenzen

• Claus Pia (games as product of their time in terms of economic, political and cultural history, "Computer Spiel Welten" 2000)
• romantic play theories (Schiller, Huizinga, Caillois)
• Schiller
• Feher (2009)
• Juul (2003) (what constitutes a game)

Begriffe

• liberal and neo-liberal gameplay
• game culture influenced by neo-liberalism
• Pias destinction between games
  • Action games: time critical (make something happen at the right time in the right place, user testing: user presence and user learning)
  • Strategy games: configuration critical
  • Adventure games: decision critical

Ziel

• "a viable perspective for contemporary critique." (p 146)

Aussagen

• "It shows further that contemporary discourse in computer game studies addresses computer game/play as if it still was the romantic form of play rooted in the paradigm of liberalism." (p. 145)
• "In those games [free-to-play games] the players invest time and effort in developing their skills, although their future value is mainly speculative – just like this is the case for citizens of neo-liberal societies." (p. 145-146)
• Pias compares the characteristics in action games to working studies, because they try to understand the player input
• "Following Pias one can say that computer games emerged out of a spirit of work optimization of a blue-collar worker (and later the white-collar worker) in an industrial capitalist society. The industrial worker of the time was a result of the industrialization and emerging capitalism and, to answer our question, computer games emerged in a capitalist economy within which prevailed the need to optimize work processes. In other words early computer games can be described as devices for ‘optimization through training’" (p. 147)
  • What is optimized? In a game you want to optimize because its a coping mechanism with failure.
• "the police negotiate the two drives in a disciplinary manner that favours the formal drive." (p. 147)
• "For Feher, liberal condition is characterized by the possibility for a subject to separate between her work and her spare time. More specifically, the liberal condition is paradigmatic for the relationship between factory owners and labourers from the eighteenth century on." (p. 148)
• "For instance, Eskelinen (2001) and Frasca (1999) directly used classical play theory to establish a unique characteristic of computer games in order to set them apart from narrative media. More indirectly, the liberal heritage is evident in discussions that emphasize any sort of separation between play and non-play, such as immersion and/or magic circle (e.g. Calleja 2006, 2011)" (p. 149)
• "in the context of this paper our main point of contention with the idea of computer games as games has to do with the contract between the player and the game. In terms of this contract, what is transparent in games appears to be opaque in computer games." (p. 151)
• "We suggest that computer games do not necessarily afford this level of transparency due to inseparability of their technological materiality and what some would describe as rules. As Consalvo observes:" (p. 151)
• "Due to this inseparability, the ‘rules’ would appear only in a benevolent description that on purpose sets out to describe them (Leino 2012). From a less benevolent, or perhaps a more realist, perspective, the only rule the player has to agree to before setting out to play is the one stating simply that the player has to devote his or her care and attention to the game." (p. 151)
• "Perhaps we can let go of the analogy between traditional games and ‘computer games’. This would mean also letting go of the assumption that computer games as we know them would serve the purposes of liberalist society, as Pias suggested." (p. 151)
• "Now, whoever has the right to celebrate his or her winning has that right for reasons other than the effort he or she had invested. This is a new ethos that warrants description." (p. 153)
• "The player will soon realize that the goalposts are moving. The neoliberalist ‘ghost car opponent’, though it may look like a reflection of one’s past performance, is but a shadow to be chased, cast by one’s current performance, always speeding one corner ahead of the player. The system the player is dealing with is not of the transparent, liberal kind, and it is not" (p. 154)
  • There is no end point in specific games.
• "Perhaps Pocket Planes was not designed to function as a game, as a tool for fun, but rather could be described as a machine designed to extract cash from its users." (p. 154)
• "Instead of playing as our own avatars in World of Warcraft, now we play League of Legends (Riot Games, 2009) as ourselves with or by using fixed prêtà-porter avatars that are the same for everyone. Achievements are tallied in our own accounts, not in those of our avatars. Audience watching us play on Twitch. TV are interested in what we do on this side of the screen at least as much as they are in what the avatars are doing on that side of the screen." (p. 156)

Fragen

• What is play for them?