Celia Pearce

The Truth About Baby Boomer Gamers A Study of Over-Forty Computer Game Players

This article describes a study conducted in the summer of 2006 aimed at exploring the play patterns and lifestyles of gamers who fall into the loose demographic of “Baby Boomers,” typically defined as people born between 1946 and 1964. This independent study, including more than 300 participants, combined quantitative and qualitative techniques to paint a multifaceted picture of the gaming lifestyles and tastes of this understudied population. The study findings show that Baby Boomers comprise a vibrant video game audience, that they are devoted players, and that they have distinct needs and interests that have gone ignored by both the mainstream game industry and the game press. They also provide some detailed data about their play styles and gaming interests, the role of gaming in their larger media mix, as well as specific case studies that paint a nuanced portrait of this understudied and underserved audience.

Productive Play Game Culture From the Bottom Up

In this article, the author argues against the assertion, originating with “canonical” game studies texts such as Homo Ludens and Man, Play, and Games, that inherent in the definition of games is that they are “unproductive.” Instead, she makes a case for the notion of productive play, in which creative production for its own sake (as opposed to production for hire) is an active and integral part of play activities, particularly those enabled by networks. Citing from her recent ethnographic research studying intergame immigration between massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs), the author describes one case in which players ejected from the MMOGUru: Ages Beyond Myst became highly productive, creating artifacts from Uru in other virtual worlds like There and Second Life. Over time, the Uru Diaspora expanded the games culture, eventually creating their own original Uru-and Myst-inspired artifacts, including an entirely new game.

Emergent authorship: the next interactive revolution☆

Since the invention of the Gutenberg Press, the infrastructure of content creation has been built on an industrial model, which has culminated in the current broadcast media narrative hegemony. This model of ‘‘mass media’’ is based on the notion that there is a centralized producer who distributes a large quantity of identical content ‘‘products’’ to a large, mass audience. This structure is built in a foundation of two fundamental principles: ‘‘authorship’’ and ‘‘ownership’’. Authorship is a measure of the value of content, and ownership determines the recipient of that value. Ironically, these are almost never the same entity, although in very rare cases, the author receives some small percentage of the value he/she creates. In this context, content is controlled by a small and elite minority. Not unlike the so-called ‘‘Dark Ages’’ of Europe, when virtually all content was owned, controlled and held under close guard by the Catholic Church, today’s content hegemony has absolute power over what is made and distributed. This system is very reliant on the dynamic of a producer/consumer relationship. Until now, the entertainment and media ‘‘industries’’, in general, have worked on this model. The computer and the Internet pose some very real challenges to this system because, unlike the media hegemony, which is centralized and controlled, the Internet is a highly decentralized, uncontrolled, peerto-peer environment. As such, it creates a physical infrastructure that poses a real and present threat to the media hegemony. A great example is Napster, the Internet music trading software that allowed users to freely share their private music files with others on the system. This decentralized, open system, although it was never used to generate a profit on anyone’s part (including Napster’s) was percieved as a huge threat to the hegemonistic copyright/ownership equation, above. As a result, the music industry used its considerable legal infrastructure to eventually shut it down. The result has been an explosion in copycat software. Now there are more ‘‘napsters’’ than there were before, and the situation becomes even harder to control. The story of Napster is a sort of modern-day David and Goliath story. Or perhaps, more aptly, it can be described as a Trojan Horse. Like the old video game Centipede, where each time you shoot the vile creature, he splits into half and becomes two Centipedes, the revolution started by Napster has not become a groundswell. This is only the beginning. In the following pages, we will look specifically at two new entertainment genres, which are generally being described as hybrid narrative/games. They are revolutionary because they not only represent the emergence of new forms that are unique to the computer medium (although, as we will see, they both have their roots in non-computer forms), they also reframe the producer/ consumer relationship. Both genres challenge fundamental notions of authorship and create a new consumer–producer hybrid, inviting the player to become a co-author in the narrative. I believe that these forms will challenge the narrative hegemony, and fundamentally change the way we both experience and create narrative content.

Sustainable Play Toward a New Games Movement for the Digital Age

This article suggests a revisit of the New Games movement, formed by Stewart Brand and others in the early 1970s in the United States as a response to the Vietnam War, against a backdrop of dramatic social and economic change fueled by a looming energy crisis, civil rights, feminism, and unhealthy widespread drug abuse. Like-minded contemporaries R. Buckminster Fuller (World Game), Robert Smithson (Spiral Jetty), and Christo and Jean-Claude (Valley Curtain) responded in kind to these environmental and sociopolitical quandaries with their “earthworks.” As digital game designers and theorists embark on developing new methods to address the creative crisis in mainstream game production, against a similar backdrop of global climate change, a controversial war, political upheaval, and complex gender issues, the authors propose a reexamination of the New Games movement and its methods as a means of constructing shared contexts for meaningful play in virtual and real-world spaces.

The Diasporic Game Community: Trans-Ludic Cultures and Latitudinal Research Across Multiple Games and Virtual Worlds

This chapter develops a methodological concept that is new in this area of research, latitudinal studies that look at phenomena across multiple virtual worlds, as a means to draw generalizable conclusions. For the purposes of illustration, it uses the remarkable case history of a community of players that arose in Uru: Ages Beyond Myst, a massively multiplayer online game, and who migrated to other virtual worlds when it closed down, taking their Uru culture with them. Uru refugees entered other online game worlds, and the non-game worlds There.com and Second Life, where they created their own fictive ethnic identities, communities, and cultures. A 5-year research project has studied the emergence of game refugees, trans-ludic diasporas, and the development of trans-ludic identities, while exploring a range of methodological challenges and opportunities. It is becoming increasingly feasible to conduct ethnographic studies with teams of researchers or graduate students that provide comparative analysis across multiple games or worlds.

Words with friends: writing collaboratively online

Author(s): Boellstorff, T; Nardi, B; Pearce, C; Taylor, TL | Abstract: Tom Boellstorff, Bonnie Nardi, both from University of California, Celia Pearce, Georgia Institute of Technology and T. L. Taylor from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method. The Handbook had been written as an entirely collaborative document, with a single authorial voice. They achieved their goal with a mix of synchronous and asynchronous collaboration methods. Aside from a small number of face-to-face meetings, they spent many hours in email and Skype discussing how best to present the principles of ethnographic research, how to clear up misconceptions regarding its scope and value, and how to reach a wide audience. Their breakthrough occurred when they realized that rather than propose an edit in a comment box, they could make the proposed edit in the text and paste the old version in a comment box. While they used asynchronous collaboration primarily during the early phases of composing the manuscript, they did return to asynchronous collaborating after the synchronous phase, in the final stages of writing.

Productive Play: Beyond Binaries

Abstract In this article we review and analyze rotions of productive play, reporting the results of a workshop held at the University of California, Irvine in May 2008.

Principles of emergent design in online games: Mermaids phase 1 prototype

This paper outlines the first phase prototype of Mermaids, a massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) being developed by Georgia Techs Emergent Game Group {EGG}. We describe Mermaids in the context of the groups research mission, to develop specific games, techniques and design features that promote large-scale emergent social behavior in multiplayer games. We also discuss some of the innovative design features of the Mermaids game, and describe the rapid prototyping and iterative development process that enabled us to create a working prototype in a relatively short period of time on a zero budget project using a student-based development team. We also discuss the special challenges encountered when trying to develop a nontraditional game, one of whose stated research goals is to interrogate MMOG conventions, using a relatively conventional game engine.

Narrative environments (panel): virtual reality as a storytelling medium

What is a narrative environment? Simply put, it is a space that facilitates a story. Although this art has been perfected in the real world by theme park designers, in the virtual world, space as a narrative medium is just beginning to be explored. Current applications focus on three dimensions, but ignore the fourth— time. Thus much of cyerspace is, at present, a ghost town in which aimless avatars wander about in search of meaning. The potential for dynamic, interactive storytelling in cyberspace is enormous when you consider the multi-user realms now available, and the level of user responsiveness that can be created within a virtual world. Furthermore, the unique immersive, first person perspective afforded by Virtual Reality creates the opportunity for emotional impact through empathy, discovery and personal choice. Traditionally, interactive narrative has been synonymous with “nonlinear storytelling,” or branching, video-based genres. Virtual reality offers a more interactive alternative: “omnidirectional storytelling.” But therein lies the challenge. For indeed the more interactivity, the more challenging it becomes to facilitate the story. What does it mean to give up this control? Must we form an entirely new paradigm for story structure? How can we harmonize the seeming contradition between “interactive” and “narrative”? For the dramatic conclusion, tune in to the next episode of “Narrative Environments: Virtual Reality as a Storytelling Medium...”

Characters on the Internet (panel): the next generation

And yet in our daily lives we communicate and engage in a totally different way. We talk with our friends and relatives. We watch their facial expressions, read into their pauses, their vocal inflections and hand gestures. This is the language, the syntax, in which we are all truly experts: communicating and engaging interactively with people, with characters. Characters that emotionally engage and entertain us through films, plays, television, cartoons, and comics. Characters that inform, educate, and try to influence us, such as teachers, sales people, and business colleagues. Characters that have personality and spirit.