[-empyre-] a definition of gaming subcultures? / playing as performance / games that you can't get out of your newsfeed

[Gabriel Menotti]

* Subcultures and their “economies”

“If gaming is a marginal culture then what is film? I would suggest
that gaming is, like film, part of the mainstream and fully
assimilated, economically and socially.” [Simons Biggs]

Indeed, I think everyone agrees that videogaming per se is not a
subculture or marginal activity (especially nowadays). Maybe it is so
precisely due to its nature of perfect “intertextual commodity,” as
pointed out by Kücklich, which brings it to the hub across different
media channels.

At the same time, the way videogames become mainstream might be the
reason for the emergence of several gaming subcultures – which, as
Mathias Fuchs said, are not necessarily /counter-cultures/.
Speedrunning, which we might discuss in detail later, is a very good
example of these practices/communities. As Kücklich said, speedrunners
are a particular group that “share a set of "values" as well as a
history, which contextualizes the everyday practice of this
subculture's members” – that is, contextualizes them within the larger
gaming (mainstream) culture (without necessarily going against it,
quite the contrary).

I think it is telling that such groups also have shared /structures
and platforms/ to where their “playing” is extended. In the case of
speedrunning, we could first think of the different forums to where
these gamers post their videos (such as TASvideos). We could also
refer to emulators used by them in a particular way (e.g. video
recording functions). On the one hand, they go much further in the
gaming platform than a “regular” gamer would; on the other, they
create ancillary platforms that support and promote such uses of the
central (gaming) platform. Maybe this is a generic way to characterize
all the gaming subcultures we are referring in this debate (in that
sense, they come closer to Christopher Kelty’s idea of “recursive
publics”). [1] I personally see these groups as collateral signs of
the technosocial complexity that gaming has attained.

(According to this definition, I’m not sure if the anecdotal hardcore
gamers should be taken as a sub-culture as well - but maybe that is
just a moral judgment, informed by the fact that hardcore gamers seem
very conservative in relation to the central gaming platform (genres,
conventions, values, etc), while most other subcultures are rather
progressive – or at least born out of a “perversion” of the original
platform.)


* Play as rehearsal or performance?

“The game offers opportunities to play with aggression and cooperation
via a contractual buffer. In some sense, it is not all that different
from the more obvious forms of play-acting that people engage in
through other estrangement strategies: Larping, inebriation, costume
parties, etc.” [Davin Heckman]

This is a very good point. We should also remain aware of the nature
of play as rehearsal, and the game as a pedagogical system. However,
what happens when playing becomes a rehearsal of itself? Date sims,
for instance, do not teach people anything about actual social
interactions – ironically, they are among the preferred games of
Japanese hikikomori. [2]

Before someone brings Baudrillard into the discussion, I just wanted
to ask if the “will-to-immersion” pointed out by Rafael Trindade
cannot lead to some sort of short-circuiting. As Cynthia Rubin has
remarked, the activity of playing can be a mode of participating /
inhabiting certain systems/ environments. However, if a gaming system
has such internal complexity that it requires a very specialized
investment of skill and cognition, how can playing also feedback into
other practices?

Moreover, could that be seen as a reason for the increasing importance
of the aspects of play as “performance” (e.g. musical)? In other
words, are the gamers inconsciously thinking that “if we cannot employ
these skills beyond this platform, let’s capitalize this platform,
turning it into one for spectacle”? (Which is a question that
foreshadows next week’s topics).


* From immersion to eversion?

“So vis-a-vis established gaming culture, social games are the new
punk rock: easy to produce, with much more emphasis on "spreadability"
than gameplay, and reaching out to audiences who would never pay 60
euros for a AAA console game.” [Julian Kücklich]

I like very much this reading of the situation, as counter-intuitive
as it may seem. It also shows that the way these games operate
prevents them from becoming a counter-culture by default. Farmville
players must comply not only to the game rules, but also with those of
its platforms of distribution (e.g. Facebook) as well, right?

Do social games also challenge the idea of playing as a form of pure
immersion? After all, you do not have to make any active, constant
effort to be part of such systems: the system “naturally” surrounds
users with dozens of notifications from their friends, sometimes even
free bonuses. One is often scoring points without doing anything –
without even being aware of it! (“You may already be a winner!”)

I’m not sure if I agree with Davin Heckman that such model of
circulation is a dead-end for gaming (or cultural production). But I’m
sometimes astonished by the fact that games such as Mafia Wars/
Farmville/ etc cannot be “turned off” (and here, one can compare them
to offline cases like Assassin, StreetWars [3] or The Game).

Avoiding the deeper political implications of this fact (or the
anxiety it may generate), I’m compelled again to ask if the limits of
playing must coincide with the limits of the game, or if they can be
separated by a large degree, without becoming antithetical.

Best!
Menotti

[1] http://p2pfoundation.net/Recursive_Public
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori
[3] http://www.streetwars.net/