The Political Economy of Player Generated Content

A couple of posts got me thinking about the issue of player generated content recently. Tony Walsh writes generally about players as storytellers as a trend in multiplayer games. Meanwhile (well, a few months ago), Brian Clark writes about his plans for Eldritch Errors, which include a panoply of media products (book, comics, films, etc.) based on the events which are currently unfolding in the immersive narrative. Brian talks about the players of the game as effectively “starring” in the retellings, or at least being largely responsible for their eventual content. Of course, that’s a bit of an overstatement. Most of the creative sweat is being put in by the professional writers, designers, etc. behind the property. But it does represent a significant shift from the way games and entertainment generally is developed — it’s becoming a collaborative process, and the lines between the producer and the consumer are being blurred.

I’m pretty much a fan of this. And superficially, it’s all well and good. But there are some quandaries you get into when a significant portion of your content is materially attributable to an unpaid, uncredited player base. Specifically: Why aren’t they being paid? Why aren’t they being credited? Are the players being taken advantage of? If so, why do they let it happen? And if not, what safeguards can we put in place to avoid declining the slippery slope into outright exploitation?

Of course, player generated content is nothing new. But in most cases, this content is mainly incidental, and not comparable to the larger body of work. Generally, we’re talking about the output from a fairly limited functionality that allows self-expression. In any MMO, you can create and operate a character/guild/organization/etc, and this certainly goes a long way to building the experience for other players. An MMO would simply not exist without a wide range of player generated entities to interact with. But it would be tough (albeit possible) to argue that these entities represent significant content on their own, because (a) they are generally irrelevant outside of the game, (b) each one is generally only experienced by a tiny percentage of the player base, and (c) the capacity for truly creative expression is severely limited.

There are also games that are built specifically to be tools for storytelling or content development, like Neverwinter Nights and RPG Maker. But these are largely the same as other development tools, an essential property of which is the fact that what you create with them becomes your property. There’s a crucial point here: creating the expression engine is important work, and the expression itself is equally important work; both are valid and rewardable forms of labour.

Looking elsewhere, user-generated content is the talk of the town in the whole web 2.0, social web thing. The “next great revolution” is the “cult of amateur”, etc. And it’s quite obvious that Youtube wouldn’t be worth much without the videos, and Facebook wouldn’t be worth much without your annoying high school friends. Unlike the case of the MMO, there would be no content left whatsoever. However, it’s worth noting that (a) at least the content is explicitly attributed to the creators, who can use their page/profile/etc. to further their own ends, and (b) we are beginning to witness a backlash against terms of service which grant highly liberal licenses over user contributed media. In my opinion, this issue, and the broader issue of the commodification of individuals to make billions for investors, are issues ripe for some scrutiny. Luckily, some people are taking the task to hand.

Although these sorts of sites represent the clearest appropriation of user-generated content, they are a lot closer in this respect to MMOs then the sorts of situations that I envision when I read Tony’s and Brian’s comments; content-generation on these sites is usually either incidental or highly disparate. For me, Tony and Brian are predicting a future of games that looks a lot more like Second Life, where highly creative expression and consumption of that expression is at the heart of the experience, and where that products of that expression are recognized as goods that ought to confer the same benefits they would if created outside of the game.

Will the games that arise from Tony’s and Brian’s visions follow the example set by Second Life? Although SL represents the closest parallel for me, they’re still quite different things. Media in SL is still quite disparate, while ARGs/chaotic fiction/whatever tries to present a cohesive experience. I can imagine that it would be quite problematic if a player decided to try and sell some part of the story that they were highly involved with at some point — or simply deny the producers they ability to use what they had contributed.

It’s important to note that these guys are in a whole different class from the people behind Youtube and Facebook. The latter are merely [gross generalization] cynical capitalists [/gross generalization], while the former are well-intentioned designers exploring the frontiers of collaborative storytelling. In general, people in this community are super nice and frequently idealistic (I’d like to think I’m a super nice idealist myself!) What I fear though, is that this niceness and idealism will perpetuate an already nascent assumption that the relationship between producers and players will forever be blanketed by a layer of happy warmness that precludes exploitation. In fact, this is not terribly unreasonable. We are talking about very nice people, in most cases, here. But the reality exists that you can be the nicest developers in the world, yet still end up screwing over your players quite unintentionally. Business tends to have that effect. (Much respect for EE, but it’s a good example of what I’m talking about.)

My hope is that game developers who take up this vision, and turn it into reality, will take this issue to heart. And I hope that players will realize what they’re contributions are worth, and take developers to task when they don’t show the proper respect. I am consistently amazed by the amount of creativity, resourcefulness, and plain old tenacity that exists amongst the player-base for these games. Games frequently succeed because these qualities. But I’m also consistently amazed that these same players spend most of their time working despised day jobs, without really thinking about they could do with these skills. They’re having fun, of course, and that’s important; not all unpaid labour is “unpaid labour”; that is, not all of it is bad. But we are talking about a completely new dynamic here, and that comes with the need to ask some hard questions.

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Wonderfully Unspeakable Horrors

I’ve been meaning to throw up a quick post about this for quite some time. Given that I… well, I didn’t exactly pan Eldritch Errors in a previous post, but I certainly said, you know, some words. In any case, I feel compelled to point out that the designers have since crafted a rather wonderful meta site that does a fine job of helping to jump in to the Lovecraftian horrors, thus resolving many of my earlier concerns.

However, what’s really got me excited is their behind-the-scenes blog, where they’ve been discussing what’s going into this thing. I’m actually pretty disappointed that I haven’t seen this mentioned on (m)any other blogs, because this is something fairly novel. Anyone who’s been involved in developing & running an ARG knows the toll it takes on those at the helm; so it’s no surprise that, to date, there is little documentation on this process. So a blog like this is an incredibly valuable resources to anyone interested in the genre.

This isn’t the only way that Eldritch Errors is breaking the mold, mind you. I’m keeping a very close eye on this one, and I’ll probably be writing about it plenty more in the future.

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Speaking of Chaotic Fiction

There’s this blog roundtable, right, and the topic du jour is chaotic fiction. Here’s the other post in the roundtable (we’re part of an exclusive club, I guess.) Also note that the somewhat mundane post title is not meant to imply that I am unenthusiastic about the topic — I just couldn’t think of a clever wordplay on “chaotic fiction,” and got frustrated. Chaotic diction? Erotic friction? No.

For the uninitiated, chaotic fiction is a term coined by Sean Stacey to define a space of participatory creative works. I guess if you were so inclined, you could call it Fiction 2.0 (except you would probably get punched.) Although Sean came up with the term in an attempt to contextualize the ARG-definition controversy (and get everyone to shut up about it I suppose), the idea is that it describes a space that contains a wide variety of genres, so it’s not strictly necessary to even bring up ARGs in this discussion… except I just did, so never mind.

Chaotic fiction is a nice framework, because it situates a number of hitherto discrete genres within a single conceptual space. Moreover, it recognizes the fluidity of that space. Second Life may be superficially distinct in nature from SFZero, but there is certainly something similar going on there — a truth that is manifested in the way that virtual games and live games are bleeding into one another. Cross-media entertainment is the big thing these days, and I would argue that it’s not because of interesting synergies between unique platforms, but because they’re all part of the same delicious pie. I expect the media theorists have known this for a long time.

While I like the idea of chaotic fiction, it’s really the aforementioned theorists I’m waiting to hear from. The idea is inherently academic, but I haven’t seen it appear on any academic radars. This is unfortunate because (a) there’s little doubt that Stacey’s thinking overlaps with a significant corpus of previous literature, so discussing chaotic fiction without the benefit of those insights is at best arrogant and at worst profoundly misguided, and (b) there’s not been a useful conceptual framework that entered the world fully formed; there need to be iterations, there needs to be a synthesis of viewpoints.

A brief synopsis: chaotic fiction inhabits a 3-dimensional space where the three axes represent authorship (centralized or distributed), ruleset (loose or strict), and coherence (less plot or more plot.)

Those are some good axes, but they don’t really represent the full space of possible variations between projects. Of course, the set of possible axes is infinite: How much of a project takes place online? How many participants does it scale to? How many cats were tangentially involved in the creation process? Etc. The question is, how do you choose which axes are salient enough to include in this sort of framework? Stacey might have had certain criteria in mind, but unfortunately, he didn’t explicitly share them. He sort of implies that he’s looking at properties that exist independently of specific media, and focusing mainly on abstracted patterns of behaviour rather than material details. That strategy makes sense, but it doesn’t exclude seemingly relevant properties like scale. Is a project geared to handle millions not fundamentally different from one geared to handle dozens? If someone were to really build on Stacey’s ideas, I’d say this is the way to do it: refine and justify the choice of axes.

One of the other interesting things about Stacey’s analysis is the way he situates the space of chaotic fiction as being connected to the larger trend of participatory online culture in general. This is certainly an apt observation. My question is, what exactly is the relationship between these spaces? Do they exist alongside each other, or is one within the other? How much overlap is there? Tellingly, if you treat “coherence” simply as a measure of structure, rather than a measure of plot, you get a space which very clearly includes projects like Wikipedia and GNU. Stacey has constructed a very thin barrier between what he calls chaotic fiction and virtually the entire sphere of participatory projects. In this model, all that distinguishes an ARG from a collaborative encyclopedia is the presence of narrative — and narrative being a fairly subjective concept, that’s not much of a distinction. Far from being a bad thing, all this means is that the ARG-definition controversy is inherently very silly, something which Stacey himself implied very strongly in his essay.

Enough theory. A framework isn’t very interesting unless you actually try to frame things within it, something that only Stacey has actually done so far (to my knowledge.) Stacey framed various projects within each individual axis, but when you’re in a multidimensional space what’s really neat is the interaction between axes. With 3 axes, you’ve got 8 sectors, each of which can be construed as a distinct category. Looking at each of these categories ought to be an interesting thought experiment. Of course, this is a ruthlessly mathematical way of looking at things, but I’ll save that critique for a later post wherein I refute everything I’m currently saying on the basis of postmodernity.

So, just for fun, let’s take a look at a few sectors in this space of chaotic fiction. In particular, those where distributed authorship lives, because that’s all that’s worth talking about anyway these days, right?*

1. Distributed authorship, loose ruleset, low coherence. People sort of just do whatever they want. Absolute anarchy is (arguably) not particularly worth exploring, but finding a magic balance with just enough rules and just enough coherence can lead to some highly empowering and compelling experiences. I’d argue that Second Life inhabits this space — it’s really quite chaotic, and despite the presence of a shared world, there is very little about the world itself that actually encourages any sort of normalized behaviour. There aren’t many examples of other scaled environments that allow users to do almost anything, probably because it’s hugely risky and challenging to give so many people so much freedom. On the other hand, there’s a plethora of small groups who create their own personalized spaces for these sorts of activities. Kupopolis, for example, is used by about 20 writers to write stories within a shared universe — there aren’t many rules because there aren’t many people. Unbounded freedom on a large scale is a tough thing to harness, but I’d wager that there’s a lot of room for Big Ideas that could pull it off.
2. Distributed authorship, loose ruleset, high coherence. It’s somewhat difficult to think of a system for distributed authorship that could facilitate high coherence without a significant set of rules. About the closest I can get are the “interactive story” communities like Kupopolis — a small group of authors trying to create something reasonably coherent, where strict rules are unnecessary because of participants’ like-mindedness. It’s an interesting concept, though: let users run free while somehow compiling their output into something that is greater than the sum of its parts. ARGs get rather close. They tend rather closely to centralized authorship and a strict ruleset, but one can certainly imagine an ARG with less of each. The trick, I expect, is finding a minimal but effective management/planning strategy that’s capable of coordinating emergent, unstructured behaviour without getting in its way. Well, duh, that sounds like a cinch. Arguably, something like Wikipedia does this well — but the extent to which that sort of output is coherent is debatable. Still, an ARG that borrowed patterns from Wikipedia would be rather intriguing.
3. Distributed authorship, strict ruleset, low coherence. This is pretty much the baseline for Webs Two Point Oh, and is consequently a space littered with the detritus of a million mediocre startups. Consider your standard YASNS (Yet Another Social Networking Service): it’s built entirely on the users’ backs, you’re pretty limited in what you can do on it, and ultimately there’s not really much to it. The idea is to reach some sort of level of coherence — a point at which the swamp of unassociated data comes together into something magical, like when you look at clusters in Flickr. Most don’t succeed…
4. Distributed authorship, strict ruleset, high coherence. …but when they do succeed, it’s something to get excited about. Of course, the kinds of projects I’m talking about don’t strictly fit into the realm of chaotic fiction. But, as I argued in my previous overlong essay, there’s a lot to be learned from the internet at large.

*My other reason for not probing the entire space in detail is the fact that I wrote most of this post about a month ago, and only came back to it now. You ever try starting a lengthy blog post and coming back to it after several significant life events? It doesn’t work. No thanks.

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Day of the Figurines

(x-posted from Wero Notes)

Blast Theory is an artists’ collective in the UK that does a lot of work with pervasive gaming, amongst other things. They are mainly famous for their games Uncle Roy All Around You and Can You See Me Now, both of which are games played in cities in small groups of online players and street players who are equipped with fancy schmancy GPS-enabled PDAs. The games are very innovative and creative, but they are not consumer products and are not available for general consumption (not that that’s a bad thing, I’m just saying.)

The reason I mention them is largely because one of their other works, Day of the Figurines, has got me thinking. In this piece, there’s an actual miniature village full of figurines.

To begin the game, players are invited to create their own figurine: to name it, answer questions about its past and how it is represented to other players. They then see him or her placed in the town. Thereafter participation in the game is via mobile phone. Players receive a minimum of one text a day updating them on the progress of their figurine and are invited to make increasingly challenging decisions over the fate of themselves and other players in response to deteriorating circumstances. Players can join or leave the game at any time. One of the key aspects of this new form of artwork is that it is situated within players’ daily lives and can be accessed at any time.

This is interesting to me because players can participate in a narrative space through lightweight, structured interactions.

I love the idea of narratives that are molded through audience participation, and I love the idea of open source worlds like Saijo City. The problem in my mind has always been finding a model of participation that is relatively undemanding but still significant. On the one hand, very unstructured bottom-up participation, such as the kind practiced by fan-fic writers, is hugely compelling to those involved but ultimately pretty inaccessible. On the other hand, highly structured top-down participation, such as being able to vote for who the protaganist of a TV show should date, is cool but not very rewarding for the individual decision-maker. Day of the Figurines points to an interesting middle ground: participation that is structured and accessible, but still acknowledges the unique contributions of individuals. Despite the lowkey nature of participation, players still have a meaningful investment in the world, as manifested by their tangible avatar. Of course, there’s no reason to stop it there — you could have a sliding scale of interaction, moving from the structured to the freeform, so that engaged players who want to contribute more can do so.

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Kameraflage

My old labmate Connor Dickie is up to something pretty interesting. His Kameraflage technology is described as

…display technology specifically designed for the camera-phone generation… By rendering content in [infrared] wavelengths we are able to create displays that are invisible to the naked eye, yet can be seen when imaged with a digital camera.

Connor has a knack for dreaming up innovative applications for off-the-shelf technology that seems incredibly sci-fi and captures the popular imagination. I previously worked with him on eyeBlog, which was featured on a number of TV shows. I have no doubt that kamerflage will generate similar levels of interest.

The technology is particularly salient to me because it presents compelling possibilities for interaction in pervasive games. This is essentially dirt-cheap augmented reality, which runs on a ubiquitous device. Games that rely on AR, previously one-off academic exercises, suddenly become massively scalable. Perhaps more importantly, the model of interaction is extremely compelling, and lends itself to detective-style gameplay. The mobile phone becomes a personal magnifying glass that reveals secrets — and every object becomes a potential clue. The potential for creating an immersive experience is pretty serious.

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