Opening Note

Henry Jenkins continues with this series in the Opening Note this week, providing an advance version of his latest essay, which will be featured as an additional chapter for the paperack edition of Convergence Culture and as part of a forthcoming book from Jonathan Gray, who was one of the speakers at the Futures of Entertainment 2 conference. The previous two pieces in this series on how politics and citizenship intersect with new technologies which enable participatory culture, ran in the previous two weeks' Opening Note.

In his essay "The Spectacularization of Everyday Life" in Lynn Spiegel and Denise Mann's Private Screenings: Television and the Female Consumer (1992), Dennis Mann discusses the ways that early television deployed parody to signal its uncomfortable relationship to Hollywood glamour, positioning its technology -- and its own stars -- as closer to the public than their cinema counterparts. Early television often spoofed the gap between Hollywood and reality, making fun of its over-dramatic style and cliché situations, depicting television characters (such as "Lucy" in I Love Lucy) as fans who want but are denied access to film stars. In the process, these programs helped to negotiate television's emerging social status, stressing the authenticity and everydayness of its own modes of representing the world. Something similar has occurred as digital media has negotiated its own position within user's experiences. Amateur media makers often signal their averageness through parody, openly acknowledging the gap between their limited economic resources or technical means compared to more polished commercial entertainment. (See more from my essay, "Quentin Tarantino's Star Wars?: Digital Cinema, Media Convergence, and Participatory Culture," in the 2003 anthology Rethinking Media Change, which I co-edited with David Thorburn). Through parody, they hope to invite people to laugh with them, not at them.

Hollywood stars often embraced self-parody when they appeared in early television, showing that they were also in on the joke and were able to make the adjustments needed to enter our homes on television's terms. Something similar occurs when presidential candidates embrace self-parody as a campaign tactic. In one famous example, the former president and first lady re-enacted the final moments of The Sopranos. Here, "Hillary" and "Bill" seek to become more like average Americans, tapping a YouTube trend in the aftermath of the HBO series' wrap-up. Through this video's jokes about Hillary's attempts to control her husband's diet and Chelsea's difficulty with parallel parking, the Clintons hoped to shed some of the larger-than-life aura they gained during their years in the White House and to re-enter the lifeworld of the voters. A candidate, who was otherwise closely associated with a culture war campaign against media violence, sought to signal her own fannishness; a candidate often seen as uptight sought to show that she could take a joke. And the video itself was designed to call attention to the Clinton Campaign's effort to get the public to pick a theme song for her campaign.

Or take the case of a Mike Huckabee campaign commercial, originally broadcast but also widely circulated via Youtube. The spot's opening promise of a major policy announcement sets up its punchline: action film star Chuck Norris is unveiled as the Arkansas governor's policy for securing the American-Mexico border. The video does offer some serious policy statements, including a discussion of Huckabee's stands on gun rights and the IRS, but they are rendered over a western movie soundtrack and coupled with more playful statements: "When Chuck Norris does a push-up, he's not lifting himself up, his pushing the earth down...Chuck Norris doesn't endorse. He tells America how it's going to be." The video thus seeks to establish Huckabee's credentials as a man's man, even as it makes fun of his need to do so. The video both exploits – and spoofs – the role of celebrity endorsements in American politics.

CNN had asked the Democratic presidential candidates to submit their own "YouTube-style videos" for the broadcast debate. For the most part, they recycled existing advertising content without much regard for the rhetorical strategies by which YouTube contributors signaled their distance from the commercial mainstream. A notable exception was the video submitted by John Edwards campaign, a spot set to the song "Hair" which jokingly suggested that media coverage of the candidate's expensive haircuts displaced attention from more substantive issues. We might contrast this with Roger Rmjet's similarly themed "Feeling Pretty" video, which sets captured footage of Edwards's primping before doing a local news appearance to a highly feminized song from West Side Story. The first invites us to laugh with, the second at Edwards. Read side by side, they reflect a moment where both top-down and bottom-up forces are deploying internet parody for their own ends – though with very different rhetorical consequences.

Next week, in the Opening Note, Jenkins provides the fourth part of this six-part series.

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Closing Note

C3 Consulting Researcher Doris Rusch continues her look at metaphors and digital games in the concluding piece in this series. The previous two pieces appeared in the Closing Note of the past two weeks' Weekly Update.

To become a bit more specific about the concepts I've written about in this series over the past couple of weeks, I have so far identified three key concepts shared by "game" and "life":

1. direct causation

2. physical conflict

3. regulation of behavior

All three concepts are based on physicality. They directly emerge from experience and are major building blocks for our metaphorical structuring and understanding of the world. All of these concepts consist of a range of structural elements.

Ad 1) At the heart of every interaction with the (game)world lies the concept of direct causation. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson list twelve structural elements of direct causation in their book Metaphors We Live By (p. 70). The following elements I find most relevant to illustrate my point.

For direct causation to happen:

• an agent has as a goal some change of state in the patient
• the change of state is physical
• the agent has a plan for carrying out the goal
• the plan requires the agent's use of a motor program
• the agent touches the patient either with his body or an instrument
• the change in the patient is perceptible
• the agent monitors the change in the patient through sensory perception

Examples for direct causation are endless. From scratching one's nose to sewing on a button to firing a gun. Thanks to the "action button," all of these acts of direct causation are principally possible in games. However, some might feel more immediate than others, depending on the physical mapping between real-life input and on-screen action.

What is important now, in regard to the question, how thinking about game design as metaphorical process can help us to systematically expand the thematic range of games is that, according to Lakoff and Johnson (p. 72), "given a concept of causation that emerges from our experience, we can apply that concept to metaphorical concepts."

I argue that this is true for all of the three key concepts I have just introduced. Once you understand how they work on the physical level, you can find analogies to more abstract ideas with which they share essential structural elements. The concept of direct causation could be applied to every kind of more abstract causation, e.g. changing a state in the patient through not primarily physical means.

Take a motivational speech, for example:

• The agent's goal is not a physical change in the patient but an emotional and mental one.
• The plan in carrying out the goal does require a motor programme, but this motor programme is just a vehicle for something more abstract. It is the mental challenge of giving a good speech that is in the foreground of this action, not the skillful wagging of the tounge or the moving of the lips themselves.
• The agent does not touch the patient with his body or an instrument (thinking about a speech as "touching" is a metaphor!), but with thoughts and ideas.
• The result is not a physical change in the patient, but a mental and emotional one.
• They change in the patient might not be perceptible to the agent (admittedly a problem in the gaming context, since we all want feedback to our actions.)

Thinking about causation and its various structural elements in more abstract terms can lead to fresh game ideas and be a way of creating interesting insights into the human condition. That a man will bleed if hit on the head with a wrench is not an interesting insight. We know that that would happen. How various mental and emotional changes are brought about through actions, how they interrelate and change our behavior, that is not as readily understood.

A simple change of metaphor such as substituting the resource "health" through the resource "nerves" as has been done in the game Indigo Prophecies can already create some of these more interesting insights. Losing the game when you lose your nerves made me think differently about my personal daily stress management. I catch myself seeking activities that give me a +5 mood boost in potentially stressful situations. Buying shoes high scores a +50!

Ad 2) Conflict is another key principle of digital games as well as life. In games, it mostly takes the form of physical conflict. Physical conflict is the most readily understood form of conflict since it directly emerges from experience:

Fighting is found eveywhere in the animal kingdom and nowhere so much as among human animals. Animals fight to get what they want – food, sex, territory, control, etc. – because there are other animals who want the same thing or who want to stop them from getting it. The same is true for human animals, except that we have developed more sophisticated techniques for getting our way. (Lakoff / Johnson p.62)

Games are rarely built around these more sophisticated techniques. One reason might be that argument is one of the main substitutes for physical conflict and convincing communication with NPCs is still quite an AI challenge. A game that tries it nevertheless and finds some interesting metaphors on the way is the MMPORG Vanguard. Vanguard tackles the concept of diplomcy via a strategy card game, throwing any attempt at verisimilitude out the window, but thereby generating some interesting insights into how verbal conflict works. The diplomacy game is rather complex, and I will not explain it here in detail, but just point out some analogies to real-life conversation:

• the value of the various cards the player gets depends on character class. This implies that certain personality types have particular persuasive strengths and weaknesses. Not everybody is a born flatterer. If flattery works depends on the flatterer. When playing a cat person, flattery is more potent then when playing another character class.
• By exercising diplomacy you get better at it. Not even do you get really better at playing the game, but the quality of you conversation statements improves. This is analogous to improvement of vocabulary and finesse in real life.
• Another similarity to real life conversation is that you have to vary the kinds of statements that you make. If you continously boast or flatter, you will lose all credibility. Thus, a particular statement card is tapped after it has been played out. This is comparable to recast timers in physical combat. It takes a while, until you have rebuilt enough energy to backstab your opponent again.
• To win the diplomacy game, you have to get rid of all your conversation points, before your opponent does. You have to have made your point, before the other party had a chance to do so. That means you have convinced your opponent.

For an insightful account of how verbal conflict can be understood in terms of similarly structured physical conflict, such as war, see Lakoff and Johnson, pp. 61-65.

Ad 3) player behavior has to be regulated or else there would be no game. We understand all sorts of mental, moral, social or emotional restrictions through our experience of physical restrictions, e.g. "my hands are tied." For verisimilitude's sake, it must be plausible why the player can do certain things and cannot do others. Mostly, the "cans" and "cannots" are physically motivated. A physical boundary cannot be crossed, an object is too heavy to be picked up, the inventory is full etc.

We know that we are moving in a simulated world and that not every aspect of that world can possibly be implemented into the rule-system and thus we have a high tolerance for incoherences regarding the things the game allows or doesn't allow us to do. Still, resorting to certain intrinsically rule-based schemata that have regulation of behavior as one of their key principles helps in the construction of believability because it provides plausible metaphors for such restrictions and limitations. One such schema is "prison" and a game that employs it quite succesfully is Chronicles of Riddick - Escape from Butcher Bay. We do not expect to be able to move around freely in a prison. Weapons are not allowed. We accept the fact that our actions are surveyed and we thus accept that whenever we engage in unruly behavior, guards will show up that stop us. So, should we have managed to aquire any weapons, waving them around openly is not a good idea.

Again, analyzing and identifying the essential structural elements of concepts that physically regulate behavior is a first step to apply this concept to more abstract ideas in order to expand the thematic scope of games and to foster insights into the human condition. Limitation of freedom cannot only be due to physical boundaries but it can be the result of traumata, mental restrictions or emotional problems. E.g. being in an unhealthy relationship can share essential structural elements with the experience of being imprisoned. Trying to capture metaphors that arise from the abstract concept "unhealthy relationship" might make for a thought-provoking game-play experience, one that stays with you long after you have put down the controller. It might make you see life differently.