Edited by Pat Kane (email)


:: Cyber-Sparta ::

A huge topic, this one - and we're only making a tentative start here in the Journal. But what are the play-ethics of a computer game?

My own mind was focussed by a story in the US new-economy magazine Business 2.0 (not available online), covering There.com, a forthcoming virtual community (in the tradition of ventures like EverQuest, Asheron's Call, Ultima Online, and Lineage.)

Already being ooh-ed and ah-ed over by the digerati for its graphics and software, There Inc is also offering companies the possibility of testing out products and services with its subscription-paying community.

But There’s first bankable revenues are coming from...the War Machine:

The U.S. Military has a long history of expertise in the creation of simulated environments, but since 9/11 the Pentagon has looked for ways to fill those environments with the bustling crowds that terrorist and other “asymmetric threats” tend to emerge from. Designed precisely with crowds in mind, There turns out to be far ahead of any multiuser world the Defense Department has cooked up internally.

This April, There Inc signed a $3.5 million dollar contract with the DoD for military-training purposes - creating a "virtual Afghanistan", for example.

Now, at the very least, this level of hard-power interest removes the "triviality" tag from considerations of play. And already, even within There's own prototype testing, there are a few anti-war communities amassing in its pristine environments. If a community software is going to be worthy of the name, it must have a social openness that allows self-organisation of all kinds.

But there are tough general questions to answer here. Put bluntly: to what extent should game makers - whether involved in hardware or software - take the military dollar (or shilling)?

The US Army itself produces games - like America's Army - which explictly aim at winning over game-players to Army values. They also have their stenographers to power, like James Wagner Au in Salon:

Though not explicitly doctrinaire in an ideological sense, by showing the very young how we fight, applying the moral application of lethal force on behalf of liberal values, these games create the wartime culture that is so desperately needed now. One hopes they'll inspire the best gamers to consider a career of military service, while preparing them for the battles to come. There are even indications that playing these games provide useful experience for when they do go into real-world combat.

Well, no beating about the Dubya there. Those who conflate cyber-tech with imperialism will have their suspicions confirmed: American imperialists - in all their supreme self-confidence - would rather guide their actions through techno-simulations of "possible threats", than engage with the real angers and frustrations that their massive power engenders.

Yet there are signs of a Matrix-like internal resistance. There's the "hackathon" organiser who expressed public misgivings about his funding from DARPA, the US's futuristic defense research facility ("Maybe it takes money away from a bit of a cruise missile") - and promptly lost his funding.

And in the growing field of ludology - the academic theory of computer games - there is much principled discussion about the ethics of game making and game playing. See the estimable Gonzalo Frasca's Ludology.org, and in particular this discussion on a "9.11 simulation game", and his essay on videogame politics on his site.

(He also runs a poll asking people what topic they'd like a game on: the top mark is for the "Amelie Simulator (help odd people find odd things)", well ahead of "The WMD Simulator (find Saddam's weapons - I swear they are there!)".

As Gonzalo says, "games can teach, can help people discover and understand systems". But perhaps the real play-ethical focus should be on the values that drive those systems, which game technology and culture only animates. My forthcoming book provides a schema for making explicit the value-systems that have historically conditioned our forms of play(there's an early version in Powerpoint on the Play Ethic site).

And it's funny: when on a whim I typed "programmers for peace" into Google, I eventually came up with a enthusiast's reference to Buckminster Fuller's 1968 "World Game". Reading through its techno-topian idealisms, you don't know whether to laugh or cry.

(Note: I'm hoping to run a "PlaySalon" on the ethics of gameplay at Dundee Contemporary Arts centre after the summer vacation. More details soon).


:: It's All In The Head, Son ::

Though I love great sportsplayers for their sheer body smarts, I'm also always looking out for philosopher-athletes - those who manage to leave space for the conceptual, in the midst of their usually punishing and obsessive physical regimes. The question is: How capacious can a player be?

Unfortunately defeated by Lennox Lewis in Los Angeles this week, heavyweight boxer Vitali Klitschko is both an intellectual as well as a physical contender - with a doctorate in physical science from the Ukraine, and a professorship in philosophy from Germany, where he now trains.

The story of how he began his titanic dual career, told by his old tutor Professor Leonid Volkov, couldn't be more post-Soviet if it tried:

Vitali came up to me and said: 'Leonid Viktorovich, I am interested in one question -- being talented at sport, being good at sport -- what does it mean? Am I gifted or have I made myself talented?'"

That was how he started his PhD. Working into the early hours during his trips to Ukraine, Vitali, Vladimir, a childhood friend and Volkov would analyse the data from experiments on national youth teams and argue about their conclusions.

"We had to open all the windows and the balcony doors because with three strong men in my room having to breathe, there was almost no oxygen," Volkov laughs, sitting in his two-roomed flat on the outskirts of the Ukrainian capital Kiev.

Volkov concludes: "I have always said to him: 'Don't let yourself get hit on the head, science needs you.'"

A childhood hero of mine also revealed his social-theory side recently - the seventies Dutch football wizard Johan Cruyff. Now a major force in Dutch politics, the magazine Ode has unearthed an extraordinary 1984 interview. How much is there to learn from this disquisition on the relationship between individual play and team play:

You have this game with 22 players, all of them individuals, and yet they form two teams. Everything in this field of sport is contradictory. The 11 of you must operate as a hermetic group, while each player is constantly being judged on his individual performance. Eleven ways of thinking, 11 opinions, 11 personalities - how can they ever agree? And yet on the field a common goal must be set.

Another complication is added: the problems that arise when things are not going well, appear in reverse when all is going smoothly. If there is a hitch, the guys, by being organised and not solely relying on their own insight, will give all it takes to get things back on track. If the game is progressing optimally, then these players will all want to stand out again anyway.

Cruyff's own solution? "I always went against the grain of all the accepted opinions. I dared to say to myself: 'Today is not important.' So I do not really have to go around that guy now and shoot the ball in the goal myself. If the organisation is sound, we will succeed - maybe not today, but tomorrow."

For more background on the extraordinary fusion of philosophy and sports that created the Dutch football dream of the seventies and eighties, read David Winner's Brilliant Orange: the Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football. Winner cites this definition of the Dutch system here, and it's as play-ethical as you'd wish:

A good player is one who touches the ball only once and knows where to run.

:: Play Times ::

The German obligation to play NY Times in perplexed mode on why Germans work more than 350 hours a year less than Americans. One answer suggested: perhaps after "arbeit macht frei", the intrinsic values of labour (old or new) don't have that much credibility...

"Playing God" Watch More agonising about our genetic hubris from Steven and Hilary Rose; a review of god-players, post-Bruce Almighty; and protests against the genetic recreation of the extinct Tasmanian Tiger. Says the lead scientist to fundamentalist protestors: "My response is that people played God when we exterminated the animal in the first place."

Dodgiest ludic research ever Playboy bunnies get curvier in recession, leaner and harder in prosperity. Or: Hefner gets out of that side of his kingsized love-bed for one season. Rather than the other.

Mobilize! Fabulous developments, every minute of every day, on the politics of wireless and mobiles, the player's tech par excellence. NYTimes columnist Thomas Friedman muses on the global instabilities that Google on a wireless broadband mobile device might bring. At the other end of the scale, we have "flash mobs", where urbanites with mobiles coordinate mass public events, to do completely arbitrary things - like this,this and this. (Hear a "flash mob" happen on NPR radio (Real Player).

Robots without a cause Funny, wry article which challenges techno-players like myself as to why we want everything that can be automated, to be automated.

Our consumerist technological zeitgeist is summed up in a question from Stuff, the techno-geek mag, in a recent article despairing of cyborg technology: "We've launched missions to Mars, so why can't we build a robot to pour us a drink?" The proper answer, surely, is that while interplanetary exploration is conceivably a noble human aspiration, needing a robot to pour your pop is the hallmark of the idle ponce.

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