The gamework

Abstract

This article outlines the gamework, a neologism designed to help scholars attend to the various kinds of work involved in computer game development, play and analysis. This work is integral to computer game artifactuality yet tends to be obscured by the aesthetic, narratological, mechanical, and economic aspects of games and gaming. We offer the gamework as a means for theorizing computer games as a form of culture that motivates work as much as (if not more than) play. Specifically, we point to how computer games participate in (1) labor culture; (2) an emergent culture determined by a work/labor/play dialectic; (3) artistic culture; and (4) cultural criticism.

Keywords:

• Games
• Culture
• Work
• Play
• Art

Notes

Judd Ruggill, Ken McAllister, and David Menchaca are members of the Learning Games Initiative, a University of Arizona‐based research collective that studies, teaches with, and builds computer games. Correspondence to: Judd Ruggill, Department of Media Arts, Marshall 249, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA. Email: [email protected]. The authors would like to thank Caren Deming, Ron Gard, and the two anomymous CCCS readers for their excellent suggestions on earlier versions of this article. Thanks also to Joseph Chaney for his interest and support.

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw‐Hill, 1964), 238.

Entertainment Software Association, “Top Ten Industry Facts,” Media Center, http://www.theesa.com/pressroom_main.html (accessed 27 February 2004).

We employ the term “computer game,” instead of the more common “video game,” because it is computation, rather than visualization, that distinguishes the medium. While most games have a visual component (e.g., Monopoly, Dungeons & Dragons, Jeopardy, and The Gong Show), only computer games utilize integral electronic microcircuitry to process player responses. In addition, there now exist numerous computer games for the blind. Naturally, these games use no visual elements (for examples, see http://www.gamesfortheblind.com).

Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 4–5.

Interestingly, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Japan, and other countries seem to be further along than the US in the study of game artifactuality. It is important to note, however, that we are not claiming there is a paucity of computer‐game studies in the US generally, for indeed academic work on games is proliferating. We mean only to point out here that very few of these studies so far recognize that computer games are more than “texts” that have certain limited influences (e.g., on players). Such studies, which may examine the roles of violence, gender, race, or genre in particular games, rarely extend their analyses further than the game itself to investigate how the game is both a product and producer of the culture within which it has emerged. Even game developers themselves recognize this lack, as is clear in these recent comments from legendary game developer, Ernest Adams: “We need not merely reviewers, but critics. Right now, we don't have in‐depth criticism of games; we have reviews. Reviews only compare games to other games; they don't analyze games in their larger cultural context. Real critics bring to their profession not just a knowledge of the medium they are discussing, but a wider reading and an understanding of aesthetics and the human condition.” Markus Friedl, Online Game Interactivity Theory (Hingham, MA: Charles River Media, 2003), 400.

Computer games are in fact very different from other kinds of games. In addition to utilizing microcircuitry to facilitate play, computer games also allow for scenarios and interactions that are nearly (if not completely) impossible in other types of games. MMOGs such as Dark Age of Camelot and A Tale in the Desert, for example, allow thousands of players to interact with one another in the same game space at the same time. These players need not even live in the same town, let alone the same country (or even speak the same language, for that matter).

For an explication of the “dream‐work,” see Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (New York: Avon, 1998).

Thierry Kuntzel, “The Film‐Work,” enclitic 2, no. 1(1978): 41.

Kuntzel, 42.

According to Midway Games, some titles take even longer to develop, and adapting a game from one platform to another takes an additional three to twelve months, further extending the development period. Midway Games Inc., SEC 10‐K Report, 28 March 2003, http://web.lexis‐nexis.com/universe.

http://popcap.com/

PopCap Games, “Our Mission,” http://popcap.com/aboutus.php (accessed 5 August 2003).

For examples of these discussions, see any of the various forums established by the International Game Developers Association's Quality of Life Committee (http://www.igda.org/qol), or Jennifer Olsen's editorial, “Quality, Not Quantity,” Game Developer, February 2004, 2.

See “The Software Factory” in Andrew Rollings and Dave Morris's Game Architecture and Design (Scottsdale, AZ: Coriolis Group, 2000) and “Workers and Warez: Labour and Piracy in the Global Game Market” in Stephen Kline, Nick Dyer‐Witheford and Greig de Peuter's Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing (Montreal: McGill‐Queen's University Press, 2003).

Stuart Hall, “Encoding/decoding,” Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79 (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1980), 128–38.

Entertainment Software Association, “Industry Sales and Economic Data,” Media Center, http://www.theesa.com/pressroom.html (accessed 27 February 2004).

Chris Crawford, The Art of Computer Game Design, http://www.vancouver.wsu.edu/fac/peabody/game‐book/Chapter6.html.

Crawford.

Many avid gamers are already able to identify technique, recognizing homages to Shigeru Miyamoto in the work of newer developers, detailing the history of game clones, and even carefully noting details about the private lives of key personnel in a game's development in order to see if those details influence the game's aesthetics and kinesthetics.

Julian Dibbel, “The Unreal Estate Boom,” Wired, January 2003: 108.

Dibbel, 110.

Dibbel, 110.

Karl Marx, Capital (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), I: 7.3.

Bikhu Parekh, “Hannah Arendt's Critique of Marx,” in Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World, ed. Melvyn A. Hill (New York: St. Martin's, 1979), 85–86.

Marx, I:7.1—emphasis added.

Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Elements in Culture (Boston: Beacon, 1986), 13.

The notable exception to this is when players intentionally labor in a game to create items and characters that they intend to sell for real money at auction.

Huizinga, 8.

Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1972), 144–45.

Suzanne Ashe, “In the Driver's Seat,” Wired, May 2003: 70.

Ashe.

Ashe.

Ashe.

Paul Valéry, “The Conquest of Ubiquity,” Aesthetics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Pantheon Books, 1964), 225.

For a really pretty book documenting the Game On exhibition, see Lucien King's Game On: The History and Culture of Videogames (New York: Universe, 2002).

Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1969), 221.

As Illkka Tuomi points out, “the definition of computing power depends on the tasks for which the computer is used.” Illkka Tuomi, “The Lives and Death of Moore's Law,” First Monday, 2002, http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue7_11/tuomi/. Hardware designs, however, change regularly, and their capabilities often increase at linear and sometimes even exponential rates.

John Carmack, one of the legendary designers of the Doom franchise, is well known for obtaining pre‐release versions of video cards in order to develop his games. See David Kushner, “Prepare to Meet Thy Doom,” Wired, May 2003: 150–53, 160–61.

Benjamin, 220.

The notable exception might be emulation software. Emulators such as the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator (MAME) faithfully reproduce every detail of old games—graphics, sounds, set‐up and testing utilities, and gameplay—for more contemporary computer systems. Arcade games from twenty‐five years ago like Tempest, Defender, and Donkey Kong can thus be run on the latest multi‐gigahertz computer—a violation of Benjamin's time/space aura criterion. By the same token, in order to run older games, an emulator effectively has to transform the computer it runs on into an older model, a transformation that recalls both the time and space in which the game was originally rooted.

Benjamin, 220.

The idea that games have no physical presence is made even more complicated by the development of game engines that render environments “on the fly.” Halo II, for example, uses no pre‐rendered graphics, which means that when players see the game environment on their screens, they are essentially seeing them for the first time. The game environments are not stored on the game's disks, but generated during play.

Benjamin, 220.

Leo Lowenthal, Literature, Popular Culture, and Society (Palo Alto, CA: Pacific Books, 1961), 6; Lowenthal, 11.

Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 29.

Said, 11.

Said, 29.

Hoover's Inc., “Sony Corporation,” Hoover's Company Profile Database—World Companies, LexisNexis Academic Universe, http://web.lexis‐nexis.com/universe (accessed 24 June 2003).

Entertainment Software Association, “Top Ten Industry Facts.”

United States Army, “America's Army: The Official U.S.Army Game,” http://www.americasarmy.com (accessed 15 October 2003).

http://www.mesmernet.org/lgi

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Judd Ethan Ruggill

Judd Ruggill, Ken McAllister, and David Menchaca are members of the Learning Games Initiative, a University of Arizona‐based research collective that studies, teaches with, and builds computer games. Correspondence to: Judd Ruggill, Department of Media Arts, Marshall 249, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA. Email: [email protected]. The authors would like to thank Caren Deming, Ron Gard, and the two anomymous CCCS readers for their excellent suggestions on earlier versions of this article. Thanks also to Joseph Chaney for his interest and support.