Videogames are often discussed under the concept of “play”, but this is not always how gamers themselves talk about their experience: they use instead vocabularies of desperate competition or violence. Take the very common expression of satisfaction after completing a game: “I beat the game.” What exactly does it mean to beat a game? You can’t have a meaningful contest against an inert digital artefact. From the game’s point of view, you did not beat it. On the contrary, you did exactly what the game wanted you to do, every step of the way. You didn’t play the game, you performed the operations it demanded of you, like an obedient employee. The game was a task of labour. From this perspective, playing a videogame looks as much like work as play.¹ Continued →

1. This is the paper I gave at the very awesome F.R.O.G. conference, Vienna 2008. It was subsequently published as a chapter in the book of conference proceedings, Edges of Gaming (Vienna, 2010). I also considered the alternative titles “I Got All the Fucking Work I Need“, and “Fuck You, I Won’t Do What You Tell Me“, but I wasn’t sure about the etiquette of swearing in the titles of papers for academic conferences. ↩

One couldn’t wish for a more colourful circus of corporate stupidity and vindictiveness than the public actions of the major record labels over the past decade. They have secretly installed spyware on people’s computers and sued American college students; last month, one label filed a US court claim that throwing their promotional CDs in the bin constituted a violation of copyright. At the same time, they have been demanding a tax on iPods, the proceeds from which would flow directly into their pockets, and firing the A&R staff upon whom their future depends. None of this, of course, is meant to protect the interests of musicians, only of their executive leeches.

It is a farcical ongoing case study in how not to respond to what former pirate-radio DJ Matt Mason calls “the pirate’s dilemma”. Despite some special pleading in the introduction, he really means “the pirate dilemma”: the pirates themselves are not mulling much over ethical quandaries, but they are forcing everyone else to figure out how to live with them. Continued →

On videogames ‘versus’ reading

As George W. Bush nearly asked: “Is our children reading?” The answer appears to be no, according to the 2006 report of the International Literacy Study. As the Guardian summarises its findings:

England has plummeted from third to 19th in an international league table of children’s literacy levels as pupils replace books with computer games.

Imagine the headline 100 years ago: “Children Spending Too Much Time Playing Outdoors with Hoops and Sticks, Says Minister; Should be Forcibly Enclosed to Read Improving Literature.” There’s always some apparently pointless youth activity to scapegoat.

As has always been the case, though, the adult paranoia expressed here about the supposedly harmful influence of videogames depends on a sublime ignorance of the form. In fact, you’re not going to get far in most modern videogames if you can’t read. And some of them make you read an awful lot. Continued →

Amazon has introduced a new $400 ebook reader, aggressively named the Kindle. (So funny, of course, to bring the idea of burning together with the idea of books.) The Kindle is called a “wireless reading device”: I don’t know about you, but I’ve been able to read without needing wires since I was very small. Anyway, we gadgetophiles must bravely acknowledge that the Kindle is certain to fail, since (among other reasons) it is stupidly expensive and relies, as John Gruber points out, on a proprietary file format with insane restrictions on use.

But please don’t imagine that I’m one of those muttering diehards who exhibit an irrational fetish for the book-as-object. Instead, in the hope of hastening the exciting ebook revolution, I here propose a minimal list of features that any really successful ebook device must eventually have. Feature parity with physical books, after all, is surely a reasonable baseline demand. So here is what the electronic book of the future will be like. Continued →

For the first time, I no longer have a copy of Microsoft Word installed on either of my computers. That’s some change. I wrote my first two books, and many hundreds of articles, in Word. But I’m writing my third book in an inexpensive yet wonderful piece of Mac-only software written by a single person instead of a “business unit” at Redmond. Scoured of Word, my computers feel clean, refreshed, relieved of a hideous and malign burden. How did it come to this? Continued →

I read this book while chain-smoking, glugging whiskey and eating massive quantities of dairy products; now I feel I’ve been had. Not everything bad is good for you. Steven Johnson’s fizzily readable little polemic actually consists of two separate arguments about popular culture. First, he rails against the notion that our culture is dumbing down; he says that TV, films and videogames are better than before. Secondly, he maintains that these things are actually making us more intelligent.

Johnson makes a persuasive case for the first claim. It is true that TV shows such as The West Wing are more complicated than Starsky and Hutch. It is also true that videogames such as SimCity are more complicated than Pac-Man. The uninitiated may learn a lot from Johnson’s entertaining and clever account, in the first section, of the sheer hard work and problem-solving required to navigate a modern videogame. His fine analyses of obscure in-jokes in Seinfeld or the confusing jargon of ER are also illuminating, and he makes the good point that the era of DVD aftersales encourages more subtlety and complexity in television programming. So far, so good. But perhaps these scattered observations do not cohere well enough into a headline-grabbing thesis. So let’s say in addition that this stuff is actually making us smarter. And here the problems begin. Continued →