Gaming, Difficulty, and ‘Getting Good’

    Every time From Software publishes a new Souls game, there is inevitably a discussion on difficulty in gaming and how creating more accessible modes of play could improve or harm the intended experience of a game. This discussion is inevitably plagued by calls of “Get good” from a specific crowd of players. While clearly unhelpful, this cry is actually actively harmful to the discussion.

(Pictured: A player preparing to challenge the first boss of Dark Souls 3, Iudex Gundyr)

    While the Soulsborne games (games in the Dark Souls and Bloodborne series) are a popular host to these ideas, they are not the only offenders. Many communities built around difficult games will often use the phrase to shut down discussions on difficulty. The idea of “Get good” frames the conversation as one of skill. The ideas that you should have to be skilled in order to enjoy the game, or that the point of the game is to become skilled are often baked into invocations of this phrase, directing the discussion specifically into the realm of skill. This completely shuts out players who enjoy different parts of the game. Those who enjoy games for other aspects such as the story or world are cut out of the discussion since their enjoyment does not fit neatly into the skilled vs unskilled framework.

    Even for those whose enjoyment does fit into the skilled vs unskilled framework, the “Get good” argument can be a source of suffering. The phrase assumes an absolutely equal playing field which isn’t always true. Those who want to enjoy the difficulty of a game but suffer from disabilities may find themselves unable to engage with a game which is not built with them in mind. The idea of skill that this argument is based on requires one to assume that every player is equally enabled to play the game in the same way. This is strictly false.

    The closest thing one could derive to an argument against accessibility from the “Get good” mindset is the idea that games are art, and by forcing the developers to include modes which aren’t part of the intended way of playing, they are actively decreasing the quality of the experience. But even this crumbles under examination. This relies on an artificial separation of the act of consuming art and the means to consume art. For any other medium this wouldn't make sense: You wouldn’t tell colorblind people they couldn't see a painting because they wouldn't fully enjoy it the way the creator intended. That would be arbitrarily cutting people out of enjoyment because they can't enjoy something in the same way you do. Because games require player input to function, they have a much stronger link between means and consumption than many other art forms. And because of this, refusing accessibility options can be just as good as closing an art gallery to those who don't see art in the same way as you. It completely shuts people out of the experience, rather than allowing them to experience in their own ways.

    In “The Toxic Meritocracy of Video Games : Why Gaming Culture Is the Worst”, Christopher Paul brings up the idea that the symbols and rhetoric associated with subcultures can frame debates towards specific channels and outcomes. His writing focuses on the ideas of meritocracy and its intersection with gaming, and “Get good” is probably one of the clearest examples of the form of rhetoric he discusses. The phrase acts as a type of thought terminating cliché, and those who attempt to engage beyond the cliché end up forced to engage on the terms of skill first, leaving any other routes of discussion sidelined.

    So far, this has focused for the most part on single player experiences, where one player’s enjoyment of a game has absolutely no bearing on another's. In this context, there are a number of ways in which developers could make games more accessible without hurting the quality of the experience for existing players. Unfortunately, single player experiences are not the only place where “Get good” is employed.

    In competitive multiplayer environments, “Get good” is often used to taunt inexperienced or losing players. It carries with it all of the ableism and poor analysis of its single player usages, but with an additional element. Because it is being used as a taunt, this means the game allows communication between players. Games like this allow players to share ideas and help teach each other in far more direct ways than single player experiences, and as a result, when a phrase like “Get good” is used in this context, it takes up space that could have been a moment of teaching or community building. Telling a player why they lost is infinitely more helpful than snarkily informing them that they weren’t “good enough to win” and gives usable information to the losing player that they can then use to potentially win more if that is their goal, or discard without any negative feelings if they are playing the game for other reasons. “Get good” robs the player of both of those potential options, instead substituting them with both a void of information and a directed insult.

    There is a bit of poetry to the story of “Get good”. The story of Dark Souls is largely one of a meritocracy unfulfilled. The repeated journeys to rekindle the flame to perpetuate the same broken system over and over as the fires become weaker and weaker. Each of the unkindled works thanklessly to attempt to link the fires, honing skill towards defeating the lords of cinder over and over, just so the Age of Fire’s decaying corpse can last just a little bit longer. Hopefully, the toxic, skill centric view of gaming will eventually go the way of the Age of Fire and make room for a more inclusive discussion on games.

Paul, Christopher A.. The Toxic Meritocracy of Video Games : Why Gaming Culture Is the Worst, University of

        Minnesota Press, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=5330038.

Created from wisc on 2021-09-01 19:41:45.

Pull Yourself Up By Your Merit

Your fast thinking brain most likely finished the title of this post before it was even over, but for the unfamiliar the last word is supposed to be “Bootstraps.” Bootstrapping was a popular idea where I grew up. It is a metaphor used to convey that if you want to improve your life, then you just need to try harder. It is a context blind statement that assumes that if you give enough effort, then you can be better. Not just can be, but more accurately, will be better. In other words, what you get out of life is based on merit and merit alone. A Meritocracy if you will.

(Pictured: A person wearing a pair of boots attempting to lift themselves by their bootstraps. Source: Isabella Carapella/HuffingtonPost)

Meritocracy or Hypocrisy?

The lights are glaring at me as I set up my equipment. PC streaming today means adjusting the brightness of my triple monitor set-up, doing some color-correcting, and making sure my streamer window doesn’t cover up anything that could be important to the gameplay. What am I playing today? Something light, something that doesn’t take too much attention from my chat and monitoring my equipment, but most importantly, something solo. I’m a female streamer and I’m already braced to deal with harassment from randos in the chat- I don’t want to also deal with it in-game. I don’t want to deal with toxic gamers attacking me on two fronts, trying to break me and, if I show any negative emotion to their attacks, declaring, “it’s just a joke- you aren’t a real gamer if you can’t deal with this. It’s just a joke.”

It’s just a joke.

Image taken from: ADL

Where the Hell is L3: Gaming for a Non-Gamer

What are some things we take for granted as long-time gamers when picking up a new title? We can run, jump, and dash. Enemies have health bars (usually red). We have an inventory, mini map, and other features that help us accomplish our goal. But what does picking up a new title look like for someone who has never touched a controller in their life?

One day, while one of my endless promenades through the YouTube recommendation system, I stumbled across a video by popular creator Razbuten called "What Games Are Like for Someone Who Doesn't Play Games." In said video, Razbuten makes his wife play a collection of titles ranging from Super Mario Bros to Dark Souls. Razbuten documents her struggles and successes as a person who has only ever played Mario Kart, and the results were both highly interesting and notably entertaining.

(Side note: I'll be referring to the subject as Razbuten's wife, as she's never referred to by name in the video.)

In almost all of the games Razbuten's wife played, there were multiple functions she simply didn't know existed. We take these for granted as long-time gamers. For example, Razbuten's wife was frustrated that she didn't know she could dash in Super Mario Bros, which made her time on each level way higher than they had to be. To her credit, the game doesn't explicitly say you can dash. But someone who plays a lot of games knows dashing is a feature most titles have, so they would fiddle with the controls until they figured out how to do it.

Razbuten's wife struggled with manipulating a controller in general. Every time a game told her to press a specific button, she had to look down at the controller to figure out which one it was. Her greatest challenge in this realm came while playing The Last of Us. There's a point where the game prompts the player to press L3, which isn't explicitly labeled on the controller. You can see why this caused problems. The prompt was a circle, so Razbuten's wife assumed she had to do something with the joystick, but how was she supposed to know you could even press down on it? She ended up just walking back and forth around the area until eventually figuring it out. A long-time gamer wouldn't even think twice about this prompt.

Controls ended up being the least of her struggles. Razbuten's wife had a hard time understanding video game "logic," namely where to go and what lessons she was supposed to learn. For example, there's a part in Uncharted 2 where the player scales a hanging train. Her idea was to swing from a pipe through a window. However, the game obviously doesn't let you do this, and she was disappointed when the only path she could take involved little more than just pressing left. While her idea would work in theory, Razbuten raised the point that developers are restricted. There's no physical way to code every possible action in, otherwise games would never get released. Long-time gamers are used to this concept. If a path looks blocked off, I wouldn't waste time trying to get through, but a new player who has no concept of what is allowed and restricted in games might explore it anyway.

All of these combined struggles make new players like Razbuten's wife more likely to quit playing due to frustration. Razbuten mentioned that there were multiple instances where she expressed a desire to stop playing, but he made her keep going for the video's sake. These high entry barriers contribute to the self-perpetuating "aristocracy" of the game community, where players who have been playing for longer and have an abundance of time and money to spend on games are more likely to be better. Christopher Paul raises the point in "The Toxic Meritocracy of Video Games: Why Gaming Culture is the Worst" that skill transfers ensure that players who have been playing for longer are rewarded for it. Examples of skill transfers include health bars, mini maps, and other UI features that new players need more time to understand.

Once these entry barriers are established, it's very hard for new people to break into the game community. Razbuten brought up the idea that knowledge about video games mainly spreads from person to person. This perpetuates a toxic meritocracy if the community is homogenous or certain people can't get access to it (ie. through forums, game shops, etc.) So if, for example, a game's community starts as a group of white males with access to the internet, they're more likely to spread knowledge and their experiences with other white males who have access to the internet.

All that being said, I'm grateful I stumbled upon Razbuten's video because it stuck with me. He ended up making it into a series where he observed his wife playing certain titles in greater detail, and they were all as interesting at the first. As someone with a high degree of video game literacy, it was intriguing to peek into a new player's mind. I hope her experiences can help me combat gatekeeping and integrate new players into the gaming community.

[1] Paul, Christopher A. The Toxic Meritocracy of Video Games : Why Gaming Culture Is the Worst, University of Minnesota Press, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=5330038.Created from wisc on 2021-09-01 19:40:34.
[2] Razbuten. (2019, September 28). What Games Are Like For Someone Who Doesn’t Play Games [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ax7f3JZJHSw

Will Free-dom ruin Halo?

 Earlier this month 343 Studios announced that they would be trying a new tact with Halo; multiplayer in Halo: Infinite is going to be free to play. 

Cue my college budget reaction...                         Followed by...

        

What would this mean for the Halo I know and love? Would things change? Fortunately, it appears that 343 did their homework, and they are not going the route of many Free to Play mobile games that optimize on finances. Instead, Halo: Infinite is set up to engage new users and widen the Halo diehard community.

The post that follows will use the ideas of capital as outlined by Malaby [1] to outline a few of my primary concerns around how a F2P system might have changed the experience alongside discussion of how 343 is heading off my concerns at the pass.

Can we start with the fancy hats? I remember back when I started playing multiplayer in Halo that I never had the coolest hat which was honestly just as well because it meant no one expected anything of me. Not only did I only play as a guest(1), which meant I could never actually have my own rank, but I never had anything to show for my progress. We had one Live account at home, and it was shared. Because of this, I was not able to take part in collecting cultural capital in the form of custom loadouts that could signal my expertise.

Having armor as a status symbol makes certain decisions easier within the multiplayer game universe. For example, if the Spartan with the flaming head came up and punched me for picking up the sniper, I wasn’t even mad. They were probably right on and going to do way more good with that than I was. If I had the ability to nab the Banshee before the enemy, I certainly would, but I would usually pass it off to the player who was better suited to use it than I was. I could pretend that these are moves of altruism, but it;s more akin to reciprocity where I’m expecting a win in return, or at the very least some cover fire while I try to make headway on the objective.

A shift to Free to Play often includes a “Pay to Play” (P2P) scenario where players can accelerate their ability to gain equipment and other artifacts (like cool armor) by pumping more real-world money into the game. While this is one thing when you’re vying for a top spot on a leaderboard, it’s another when you’re in a battle royale with other players, most of whom haven’t sold a kidney for the Christmas hat. Add in the potential for fancy equipment a ‘la the Warzone debacle of Roze Skin (made privy to me by another blog espousing Halo’s virtues), and I was worried for my safety.

I am already most likely to be used as a mobile spawn point for my Invasion partner. The increased likelihood of me dying, repeatedly from people who bought all the fancy stuff was bound to happen. Unfortunately, the degeneration of the status symbols also hold the potential of creating distrust in the system, and the system includes the players. If you can’t trust the artifacts that your teammates have, can you trust their competency with the power weapons? Doubtful.

Furthermore, the transition of "real world" money into the market capital of a game can greatly distort the power dynamic. It isn't a fair fight when some weapons greatly outperform others. In this way, the game begins to mimic the "real world" complete with privilege of being able to afford certain luxuries that perpetuate inequity in play.

343 seems to have headed this off at the pass by encouraging everyone to play their own game. By allowing players to progress their Battle Pass at their own pace with no expiration date, as well as assuring players that Battle Pass items will never appear in the store, Halo Infinite promises to level the proverbial playing field in terms of time and monetary investment [2].

Related to the ways we interact with perceived experts is the idea of social capital. While I am almost always playing split screen with my partner, we are very rarely in a party. We simply don’t know that many other people who play Halo. This is one of the challenging aspects of Halo as verbal communication seems to have fallen out of favor on the platform. Without a full party, it can be hard to get in sync with your team. Knowing who is going left and who is going right can make or break a match. Fortunately, the F2P model will allow more people to join in the fun. With a reduced buy-in threshold (reduced since you do still need to have Xbox Live Gold), it is likely that Halo Infinite will see a large growth in its fanbase. 

343 is planning for those players who are coming back to Halo after a long-term hiatus as well as those who are brand new to the franchise. The plan is for an AI Academy to exist as a player training bootcamp [3]. This removes the failure to launch scenario of those players who have limited connections to the fandom of the established franchise, essentially bypassing the need for social capital.

While I am super excited about a new Halo multiplayer opportunity, my concerns over the ways that F2P games change group dynamics by undermining the cultural transactions in a game have me a bit on edge. If 343 does manage to support the community of interactions within Halo Infinity to maintain the cultural capital that is present in earlier games, there will be the added byproduct of supported means of turning that into social capital through cooperation in multiplayer. If you're looking for me mid-December, you'll likely find me assuming my role as the spawner.

References

[1] Malaby T. (2006). Parlaying Value: Capital in and Beyond Virtual Worlds. Games and Culture. 1(2):141-162. doi:10.1177/1555412006286688

[2]Mercante, Alyssa. (2021) Halo Infinite multiplayer is doing free-to-play the right way. https://www.gamesradar.com/halo-infinite-multiplayer-is-doing-free-to-play-the-right-way/.

[3] https://www.halowaypoint.com/en-us/news/inside-infinite-september-2021 

Who needs a “first life” anyway?

I’m not sure we can simply dump our “first” life, otherwise known as the real world, but it’s a good thing we can build cultural capital within a second life as well. Where can you build a second life you may ask, well it could be in Second Life by Linden Lab, World of Warcraft (WoW) by Blizzard Entertainment, or really anywhere you so desire. When you first step into these types of new worlds, you may think they are simply virtual and completely distinct from the real world. Thomas Malaby in “Parlaying Value - Capital in and Beyond Virtual Worlds” suggests that the distinction might not be as large as you first imagined.

World of Warcraft - Stormwind Auction House - Sargeras Realm

Malaby suggests that it is understood that these virtual worlds allow generation and transferral of market and social capital, but the idea of cultural capital is not as well understood to be tied to these virtual worlds. To help bridge this gap, he instead uses the term “synthetic worlds” as they can be just as real in terms of human action and its results. Then he presents a new framework based around the existing parlaying of value between “domains of human action.” (Malaby 2006, 143), showcasing how the value generated from human action in these “synthetic worlds” is not much different than any other domain. 

To build this framework, Malaby provides background on various types of capital and provides examples from various “synthetic worlds”, primarily Second Life and WoW, in relation to the different kinds of capital. Capital is defined specifically as “a resource for action” (Malaby 2006, 146), all resulting from the resources of human capital, or what humans generate over long periods of time. This can easily be taken to mean the material resources generated, particularly if we look far enough back, but also the results from the shared experiences humans undergo. 

Due to the more complex nature of other forms of capital, market capital is perhaps the easiest to see and understand in the context of synthetic worlds, with some worlds, such as WoW having a clearly identified market which even presents “basic laws of supply and demand for desirable ‘virtual goods’” (Malaby 2006, 145). It’s larger than just that though, with the items being desired enough so that they are often auctioned or sold through online marketplaces like eBay. This is a direct example of capital crossing realms of human domain and finding meaning in what we may call the “real world”. Some of this results from the forced scarcity by developers, such as in the case of WoW, where items can sometimes take months to collect. That does not mean capital is only the result of scarcity though, in the case of Second Life, assets and creations can be copied and distributed easily. This is where the interweave between all forms of capital is introduced.

Social capital, “a resource that depends on the special qualities of reciprocity” (Malaby 2006, 153), also can be clearly outlined within “synthetic worlds”, with the most clear examples being social groups built directly into the worlds, such as guilds in WoW. Malaby suggests we need to look beyond these though, as social capital is about the “practices of reciprocity that sustain these networks” (Malaby 2006, 154), and not all social networks fit a strict criteria. Within any type of world, networks can be built for many types of reasons with many types of people, with one provided example being the discourse around WoW’s in-game marketplace. These connections can then be parlayed, for example into market capital, both in game and out. Perhaps the easier transfer to see though, may be into cultural capital, or status, such as Wagner James Au accomplished by providing free, virtual copies of his book during an event in Second Life. 

Cultural capital, which Malaby mentions as including “competencies, credentials, and artifacts” (Malaby 2006, 148) and defined as “the realization of what a given cultural group finds to be meaningful or important in bodies, objects, and offices” (Malaby 2006, 155), therefore is also present in these “synthetic worlds”. Not only is it generated, but it can be parlayed. In the case of the market in WoW, various players may have the skills and prestige to find players to help them find and create expensive items, that then can be seen as a commodity in terms of market capital. Cultural capital is all about the value and importance people give to things or to other people, which in the case of games, there is no lack of.

Competencies, perhaps the most clear form of cultural capital, result from learning and experience, which are aspects certainly not devoid from “synthetic worlds”. It may be hard to separate these from the avatar in the world, but Malaby suggests we should consider thinking about these competencies as not separate from those individually developed in other human domains. This can apply in the form of credentials as well, where an example of a notary in Second Life is provided, as what distinction really exists when this “virtual” notary must be trusted by those using their services? As for artifacts, these can exist in game but more tangible items that transcend the borders between human domains exist as well. Malaby provides the example of Linden Lab’s Second Life trading cards to illustrate this.

These cards highlight details of a person and their creation, pointing to the inherent capital that person’s actions generated, even in relation to their life in the “real world”. Tringo, a game created by Kermit Quirk within Second Life, was the topic of the specific trading card highlighted by Malaby. We can see the game’s market capital transcending boundaries, as the card highlights that the game was sold in game but also the rights for the game outside of Second Life were bought. This all started with the cultural capital, where Kermit used his skills as a systems analyst and programmer to become a sort of game developer in Second Life.  Social capital took over after that, with knowledge of the game spreading by word of mouth. From this “synthetic world”, Quirk gained market, social, and cultural capital from his creation. Then, the card documenting all of this, is a cultural artifact in its own way, drawing value from the context of its contents as cultural capital.

Overall, Malaby in this article succeeded in presenting a framework, based around the interplay of human actions between boundaries, that allows researchers to see these “synthetic worlds” as not necessarily distinct from our lives in the “real world”. The capital generated and parlayed is real and it’s not necessarily stuck in one world or limited to market value and social connections. He admits there are challenges in this analysis, due to “the increased scope these domains afford” (Malaby 2006, 160), but proper tools and frameworks like he laid out here will help bridge that gap between “synthetic worlds” and digital society as a whole.

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Thomas Malaby, “Parlaying Value,” Games and Culture 1, no. 2 (April 1, 2006): pp. 141-162, https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412006286688.