----------empyre- soft-skinned space---------------------- Thanks, Alenda, for organizing this! I think I finally have my technical difficulties worked out and I can play with you all.
My book, Mixed Realism (2016), is about the ways game narratives fold back onto the activity of gameplay, recontextualizing our engagements with digital culture. Recently, I have been thinking about those concepts as they apply to the aftermath of "casual revolution" (Juul 2012) and the industry's transition to "live service" models designed to encourage "recurrent user payments" such as subscriptions and microtranscations. Here is one example that got me on to this topic. On June 10, 2015, Rockstar Games released the “Ill-Gotten Gains” downloadable content pack (DLC) for Grand Theft Auto V Online (GTAV). This DLC featured the most expensive in-game items to date, including a ten-million-dollar, gold-plated Luxor Jet. Offering some diegetic justification for these expensive items, a blog post on Rockstar Newswire announcing the patch cites “a surge in high-end crime across southern San Andreas," which resulted in an increased “demand for luxury goods and services." On one level, the “crime surge” mentioned refers to the heist missions introduced in the previous patch. The exorbitant cost of the "Ill-Gotten Gains" items rebalances the in-game economy to accommodate the large payouts of this new game mode. On another level, the “crime surge” refers to the widespread practice of amassing in-game currency through the use of glitches and exploits. The "Ill-Gotten Gains" patch included a number of new security measures to track and ban glitchers, putting an end to some of the more popular methods. Thus, it seems the patch’s high-priced items were intended to clear out not only the money earned through the diegetic crimes of the heist, but also the non-diegetic crimes of glitchers, whose gains were in reality ill-gotten, as opposed to those who dutifully grind heists, whose gains were ironically legitimate. What I am interested in here is the way the locus of the game seems to have shifted. Most game modes can be described as player-vs-player or player-vs-environment and those labels certainly apply here as well. Superseding all of them, however, is a confrontation of player-vs-developer. In this "meta-game" (Boluk and Lemieux 2017), players and developers compete to determine the value of the player's time. It demands highly efficient playstyles, long sessions of grinding one productive method, in which players attempt to leverage available mechanics--sometimes against their intended design and, even when they legitimate, before they get patched by developers--to earn in-game resources without having to spend real money. While efficiency has always been valued in gaming, the industry's embrace of free-to-play models (which demonstrated explosive profitability during the casual revolution) has made enhancing productivity the game itself. My work recently considers what this shift has meant for videogames as a medium of storytelling as well as the role of game narrative in subverting these forms of play transformed into productivity. So, I’m excited to chat with you all about videogames and their participation in the mangles of play and work that characterize contemporary digital culture. // Tim -- Timothy J. Welsh Associate Professor of English Loyola University New Orleans Mixed Realism: Videogames and the Violence of Fiction www.timothyjwelsh.com _______________________________________________ empyre forum empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
