The Self-Affirming Culture of Gaming

In these three examples, we have seen that economic, political, and legal activity that crosses the membrane between synthetic worlds and the Earth serves mostly to blur any distinction between what is synthetic and what is Earthly. This argument may be applied more generally to the world of gaming as a whole. As the industry has evolved from board games to the creation of entire new worlds, the cultural milieu in which its products are experienced has expanded well beyond the card table on a Saturday night. Games are becoming such an integral part of daily life that the distinction between game and life may be fading as well.

One of the early applications of ubiquitous computing will doubtless be ubiquitous gaming. If gaming is truly ubiquitous, what distinguishes it from daily life? One sees gradual growth in the culture of gaming in many different practices and behaviors. At this particular moment, I am flying in a plane whose pilot is receiving flight path instructions from an air traffic controller - a good one, I hope - somewhere down there. At the same time, I know there is someone flying a simulation of this plane or one like it, on a similar flight path, and that person is also receiving path instructions from a controller; all of this is happening through VATSIM.net, the virtual air traffic simulation system. Through VATSIM, ordinary people have come together as a network of pilots interacting with air traffic controllers to produce a vast, organic simulation of actual air traffic. Flight simulation, in other words, has taken on a massively multiplayer format, and hundreds of ordinary people fly long, ordinary flights under the watchful eye of other ordinary people. All for fun.

If we move to the world of combat flight simulators, we find tens of thousands of people forming into squadrons to fly small-group missions against AI or human opponents. In the world of multiplayer first-person shooters, thousands come together in small teams to relive the horrors of the wars of our past or wars we have only yet imagined. All of this activity is coordinated by active communities based on websites, email, instant messaging, and voice over Internet. It is occasionally charged by face-to-face meetings as well, at fan gatherings, or in the form of romantic trysts. Meanwhile, social gaming grows gradually. Certain venues, such as PC Cafes, host walk-in players interested in gaming with one another; at this writing, Korea boasts some 25,000 PC Baangs (Herz 2002). Not all of this meeting up is about physical togetherness, mind you; for some gamers, the Internet is just too slow. If everyone can bring their high-powered machine to one location where they can link to a local high-speed network, the gaming is better for everybody.

The broader implications of emergent playlife communities could be significant. The political movements that happen inside and outside games are, at the moment, mostly about games. But there is no reason to expect that these communities will always limit their political activity to game-related issues. If there is a “cyberdemocracy” movement, or any online political movement at all, perhaps it will have to make use of synthetic world technology to get its message to the masses.

Increasingly, the gamer’s daily life involves shifting frequently back and forth between different activities, some of which can currently be identified as the “game,” whereas others are called “life.” But when I am sitting at my computer at home, chatting to my friend Ethelbert, who happens to appear on my screen as an Elven Mage, we are just as likely to be talking about the weather as we are about Magecraft. Perhaps we are also talking to our mutual friend Shotgun Edna by voice over Internet, and she is inviting us into a game of first-person World War II shooter action. Meanwhile, I am in an instant-messaging conversation with my friend Rowena, who wants to get together for a card game Saturday night.

Ethelbert is reading an email from the administrator of another synthetic world, informing him that he has won an in-world auction for 600 slats of wood for 50 gold pieces. A similar email from eBay informs him that he has won an auction for a nice Magritte print for $50.With all of this going on, where exactly is the line between game and life? Perhaps someone might be able to make distinctions, but Ethelbert and Edna and Rowena and I, who share a common set of assumptions about the rituals and symbols of our game-infused environments, would probably find them too nit-picky to implement. Imagine if someone were to insist on the following rule: if a rabbit attacks Ethelbert and I help him by casting a spell, we are “in the game,” but if we are not actually interacting with the synthetic world, but rather only with each other, then we are “in life.” One could always divide things up that way, but for the purposes of living with both the Earth’s weather and the fearsome Wererabbits of El Dorado, it’s not worth it. Our culture has moved beyond the point where such distinctions are helpful.

Thus this Article ends with the point that the membrane between synthetic worlds and daily life is definitely there but also definitely porous, and this is by choice of the users. What we have is an almost-magic circle, which seems to have the objective of retaining all that is good about the fantasy atmosphere of the synthetic world, while giving users the maximum amount of freedom to manipulate their involvement with them. Because of these properties, it seems more than likely that synthetic worlds will never be completely marginalized; the routes between them and daily life are too well-traveled. Because the two worlds are destined to interact, some attention should be paid to the broader economic, political, and security issues that will certainly arise.