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The phrase “alternate careers” is thus remarkable at second glance not for suggesting that there are alternatives but for the centrality it still accords to those academic careers that are not alternate. This centrality is not just an effect of graduate study and not only perceptible within the academy; it shapes the way universities are understood as workplaces even by those who stand outside them.

strongly defined intellectual and professional career trajectory that, as Alan Liu astutely observes in The Laws of Cool, may no longer be characteristic of modern knowledge work: “to be a professional-managerial-technical worker now is to stake one’s authority on an even more precarious knowledge that has to be re-earned with every new technological change.

These “alternative” or “para-academic” jobs within the academy have a great deal to teach us about how academic labor is quantified, about different models of work and work product, and about the ways that aptitude, skill, expertise, and productivity are weighed in assessing different kinds of work.

the significant parameters were essentially these. My pretax income for the academic year was $12,500, and my formal work responsibilities were to prepare and teach two undergraduate writing courses of my own design. The time commitment for my teaching responsibilities was assumed to be approximately twenty hours per week. In addition, it was assumed that I would undertake my own research and make progress toward my PhD.

the research I conducted as a student (preparing for professional advancement through field exams, writing conference papers, and participating in the intellectual life of the department by attending public lectures and university seminars) was not considered work, or at least not compensable work.

Students are positioned as net gainers from, rather than contributors to, the reservoir of knowledge the university contains, and the fellowship stipends they receive are characterized as “aid” rather than as compensation

I was accountable for all my time to the PhD program I was in, not just for my paid duties or even for a standard forty-hour work week, but potentially all the hours not devoted to sleeping and eating.

this erosion of a boundary between the professional and personal space is a familiar and very common effect of graduate study, and (even more anecdotally) I would observe that the people who typically enter a graduate program are likely to have the kind of personality that lends itself to this erosion: highly motivated with a strong sense of duty and an established habit of hard work and deferral of personal pleasure (or an ability to experience hard work as pleasure)

I tended to feel that the research work required of me was effectively limitless: that no amount of effort could be sufficient to really complete it and that therefore no time could legitimately be spent on anything else.

Each hour of project work, in other words, stood on the back of a fairly substantial apparatus that was necessary to make that hour possible. Without the e-mail, the payroll, the servers, and so forth, project work wouldn’t be possible. However, for many collaborators and funding agencies, this model appeared not only counterintuitive but deeply troubling because it made our work look much more expensive than anyone else’s

Running in parallel to this entire narrative is another with an entirely different developmental trajectory. Since 2000, my partner and I have had a small consulting business through which we have worked on an eclectic range of projects, ranging from simple database development to digital publication to grant writing

The value of this kind of consulting work—for both the consultant and the client—is the self-consciousness it provides concerning the nature of the work being done and the terms on which it is conducted

For the client, self-consciousness results from having to bring all of this to articulation, and the result is often a better (because more explicit, transparent, and widely shared) set of intellectual configurations within the client’s project or environmen

For instance, work processes might be explicitly documented; latent disagreements might be brought to the surface and resolved; methodological inconsistencies or lacunae might be examined and rationalized.

it is interesting to observe that digital humanities, as an institutional phenomenon, has evolved very substantially out of groups that were originally positioned as “service” units and staffed by people with advanced degrees in the humanities: in other words, people with substantial subject expertise who had gravitated toward a consulting role and found it congenial and intellectually inspiring. The research arising out of this domain, at its most rigorous and most characteristic, is on questions of method.

Mark selected text as Mark

our technical expertise (in this case, familiarity with markup languages and XML publishing) had an obvious relevance and importance, but arguably more important was the ability to understand and explain the editorial significance of technical decisions and to serve as a bridge between the two strands of the project: the project’s editorial work (conducted by senior humanities faculty) and the project’s technical implementation (overseen by professional staff at the MLA who manage the production of the editions in print and digital form but for whom the XML is largely unfamiliar terrain).

The discourse around the use of XML was substantially instrumental: it concerned the practicalities of supporting a digital interface and generating PDF output and similar issues.Treating this work as information modeling, however, has produced a subtle shift in these relationships.

Where in the print production process the editorial manuscript was taken as the most informationally rich artifact in the ecology (whose contents would be translated into an effective print carrier for those ideas), in the digital process the editorial manuscript is a precursor to that state: the XML encoding brings information structures that are latent or implicit in the manuscript into formal visibility.

what has proven most useful (and what students most remark on in their evaluations of the class) is the kind of embedded knowledge I represent: the understanding of methods, approaches, and strategies that arise out of real-world experience at a functioning digital publication project

The course I teach covers a number of highly technical subjects (schema writing, XML, metadata), but its emphasis is strongly on how we can understand the significance and contextual utility of these technologies within a set of larger strategic concerns. Although on paper I only became a plausible hire with the completion of my PhD, the credential that really grounds the teaching I do is actually the fifteen years I spent not completing that degree and working instead in the variety of roles detailed earlier.

for the typical humanities faculty member, most of these paradigms of work are equally alien; only the first will look truly familiar (the adjunct faculty position is familiar but not to be identified with).

what characterizes mainstream academic work is two qualities. The first is the unlimitedness of the responsibility: work interpenetrates life, and we do what is necessary. For instance, we attend conferences without there being a question of whether it’s our “own” time or our employer’s time;

The second, related characteristic is the way time is conceptualized as a function of work practice. Time for academics is not regulated in detail, only in blocks. (For nine months you are paid; for three months you are free to do other things; at all times you should be working on your next book.)Most digital humanities work, however—as performed by library staff, IT staff, and other para-academic staff who are not faculty—is conceptualized according to one of the other models: hourly, by FTE, or as an agenda of projects that granularizes and regulates the work in quantifiable ways. Increasingly, the use of project management tools to facilitate oversight and coordination of work within IT organizations has also opened up the opportunity to track time, and this has fostered an organizational culture in which detailed managerial knowledge of time spent on specific tasks and on overhead is considered virtuous and even essential.

The importance of qualitative rather than quantitative measures of work is similarly a kind of class marker: the cases in which specific metrics are typically applied (e.g., number of students and courses taught, quantity of committee work) are those that are least felt to be characteristically scholarly work. Quantifying scholarly output can only be done at the crudest level (e.g., number of books or articles published), and the relative and comparative nature of these assessments quickly becomes apparent: a monumental, groundbreaking book is worth much more (but how much more?) than a slighter intervention, and it takes a complex apparatus of review to establish, even approximately, the relative value of different scholarly productions.

the tension between quantitative and qualitative measures of productivity was a constant source of methodological self-consciousness.

This last formulation—accomplishing the same task with available resources—reverses the narrative of academic work that is on view at liberal arts colleges and research universities, in which a thoughtful person pursues his or her original ideas and is rewarded for completing and communicating them. In this narrative, the defining and motivating force is the individual mind, with its unique profile of subject knowledge and animating research vision.

the effect of this model of work is to treat people as resources—as a kind of pool from which one can draw off a quantum of work when needed. The result of this fractionalization may be felt as a positive or negative effect: either of fragmented attention or of fascinating variety. But in either case it constitutes a displacement of autonomy concerning what to work on when and how long to take

What is the effect of this fungibility, this depersonalization of labor on the para-academic staff? What is my life like as a worker (and a self-conscious manager) in these conditions?

Our expectations of what work should be like are strongly colored by the cultural value and professional allure of research, and we expect to be valued for our individual contributions and expertise, not for our ability to contribute a seamless module to a work product. Our paradigm for professional output is authorship, even if actual authoring is something we rarely have enough time to accomplish.

But in 2025, what will the now-commonplace jobs (web programmer, digital project coordinator, programmer/analyst, and so forth) look like as professional identities, especially to people who may never have imagined themselves as scholars in the first place?

What are the larger effects of accounting for time and regulating it in these ways? One important effect is that time and work appear fungible and interconvertible. The calculus of time and effort by which we know the cost and value of an hour of an employee’s time is also the basis for assessing how those resources could be used otherwise. On the spreadsheet that tracks the project, that unit of funding (time, product) could be spent to purchase an equivalent quantum of time or product from some other source: from a vendor, from an undergraduate, from a consultant, from an automated process running on an expensive piece of equipment.

Will a new set of credentials arise through which these jobs can be trained for and aimed at, avoiding the sense of professional anomaly that (in my experience at least) produces such a useful form of outsiderism?

most PhD candidates the idea of accepting a job other than a tenure-track faculty position is tantamount to an admission of failure. The reason why Mr. Silva assumed that I was Professor Flanders—the reason that no alternative is visible to him—is that no alternative can be articulated by the profession itself.

In the archetypal digital humanities collaboration, traditional faculty explore forms of work that would ordinarily look “technical” or even menial (such as text encoding, metadata creation, or transcription); programmers contribute to editorial decisions; and students coauthor papers with senior scholars in a kind of Bakhtinian carnival of overturned professional usages.

For technical staff, these collaborative relationships produce a much richer intellectual context for their work and also convey a sense of the complexity of humanities data and research problems, which in turn makes for better, more thoughtful technical work. For students, the opportunity to work on real-world projects with professional collaborators gives unparalleled exposure to real intellectual problems, job demands, and professional skills across a wide range of roles, which in turn may yield a more fully realized sense of the landscape of academic work.

Drawing on interviews we conducted with game developers in Canada

In addition to looking at how game labour is mobilised in commercial game development, we also consider in this article how game labour is counter-mobilised – dissident directions that are emerging in the subjectivities, organisation, and creations of this form of new media labour.

tactical games created in the context of political activism

a job making virtual games seems employment nirvana – a promise of being paid to play

experiments in open-source game development

our inquiry into the composition of game labour is part of a longer study of computer and video games. Our study proposes that interactive games are the paradigmatic media of “Empire”, using that term in the inflection given to it by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their companion books, Empire (2000) and Multitude (2004).

the five reasons we think digital games are exemplary creations of Empire

he largest game firms and markets are located in the United States, Japan, and Europe, though South Korea and China are quickly becoming burgeoning regions of game-capital’s expansion

the corporate organisation of the game industry spans the “world market” (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 254-256). Game companies roam the entire planet in search of workers and consumers, establishing a globe-girdling network of production and consumption.

Early digital games were created during the Cold War by hackers and hobbyists within the military-academic complex. The creations of this autonomous invention power were only later harnessed by entrepreneurs – the act of capture that set in motion a multi-billion dollar cultural industry (Kline et al., 2003: 86-88). Since its inception, the digital play industry has continually discovered profitable new strategies by capturing counter-play.

The concept of immaterial labour invites us to assess the multitudinous potentialities of the new forms of work

digital games are a paradigmatic media of Empire

The activity of making and playing games combines the range of qualitative features of immaterial labour: scientific know-how, hi-tech proficiency, cultural creativity, human sociability, and cooperative interactivity

The transnational architecture of game production reminds us that the world market may be a “smooth” space but it’s far from level

A concept such as immaterial labour, for example, enables us to defamiliarise interactive play, reconceive it, and glimpse aspects that are often occluded

By examining game work in terms of immaterial labour we can start to show how it relates to other aspects of this social field – participating, for instance, both in the structures of “networked power” that uphold contemporary sovereignty, and the insurrections of the “multitude” that challenge it.

To draw an analogy to the music industry, the game publisher is like the record label, the developer like the band. Developers make games, while publishers finance, distribute, and market them.

Publishers include the colossal video game console-makers (Microsoft, with its Xbox, Nintendo, with its GameCube, and Sony, with its PlayStation II), a collection of transnational publishing conglomerates (e.g., Electronic Arts, THQ, UbiSoft), and a number of smaller but still powerful publishers.

tremendous control consolidating in the hands of one company in particular, Electronic Arts (EA).

it is not uncommon for publishers to cancel a development contract mid-way.

At the top are a handful of mammoth developers with between five hundred and over two thousand employees, releasing dozens of titles each year.

Below these is a stratum of mid-sized studios that enjoy an established record with one or more publishers, have more than one hundred employees, and release a couple of games each year.

In addition to operating their own in-house development studios, publishers contract “third-party” development studios to make games for their publishing label

One studio manager describes the power relationship of a developer to a publisher as ‘indentured servitude’.

developers are ‘the David; the publisher is the Goliath’

Then there is an echelon of small studios with less than one hundred employees, producing one game every eighteen months or so, often scrambling from one contract to the next.

game development is an exemplary site of “immaterial labour”

This term is used by autonomist theorists to designate the ‘distinctive quality’ of work in ‘the epoch in which information and communication play an essential role in each stage of the process of production’

Hardt and Negri (2000: 289-294) distinguish various sub-categories of immaterial labour, including work with computers and networks, work manipulating and managing emotion, work involving communication and images, and work entailing high levels of coordination and cooperation

The net of immaterial labour is cast widely: bio-tech lab technicians and game designers – as much as call centre operators, childcare providers, and even virtual game players – are engaged in immaterial labour

Programmers, or engineers, develop “game engines” and write the code on which a game’s functionality is based

We want to stress that digital games are “immaterial” commodities and they may be designed by “immaterial” labourers – but at some point in the production chain some unmistakably material labour is required, producing a tangible good, whether that be a game cartridge or a game console.

we focus our attention on the labour at the “high” immaterial end of the game value chain in the North, and the unique forms of incentive and discipline it incites

the day of the lone-wolf commercial game developer is definitively over

Most big games cost $5-10 million to produce, and $25 million budgets are ‘around the corner’

Designers establish the basic game concept, characters, and play mechanics.

The main job types in game development include design, production, art, programming, and testing

Artists develop characters, virtual worlds, animation, special effects, and sound.

Today’s most visible immaterial workers are those in high-tech milieu and in cultural industries

Producers have a “leadership role” in administering the budget, coordinating the project, and managing the development team; they are charged with maintaining a coherent vision of the game’s design, facilitating communication among the sub-teams, and addressing “personnel and motivational issues”. Finally, testers play a game to evaluate it for “bugs” and playability

Game development typically involves four stages. In “pre-production” the conceptual infrastructure for the game is designed, its look mapped, schedules created, and resources assigned. In “prototyping” programmers create the tools that build the game, and the rendering tools which iterate animation or special effects, permitting artists to design, review, and edit their creations. Artists are working on two- and three-dimensional models, developing textures, and animation for characters and the game world, while software engineers code the game mechanics and the story. The third stage is “production”, with its sub-stages of alpha, beta, and final. Game engines are now complete, and characters and animation are embedded in a working game. At “alpha” the game isn’t fully stable, but all the art, code, and features are present. Testers are evaluating levels, and returning them for correction to the development team. At “beta” the game should be full and stable, adapted to the “platform” it will play on, and it is undergoing play testing. At “final” the product is shipped to the publisher, who will run its own tests before approving a game for release

The empirical basis for the analysis that follows is a three-year study of the Canadian video and computer game industry. We conducted personal interviews with about forty games workers, including producers, artists, programmers, designers, testers, studio executives, and owners

Comparable to the Australian situation, the Canadian game industry is a small but significant node in the global digital play business

a preliminary profile can be drawn: relatively young, generally well paid but unevenly precarious, and overwhelmingly male

The largest proportion of the game workforce is between their late-teens and early-thirties, a generational bracket that jives with the twenty-nine year-old age of the “average” gamer

many new recruits to game jobs hold college or university degrees in areas such as computer science, physics, and fine arts

There are few university-level specialised game programs, though in 2004 EA – a company that sees ‘universities as the next-generation of talent’ – donated US$8 million to help launch just such a program (Rueff cited in Delaney, 2004)

Celebrity” designers can earn $500,000 or more; programmers and artists, about $60,000; and game-testers are often paid minimum wage

There are, however, a growing number of developers setting up in smaller towns, due to the growing supply of skilled labour and the lure of reduced overhead costs – including lower wages.

The game workforce is, by and large, male.

Even if there has been a shift in the gender of game players, ‘there’s not much of a change in hiring numbers

The verdict of most women insiders is scathing: ‘It’s a total old boys club’

Projects to explore paths beyond the gender clichés in virtual game content ‘do not get support in the industry at all…. [Y]ou have a really dominant gender leading and they’re the ones who have the purse strings’.

There’s nobody telling you how to do something. There’s no paperwork getting in your way. There are no set rules that you have to follow – rules that you don’t feel are necessary. There’s no formal way that you are supposed to do a technical design.

We have very little hierarchy, very little formal structure, very little “understood” ways of doing things…. In a situation where everyone more or less knows their role, it works out well: everyone just divides the work, you work on your bit, and everyone knows what to do. It just works out.

To function smoothly, though, a smooth, open play of communication is required.

Cooperation within and among the sub-groups of a development team is cited by game workers as a most gratifying aspect of their work

Software is a very dynamic, huge system: this is something I find attractive about the games industry. You have all these different components: artists, programmers, legal, production, data. You’ve got all these people that don’t understand each other’s jobs. And (yet) you have to make that all come together as one cohesive piece of art.

The work as play milieu of contemporary game studios spans a varying range of perks and promises: flexible hours, lax dress code, free food, fitness facilities, parties, and funky interior design; and it also encompasses a host of intangible qualities, from “rebelliousness” to twisted humour to self-expression.

Generally, when you go to work, it’s not, “Ah, I gotta go to work”. It’s, “I’m going to work, cool!” You come in, you see your friends, you get to make video games, and you get to play some. It’s pretty cool. It’s really not even so much like work here.

‘industrialization of bohemia’ – in particular the idea that games corporations aren’t actually part of the ‘corporate world’

To tap this “jaded intelligence” game studios tend to elaborate a work as play ethos that promises great ‘leeway to express yourself’: ‘People have to be entirely comfortable to be who they are to come up with anything spontaneously, to have that real dynamic’

he “anti-corporate” culture of many game studios would seem to be exemplary of McRobbie’s (2002: 109) incisive critique that, in creative workplaces, ‘[w]hen the individual is most free to be chasing his or her dreams of self-expression, so also is postmodern power at its most effective’.

Another reason studios bend to a work as play model is because many companies have a recruitment and retention problem.

various disciplinary mechanisms are employed so to say to staff: ‘Oh my God, you don’t want to leave here!’ The campus-like Vancouver-area studio of EA provides a striking example. Employing 1000 people, the sleekly designed complex features a gym, pool tables, basketball courts, a soccer field, subsidised gourmet food, and snowboarding fieldtrips, among other “bonuses”.

Studio executives are anxious to not only attract new youthful employees but also prevent current team-members from leaving midway through the production schedule, or defecting to a competing studio or another industry.

The length of the working day in game studios varies widely depending on company, rank, and stage of development

studios open their doors to extreme hours of digital drudgery: ‘forced workaholism’ is the diagnosis in IGDA’s recent study of Quality of Life in the Game Industry

Most North American developers are salaried, so the extraordinary overtime put in at game studios is unpaid labour.

The personal accounts we received give every indication that studio workplaces are, with varying degrees of intensity, obsessively hard-driving and punishingly disassociated from domesticity, sleep, and nourishment.

EA employees report that ‘work inside the company more resembles a fast-moving, round-the-clock auto assembly line’

At least one manager we talked to was deeply critical of studios that get these young guys that come out of film school, game programming school, or art school and get them to work their asses off….If I had a dime for all the people I knew who are sort of resentful of their experience at their first or subsequent game industry job because the corporate culture was very subtly coercive: “You should be working here at 8:00 at night and, if you aren’t, then you’re slacking off!”

This ruthless work regimen reflects and reinforces divisions based on age, gender, and parenthood. Those in long-term relationships, those who have children or want to start a family, or those who simply don’t want to reduce the time of life to time spent at work, are ostensibly excluded from the game sector, or will find it tremendously difficult to commit to the ludicrous hours that can be expected of them

Enduring excessive hours without complaint is tied to the game industry’s ‘hard work ethic’ (IGDA, 2004a: 31), which we would add has a machismo quality to it that joins the other manifestations of sexism that have functioned to exclude women from working in game studios

Here we catch a view of the demanding practices of self-regulation in game studios, an aspect of Empire’s search for ways of realising ‘unmediated command over subjectivity itself’ (Lazzarato, 1996: 135; see also McRobbie, 2004). Consider this developer’s remarks: When you work in this industry you are judged for what you’ve done. So you want to make a good name for yourself. You want people to consider you a hard worker, a good worker – a guy that can do a bit more than what’s expected. Because the thing with the game industry is that it is, really, a small business.

Stress is a major problem in development studios. Referring to the exhausting rhythm of work, one game artist comments: ‘I don’t think it’s good for you to work like that, that often. And to be creative all the time without a break – it just isn’t good for your brain, or for your creativity, potentially’

The turnover rate in the game industry is described as ‘nothing short of catastrophic’: over 50% plan to leave the industry within ten years, 35% within five years

‘Normally, you sign a contract of employment with a company and any idea you have becomes theirs’

any studios are rife with quiet suspicion about ideas being ‘stolen’

The five had signed “non-compete” agreements and this legally blocked them from working for another North American games company for one year after terminating their employment. A court judged in favour of UbiSoft.

It seems that UbiSoft thinks of Montréal as a plantation – any worker who dares to escape will be hunted down by lawyers and forced out of business’

[p]retty much everyone would rather be working on their own project, some original and creative game’.

game workers’ disenchantment with the effects of corporate rationalisation on creativity is often what causes developers to leave their employer – often to launch a start-up.

In terms of precarity, one segment of game labour that stands out is “bug catchers”. Game testers, or Quality Assurance (QA) employees, are notorious for being the lowest paid and worst treated workers in the studio system:

Many testers make a minimum wage, and at larger developers, are in temporary, contract-based employment. ‘We’re treated no differently than the janitorial or the cafeteria staff, who make more money than us anyway. I’m not belittling other jobs but…’, one tester explains

A lot of the QA testers are very angry, because they’ll hear that their bug count isn’t as “high”. But it isn’t fair because certain areas of the game just don’t have any bugs’. One tester says his department is filled with ‘really angry people, because you work fourteen-hour days and we save each game probably millions of dollars

game studios begin to experiment in “outsourcing”.

as high-technology capitalism rips its course round the world in search of new markets and “cheap” labour, “talent” begins to incubate in the Global South, giving game-capital increased mobility

EA, for example, outsources development work to India (Overby, 2003); and EA, Nintendo, and Microsoft, among others, have outsourced game work to a Vietnamese firm

But the diffusion of game labour is presenting game corporations with not only discounted but also free labour.

when young “hardcore” gamers spend their evenings modding a level of a computer game, or sculpting an avatar for a multiplayer virtual world – or, for that matter, contributing to their favourite developer’s online “community” forum – the boundaries between “play” and “content provision” subtly dissolve. They join the legion of ‘free labor’

a major source of value creation in the networked economy, as capital learns to digitally tap, outside all boundaries of work-time or -place, a diffuse “collective intelligence”

Now development companies often “buy back” successful mods, and hire the teams that created them en masse

What’s more, best-selling games like Counter-Strike have been developed by remote modding teams, establishing a profitable precedent of a “virtual studio” model of game development. In that aspect, and in the modes of distributed content provision evidenced by the mod community, free networked labour in the gaming sector is perhaps prototypical of work in what has been dubbed the coming ‘firms without factories’

‘eighty-five hour’ work weeks at EA; of the normalisation of hyper-extended ‘crunch’ time; of the absence of compensation in the form of either ‘overtime’ pay or ‘compensation time’; of the ‘put up or shut up and leave human resources policy’ of EA; of the allegedly ‘illegal’ failure of EA to pay overtime; and of the rapid concentration of ownership in the game development industry.

The reverberations of ‘EA: The Human Story’ are only beginning to register as we write this article. At minimum, as one industry commentator put it, ‘the general perception of EA’s overall sliminess has increased exponentially’

managers regularly ‘falsified timesheets to avoid paying overtime’

IGDA’s gambit, for example, is that studios that reduce their hours will get ‘more productive and creative workers’

And only because it is being forced to, EA is promising workplace ‘reform’

Generally, though, game studios in North America are very far, culturally and politically, and often geographically, from the traditions of trade unionism

These resonate in many respects with the counter-globalisation movement, for example, in an opposition to the commodification of life forms, in a commitment to experiment in alternative modes of human cooperation, and in the elaboration of non-commercial applications of new media

The counter-mobilisation of immaterial labour that currently causes industry managers most anxiety is the growing network of game pirates

games have a piracy rate of nearly five times that of the music industry

pirated product often springs from within development studios themselves.

Empire sets in motion potentialities it cannot contain

Modders often import content for an altered game from some other pop culture artefact – either from another game, perhaps owned by a company other than the one that made the original game, or from another media, such as a film. In doing this, these modders are constructing a “commons” of images, characters, and themes, in violation of the corporate enclosures that divide them up into carefully policed proprietary domains.

Modding, like piracy, carries both potentialities and limitations. Usurping the corporate control over the direction of game development, modders are intriguing figures of autonomous production

In other words, modifications don’t necessarily modify much, often only amplifying the spirit of the original game

As military training camps and management schools constantly demonstrate, networked simulation is not just a matter of entertainment.

‘agoraXchange’, a collaborative open-source game development and art project, has the goal of creating a massively multiplayer online game simulating a future where there has been a radical change in political institutions.

The experiments of this playful multitude, as modest and preliminary as some may be, flow into the wider currents of tactical media, hacktivism, free and open-source software, and distributed computing generating tumults throughout the circuits of Empire

That simulation games represent problem-spaces is in some respects just a more sophisticated articulation of the basic core of game-ness. By most definitions games require players, conflict, and a quantifiable outcome.

As expansive as a game might be in its treatments, it will impose arbitrary limits on its subject. These limits begin with the roles and goals of the player, decisions that shape the entire design

The quantifiable gameplay elements and mechanics all, in a tightly designed game any way, factor directly into whether the player achieves their goals.

There has been excellent discussion on Play the Past about the appropriateness of, and methods for critiquing simulations historically.

they are interpretations in the form of quantifiable problem spaces

It suggests considerations for rigorous and meaningful criticism that is holistic and sensitive to the medium

why Colonization codes native peoples the way it does, why Civilization does not deal with social issues in cities, or why East India Company does not represent the tensions between English and Indian customs—one needs to consider holistically the problem space selected by the designers

Generally speaking however—and I welcome examples where this is not the case—simulation games, especially pleasurable and/or commercially successful ones  must commit to a very small set of roles and goals, often one role and one goal. Even where roles and goals differ and conflict, they tend to be set up as binary opposites or at least draw from the same well of constraints and affordances.

This is in large part, again, because games must be closed functioning systems: each part must connect to every other part. So a game cannot represent roles and goals well that do not fit into the core choices, affordances, and constraints of the chosen problem space.

Slaves in the game become a commodity, a valuable source of cheap labor and it is not unreasonable at all for players to initiate battles in the hopes of gaining more slaves for mines and building projects.

Suppose, however, one wanted to criticize formally this historical representation of slaves. One might start by noting that these slaves have very little agency.

slaves become nothing more than affordances, resources for the player to exploit in the game

Why does the game not portray the agency of slaves? How Longbow defined the primary problem space, the human player’s problem space, is a critical answer. For the player Philip king of Macedon is the role with a goal of uniting Macedonia and building a Balkan empire. With this role and goal driving the articulation of the problem space, depicting slaves in the game as affordances is fully understandable.

It is important to note, however, that saying a portrayal of ancient slaves, native Americans, Hessian mercenaries, railroad barons or any other agent or aspect of the past, takes the form it does because of the problem space is not meant to be a tactic for ending discussion or defending an implementation (one could imagine such a chilling effect: “why are they portrayed this way? Because the problem space demanded it. Oh … okay, so what’s for lunch?”). It is meant to focus criticism on a game holistically and consider how the affordances and constraints of the simulation game medium and the interests and goals of a game’s creators (their concerns, assumptions, hopes, attitudes, what have you) shape a game’s interpretation of the past.

the agents could not reasonably be conceived to play that role  in the problem space from the point of view of the player, the primary agent

simulation games are human interpretations of the past subject to certain constraints, as sources and media they should be considered holistically, and this can be done by thinking in terms of problem spaces.

Players with choices and strategies

Affordances and constraints: Agents in the past (and present) have opportunities and roadblocks, abundances and scarcities, talents and weaknesses, access and exclusion. These affordances and constraints shape their choices, goals, and roles.

make notes on the following: role, goals, geographical setting, types of choices available, affordances (I didn’t call them that at first, but got there quickly), and constraints.

I indicated I would start the class off by giving some background biographical information on Pliny.

Comprehension: even those who sometimes struggled with the challenge of making sense of primary sources and organizing a variety of historical evidence reported their sense that they understood Pliny and his world better than they normally understood many topics we explored

t is too easy for evidence and facts (such as they are) to get divorced from one another and appear meaningless, particularly when one lacks a deep background in a subject.

Engagement: problem solving is inherently engaging

what reasonably valid simulation games offer most of all to students of the past is the ability to explore problem spaces from the strategic, if not emotional and intellectual, perspective of a player/agent in the space.

Simulation games are particularly good at modeling choice in problem spaces.

When students play and critique simulation games, they can actually make choices within a problem space and see how they are resolved.

potentially a much closer analogy to the reality of the past problem than regular classroom media

Of course we must be very careful when using simulation games to help students study problem spaces. The games will tend to focus on one set of roles and goals in the problem space and it is essential to remind students that there are many roles and goals.