Christian McCrea

(Submitted to Under The Mask 2012)

The proposition of a ‘convergence culture’ has built a series of dangerously mythic cultural imperatives for the technocratic class.  These imperatives often draw down from videogame design and culture to perform a series of increasingly unlikely tasks. Games are being summoned to save education, save libraries, save the electoral process, save the environment, save the economy and help stage manage the narrative of a converging technological society. These missions are often built on false premises about players themselves.

For cultural studies and the broader humanities, games have long been used as a touchstone for changes in our symbiotic relationship with the technological, positioned as a curious junction of leisure and capital. With material ontologies now forming a discursive tract, from object-oriented ontology to the material turn in cultural studies, traces of a videogame materiality are now emerging. The last few years has seen such approaches inform the anthropology of games, player studies, and become part of the ‘proceduralism’ fracas.

This paper will suggest two notions; the orthodox and the ideal, continue to frame our concepts of videogame players, and how we have built methods for material approaches. For example, most experiences of retail videogames are made possible by piracy, trading and second-hand markets. Rather than propose this as a new idea, this paper will examine the broad consequence of this growing trend inside game studies and ask what questions we may have already solved, and what problems we can go on to create for technocrats eager to capture games’ precarious position in culture.

The HE pieces in the Age and Australian are well-linked and the NTEU’s response is pretty clear. The papers couldn’t hide their scorn, and I want to make this brief comment with a few assumptions that might be instructive for the few people who read this. My assumptions:

1. That the drafters of the Behavioural Capability Framework (BCF) are worth the money they’ve billed my employer, and their methods (a blended approach of classic neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) and value statement systems) are tested and benchmarked. That is, that they’re smart. That RMIT hired people as smart or smarter than the thousands of PhD-holding staff to help regulate behaviour of those staff.  

2. That the drafters of the BCF worked with University staff to bring the high level statements (coming from the external consultancy) and actionable statements (coming from RMIT staff and management) together. This is both obvious in the split in language and obvious because it is the only method that works. 

3. That the drafters are happy with the final format of the BCF. 

You might even say I’m being positive here about the BCF and attempting to find an innovative solution to the situation. I feel they are important assumptions to proceed on. I want to just show the BCF high-level statements again for those of you who asked in private, on twitter, on email. Before we do, some analysis.

They aren’t flagged as such but in classic 1990s NLP systems, this format is just called value-product (value on left, production terms on the right.) As NLP fragmented post a couple of lawsuits and new enterprises forming in the US, you had some really interesting approaches crop up and try to make these systems more complex.

So this is considered a really old-school approach. I’m considerably out of the loop on NLP thinking these days so I am relying on nearly 15 year old training and reading. However, NLP from this era is very simple to explain. Anybody can understand it, and anybody who has worked in an office knows instinctively what the purpose is. 

A value-product table like this works on the following premises. First, get staff to use new language to describe their work and the techniques they use to do their work. Second, shift the order of language so that ambiguities rule over specifics. Third, devolve responsibility for policing of the new language to the individual. Let’s have a look. 

Resilience

• maintains commitment to and persists in the pursuit of objectives, even when challenges are encountered
• copes with pressure and ambiguity, remaining focused and productive
• demonstrates adaptability and sources the assistance, support and advice of others

• shows passion, energy and tenacity in repeated efforts to achieve a result.

Connectedness

• builds constructive, lasting partnerships internally and externally
• sets and achieves shared objectives with others
• establishes appropriate channels and processes to connect with others

• encourages collegiality and team work.

Commitment to excellence (continuous improvement)

• reviews and evaluates personal performance and outcomes to identify scope for further improvement
• looks for opportunities to improve accuracy, efficiency, effectiveness and excellence
• embraces opportunities for personal growth or development
• understands and applies internal and external benchmarks of performance excellence
• adheres to the requirements of laws, industry and organisational standards, principles of good governance and accepted community and ethical practice

Innovation

• conceives of, and plans initiatives that change the way things are currently done to improve outcomes
• investigates possible ways of doing things and devise improved approaches and methods
• generates new ideas and solutions and challenges accepted thinking and norms

• identifies opportunities, taking action to convert them into outcomes while recognising and managing associated risks.

Outcomes focussed

• sets and meets clear challenging goals that align with team/organisational goals and have demonstrable, appropriate and high-quality outcomes
• executes tasks and ensures they achieve intended results
• plans tasks and initiatives to ensure they are completed on time

• takes responsibility for seeing things through to completion.

Open thinking

• understands the connections across disciplines, organisations, countries and cultures to resolve complex problems
• displays thinking beyond current norms and paradigms
• forecasts trends and anticipates future needs
• identifies relevant information and variables from outside the immediate environment and field of expertise

• displays tolerance and openness to different cultures and experiences.

Doesn’t seem quite complete, does it? That’s because the meat of the BCF is in another document that lists the expected actions against your particular pay grade. Which is, A, B/C, D, E and Executive. Let’s have a closer look at these expected actions, I find them very interesting.

The Innovation category, for the B/C rank, instructs that a staff member:

1. Anticipates problems and generates ideas to ensure they do not materialise.

2. Thinks outside apparent boundaries or limitations in developing teaching and/or research outputs. 

3. Encourages and assists others in finding imaginative and novel solutions that bring lateral thinking to problem resolution or teaching and/or research method.

Now much of the attention has focused on the reslience section, which for a staff member of B/C level, asks:

1. Maintains optimism and professionalism in challenging situations 

2. Encourages others to become enthusiastic and committed to an initiative or task 

3. Exhibits flexibility and retains focus on the ultimate goal in the face of set-backs  

4. Invests in understanding the challenges team members face and facilitates renewed efforts to overcome them.

Notice anything strange so far? That’s right. The third level, the detail level which isn’t in the first table, is actually not more precise in detail. In fact, what you have is a system that works on 1. The Value Word / Phrase 2. General Statements Regardless of Position 3. General Statements Specific to Position. 

Understand that difference for a second. You’ve come this far so you must be interested. The staff-level statements are not more or less specific than the high-level general statements, they’re general statements that are purpose-built for a pay-grade.

This is actually extremely elegant for what it is trying to achieve. That is, invent new language, shift the order in favour of the ambiguous, encourage self-policing. 

Good NLP practice assumes that people are deeply aware of when they’re being manipulated. It takes into account the wholesale resistance to managerial debasement that, by the way, is totally complicit and reinforces managerial debasement. A framework like this - again, on my assumptions - is done knowing that thousands of intelligent people will find it, at first, troubling or indeed insulting. Any perceived alteration of culture is outre, of course.

What occurs in the second phase is reinforcement. What we used to call ‘the invitation’. Also used (and partially inspired by) the reading of Tarot cards to a skeptical mark. The ambiguity becomes the product. “We know you’re skeptical, but look closely for yourself and tell me what you think. You tell me what you see in the details.” Maybe you’ve seen one of these young pick-up artist chaps in the last few years, the method of invitation is somewhat similar. Devolve the perceived weakness to the skeptic. “This is here for you, I’ll just leave this here. But you’ll see it can help you, and when you do, you can own the meaning for yourself. It belongs to you.” 

Why is any of this interesting to anybody but RMIT staff? Well, it largely uses very established methods and as such, I am both extremely relaxed (and positive) about its relationship to my job. That is to say, with no roots into actions, it is meant to float high above meaningful interference. I’m sure there were originally scope elements such as being able to more easily fire staff that sat outside University culture. But this BCF offers no such habour. So maybe it isn’t interesting.

Oh.

There is one thing.

One thing you may find interesting.

When you have a system like this, with generalities going up and down the list, the most fun is to look right across to the Executive column and look at what they are signing up to themselves. 

Under the Open Thinking element, a member of the Executive must be someone who “champions and shapes a culture that values open, creative and liberal thinking.” and even “thinks ahead of the curve and  leads the way in progressive  thinking, engaging others in the process.”

Under the Resilience element, a member of the Executive must be someone who “models conviction, provides direction and serves as a source of advice and inspiration.” and then “leads and inspires others’ efforts to persist, facilitating a continued focus on what is important about their efforts and why.”

This really is a lot of pressure to put on the Executive; and bestows upon people of that level a tremendous responsibility for institutional change. I am actually not prima-facie hostile to the BCF (those of you looking for such are disappointed, I know) or even to the idea of having some enforced positivity. With any set of ambiguous statements, there’s not a person anywhere in the system that can’t be said to be meeting their guidelines. The point isn’t to enforce, of course, but to self-enforce. One wonders, though, how the Executive will be able to self-enforce since their requirements are more specific than the other levels. I will certainly be more free to use creative and liberal thinking. I will be free to do so because my Executive must be championing it very soon.

RMIT is actually a very positive place to work - I’ve seen many University cultures close up and the culture of complaint is basically absent from the meetings and discussion I see. Where people are extra .. how do I put this … resilient? .. their complaints are real, and the things they do to fix the complaints are concrete. More to the point, the staff hired in the last couple of years are usually coming from Universities that are far far worse off in terms of staff culture. There is a sense among the new staff that RMIT’s reputation for being a total basketcase is a reflection of a distant past. 

So measures like this come as a surprise, but not a deep one. From a quick look at the guidelines you can imagine that this document is a distillation of some ongoing worry about staff morale. Consultants tell Universities morale is a huge cost, and this is very true. With the production of value by academics being so unreliable (research, grants and teaching scores), it pays to put down structures which - brutally - get the strong to help the weak.

Many often say in response to things like this that the Universities should hire more staff, increase pay, loosen requirements etc. The culture of capitalist realism (not sure about the politics but love the term) is still too fully ingrained for such measures to be considered part of a full-scale growth strategy. But perhaps if we innovate enough, think past our apparent boundaries and become enthusiastic catalysts for change, we can get there. Ahem.

In fact, I think it will probably be the same capitalist realism that will soon take a knife to managerial language systems and do to the top what’s been done to the bottom of the University management system. What was efficient in the 1990s is very different to what’s efficient now. In the much-loved-but-invisible ‘real world’, people are figuring out that the distaste for ambiguous language and the growth of critical analysis are now bred into people via networked and social media.

With that last sentence, a thousand humanities academics are ready to innovate my guts out, so I’ll leave it there. 

A brief excerpt from an upcoming book chapter, book not yet announced, details soon.

“During this period, there were so many advances in arcade game technology that games existed merely to exploit a new component or process. The fully animated Dragon’s Lair (1983) by Cinematronics and the voice-synthesised Star Wars (1983) were huge additions to arcades, opening the doors to those who had found earlier games unappealing. Increasingly elaborate cabinets and machines grew in profile and popularity, such as racing games with built-in seats and steering wheels, a trend that would perhaps culminate in Sega’s immensely popular After Burner (1987). The full deluxe cabinet for that game was designed by Yu Suzuki, designer and producer for Sega, and allowed players to experience a fully rotating cabinet as they played a jet pilot flying through enemy ranks.

The mass market for arcades was in full swing until 1987, even as the industry’s need for new titles presaged an inevitable decline. In fact, it was designers such as Yu Suzuki who were able to negotiate both the explosive growth of home consoles and the changing arcade environment by changing gears and eschewing simple gimmickry to focus on a company-wide style. Many of Suzuki’s games involve fast and fluid movement under blue skies, a trademark that impacted other Sega properties such as the technology of their home consoles and, later, Sonic the Hedgehog (1991).

Yu Suzuki worked with Sega’s best engineers to make games that expressed new technologies while keeping this distinctive house style. Arcades the world over began to change during the mid- to late 1980s, and while costs were skyrocketing due to the technological one-upmanship over graphics and sound, the console business seemed like a safer bet for many companies. It was during this period that some of the most interesting arcade games emerged, as different gameplay types and incentives were experimented with. Long after some companies had abandoned the arcade space, Yu Suzuki arcade games re-emerged in the form of Virtua Racing and Virtua Fighter (both 1992), in the wake of the massive impact of Capcom’s Street Fighter II (1991). This wave of rich new games halted the decline of the arcades briefly and brought back teenagers, now a few years older, looking for new thrills.”

A brief excerpt from my article in the November 2011 issue of Convergence.

“In discussing the social and technical convergences surrounding Japanese mobile gaming, Dean Chan noted that ‘there can be a considerable technosocial gap between planned and actual usage’ and that ‘vernacular patterns of actual use underpin the importance of negotiating everyday play practices in context’ (Chan 2008, p23). These realizations come about because in surveying earlier critical and sociological work in the area, Chan also noted that there is an increasing realization that the primary characteristic site of mobile/portable gameplay is actually the home itself. 

Larissa Hjorth’s work addresses the cultural changes involved in the growth of mobile media in Asia, in which a focus on the resilience of ‘place’ figures heavily, despite the market rhetorics of convergence, freedom, and dis-locality. Hjorth noted in 2007 that: 

As a domestic technology that has literally left the physical confines of the home, mobile media is still very much affected by the user’s notion of home and place. Far from eroding a sense of place, ethnographies into mobile practices … have demonstrated the significance of mobile technologies in re-enacting the importance of place and home as both a geo-imaginary and socio-cultural precept. (Hjorth 2007, p371)

The home is persistent across our examinations of mobile and portable devices because they engender an almost completely private zone of experience that can develop a sense of ownership of time and space – which is fragmenting and complexifying as different media attempt to re-write the concept of home (Hjorth 2007). As home consoles and PCs develop more presence across the media landscape – pay TV subscription services being embedded inside game consoles, for example – they commercialize the concept of the living room and shared familial space. One of the forces driving mobile and portable gameplay may be, paradoxically, escape from a mediatized home. 

But these escapes are distinct. The players of the Nintendo DS sitting on stairwells and hiding in rooms together to play Mario Kart or Pokémon are seeking a highly focused, and certainly longer period of play than the distracted engagement of the mobile game player, even if they often retreat to the same space to do – ostensibly – the same thing. While we have seen that the design of a device often radically diverges from its ‘vernacular patterns of actual use’ (Chan 2008, p23), it also creates deep affordances, literacies and loyalties in users that are bound up in the platform. Some are entirely suitable to capitalization – and others are more nuanced, vernacular and unregulated.”

A brief excerpt from my chapter in a new Routledge book on Amateur Media: 

“Amateur game production is often seen as a historical quirk; an acknowledgement that early game development culture was chaotic and diverse and has slowly been commercialised, alongside which a trace of the original amateur production ethos exists. However, many of the market structures that underpin this distinction are being radically inverted by recent changes to digital culture. Surprisingly, it is not merely the broad phenomena of Web 2.0 that is driving the changes. If games are not often part of the discussion of Web 2.0 phenomena, it is because the games industry and culture are undergoing vast shifts of their own which tempt us to make connections to the broader changes online and throughout technology culture. These changes are distinct and, importantly, at least partially antithetical to the common understanding of the social media paradigm. Games have an amateur dimension spanning the spectrum from player to developer; but this dimension has several and distinct intersections. 

First, the traditional games market is splintering underneath enormous pressures both internal and external. Spiraling development costs and poorly-managed speculative game publishing practices have built a boom-bust cycle that turns over companies, which in turn is constantly disrupting or ending the careers of developers. Parts of the game publishing business are dysfunctional by any measure; publishers fund expensive development in a hostile and volatile consumer landscape, reliant on hardware changes that need to be expertly managed on a global scale. In response, top-tier games are routinely released with post-release paid content in mind, known as DLC (Downloadable Content). Depending on the game, this can be episodic single-player segments, paid multiplayer systems, online passes meant to extract a little more from those who bought the game second hand, game variants such as options or items, or purely cosmetic changes such as character costumes.

Second, the Apple App Store for iPhone and iPad, while only lightly cannibalising previously measured consumer spending in games, figures heavily in the planning of contemporary game development. While Angry Birdsby Rovio sells for as much as a chocolate bar, much of the rest of the industry is entirely reliant on expensive packaged goods and marquee digital downloads. Mobile game development (or more accurately, App Store and Android game development) intersects with the epiphenomena of ‘social games’. This describes first and foremost a specific type of game played through or in concert with social networks. The most famous examples would be FarmVilleand CityVille by Zynga Games and The Sims Social by EA/Playfish. The most important attribute of these games is their utterly addictive and abusive payment systems, where game progress is continually impeded until further payment is made. Social games can also refer to a wide range of digital and non-digital games, but in practice, it is this abusive/addictive game design which is the foremost feature of social games.

If Web 2.0 has impacted games, it is along these pressure lines. However, it is crucial to understand that these changes are fragments of a vast and complexly changing picture that includes a precarious global industry and volatile commercial forces. For traditional game developers and players, Web 2.0 is most accurately described as an existential threat, not an emerging trend along which one is willingly swept. It represents, through games like CityVille, a virulently destructive force that diverts player time, money and corporate position from traditional games developers and creators.”