Papers by Benjamin Abraham
Organization., 2022
The games industry has seen a burst of new interest in the prospect of unionization. The efforts ... more The games industry has seen a burst of new interest in the prospect of unionization. The efforts of organizations like Game Workers Unite have attracted much favorable coverage in the enthusiast and trade industry press, increasing awareness amongst videogame audiences of the difficult working conditions facing professional game developers. However, often missing from these discussions is an articulation of what unionization would look like for the significant number of game developers working in precarious conditions in small, often informal teams. The fragmented nature of contemporary gamework presents challenges in aggregating worker power similar to those found in other fields of creative or precarious work and entrepreneurial careers, where contingent work is typically organised around piecemeal, project–based funding arrangements. In this paper we draw from empirical research with Australian game developers to identify a number of barriers to unionization posed by small-scale game production. We also identify how within these same circumstances, novel and alternative forms of solidarity and collective action are beginning to emerge. The article ultimately argues that any successful attempt to unionise videogame workers will need to both account for, and take advantage of, the complex situation of small-scale videogame production in local contexts.
TRACE Joural, 2018
This paper focuses on the genre of games known as "survivalcrafting." Games of this genre, popul... more This paper focuses on the genre of games known as "survivalcrafting." Games of this genre, popularized in the wake of Minecraft's success, often feature high degrees of environmental interactivity and simulation of plant and animal behaviours. They also include a heightened sense of dependence upon the natural environment for shelter, sustenance, entertainment and other necessities. Beginning with an examination of the ecological and environmental metaphors embedded within terms commonly used to describe features of the genre, I then focus on Minecraft's two nominal pillars: survival and crafting. Analysis of both these mechanics reveals their role in creating game dynamics that are less ecological and more economic in character. Many games lead players to prioritize resource acquisition and structure their play experience according to rates of resource accumulation that mirror capitalist economic activity. Often these processes resemble a simplified and stylized reenactment of industrialization. This paper concludes that a truly ecological game only becomes conceivable in a partial and fragmentary way through what Timothy Morton calls "the ecological thought"-by thinking across the connections and assemblages involved in digital gaming as an activity or experience.
The burgeoning genre of climate fiction, or "cli-fi," in literature and the arts has begun to att... more The burgeoning genre of climate fiction, or "cli-fi," in literature and the arts has begun to attract both scholarly and popular attention. It has been described as "potentially [having] crucial contributions to make toward full understanding of the multiple, accelerating environmental challenges facing the world today" (Buell). Implicitly, these works confront the current orthodoxy about where exactly the issue of climate change sits in domains of knowledge. As Jordan notes: "climate change as 'nature' not culture is still largely perceived as a problem for the sciences alongside planning, policy, and geography " (Jordan 8). In this paper we ask where is, or alternatively what could climate fiction look like within the field of digital games? Even a passing familiarity with the cultural output of the mainstream game industry reveals the startling omission of the issue – with very few games telling stories that engage with climate change and the unfolding ecological crisis (Abraham "Videogame Visions"). Finding a relative dearth of explicit engagement, this paper offers an alternative engagement with climate change in games by focussing on the underlying ideas, conceptions and narratives of human-environment relationships that have been a part of games since their earliest incarnations. We argue that it is possible to read games for particular conceptualisations of human relationships to nature, and offer a description of four highly prevalent "modes" of human-environment engagement. We describe and analyse these relationships for their participation in or challenge to the same issues and problems that undergird the current ecological crisis, such as enlightenment narratives of human mastery and dominion over the earth.
This article discusses ARMA 3 (2013), a military simulation game from Bohemia Interactive. Throug... more This article discusses ARMA 3 (2013), a military simulation game from Bohemia Interactive. Through the prominent placement of visual representations of renewable power generation the game offers a compelling vision of the future in which current resistance to low-carbon and renewable economies have been overcome. I argue that the potential of this vision to challenge cultural futures and imaginaries is dependent on its presentation aesthetically and not, as is often suggested, on game mechanics operating in a ‘‘persuasive’’ mode. Instead, I argue that ARMA 3’s aesthetic vision can skirt around the ideological resistances players may have against accepting more didactic modes of engagement with the highly charged and ideologically contested reality of anthropogenic climate change. In this way, I suggest ARMA 3 offers a compelling challenge to current theories about games ability to persuade or influence players
This article makes a case study of ‘flarfing’ (a creative Facebook user practice with roots in fo... more This article makes a case study of ‘flarfing’ (a creative Facebook user practice with roots in found-text poetry) in order to contribute to an understanding of the potentials and limitations facing users of online social networking sites who wish to address the issue of online hate speech. The practice of ‘flarfing’ involves users posting ‘blue text’ hyperlinked Facebook page names into status updates and comment threads. Facebook flarf sends a visible, though often non-literal, message to offenders and onlookers about what kinds of speech the responding activist(s) find (un)acceptable in online discussion, belonging to a category of agonistic online activism that repurposes the tools of internet trolling for activist ends. I argue this practice represents users attempting to ‘take responsibility’ for the culture of online spaces they inhabit, promoting intolerance to hate speech online. Careful consideration of the limits of flarf’s efficacy within Facebook’s specific regulatory environment shows the extent to which this practice and similar responses to online hate speech are constrained by the platforms on which they exist.
Digital Culture and Education, Nov 15, 2013
This article examines the Tumblr site Fedoras of OK Cupid which emerged in 2012 amidst a growing ... more This article examines the Tumblr site Fedoras of OK Cupid which emerged in 2012 amidst a growing trend in feminists and other activists online that used shaming as an activist strategy. Fedoras of OK Cupid displays images and excerpts from men who wear fedora hats in their OK Cupid dating profile pictures, often highlighting worrying or even downright dangerous attitudes towards women revealed by their profiles. To understand this practice this articles draws on work identifying feminist discursive activism in online communities, to examine the Tumblr site in the context of reintegrative shaming in order to evaluate the practice of deploying shame for activist ends. While shame is often seen as having stigmatising effects, the author of the Fedoras of OK Cupid Tumblr illustrates how the process of reintegrative shaming may work in the context of online activism by offering earnest commentary on negative attitudes while also offering the possibility of social reintegration.
Exploring Videogames: Culture, Design and Identity, 2013
In the following chapter I look at the section of the online community of videogame bloggers I ha... more In the following chapter I look at the section of the online community of videogame bloggers I have been involved with since 2007. I begin with an outline of some of the steps that allowed them to arrive at the status of ‘experts’ in the field of game criticism. Along the way I will examine the nature of community in online situations, and apply Benedict Anderson’s insights about the nature of community to examine how this particular community imagines itself. I will look at what it says it does and how it frames its purpose, but considering this alone is not quite enough, as the community is as much a product of technical forces as human or social ones. I will avoid the presumption that community is some kind of ‘stuff’ like a social fabric, and thus resist putting all my explanatory eggs in the basket of ‘social forces.’ Instead I will adopt the agnostic approach of Bruno Latour, who examines associations between all things, emerging with a conception of the community as a network of actors, presenting a safe path through the twin minefields of technodeterminism and social constructivism. I will then take a slight detour to recent discussions on the nature of cognition and the mind, and find parallels with the network community that enable me to suggest the epistemic conditions are emerging for a successful challenge to the long-dominant conception of the humanist subject. It is my contention that a new episteme is fast approaching, and that an alternative ‘subject of knowledge’ is perhaps visible at work in the internet community I call ‘the critical videogame blogosphere.’
Halo and Philosophy, Jul 28, 2011
Unlike traditional artistic endeavours such as literature, painting or sculpture, videogames and ... more Unlike traditional artistic endeavours such as literature, painting or sculpture, videogames and their creation, according to Janet Murray, are still in an incunabular period. Various efforts have been made to view videogames in light of other media such as film and narrative while few have yet to address, specifically, ways in which videogames present unique opportunities for expression. This thesis draws upon a number of authors to identify areas unique to videogames, and examines the implications for the employment of music within them. After examining the case for videogame uniqueness, the thesis looks to the current musical paradigm within videogames and, finding it somewhat lacking, offers a critique of the paradigm. A number of games that do, however, break from tradition and utilise music in exceptional ways are then discussed and their potential for adoption in future games is assessed. The final component of the thesis is an investigation into the use of music within the Xbox videogame Halo 2 (2004) through discussion with the composer, Martin O’Donnell, and an analysis of the music and sound of the game. In the process I discover that the game uses music in a way similar to the dominant paradigm, while also exhibiting a musicality within the in-game sound effects and level ambience. The result is a ‘soundscape’ style approach well suited to attaining both the emotive power of linear compositions as well as a closer relationship between music and visuals, seemingly a ‘best of both worlds’ videogame musical approach.
Conference Presentations by Benjamin Abraham
Digital Games Research Association annual conference 2017 Melbourne, Australia, 2017
Digital games have yet to grapple with the fact that they are fundamentally dependent on the chea... more Digital games have yet to grapple with the fact that they are fundamentally dependent on the cheap and reliable generation of electricity, as well as being imbricated in a host of other carbon intensive processes necessary for the industry to function in its current form. As a result, games stand largely unprepared at the edge of a number of compelling challenges. In this paper I propose to spell out the nature of just one of these challenges that the games industry may need to respond to – and the potential rewards for those who are able to anticipate it – taking the form of carbon regulation and its likely effects on energy generation and end-consumer pressures on electricity usage. The World Energy Council’s most optimistic of its recent forecasts for the future pace of decarbonisation of the world’s energy supply only permits intermittent renewables (wind, solar, etc.) to “reach 39% of electricity generation by 2060.” (World Energy Council, 2016) Electricity generation and use, in this context, is then a prime target for strong emissions regulations, with dramatic consequences for an industry dependent upon consumers’ access to cheap electricity for the consoles and devices necessary to play games. Clearly this will have significant consequences for the games industry depending on the shape and form that this regulation comes in.
Nobel laureate in chemistry Paul Crutzen, who received the award for his work on CFC’s and the hole in the ozone layer, went on to work on climate change, warning of a possible scenario in which the situation becomes so dire that a “carbon dictatorship” emerges to ensure the earth remains habitable. (Flannery, 2005: 290) Similarly, the consensus in the scientific community has been for some time now that “the level of global emissions of greenhouse gases needs to lead to atmospheric concentrations somewhere between 450 and 500 ppm to avoid serious, if not catastrophic, effects on life and property.” (Patrinos & Bradley, 2009: 949) Having already passed 400 ppm, and with global emissions not yet declining, time appears to be running out to avoid some version of Crutzens’s scenario. Furthermore, avoiding this scenario it is safe to say will require draconian carbon regulations with more economic impact than those implemented currently. This paper will explore the consequences of this for the games industry.
Following in the footsteps of a number of scholars of the environmental consequences of digital media and high-tech industries (See: Taffel, 2012; Cubitt, 2017; Maxwell & Miller, 2012) this paper applies a narrower, more focused lens by considering digital games at the intersection of carbon emissions regulation specifically in the context of consumer electricity use. As with all work about the future, it involves a significant degree of informed speculation, and maintains resonances with the tradition of ‘scenario planning’, developed (somewhat ironically) by energy companies like Shell in the 1970s in response to the first oil crisis, to assist in long term strategic planning to anticipate structural shifts affecting entire business sectors. (Cornelius, et al., 2005) The paper first outlines the main dynamics and drivers behind a carbon emissions reduction scheme on a global scale, a scheme which the games industry will be required to contend with. It details the forms that this scheme is most likely to take, contingent on either a soft transition (extending existing market driven regulations) or a hard transition of social upheaval (following Crutzen’s “carbon dictatorship”), drawing on the work of Wainwright and Mann’s (2012) scholarship that presents a kind of ‘possibility space’ for future global responses to climate change in a geopolitical context.
A principle feature of the argument in this paper is that the specific form that regulation comes in will not change the overall prognosis for the industry. Whether it is a liberal market-style regulation or to a populist Trump-style “carbon dictator” all possible scenarios leave the games industry exposed to decarbonisation pressures. While the latter scenario presents the greater challenge for the industry, even the former stands to make a significant impact on digital games and the way they are played, at the very least by changing market incentives and price signal for energy efficiency and consumption.
The paper examines how the games industry could respond to the challenges of these possible impositions and limitations, and suggests that a positive interpretation of these developments is possible. A radically different games industry could be ushered in, with a greater emphasis on energy efficient devices and significant implications for the kinds of games that can be developed. Parallels and prototypes for the types of proactive responses needed already exist today, with a number of traditions both within and outside the commercial games industry that take quite a different approach to the mainstream. Examples from the ‘demoscene’, with its ethos of “doing more with less” offers one potential avenue for the industry’s response to increased regulatory and/or consumer demands for increased, even draconian energy efficiency under a carbon dictatorship scenario. Likewise, an industry-wide turn away from photorealism and the ever increasing demands of graphical processing power would be prudent in such a scenario. One can think of Nintendo’s current position in the marketplace, as well as the rise of mobile gaming, both occurring through and making great success of the proliferation of less than maximally powerful devices. The case of Nintendo is a particularly illuminating example for its (in general) emphasis on stylistic approaches to visual design over hardware-taxing (and thus, energy intensive) photorealism, providing a possible sign of things to come, and a template for adapting to changing consumer or regulatory demands.
An avowedly speculative paper, this work presents a series of educated guesses to help flesh out one part of the real world ‘possibility space’ (Bogost, 2008) that the commercial games industry as a whole may face in the near future in order to better prepare it for the challenges it may face and the transformations it may require.
NB: as always, presentation ended up rather less ambitious than abstract suggests.
The past seve... more NB: as always, presentation ended up rather less ambitious than abstract suggests.
The past several years have witnessed the emergence of a new genre of videogame with implicit, and sometimes explicit, ecological themes. Labelled variously as the 'survival/crafting' genre and taking its cues from the landmark title Minecraft, games of this kind are often preoccupied with altering the landscape itself and with the ability of players to mine and collecting resources to both sustain themselves and further advance their material position and access to technology. As I have argued elsewhere (Abraham, forthcoming) despite the seemingly embedded 'ecological' themes of these games which often feature a greater than normal emphasis on terrain interactions, food and shelter, their mechanics more often feature simplified ladders of technological progress and fail to generate a sense of what Timothy Morton (2010) calls 'ecology without nature'. In this paper I propose to examine in more detail the emergence of the videogame terraforming imaginary, and offer an account of the origins of the impulse to terraform in the modern videogame as an extension of long standing fantasies of dominance and power within the larger gaming imaginary. I draw on the work of Val Plumwood (2003) to describe narratives of mastery over nature and find the same embedded attitudes in the terraforming imaginary. With a brief survey of modern examples and historical precedents, the impulse to 'terraform' in games will be located and revealed as not especially ecological, and a brief counter-factual history of ecological gaming will be considered.
A short talk presented at the Digital Games Research Association Australia (DiGRAA) conference 20... more A short talk presented at the Digital Games Research Association Australia (DiGRAA) conference 2016. The talk lays out the proposition that climate change is of such supreme importance that everything and anything possible to arrest its advancement must be attempted. The paper laid out the major themes that I believe this proposition suggests for the field of game studies, which the abstract here describes.
In this paper we propose to offer a provisional typology of the primary categories of environment... more In this paper we propose to offer a provisional typology of the primary categories of environmental or ecological relationships depicted, represented or simulated in games. We explore four main approaches to environments in games: environment as backdrop, as resource, as antagonist, or as text. These four provisional types are not clearly delineated, or equally common amongst all games and game genres. We argue that consideration of ecological notions in gaming reveals their frequent subordination to higher level game design decisions, and that analysis through this typology can reveal the shifting relationships between technologies of simulation and videogame strategies of representation.
In this paper I describe my current research into videogame depictions of the future, and those t... more In this paper I describe my current research into videogame depictions of the future, and those that engage substantially with anthropogenic climate change, building upon an understanding of the role played by visions of the apocalypse as an outlet for expressions of popular fears and anxieties. The paper looks at games that have been released in the recent period, which has seen a rise in corporately funded campaigns undermining popular and scientific consensus on climate change, discussing three games in detail and the climate future they present; Anno 2070 (2011) which depicts a flooded earth; Fate of the World (2011) which presents a player with the supreme difficulty of balancing development goals with a finite carbon budget; and ARMA 3 (2013), which deploys visual depictions of renewable energy power generation (windmills, tidal power, solar arrays) to evoke a sense of futurity and in the process projects an unexpectedly optimistic vision of our climate future.
"In 2009 I completed a single life playthrough of the first person shooter Far Cry 2 (2008), chro... more "In 2009 I completed a single life playthrough of the first person shooter Far Cry 2 (2008), chronicling my progress in a series of blog posts compiled into a 300 page, 16,000 word PDF that has since been downloaded over 10,000 times. The exercise began as an intervention into an ongoing discussion between Clint Hocking (Ubisoft) and Manveer Heir (Raven Software) of the impermanence of player decisions in the face of prevalent saving and reloading. I vowed to stop playing wherever and whenever in the game I died, for the purpose of seeing what new possibilities and experiences would eventuate. My assumption was that this self-imposed ‘permadeath’ would also retrieve from my gameplay experience a single, unbroken narrative that might show new facets of the game. My blogging of the exercise connects with a long and storied history of artefactual production documenting gameplay, from ‘After-Action Reports’ to videogame travelogues to their distant cousin, the infamous ‘New Games Journalism’ popularised by Kieron Gillen and others.
Engaging with Felan Parker’s concept of “expansive gameplay” as a term for the expanded set of possibilities afforded by the addition of self-imposed rules, in this presentation I discuss some of the more salient effects of self-imposed permadeath in Far Cry 2. The expansive gameplay that results from self-imposed permadeath also stands to alter what Helen Kennedy describes as the limits of textual analysis, broadening the number and type of possible readings of games, the permadeath experience serving to both heighten certain features and mechanics as well as guide the player down novel narrative and gameplay paths.
Imposing the permadeath rule resulted in expansive gameplay with a novel emotional tenor, with Far Cry 2’s oft-praised dynamic combat systems tending toward chaos and unpredictability felt even more keenly when playing in permadeath. With fires and explosions rapidly changing the terrain of battle, playing with this self-imposed rule encourages the minimization of exposure to risk, leading to particular playstyle choices (eschewing explosives just as likely to kill the player as enemies) as well as exacerbating the problems that Hocking et al. experienced when tuning close-combat weaponry (such as shotguns) for the extreme distances of the open African savanna. Permadeath also heightened the importance the ‘buddy mechanic’ which provides a second chance at life in the event of death with a buddy ‘rescue ready’. This novel design feature for a first-person shooter game works to mitigate the sense of “unfairness” that would otherwise arise from inevitable mistakes, accidents and chaos without reducing tension. The buddy rescue feature seems almost uniquely suited to enabling permadeath gameplay, suggesting both that expansive gameplay possibilities can be designed for, and that the historical dearth of permadeath mechanics from FPS games need not be the rule. Permadeath does however seems uniquely suited to Far Cry 2, enhancing its themes of chaos, entropy, death and nihilism – and other gamers have taken on permadeath challenges in other FPS games with similar themes, most notably STALKER."
"In the following presentation I will attempt to build an argument for the importance of communis... more "In the following presentation I will attempt to build an argument for the importance of communism, or more generally collectivist type thinking (for which I draw upon object-oriented ontology and actor-network theory), for our understanding of any evaluation of the kinds of situations involving humans and nonhumans. The context for this is the situation that Hannah Arendt describes in both her essays in Responsibility and Judgement, as well as in Eichmann in Jerusalem: when all are responsible, no one is responsible. A key component of all these types of ‘distributed’ or actor-network type situations is the role of nonhumans and often the delegation of responsibility to nonhumans – which presents a clear problem.
I will build upon the work of Bruno Latour’s rather undervalued article ‘Mixing Humans and Nonhumans Together: The Sociology of a Door-Closer’ which outlines his remarkable overlooked approach to delegation to nonhumans. I will attempt to demonstrate the fruitfulness of being attentive to delegated responsibility (and particularly moral responsibility) in the case of technology, and the way that (as Jacques Ellul has argued) high levels of labour specialisation has resulted in a modern ‘technological society’ in which it is often impossible for any one person to be responsible. To circle around to where I began, this is where (and why) thinking collectives, and the kind of nonhumans that are formed by collectives is so crucial, and the current paucity of imagination around thinking collectivity becomes a major failure. If we cannot even think the collectives that are propagating the present environmental, economic and other catastrophes around the global, the disavowal of the idea of communism and the ability to imagine collectives that it strikes out is clearly a critical issue.
References:
Arendt, Hannah, and Jerome Kohn. Responsibility and judgment. New York: Schocken Books, 2003.
Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem : a report on the banality of evil. New York, N.Y: Penguin Books, 2006.
Dean, Jodi. The communist horizon. London New York: Verso, 2012.
Ellul, Jacques. “The Betrayal of Technology”. Rerun Productions. Available online: http://vimeo.com/14490665
Latour, Bruno (as Jim Johnson) in Social Problems, Vol. 35, No. 3, Special Issue: The Sociology of Science and Technology. (Jun., 1988), pp. 298-310."
"Flarf poetry, an avant garde practise that emerged alongside the internet and involving mining s... more "Flarf poetry, an avant garde practise that emerged alongside the internet and involving mining search engines for ‘found text’, has been recently taken up by a community of ‘Alt Lit’ poets and transplanted into the context of Facebook. The community surrounding the ‘Alt Lit’ poet Steve Roggenbuck has recently discovered that Facebook’s own ‘tagging’ algorithm provides a serendipitous access to found texts, in the form of groups, ‘like’ pages, apps and check-ins, which can all be ‘tagged’ as hyperlinks in Facebook comment threads and other posts. These are then strung together to form a strange new kind of poetry, with a distinctly ‘Facebook’ flavour.
The practise is interesting for its playful and expressive engagement with code, in the form of Facebook’s impenetrable tagging algorithm, which forms the opaque basis of the practise. At the same time, some commentators have described the practise as a “raging against the machine” of Facebook’s commercialisation of personal information, a kind of fight from within (or usurpation of) the machinery itself. In this paper I will discuss the logic behind the Facebook-tag flarf poem, discuss some implications of writing poems using these found phrases and structures and doing so as part of a community. I will argue that the repurposing of Facebook’s tagging algorithm as an expressive medium is itself a found practise, transmitting from person to person much like an Internet meme - viewable as a kind of virus running like code inside the human brain. Facebook-tag-flarf poetry will be contextualised within a larger movement of playfully or expressively repurposed technology, such as twitter bots and the ‘@_ebooks’ phenomenon."
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Papers by Benjamin Abraham
Conference Presentations by Benjamin Abraham
Nobel laureate in chemistry Paul Crutzen, who received the award for his work on CFC’s and the hole in the ozone layer, went on to work on climate change, warning of a possible scenario in which the situation becomes so dire that a “carbon dictatorship” emerges to ensure the earth remains habitable. (Flannery, 2005: 290) Similarly, the consensus in the scientific community has been for some time now that “the level of global emissions of greenhouse gases needs to lead to atmospheric concentrations somewhere between 450 and 500 ppm to avoid serious, if not catastrophic, effects on life and property.” (Patrinos & Bradley, 2009: 949) Having already passed 400 ppm, and with global emissions not yet declining, time appears to be running out to avoid some version of Crutzens’s scenario. Furthermore, avoiding this scenario it is safe to say will require draconian carbon regulations with more economic impact than those implemented currently. This paper will explore the consequences of this for the games industry.
Following in the footsteps of a number of scholars of the environmental consequences of digital media and high-tech industries (See: Taffel, 2012; Cubitt, 2017; Maxwell & Miller, 2012) this paper applies a narrower, more focused lens by considering digital games at the intersection of carbon emissions regulation specifically in the context of consumer electricity use. As with all work about the future, it involves a significant degree of informed speculation, and maintains resonances with the tradition of ‘scenario planning’, developed (somewhat ironically) by energy companies like Shell in the 1970s in response to the first oil crisis, to assist in long term strategic planning to anticipate structural shifts affecting entire business sectors. (Cornelius, et al., 2005) The paper first outlines the main dynamics and drivers behind a carbon emissions reduction scheme on a global scale, a scheme which the games industry will be required to contend with. It details the forms that this scheme is most likely to take, contingent on either a soft transition (extending existing market driven regulations) or a hard transition of social upheaval (following Crutzen’s “carbon dictatorship”), drawing on the work of Wainwright and Mann’s (2012) scholarship that presents a kind of ‘possibility space’ for future global responses to climate change in a geopolitical context.
A principle feature of the argument in this paper is that the specific form that regulation comes in will not change the overall prognosis for the industry. Whether it is a liberal market-style regulation or to a populist Trump-style “carbon dictator” all possible scenarios leave the games industry exposed to decarbonisation pressures. While the latter scenario presents the greater challenge for the industry, even the former stands to make a significant impact on digital games and the way they are played, at the very least by changing market incentives and price signal for energy efficiency and consumption.
The paper examines how the games industry could respond to the challenges of these possible impositions and limitations, and suggests that a positive interpretation of these developments is possible. A radically different games industry could be ushered in, with a greater emphasis on energy efficient devices and significant implications for the kinds of games that can be developed. Parallels and prototypes for the types of proactive responses needed already exist today, with a number of traditions both within and outside the commercial games industry that take quite a different approach to the mainstream. Examples from the ‘demoscene’, with its ethos of “doing more with less” offers one potential avenue for the industry’s response to increased regulatory and/or consumer demands for increased, even draconian energy efficiency under a carbon dictatorship scenario. Likewise, an industry-wide turn away from photorealism and the ever increasing demands of graphical processing power would be prudent in such a scenario. One can think of Nintendo’s current position in the marketplace, as well as the rise of mobile gaming, both occurring through and making great success of the proliferation of less than maximally powerful devices. The case of Nintendo is a particularly illuminating example for its (in general) emphasis on stylistic approaches to visual design over hardware-taxing (and thus, energy intensive) photorealism, providing a possible sign of things to come, and a template for adapting to changing consumer or regulatory demands.
An avowedly speculative paper, this work presents a series of educated guesses to help flesh out one part of the real world ‘possibility space’ (Bogost, 2008) that the commercial games industry as a whole may face in the near future in order to better prepare it for the challenges it may face and the transformations it may require.
The past several years have witnessed the emergence of a new genre of videogame with implicit, and sometimes explicit, ecological themes. Labelled variously as the 'survival/crafting' genre and taking its cues from the landmark title Minecraft, games of this kind are often preoccupied with altering the landscape itself and with the ability of players to mine and collecting resources to both sustain themselves and further advance their material position and access to technology. As I have argued elsewhere (Abraham, forthcoming) despite the seemingly embedded 'ecological' themes of these games which often feature a greater than normal emphasis on terrain interactions, food and shelter, their mechanics more often feature simplified ladders of technological progress and fail to generate a sense of what Timothy Morton (2010) calls 'ecology without nature'. In this paper I propose to examine in more detail the emergence of the videogame terraforming imaginary, and offer an account of the origins of the impulse to terraform in the modern videogame as an extension of long standing fantasies of dominance and power within the larger gaming imaginary. I draw on the work of Val Plumwood (2003) to describe narratives of mastery over nature and find the same embedded attitudes in the terraforming imaginary. With a brief survey of modern examples and historical precedents, the impulse to 'terraform' in games will be located and revealed as not especially ecological, and a brief counter-factual history of ecological gaming will be considered.
Engaging with Felan Parker’s concept of “expansive gameplay” as a term for the expanded set of possibilities afforded by the addition of self-imposed rules, in this presentation I discuss some of the more salient effects of self-imposed permadeath in Far Cry 2. The expansive gameplay that results from self-imposed permadeath also stands to alter what Helen Kennedy describes as the limits of textual analysis, broadening the number and type of possible readings of games, the permadeath experience serving to both heighten certain features and mechanics as well as guide the player down novel narrative and gameplay paths.
Imposing the permadeath rule resulted in expansive gameplay with a novel emotional tenor, with Far Cry 2’s oft-praised dynamic combat systems tending toward chaos and unpredictability felt even more keenly when playing in permadeath. With fires and explosions rapidly changing the terrain of battle, playing with this self-imposed rule encourages the minimization of exposure to risk, leading to particular playstyle choices (eschewing explosives just as likely to kill the player as enemies) as well as exacerbating the problems that Hocking et al. experienced when tuning close-combat weaponry (such as shotguns) for the extreme distances of the open African savanna. Permadeath also heightened the importance the ‘buddy mechanic’ which provides a second chance at life in the event of death with a buddy ‘rescue ready’. This novel design feature for a first-person shooter game works to mitigate the sense of “unfairness” that would otherwise arise from inevitable mistakes, accidents and chaos without reducing tension. The buddy rescue feature seems almost uniquely suited to enabling permadeath gameplay, suggesting both that expansive gameplay possibilities can be designed for, and that the historical dearth of permadeath mechanics from FPS games need not be the rule. Permadeath does however seems uniquely suited to Far Cry 2, enhancing its themes of chaos, entropy, death and nihilism – and other gamers have taken on permadeath challenges in other FPS games with similar themes, most notably STALKER."
I will build upon the work of Bruno Latour’s rather undervalued article ‘Mixing Humans and Nonhumans Together: The Sociology of a Door-Closer’ which outlines his remarkable overlooked approach to delegation to nonhumans. I will attempt to demonstrate the fruitfulness of being attentive to delegated responsibility (and particularly moral responsibility) in the case of technology, and the way that (as Jacques Ellul has argued) high levels of labour specialisation has resulted in a modern ‘technological society’ in which it is often impossible for any one person to be responsible. To circle around to where I began, this is where (and why) thinking collectives, and the kind of nonhumans that are formed by collectives is so crucial, and the current paucity of imagination around thinking collectivity becomes a major failure. If we cannot even think the collectives that are propagating the present environmental, economic and other catastrophes around the global, the disavowal of the idea of communism and the ability to imagine collectives that it strikes out is clearly a critical issue.
References:
Arendt, Hannah, and Jerome Kohn. Responsibility and judgment. New York: Schocken Books, 2003.
Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem : a report on the banality of evil. New York, N.Y: Penguin Books, 2006.
Dean, Jodi. The communist horizon. London New York: Verso, 2012.
Ellul, Jacques. “The Betrayal of Technology”. Rerun Productions. Available online: http://vimeo.com/14490665
Latour, Bruno (as Jim Johnson) in Social Problems, Vol. 35, No. 3, Special Issue: The Sociology of Science and Technology. (Jun., 1988), pp. 298-310."
The practise is interesting for its playful and expressive engagement with code, in the form of Facebook’s impenetrable tagging algorithm, which forms the opaque basis of the practise. At the same time, some commentators have described the practise as a “raging against the machine” of Facebook’s commercialisation of personal information, a kind of fight from within (or usurpation of) the machinery itself. In this paper I will discuss the logic behind the Facebook-tag flarf poem, discuss some implications of writing poems using these found phrases and structures and doing so as part of a community. I will argue that the repurposing of Facebook’s tagging algorithm as an expressive medium is itself a found practise, transmitting from person to person much like an Internet meme - viewable as a kind of virus running like code inside the human brain. Facebook-tag-flarf poetry will be contextualised within a larger movement of playfully or expressively repurposed technology, such as twitter bots and the ‘@_ebooks’ phenomenon."
Nobel laureate in chemistry Paul Crutzen, who received the award for his work on CFC’s and the hole in the ozone layer, went on to work on climate change, warning of a possible scenario in which the situation becomes so dire that a “carbon dictatorship” emerges to ensure the earth remains habitable. (Flannery, 2005: 290) Similarly, the consensus in the scientific community has been for some time now that “the level of global emissions of greenhouse gases needs to lead to atmospheric concentrations somewhere between 450 and 500 ppm to avoid serious, if not catastrophic, effects on life and property.” (Patrinos & Bradley, 2009: 949) Having already passed 400 ppm, and with global emissions not yet declining, time appears to be running out to avoid some version of Crutzens’s scenario. Furthermore, avoiding this scenario it is safe to say will require draconian carbon regulations with more economic impact than those implemented currently. This paper will explore the consequences of this for the games industry.
Following in the footsteps of a number of scholars of the environmental consequences of digital media and high-tech industries (See: Taffel, 2012; Cubitt, 2017; Maxwell & Miller, 2012) this paper applies a narrower, more focused lens by considering digital games at the intersection of carbon emissions regulation specifically in the context of consumer electricity use. As with all work about the future, it involves a significant degree of informed speculation, and maintains resonances with the tradition of ‘scenario planning’, developed (somewhat ironically) by energy companies like Shell in the 1970s in response to the first oil crisis, to assist in long term strategic planning to anticipate structural shifts affecting entire business sectors. (Cornelius, et al., 2005) The paper first outlines the main dynamics and drivers behind a carbon emissions reduction scheme on a global scale, a scheme which the games industry will be required to contend with. It details the forms that this scheme is most likely to take, contingent on either a soft transition (extending existing market driven regulations) or a hard transition of social upheaval (following Crutzen’s “carbon dictatorship”), drawing on the work of Wainwright and Mann’s (2012) scholarship that presents a kind of ‘possibility space’ for future global responses to climate change in a geopolitical context.
A principle feature of the argument in this paper is that the specific form that regulation comes in will not change the overall prognosis for the industry. Whether it is a liberal market-style regulation or to a populist Trump-style “carbon dictator” all possible scenarios leave the games industry exposed to decarbonisation pressures. While the latter scenario presents the greater challenge for the industry, even the former stands to make a significant impact on digital games and the way they are played, at the very least by changing market incentives and price signal for energy efficiency and consumption.
The paper examines how the games industry could respond to the challenges of these possible impositions and limitations, and suggests that a positive interpretation of these developments is possible. A radically different games industry could be ushered in, with a greater emphasis on energy efficient devices and significant implications for the kinds of games that can be developed. Parallels and prototypes for the types of proactive responses needed already exist today, with a number of traditions both within and outside the commercial games industry that take quite a different approach to the mainstream. Examples from the ‘demoscene’, with its ethos of “doing more with less” offers one potential avenue for the industry’s response to increased regulatory and/or consumer demands for increased, even draconian energy efficiency under a carbon dictatorship scenario. Likewise, an industry-wide turn away from photorealism and the ever increasing demands of graphical processing power would be prudent in such a scenario. One can think of Nintendo’s current position in the marketplace, as well as the rise of mobile gaming, both occurring through and making great success of the proliferation of less than maximally powerful devices. The case of Nintendo is a particularly illuminating example for its (in general) emphasis on stylistic approaches to visual design over hardware-taxing (and thus, energy intensive) photorealism, providing a possible sign of things to come, and a template for adapting to changing consumer or regulatory demands.
An avowedly speculative paper, this work presents a series of educated guesses to help flesh out one part of the real world ‘possibility space’ (Bogost, 2008) that the commercial games industry as a whole may face in the near future in order to better prepare it for the challenges it may face and the transformations it may require.
The past several years have witnessed the emergence of a new genre of videogame with implicit, and sometimes explicit, ecological themes. Labelled variously as the 'survival/crafting' genre and taking its cues from the landmark title Minecraft, games of this kind are often preoccupied with altering the landscape itself and with the ability of players to mine and collecting resources to both sustain themselves and further advance their material position and access to technology. As I have argued elsewhere (Abraham, forthcoming) despite the seemingly embedded 'ecological' themes of these games which often feature a greater than normal emphasis on terrain interactions, food and shelter, their mechanics more often feature simplified ladders of technological progress and fail to generate a sense of what Timothy Morton (2010) calls 'ecology without nature'. In this paper I propose to examine in more detail the emergence of the videogame terraforming imaginary, and offer an account of the origins of the impulse to terraform in the modern videogame as an extension of long standing fantasies of dominance and power within the larger gaming imaginary. I draw on the work of Val Plumwood (2003) to describe narratives of mastery over nature and find the same embedded attitudes in the terraforming imaginary. With a brief survey of modern examples and historical precedents, the impulse to 'terraform' in games will be located and revealed as not especially ecological, and a brief counter-factual history of ecological gaming will be considered.
Engaging with Felan Parker’s concept of “expansive gameplay” as a term for the expanded set of possibilities afforded by the addition of self-imposed rules, in this presentation I discuss some of the more salient effects of self-imposed permadeath in Far Cry 2. The expansive gameplay that results from self-imposed permadeath also stands to alter what Helen Kennedy describes as the limits of textual analysis, broadening the number and type of possible readings of games, the permadeath experience serving to both heighten certain features and mechanics as well as guide the player down novel narrative and gameplay paths.
Imposing the permadeath rule resulted in expansive gameplay with a novel emotional tenor, with Far Cry 2’s oft-praised dynamic combat systems tending toward chaos and unpredictability felt even more keenly when playing in permadeath. With fires and explosions rapidly changing the terrain of battle, playing with this self-imposed rule encourages the minimization of exposure to risk, leading to particular playstyle choices (eschewing explosives just as likely to kill the player as enemies) as well as exacerbating the problems that Hocking et al. experienced when tuning close-combat weaponry (such as shotguns) for the extreme distances of the open African savanna. Permadeath also heightened the importance the ‘buddy mechanic’ which provides a second chance at life in the event of death with a buddy ‘rescue ready’. This novel design feature for a first-person shooter game works to mitigate the sense of “unfairness” that would otherwise arise from inevitable mistakes, accidents and chaos without reducing tension. The buddy rescue feature seems almost uniquely suited to enabling permadeath gameplay, suggesting both that expansive gameplay possibilities can be designed for, and that the historical dearth of permadeath mechanics from FPS games need not be the rule. Permadeath does however seems uniquely suited to Far Cry 2, enhancing its themes of chaos, entropy, death and nihilism – and other gamers have taken on permadeath challenges in other FPS games with similar themes, most notably STALKER."
I will build upon the work of Bruno Latour’s rather undervalued article ‘Mixing Humans and Nonhumans Together: The Sociology of a Door-Closer’ which outlines his remarkable overlooked approach to delegation to nonhumans. I will attempt to demonstrate the fruitfulness of being attentive to delegated responsibility (and particularly moral responsibility) in the case of technology, and the way that (as Jacques Ellul has argued) high levels of labour specialisation has resulted in a modern ‘technological society’ in which it is often impossible for any one person to be responsible. To circle around to where I began, this is where (and why) thinking collectives, and the kind of nonhumans that are formed by collectives is so crucial, and the current paucity of imagination around thinking collectivity becomes a major failure. If we cannot even think the collectives that are propagating the present environmental, economic and other catastrophes around the global, the disavowal of the idea of communism and the ability to imagine collectives that it strikes out is clearly a critical issue.
References:
Arendt, Hannah, and Jerome Kohn. Responsibility and judgment. New York: Schocken Books, 2003.
Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem : a report on the banality of evil. New York, N.Y: Penguin Books, 2006.
Dean, Jodi. The communist horizon. London New York: Verso, 2012.
Ellul, Jacques. “The Betrayal of Technology”. Rerun Productions. Available online: http://vimeo.com/14490665
Latour, Bruno (as Jim Johnson) in Social Problems, Vol. 35, No. 3, Special Issue: The Sociology of Science and Technology. (Jun., 1988), pp. 298-310."
The practise is interesting for its playful and expressive engagement with code, in the form of Facebook’s impenetrable tagging algorithm, which forms the opaque basis of the practise. At the same time, some commentators have described the practise as a “raging against the machine” of Facebook’s commercialisation of personal information, a kind of fight from within (or usurpation of) the machinery itself. In this paper I will discuss the logic behind the Facebook-tag flarf poem, discuss some implications of writing poems using these found phrases and structures and doing so as part of a community. I will argue that the repurposing of Facebook’s tagging algorithm as an expressive medium is itself a found practise, transmitting from person to person much like an Internet meme - viewable as a kind of virus running like code inside the human brain. Facebook-tag-flarf poetry will be contextualised within a larger movement of playfully or expressively repurposed technology, such as twitter bots and the ‘@_ebooks’ phenomenon."
Firstly, theories of mind such as Andy Clark and David Chalmer’s “the extended mind” suggest a counter-intuitive redrawing of the boundaries of the mind beyond the limits of the cranial cavity and even the body itself. Consider the example of the Alzheimer’s patient who supplements his failing memory with diligent note-keeping and diarising. Information stored in the patient’s diary now becomes his memory, and as such informs his beliefs, knowledge, actions, etc. The film Memento (2000) in which an amnesiac tattoos messages to himself onto his body functioned on a similar premise.
Secondly, the model of mind proposed by Paul and Patricia Churchland dubbed ‘eliminative materialism’ suggests that when neuroscientific advances progress to a point of near-complete modelling of the human brain, we may well arrive to discover that no structural or literal brain functions are found to represent our common-sense ‘manifest image’ of mental function. What happens when no place, structure, or function of the brain can be found to account for “beliefs”, “ideas”, “thoughts”, etc?
In the paper I propose to attempt a reconciliation of the ‘extended mind’ thesis with the promise of ‘eliminative materialism’, by way of the internet technologies that connect so-called “individuals” together into communities. But if parts of our minds can be said to be outsourced to the digital tools we use for communication, storage, and transmission, and if these tools overlap, what kind of entity arises? The paper will draw on the findings of my earlier work in characterising internet communities as a post-human (or post-individual) subject of knowledge and expertise.
Bibliography (incomplete)
Brassier, Ray. Nihil Unbound. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Clark, Andy. Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997)
Clark, Andy & Chalmers, David. “The Extended Mind”. Analysis, Vol. 58, No. 1, Jan., 1998.
Dennett, Daniel. Consciousness Explained. Harmondsworth Eng.: Penguin, 1993.
Meillassoux, Quentin et.al. After Finitude. London: Continuum, 2008.
The chapters describe an entailed set of problems around a series of ‘network objects’: the internet community and the operation of a ‘network authority’ therein; the multinational corporation and questions of corporate responsibility when humans are nearly impossible to hold responsible when things go wrong; and the emerging trend of internet ‘shaming’ as a strategy for activism and the questions it raises about the responsible treatment of human beings.
I conclude that the problem of finding a responsible object is indelibly tied to the contemporary circulation of responsibility, of responsibility being shifted and distributed across or amongst any number of objects. I describe the circulation of responsibility as a feature of a contemporary money ontology: the unspoken but evident belief that money is not just paramount, but in some way constitutive of reality itself, or at the very least, is treated as the best guarantor of what is truly ‘real.’ I conclude by proposing a speculative response rather than a solution to the problem of responsibility and the search for a responsible object.