Fun Inc. (16 page)

Looking ahead to the not-too-distant future, it’s not hard to imagine a time when the Blu-Ray release of a blockbuster film may also contain a video game, and even integrate the two. Consumers still want the passive viewing experience but, when the mood takes them, they expect to be able to launch into interaction at a moment’s notice. The point at which a game experience ends and another kind of experience begins may become difficult to pinpoint.

It’s a point that hasn’t been lost on Steven Spielberg, who in 2008 was credited as the lead designer on a new video game,
Boom Blox
, for the Nintendo Wii. Would this be a cinematic epic, bringing his storytelling gifts and visual flair to the living-room screen in an unprecedented interactive form? Far from it. The game actually presented an abstract – and extremely playable – series of physics-based puzzles, involving knocking down piles of blocks. Designing
Boom Blox
was, Spielberg explained in an interview in 2008, driven by the desire ‘to get parents and kids in the same space together’. It also involved, he noted, the virtu-alisation of one of the most ancient and most elemental kinds of childhood play – ‘knocking blocks down’.

Spielberg’s construction of this kind of shared space is both a significant achievement in itself, and a development that points towards far bigger changes – the increasing power of video games not only as a product to be consumed, but as a state of mind or place to be visited.

If you want to understand what it means to lead a ‘gaming life’, there are few better people to talk to than Nick Yee. An American games researcher whose projects have over the best part of the last decade pooled an unrivalled quantity of data on players’ shifting experiences of gaming in the modern world, Yee has, he explains to me, three ‘prongs of research’. The first has involved surveying over 70,000 online gamers about their behaviour and attitudes. The second has used immersive virtual reality technology to test how people interact in virtual environments. And the third involves ‘data mining’ from the servers of companies running MMOs – and then matching players’ opinions of their own behaviour with the mass of detailed data being kept by the companies operating the games they’re playing. Such a considerable information package has earned him a doctorate from Stanford and international renown in the gaming and academic communities, but it has also thrown up one persistent contradiction: that much of what people do when they play video games looks like very hard work – despite their claims that it represents the precise opposite.

Yee was first struck a couple of years ago by players’ behaviour within an online game set in one of the most famous futuristic science-fiction worlds ever created,
Star Wars Galaxies
. By any other name, what was taking place within the game was not just the kind of advanced cooperation or competition traditionally associated with play, but full-on corporate and individual enterprise. ‘The use of the business metaphor was dominant among players,’ he explains. This wasn’t so much about teaming up to kill ultra-tough enemies as about what happened around the margins of more traditional kinds of ‘play’: the processing and maximising of in-game raw resources, the determined exploitation of player markets. ‘There were these groups of people who were collecting raw resources, doing research, manufacturing products on an open market, finding clever ways of advertising to other players. For a lot of players, their game time was literally like a second job.’

One example Yee uses to explain exactly what he means is the in-game profession of ‘pharmaceutical manufacturing’ in
Star Wars Galaxies:
an ability that involves processing raw materials such as chemicals and minerals. These materials are bought from other players, who have in turn harvested them using their skills at geological surveying and mining. Taking advantage of economies of scale, resources tend to be bought from players who specialise in bulk-buying and can thus supply at low prices. Once bought, materials have to be processed within factories (that have to be built by players skilled as architects). All of these skills have to be laboriously trained up from scratch by the repetition of various, increasingly complex tasks. For a lot of players, this kind of ‘second job’ involves a staggering amount of what looks like ritual tedium: logging on daily to check in with their client base, ensuring sales orders are all going out on time, checking the state of the market, purchasing materials at the best possible price, and so on.

‘It was something that really made me rethink what was happening with the work involved in dragon-slaying in other games,’ Yee told me. The fantasy scenarios of the most popular online games – involving wizards, elves, orcs and goblins – automatically make them seem escapist. Yet, beneath the surface things are happening that are increasingly difficult to encompass within the word ‘game’ in any traditional sense. As Yee points out, the kinds of tasks undertaken by many players ‘involve an awful lot of work: the logistical management of maybe a hundred people in different time zones, keeping everyone happy in a group with ages ranging from twelve to sixty. I found that there were people burning out from MMOs just like they do from high-pressure jobs.’

Yee’s research may sound like it is dealing in extreme examples, yet the convergence of real life with game-playing it suggests is at work to a lesser degree across a whole spectrum of gaming activities. One of the other areas he has investigated is the relationship between players’ attitudes towards games and the real world. He experimented by putting people ‘into’ different kinds of avatars using virtual reality goggles, which made them feel like they’re actually inside an admittedly fairly crude virtual world. Subjects were put into more and less attractive kinds of virtual body, and left to interact. The results showed that people put into more attractive avatars were bolder within the virtual world, and were prepared to walk closer to virtual strangers – a predictable enough result, except that Yee then arranged a follow-up experiment, taking people who had just completed the VR study and sitting them down in front of a mocked-up dating website. This, they were told, was a different experiment into online dating; the subjects were then shown nine images of the sex they were interested in and asked to pick two they wanted to know more about. ‘We found,’ Yee told me, ‘that people who had been given attractive virtual avatars chose more attractive partners in this online dating task, while those who had been in unattractive avatars picked less attractive partners.’

This is both a limited and a highly suggestive result. It doesn’t prove that virtual interactions simply spill over into real ones; but it does suggest that, at least when it comes to the human body, people take into and out of video games a malleable conception of self that doesn’t draw a hard line between their actual body and their in-game avatar. The imaginative act of embodiment, when it comes to actually controlling a humanoid character in a virtual world, involves not only a projection but also a temporary blurring of identity, almost as if the player becomes somehow distributed between their actual and their virtual self – neither entirely one nor the other.

Yee uses the example of the virtual world
Second Life
to illustrate this in a little more detail.
Second Life
, he points out, is an environment constructed almost entirely by its players, where people can look like anything they want and build almost anything they want. Yet the most bizarre environmental feature of all is barely commented upon by the world’s million-plus users: the fact that it all looks so much like suburban America. ‘People spend all their time there shopping for virtual Abercrombie & Fitch knock-offs,’ he notes, wonderingly. ‘In a world where it is so easy to look beautiful and to rate high in the measures we use in the physical world, I suppose it’s really hard not to get seduced by them.’

Second Life
itself isn’t quite a game; it’s a virtual environment without set aims, rules or levels, where people go to interact and express themselves. Yet, as with so many other virtual (and indeed real) environments, the ways in which players themselves use it involves constructing what are effectively a succession of mini-games out of the raw materials on offer: competing to look better, to be more noticeable, but also testing their virtual environment’s laws and limits in order to gain advantages over one another, to show off, and to profit from their activities.

One example of just how far this kind of undertaking can go is an altogether more intriguing kind of clothing than ersatz-Abercrombie: real, physical pairs of jeans that are ‘manufactured’ from within
Second Life
by a specialist company called Invisible Threads. The concept itself is a strange mix of concept art and e-commerce. Described as a ‘mixed reality performance installation’, the company was created by the multimedia artists Jeff Crouse and Stephanie Rothenberg for the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. Since then, however, it’s taken on something of a life of its own, growing into an increasingly prophetic demonstration of the remarkably interchangeable ideas of virtual play and real-life work.

The process begins with customers ordering their jeans at a real, physical kiosk. Prices are given in both real-world dollars and the convertible house currency of
Second Life
, the Linden Dollar, and start at about US $32 or around 8,000 Linden Dollars, for a classic pair – not bad at all by designer standards. This order is then broadcast live by camera and microphone into a virtual sweatshop, a sturdy virtual building on a private island within
Second Life
. Over the next few minutes, the customer can watch onscreen in real time as the product is put together by a team of
Second Life
workers: avatars controlled by real
Second Life
players who have answered in-game job adverts offering to pay them a wage of just under one (real) dollar an hour to work in the jeans factory.

Each virtual worker has an individual station within the virtual factory, at which they process a particular detail of the customer’s unique specifications: size, design, requested customisations, stitching details and so on. In a cunningly Orwellian innovation, the video of the customer is projected across a whole wall of the virtual factory, and everything is performed in real time. The actual people controlling these workers are, of course, seated variously around the world, watching events unfold on their screens. At the end, after a quality control worker has ensured the virtual object is up to standard, the finished item then passes into a ‘Second Life/Real Life portal’ which transports it into the real world. What this means in practice is that the jeans emerge as a life-size schematic printout from a special printer in the real-world sales kiosk. The schematic is used as a template for rapid assembly from existing rolls of fabric, which are cut out and stuck together on the spot by a sales assistant. And the customer walks away wearing their new jeans.

The whole enterprise is above all intended to bend traditional boundaries and assumptions about the manufacturing process and its relation to space, labour and geography. Yet, as its creators noted in an interview after the Sundance festival, this integration of real and unreal environments ‘not only sheds light on the current politics of outsourced labour but foreshadows what has already become the future of capitalist production’. For example – amazingly enough – the margins involved in making and selling a pair of jeans like this are pretty good. Both land and labour within virtual environments can, for a start, be bought at a fraction of the cost of their physical equivalents – and you can leverage the skills of a workforce based in as many or as few countries as you choose. Paying workers 90 cents an hour is generous by
Second Life
standards (an added incentive is the fact that each worker is granted some virtual land next to the factory to build themselves a shack) and, apart from the salary of the sixteen workers involved, other costs are minimal. Materials and printing cost just a few dollars; assembly takes only a few unskilled minutes with glue and basic stitching.

Perhaps most intriguing of all is the fact that people are willing, and even eager, to ‘work’ like this within a world whose entire purpose is supposed to be leisure, and that defines itself as a playful refuge from the pressures of real life. What people appear to be enjoying here is essentially an idealised version of the satisfactions granted by work: camaraderie, team-work, concrete achievement, improved skills. By comparison, it seems, aimless leisure is dull – one of the reasons that
Second Life’s
citizens seek out such activities, and that
Second Life
itself is far outstripped in popularity by the purpose-driven realm of out-and-out online games. Where, then, is the work/leisure dichotomy so central to much of our recent cultural history?

It might seem that the waters couldn’t get much muddier than virtual jeans manufacture in terms of the divisions between play, pleasure, work and leisure. But even the playful production of real goods has its counterpoint, with as much real-life work being expended on creating virtual items for game worlds as virtual work is expended on creating real ones. The key – and now infamous – phrase here is ‘gold farming’, a global phenomenon that’s driven entirely by video games, and stemming from one simple fact: with tens of millions of people playing online games around the world, there is now a huge global demand for supplies of virtual currency to service these players’ online adventuring habits.

Most video games, unlike
Second Life-style
virtual worlds, deliberately don’t allow their players to leverage their real-world wealth by buying in-game currency: this would grossly unbalance their economies and power structures, and make the entire game experience less fun for everyone. The only way to obtain in-game currency, then, is to perform in-game tasks. But the last thing that many players want to do is spend tens or hundreds of hours of their own time grinding away to get enough virtual cash for a particular sword, steed, shield or whatever. And so, in the time-honoured tradition of supply and demand, they pay other, real people with real money to earn virtual cash for them.