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Speculation: Financial Games and Derivative Worlding in a Transmedia Era N Speculation : Financial Games and Derivative Worlding in a Transmedia Era Author(s): N. Katherine Hayles, Patrick Jagoda, and Patrick LeMieux Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 40, No. 3, Comics & Media, edited by Hillary Chute and Patrick Jagoda (Spring 2014), pp. 220-236 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/677374 . Accessed: 11/04/2015 17:40 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Critical Inquiry. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 169.231.142.58 on Sat, 11 Apr 2015 17:40:49 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Speculation: Financial Games and Derivative Worlding in a Transmedia Era N. Katherine Hayles, Patrick Jagoda, and Patrick LeMieux Fqp’v vgnn og aqw’xg hqtiqvvgp jqy vq rnca. —NEX1 1. Alternate Realities: Playing within the which stresses different features of the broader category. Transmedia Present These designations include pervasive games, immersive games, transmedia games, search operas, unfiction, and While games have a long social history, computer and chaotic fiction.3 The most popular examples—includ- video games have only recently developed into a signifi- ing The Beast (2001), I Love Bees (2004), and Year Zero cant cultural form. From the labs and arcades of the 1960s (2007)—have most commonly been called alternate real- and 1970s to the personal computers and home consoles ity games or ARGs.4 of the 1980s and 1990s to the digitally distributed and Unlike screen-bound video games, ARGs are not networked video games available on nearly every elec- constrained to any single medium, hardware system, or tronic device today, digital games have grown steadily in interface. ARGs use the real world as both a platform and 220 popularity over the past fifty years, especially throughout a medium, even as they complicate the concept of real- the Americas, Europe, and East Asia.2 Alongside the pro- ism in a digital era. As transmedia writer Sean Stewart liferation of popular screen-based gaming genres such explains, ARGs incorporate a range of media—“text, as first-person shooter, real-time strategy, and massively video, audio, flash, print ads, billboards, phone calls, and multiplayer-online-role-playing games, a more peripheral email to deliver parts of the plot” (“ARG”). The stories and experimental form of gaming emerged in the early that organize most of these games are nonlinear and bro- years of the twenty-first century. This new form, whose ken into discrete pieces that players actively rediscover boundaries are still in flux, goes by several names, each of and reconfigure. Thus, ARGs encourage players to form 1. This message, which requires decryption, was published in the original Speculation alternate reality game introductory hub. The epigraph’s encryption method, known as a Caesar shift, substitutes each character with another at a fixed interval (in a Caesar set to the order of two, as in this epigraph, A becomes C, B becomes D, and C becomes E, and so on). For more, see criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/nexus_x 2. Most video game publishers and console manufacturers are not required to report global software and hardware sales publicly. Nevertheless, consumer market research agencies such as Media Create and the NPD Group audit, analyze, and publish sales figures, primarily in East Asia, Europe, and North America. An increasing number of video games are also making their way to Australia, Russia, South America, and even the Middle East and Africa via digital distribution and mobile platforms. For example, the Valve Corporation, a company responsible for one of gaming’s most successful online market- places, Steam, has recently opened content servers in Brazil and the Ukraine and has reported that “outside of Germany [Russia] is our largest continental European market” (Todd Bishop, “How Valve Experiments with the Economics of Video Games,” Geek Wire, www.geekwire.com/2011/experiments-video- game-economics-valves-gabe-newell). Beyond sales, global video game distribution is evident in terms of diverse and multilingual online communities and the countries represented in global gaming events like the World Cyber Games. 3. For the term pervasive games, see Markus Montola, Jaakko Stenros, and Annika Waern, Pervasive Games: Theory and Design (New York, 2009). For immersive games, see Jane McGonigal, “‘This Is Not a Game’: Immersive Aesthetics and Collective Play” (2003), Melbourne DAC 2003 Streamingworlds Conference proceedings, seanstewart.org/beast/mcgonigal/notagame. The term transmedia games comes up in many contexts. For an early discussion of transmedia storytelling, see Marsha Kinder, Playing with Power in Movies, Television, and Video Games: From Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Berkeley, 1991). For a more recent elaboration on transmedia storytelling that includes games such as The Beast, see Henry Jenkins, “Searching for the Origami Unicorn: The Matrix and Transmedia Storytelling,” Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York, 2006), pp. 93–130; hereafter abbreviated CC. For search operas, see Sean Stewart, “Alternate Reality Games,” www.seanstewart.org/interactive/args; hereafter abbreviated “ARG.” For the terms unfiction and chaotic fiction, see Sean Stacey, “Undefining ARG,” www.unfiction.com/compendium/2006/11/10/undefining-arg. 4. While not wholly satisfying as a designation, alternate reality game provides a stable marker. Indeed, a similar case arises with the genre name science fic- tion, which, though in some senses less descriptive and inclusive than alternatives such as speculative fiction, remains dominant and conventional because of a long history of usage. We will use primarily ARG throughout this essay. This content downloaded from 169.231.142.58 on Sat, 11 Apr 2015 17:40:49 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Critical Inquiry / Spring 2014 networks which are largely participatory, collective, and Jane McGonigal, the designer of ARGs such as Superstruct sometimes transnational in scope. Unlike challenges in (2008) and Evoke (2010), has gone as far as to suggest that standard video games, which are designed for individu- “reality is broken” and can only be saved through games als to solve given enough time and persistence, most ARG that turn “a real problem into a voluntary obstacle” and puzzles mobilize a range of specialized knowledge across activate “genuine interest, curiosity, motivation, effort, disciplines and a pooling of effort. ARGs are never single- and optimism” among their players.10 player games.5 A second distinguishing feature of ARGs relies on the ARGs borrow from earlier artistic, literary, and social aesthetic experiences made possible by digital computers, forms. Their genealogical roots stretch back to diverse distributed networks, and (in some cases) locative tech- gaming practices such as nineteenth-century English let- nologies. The appearance of the form of Alternate Reality terboxing, the Polish tradition of podchody, the practice Games has had much to do with a process of total sub- of invisible theater, the situationist art practice of dérive, sumption characterized by a spread of nearly ubiquitous scavenger hunts, assassination games, and live action digital media and network access across the First World role-playing games (LARP).6 However, a major differ- and the rise of what Henry Jenkins calls “convergence ence between these older genres and recent ARGs has to culture.” Jenkins describes “convergence” as “the flow of do with the way they reflect and complicate two key con- content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation cepts—gamification and convergence culture—that char- between multiple media industries, and the migratory acterize the historical present. behavior of media audiences who will go almost any- First, gamification is a design strategy that uses where in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences motivation-oriented game components, including lead- they want” (CC, p. 2). If “convergence represents a cultural erboards, achievement systems, and other metrics to shift as consumers are encouraged to seek out new infor- motivate various forms of consumption, education, mation and make connections among dispersed media employment, and industry.7 Whereas older forms of content,” then ARGs adopt the techniques of a partici- social play often functioned in contrast or even outright pation-oriented, collaboration-savvy, and information- resistance to industrialized labor, work and play blur in based culture to tell stories across numerous media (CC, the postindustrial period of information economies and p. 3). Instead of operating as combinatory multimedia, cognitive capital.8 Corporations recode workplaces as ARGs tap into a more continuous transmedia flow that campuses, playgrounds, and homes-away-from-home. At complicates discrete media objects in favor of mediation the same time, new forms of affective labor have become as an active process.11 Transmedia
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