Productive Play: Beyond Binaries

2008 | Volume II, Issue 2 | Pages 60-68 Productive Play: Beyond Binaries Bonnie Nardi1, Celia Pearce2 & Jason Ellis3 1Department of Informatics, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA, 2Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA, 3IBM TJ Watson Research Center, Hawthorne, NY, USA ABSTRACT encounter to its fullest extent. The next day – In this article we review and analyze rotions of after 3 hours of tries on Illidan, he finally fell, and his cruel grasp on the world of Outland had been productive play, reporting the results of a workshop released by Nihilum. (Website posting by Nihilum held at the University of California, Irvine in May 2008. guild on their world-first defeat of Illidan inWorld of Warcraft) Keywords: play, work, virtual worlds At first glance, the term “productive play” may This issue of Artifact expands on the notion of appear to be an oxymoron, or at the very least, a “productive play” (Pearce, 2006a) to describe play blending of incompatible practices. Canonical works activities that begin to transition into creative, in game studies, especially those that pre-date organizational, or “work-like” activities (Castronova, digital games, such as those of Huizinga (1950)), 2001; Yee, 2006), but here are broadened to include Caillois (1961), and Sutton-Smith (1997), define a range of cultural practices in which work and play and games as being inherently unproductive, play converge in online play environments. Special although Sutton-Smith also argues that play should Issue Editors Ellis, Nardi, and Pearce convened be valued for its own sake and not for the “work” a workshop in May 2008 that comprised experts it does. One could even argue that play is not only in fields ranging from computer-supported not work but the very antithesis of work in every collaborative work, to the anthropology of virtual way. Yet emerging trends indicate that activities worlds and massively multiplayer online games associated with the cultural practices we generally (MMOGs), to the design of 2D, 3D, and text-based recognize as “work” and “play” are increasingly social environments to explore these issues from converging. For example, much attention has been a range of angles. Sponsored by the National paid in the popular press to the emerging class of Science Foundation, this fruitful discussion professional video game players. And the exchange yielded a number of insights, some of which will of virtual money for real-world currencies has given be examined in this paper. One of the most notable rise to a number of practices, from virtual worlds of these was the need to move away from a binary participants who have parlayed virtual businesses language with which to think about work and play, into real-world cash and even income (MacMillan, and find new ways to talk about their convergence. 2007), to “gold farmers” hired to collect virtual The canonical works of play theory, such as currencies and items from games such as World Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1940), Caillois’s Man, of Warcraft to be sold to players who wish to avoid Play and Games (1961), and Sutton-Smith’s The the “grind” of leveling characters and generating Ambiguity of Play (1997) specifically define play as game gold (Dibbell, 2007). On the other hand, “not work”, or the “opposite of work”, even while industry, academe, and the military have begun they assert its importance in constructing and studying and leveraging networked play spaces framing culture. Yet are these activities really as to support distance collaboration, team-building, diametrically opposed as these definitions imply? training, marketing, and retail, and other activities Is there better terminology that can evoke a more traditionally associated with work and productivity. nuanced picture of cultural practice? Do words like The term “productive play” was originally coined “effort” and “creativity” offer us alternative ways to describe the former kinds of activities, reporting to explore the spectrum of activities that fall within forms of fan cultures in which players in online this rubric? This paper will engage questions that games and virtual worlds began exhibiting behaviors arose out of the workshop discussions, more often that were more and more work-like, particularly in left unanswered than not, and set the stage for a the realm of community organization and content rethinking of traditional binaries around work and creation (Pearce, 2006a). For the purposes of this play. discussion, we have extended the term to include the latter form of productive play, in which play space is co-opted and appropriated for real-world PRODUCTIVE PLAY? work-related applications. Half of us don’t realize what was behind all of it. Hard, grunt work. The determination to learn this 60 THE HISTORY OF THE FUTURE metaphors are strictly upheld, it may take hours to One of the key problems identified by the workshop traverse a world. In user-created environments, organizers was the tendency towards historical players who wish to transcend conventional space amnesia within IT fields, but particularly within must take considerable liberties with the spatial the domain of games and virtual worlds. Claims of constraints presented by designers in order to bend “firsts” abound, though few are valid. To mitigate the world’s rules to their will. this problem and create a solid foundation for our discussion, we invited bona fide pioneers LambdaMOO was eventually transformed into who had been behind a number of significant Jupiter, a professional environment for distributed “firsts.” Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer work in which all in-world content was editable by kicked off the discussion with a presentation of users. In Jupiter, the virtual world was augmented Lucasfilm’s Habitat, their 1986 online graphical by cameras in the real-world workspace, which chat space (Farmer & Morningstar, 1991). Habitat were used to create a sense of ambient co- was the first online environment to use “avatars” presence. For example, even if one is not actively (graphical representations of players), a term communicating with another user of the system which Morningstar and Farmer adopted, and which in real time, one can still use the video feed as introduces our first theme,identity . Running on a window into their office, passively observing dial-up modems through the early online service them and assessing their interruptibility. This Quantum Computer Services, with low-resolution affordance of the system created opportunities graphics and a highly constrained color palette, for serendipitous interaction that did not exist they were able to create an environment that gave before – using video to get another user’s attention rise to one of the earliest online play communities, or find appropriate times to physically enter his through several iterations, audiences, and corporate or her office to ask a question. While some of the overlords. Emergence was a common outcome: more radical aspects of LambdaMOO ended up the two pioneers pointed out that players will take falling by the wayside in this application, a number whatever affordances are offered to them and of interesting patterns emerged that we can see appropriate them creatively to their own ends. in more contemporary practices, such as Nardi’s At the same time, they warned of the “tyranny of observation that co-workers connected via online emergence”: while we all aspire to letting cultures communication will sometimes connect for the form themselves in a bottom-up fashion, we can sake of keeping in touch, even if they do not have a never forget the “hand of God” on high which pragmatic agenda for doing so (Nardi, 2005). rules over everything. In the context of these environments, we thus must ask ourselves, who is the designer and what are the limits of leaving From here we moved to the mid-1990s virtual things to shape themselves? worlds boom. Bruce Damer (this issue) describes his founding of the Avatars! Conference (originally Earth to Avatars) in 1996, which eventually became Pushing these limits was at the heart of the first such event to be held in a virtual world. LambdaMOO, the first user-created world, an This generation of virtual worlds was highly object-oriented MUD created by Pavel Curtis influenced by science fiction, in particular William (also in attendance at our workshop) in 1990 at Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), in which the term XeroxPARC (Curtis, 1992). An experiment that began “cyberspace” was originally coined, and Neil as a text-based simulation of the designer’s home, Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1997), which introduced LambdaMOO laid the foundation for contemporary the term “metaverse” and popularized the term worlds such as Second Life, as well as arguably “avatar”, arrived at independently of Morningstar being among the first instantiations of what would and Farmer. The technical constraints of the later come to be known as “Web 2.0”. LambdaMOO early Internet produced in some ways a much was different from Habitat not only in that it was more experimental environment, with a variety strictly textual and entirely user-created, but also of challenges: limited bandwidth and graphical in that it aimed to represent contiguous space. This capability, for example, meant low-polygon introduces our second theme, space, particularly avatars. In response to this challenge, avatars the question of space-as-metaphor. Most virtual and environments tended to be more stylized than environments today are organized around some today’s. In addition, humanoid avatars

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