Playing Badly: the Heroic Cheat and the Ethics of Play a DISSERTATION
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Playing Badly: The Heroic Cheat and the Ethics of Play A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Adam Douglas Lindberg IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Advisor J ani Scandura May 2018 © Adam Lindberg 2018 Acknowledgements This project would not have been completed without financial support in various way s from the English Department of the University of Minnesota and its fa culty and staff. I would like to thank my committee – Professors Jani Scandura, Shevvy Craig, Tom Pepper, and Rita Raley – for their help and support during my coursework and throughout the writing of the dissertation. Similarly, I’d also like to acknowled ge the friendship and community I’ve found among the developers and scholars at Glitch, particularly Evva Kraikul and Nicolaas Van Meerten. I am grateful for the patience of Asher Lindberg, w ho would much rather be playing . S o would I . Last, nothing would have been possible without the extraordinary care and support of my father, Richard Lindberg. i Abstract This dissertation explains the work of hegemonic play in understanding what games are and w hat they do. This explanation is used to formalize a new theoretical and practical model for games criticism that can also be applied in literary, media, and social criticism. The present moment has been dubbed a “ludic age” as our algorithmically - informed world increasingly resembles game systems, a similarity exacerbated by an ongoing and intentional surge in deploying game concepts across every corner of organizable experience. Despite these signals to the value of reading games within ordinary experienc e, there persists a deeply held belief that the essential nature of games lies in their radical difference to non - game or “real” life. In Playing Badly , I challenge the game/non - game dichotomy on its logical and philosophical grounds and with regards to it s practical utility, arguing that classical game ontology offers neither a compelling description of games nor the means to use that description robustly in critical work. By rethinking game ontology, my argument reveals games’ crucial role in producing an d maintaining the fiction of stability on which everyday forms of life depend. Reading texts, whether social, digital, or traditional, from this ludic perspective offers a framework for critiquing the ethical stakes at play within each system. Games, howev er generous one is with that category, exercise power by formalizing values in their rules. Ultimately, my project creates space for resistance by using the concept of cheating to reveal opportunities for play within the systems of value represented in our texts and by extension the systems in which we live our lives. To contextualize my intervention, I explain the strengths and weaknesses of current views on game ontology within game studies and offer an alternative argument in favor of a game - specific on tology generated through the interaction of a game’s socio - historical context, formal components (rule interactions and representational choices), and the term hegemonic play, which refers to a way of playing a game that reinforces its dominant hierarchy o f values. I contend this approach better accounts for the dynamism inherent in games, which change depending on where, when, and by whom they are played. It is the concept of cheating that organizes these forces and offers an infinitely clearer picture of the borders of the protean texts we call games. I present an array of readings of traditional, social, and digital texts that demonstrate how cheating makes the values at play within game structures legible and how this view of games can be brought to bear on other texts where game structures predominate, which is to say any text at all. ii Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1: How to Do Anything with Game Ontology 12 Chapter 2: The Heroic Cheat 5 5 Chapter 3: Lucky Pawns 11 6 Chapter 4: Reading Chimeras 1 7 2 Bibliography 2 3 2 iii Introduction Look at me, Look at me, Look at me now! It’s fun to have fun But you have to know how. Dr. Seuss, The Cat in the Hat Like all tricksters, the Cat in the Hat teaches ambivalence. Wh ile the delightful tautology that “it’s fun to have fun” has captured the public imagination, fewer remember the qualification that follows, “but you have to know how.” Seuss’s Cat teases with a choice between fun that plays according to rules and fun that is inherently transgressive; a choice whose obligatory decision (“you have to know how”) is at once instrumental and moral, at once practical (how to have more fun) and ontological (fun is only really fun when the right choice is made). This version of pl ay is our most familiar. Sentimental, it imagines a mythic childhood whose play is exuberant and innocent even as it tips its hat to the threat of rules and obligation which are both a constraint upon and a medium for pleasure in more “sophisticated,” or a dult, play. The uncertainty in Seuss’s quotidian drama is echoed within the human story writ large. The dialogue between playing and the rules of play is a conversation so foundational and far - reaching that our lives would be 1 incomprehensible without it. T he germ of this ancient conflict flowers perpetually throughout human history as permutations of form — improvisati ons that emerge like shoots to anchor and organize new patterns — that act as organizing principles across the panoply of lived and imagined expe rience. The goal of the work that follows is to deepen our understanding of the phenomena of play and games with regard to how these reflect on human experience. I offer a model for analyzing how the frames of play and gaming make sense of moral narratives . This model is predicated upon the argument that games are rhetorical systems that provide opportunities for ethical play. Just as with the Cat in the Hat, it is not always clear whether ethical play means following rules or playing against them. Improvi ng our understanding of games has a special urgency as they command a larger and larger share of public attention. In The Gameful World , a recent collection of essays about the rising influence of games, NYU professor and game scholar Eric Zimmerman dubbed the present moment a ludic age, or “ludic century,” wherein our algorithmically - informed world increasingly resembles game systems (2014). Moreover, he argues, just as previous centuries were marked by dominant cultural forms like the novel or moving imag e, games (specifically digital games) are revealing themselves as a major medium of cultural expression in the 21 st century. 1 Recognizing this allows us to acknowledge both the explicit profit - focused trends and ongoing deployment of 1 From a strictly economic perspective, the Entertainment Software Association, using data from the NPD group, show that in 2017 nearly $25 billion was spent on game content (i.e. games themselves). See Essential Facts about Video Games . 2 game concepts across e very corner of organizable experience, 2 as well as the proliferation of game images, language, and aesthetics in social life in more subtle and complicated ways. Responses to the ubiquity of game stuff are as varied as the games themselves. The prolific a nd influential game scholar, Ian Bogost, has famously excoriated the practice of gamification as “bullshit,” specifically business consulting bullshit (2011c, 2014). Bogost’s argument is motivated by two equ ally important concerns. First , there are some de e ply concerning ethical problems even when the gamification of a business “works.” For example, consider the relative merits of a company that, although it pays its employees low wages and demands long hours in poor conditions, manages to improve employee satisfaction and productivity by gamifying their labor. There is nothing preventing a sweatshop from using leader boards and cross - team competitions to extract more labor from its workforce. While the subjective experience of the employees’ situation has c hanged, their material circumstances have not. If a subject can be trained to enjoy its torments, are they nonetheless torture? Similar problems abound as persuasion collapses into manipulation as the gamifying of production and consumption grows more soph isticated when accompanied by the analysis of mass data. Bogost rebrands this style of gamification as “exploitationware,” a moniker equally a pplicable to his second concern: that gamifiers in the consulting world don’t care at all if their interventions w ork and are only interested in selling 2 Via a process that has come to be known as “gamification,” which uses game concepts, tools, or structures in traditionally non - game contexts like work, healthcare, or a marketplace. 3 more gamification (2011c). That is, the gamification consultant Bogost admonishes isn’t properly concerned with games as such, and this disregard impoverishes the s o - called games (and gamifying practices) they are haw king. The concern with propriety gives away the game that Ian Bogost and the Cat in the Hat are ultimately concerned with a similar problem: how is one to play? What exactly are games and what are we to do with them? If there isn’t necessarily a right way to play, is there a wrong one, or at least a better or worse way to play? Games’ famous resistance to definition has two important parts. First , any statement about what games are is also a statement about how one relates to games. While this may seem obv ious, it bears stating explicitly because it goes often goes overlooked. A huge amount of ink has been spilt, for example, in raking over Wittgenstein’s famous observation that games don’t have a fixed set of shared qualities: Consider for example the proc eedings that we call "games".