PLAYING AGAINST THE GRAIN RHETORICS OF COUNTERPLAY IN CONSOLE BASED FIRST-PERSON SHOOTER VIDEOGAMES A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy By Alan Frederick Meades School of Arts, Brunel University February 2013 1 ABSTRACT Counterplay is a way of playing digital games that opposes the encoded algorithms that define their appropriate use and interaction. Counterplay is often manifested within the social arena as practices such as the creation of incendiary user generated content, grief-play, cheating, glitching, modding, and hacking. It is deemed damaging to normative play values, to the experience of play, and detrimental to the viability of videogames as mainstream entertainment products. Counterplay is often framed through the rhetoric of transgression as pathogen, as a hostile, infectious, threatening act. Those found conducting it are subject to a range of punishments ranging from expulsion from videogames to criminal conviction. Despite the steps taken to manage counterplay, it occurs frequently within contemporary videogames causing significant disruption to play and necessitating costly remedy. This thesis argues that counterplay should be understood as a practice with its own pleasures and justifying rhetorics that problematise the rhetoric of pathogen and attenuate the threat of penalty. Despite the social and economic significance of counterplay upon contemporary videogames, relatively little is known of the practices conducted by counterplayers, their motivations, or the rhetorics that they deploy to justify and contextualise their actions. Through the use of ethnographic approaches, including interview and participant observation, alongside the identification and application of five popular rhetorics of transgression, this study aims to expose the meanings and complexities of contemporary counterplay. It examines counterplayer testimonies that articulate the practices and rhetorics underpinning the creation of incendiary user generated content, grief play, glitching, modding, and hacking on the Xbox 360 platform in particular. This study represents a contribution to the field of game studies in an area so far under- researched, offering voice to a previously silent demographic, that of counterplayers. In focussing upon their practices, communities and motivations, this study challenges the framing of counterplay as reductively oppositional or hostile. Instead, counterplay is shown to be an act of seduction, a means of articulating identity, status and recognition, as an expression of hacker ideology, and as a re-engagement with the carnivalesque. These meanings, in addition to the rhetoric of pathogen, offer an expanded image of counterplay and the counterplayer that highlights the significance of counterplay within the context of contemporary popular and youth culture. 2 Table of Contents ABSTRACT .................................................................................................................................................................2 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS..........................................................................................................................................8 CONTEXT AND STRUCTURE ..............................................................................................................................9 CHAPTER ONE: GAME STUDIES AND COUNTERPLAY............................................................................14 Approaching Counterplay ................................................................................................................................14 Approaching the Player.....................................................................................................................................19 Approaching Cheating.......................................................................................................................................22 Approaching Grief Play.....................................................................................................................................27 Approaching Player Productivity.....................................................................................................................28 Approaching Rhetoric .......................................................................................................................................33 Counterplay Impacts..........................................................................................................................................35 Defending Against Counterplay.......................................................................................................................36 Penalising Counterplay......................................................................................................................................38 Towards a Taxonomy of Counterplay.............................................................................................................41 Towards a Definition of Counterplay..............................................................................................................43 CHAPTER TWO: RHETORICS OF COUNTERPLAY .....................................................................................45 Classical Rhetoric ...............................................................................................................................................45 Procedural Rhetoric ...........................................................................................................................................46 Counterplay and Transgression .......................................................................................................................48 Five Rhetorics of Transgression .......................................................................................................................51 Pathogenic Transgression .................................................................................................................................52 1. Transgression as Resistance..........................................................................................................................53 2. Transgression as Mastery..............................................................................................................................55 3. Transgression as Identity ..............................................................................................................................58 4. Transgression as Creativity...........................................................................................................................60 5. Transgression as Carnival .............................................................................................................................62 Biopolitical Paradox...........................................................................................................................................64 CHAPTER THREE: METHOD AND APPROACH...........................................................................................70 CHAPTER FOUR: INCENDIARY USER GENERATED CONTENT ............................................................77 Strain Theory and Counterplay........................................................................................................................77 Observing Counterplay .....................................................................................................................................79 Objectified Counterplay ....................................................................................................................................80 The Value of Counterplay.................................................................................................................................82 Counterplay and Marginalization....................................................................................................................83 Conclusion...........................................................................................................................................................86 REFLECTION ONE: COUNTERPLAY RHETORICS OF INCENDIARY UGC ..........................................87 CHAPTER FIVE: CONFESSIONS OF A GRIEFER ...........................................................................................90 From User Generated Content to Trolling.....................................................................................................90 Laddish Culture ..................................................................................................................................................92 Of Abuse and Opportunism .............................................................................................................................93 REFLECTION TWO: COUNTERPLAY RHETORICS OF GRIEF-PLAY......................................................97 3 CHAPTER SIX: GLITCHING COMMUNITIES ..............................................................................................101 An Invitation to Glitch ....................................................................................................................................101 Approaching Glitching Communities...........................................................................................................102 An Instructive Glitch Video............................................................................................................................104