world’s greatests—cpl world tour 2005 finals

xirdalium Posted on by

a cyberanthropologist’s reflections on e-sports
Fatal1ty vs. Vo0
At a tremendous pace computergames and gaming-culture get more and more attention and coverage by ‘traditional’ electronic and print mass media. More and more institutions of said media take computergames to be a serious and worthwhile topic. A sure sign for them becoming integrated into mainstream contemporary culture, loosing the air of an initiated-youths-only subcultural thing. Simultaneously media-coverage of game-issues step by step drifts away from the purely negative and dystopian towards the more differentiated and sometimes utterly positive.
    As mainstream contemporary culture is embedded into a transnational economical system, this spreading of the gaming-culture word has to be backed up and driven by substantial economical interest and motivations. In order to come into being, and to spread over the globe, the culture of the Internet and the Internet-infrastructure itself needed—among other things—a layer of money-driven entrepreneurs. (↵Castells 2001b, see ↵history, generations, the Internet, and cyberculture, too) In almost the same manner computergames need the attention of a ‘big-corporations-and-mass-media’ cultural layer to become a mainstream global societal and cultural issue. Maybe this layer is what became of what Castells identified as the entrepreneurial cultural layer, which played a decisive role in the formation of the Internet.
    One of the strongest contemporary factors which is able to draw this layer’s attention onto computergames is a cultural stance which emerged out of gaming-culture: the notion of ↑e-sports. Within this very notion—playing computergames to be competitive sports—lies the possibility to make computergames a multi-million business within ‘traditional’ mass media. Only that way computergames can become recognized and accepted by the global cultural mainstream, can become an integral part of the latter. Just as it happened with offline professional sports at large and in particular. I am especially thinking about boxing.
    Just like it is the case with boxing, there are several international umbrella organisations taking care of e-sports, like the ↑Electronic Sports League or the ↑World Cyber Games. But the initial and maybe most forceful thrust for e-sports stems from the ↑Cyberathlete Professional League (CPL).
Fatal1ty and Vo0 eye to eye
For this year’s CPL world tour the game ↑Painkiller (PK) was chosen. The final bout between professional gamer legend [see ↵world’s greatest, and ↵fatal1ty on air] ↑Jonathan Wendel aka ↑Fatal1ty (24 years young) and The Netherlands’ gamer top-star ↑Sander Kaasjager aka ↑fnatic.↑Vo0 (20 years young) took place on 22nd November at the Nokia Theater in Times Square, New York City, and started at 17:40EST that day. “For the first time ever, over 200 international media organizations have reported on the finals of an esports tournament.” E.g. Forbes, CNN, NY Daily News, BBC, Washington Post and many more ran reports. (↑Media Reports on CPL World Tour Finals) Furthermore MTV broadcasted the event live on air and on the Internet. Get and watch the ↑whole MTV coverage of the final match Fatl1ty vs. Vo0 [01:50:07hrs | .asf | 536MB] and find out who won and how.
    Of course within the gaming community the event is discussed controversially: There is criticism against Fatal1ty’s ‘defensive style’ of playing, against the live comments of the MTV-commentators, and many more issues [btw guys’n’gals: below is the definitive proof that Fatal1ty and Vo0 indeed shook hands after the match ;-]. But in my view it is definitely worthwhile to rewatch, especially for those having little or no idea about gaming culture, first-person shooters (↵FPS) and e-sports in particular. Besides all the critique against Painkiller, the game indeed replicates the ‘old-school FPS’ gameplay and ambience of ↑Doom, ↵Q3A and the likes. Watching Fatal1ty vs. Vo0 impressively gives an idea of the sheer speed of games like that—gamers of that calibre clearly dwell in another dimension regarding perception, action, and reaction. If one has no own experience in playing FPSs one simply is not able to follow the action displayed. The sports-reporter-style live comments are not a nuisance but actually explain what is going on and give an idea of how deeply strategy and tactics are involved—matches like that clearly go way beyond skill, precision, and speed of reaction. Those are prerequisites, mastering the actual game is not a mere demonstration of hand-eye-coordination wizardry. At one point a commentator remarked: “Now it’s a game of chess,” which very accurately, although metaphorically, described the current situation within the match.
    Chess itself is not a big hit on TV and other synchronous/real-time mass media because it lacks the action-appeal, and because in order to be able to understand and embrace what happens on the chequerboard when two grandmasters are battling, one needs to be initiated into the game quite deeply. By definition first-person-shooters possess a tremendous potential of action-appeal. But, just as it is true for chess [but not for e.g. track & field or the olympic games at large], to understand and embrace e.g. Fatal1ty vs. Vo0 you need to be initiated into first-person-shooters yourself. Initiated are the members of the transnational gaming-community. The latter’s rank and file are absolutely large enough to motivate the corporate/mass media layer to pay attention to computergames and to invest into the phenomenon. Additionally the gaming-community culturally ↑pwnz [I beg your pardon for the cheap pun] the Internet—which obviously is of vital, or even virulent interest to said layer—as its homeland.
Fatal1ty and Vo0 shaking hands

initially via entry at gamersgame
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my daily routine of doing thick participation online

xirdalium Posted on by

The cyberanthropologist's hut
 

While currently reading and rereading all kinds of articles on research methods online it came to my awareness that I till now did not document my daily routine of doing thick participation online and ‘inside’ the ↵MP-community. Of course, just as in an offline-context, fieldwork of the sociocultural anthropological kind requires flexibility and going with the flow of events. Hence my daily routine can only constitute a rough skeleton, a guideline which generates some structure concerning my doing.

Not surprisingly my ‘day in the field’ starts with firing up my computers. Two machines to be exact, a laptop and a desktop, both connected to the Internet via a broadband connection. The laptop—the way more powerful machine—is my main tool. All kinds of online-interaction take place via the laptop, on its HDD the fieldnotes are typed and stored together with files I download. All kind of work with software (e.g. image manipulation, 3D visualisation, mapping) is done on it, too. The desktop machine is used for backing up data and, during the course of the day online, mainly as a tool of recherche—e.g. I run on- and offline dictionaries and reference works on it. If I run out of space on the laptop’s screen I shove a task over on the other machine. In short, all kinds of secondary tasks which require a computer are done on the desktop. Beyond the convenience of having two screens, two keyboards, and two fully operable machines for tasks which have to be done, the backup on the desktop lends immense comfort and relaxedness.

When the machines are running and the anti-virus software is updated [anthropologer, keep your hut clean!], I at first create a new folder inside my nested fieldnotes-folders on the laptop. Today’s folder for example is nested like that: fieldnotes → 2005 → 12_2005 → 09_December_2005. I keep folders like that since April 2002. Every bit of online communication and interaction which takes place during the whole day is saved to that folder.

Next I create a text file. Today’s file is called 09_December_2005_fieldnotes.txt. This plain text file is today’s repository for fielddiary-entries and fieldnotes. Thoughts, observations, associations, reflexions, comments—everything is typed into that file. Hyperreferences [vulgo: links], excerpts from texts online etc. are copied and pasted into that file. Excerpts, citations from offline texts [hardcopies] are typed into that file by hand. The first draft of what you are reading right now was typed into that file, too.

Now I am set to head out into cyberspace and meet “my tribe”. On the desktop machine I fire up the webbrowser, on the laptop: webbrowser, e-mail client, clients for chat, messenger services, voice over IP, and maybe video-chat. Furthermore the clients for real-time interaction are all set to log everything going through them. These clients make me ‘visible’ and ‘present’ for the others, too. Now they know that I am potentially available for interaction. Then I connect to my domain in order to be able to change the contents of my ↵website and ↵weblog.

E-mail is checked first. There may well be an e-mail from someone in the community: read → act accordingly → reply → store original mail and reply away into the according folder of the e-mail client. The mail-folders are not organised chronologically like the fieldnotes-folders, but according to topics, websites, teams, and individuals of the community. Then, very likely, in my e-mail inbox there may be automated messages originating from a Bulletin-Board system running one of the community’s forums. Principally I configure my forum-profiles so that the BB-system notifies me via e-mail if something happens at a forum-thread I am watching or am participating in. The automated notification-mail is stored away into the client’s according folder, the link it contains is immediately followed. Now I read what’s new in the thread, follow links (in-site, offsite, hidden, or public) etc., and post a reply or not. In either case I save the whole thread, complete with images and all, into today’s fieldnotes-folder. This is crucial, as in that fashion my every step in the community’s realm is documented, becomes retracable, and re-readable/watchable and to a certain degree re-experiencable later on. I learned that the hard way when ↵MPHQ‘s vast forums were wiped clean for the first time back in January 2003 (↵catastrophy). And “Save a lot!” is a wisdom every decent gamemodder has internalised ;-)

The procedure may appear crude and unsophisticated. And to this strategy of handishly downloading forum-threads and the like piece-by-piece, one may well object that there are offline-browsers which allow to download whole websites, including subpages and linked-to websites according to a definable link-depth. True so—and indeed I already used such tools—but I have got two strong points against the standard-usage of offline-browsers in the context of my project. The first is a pragmatic one: Who the hell shall read the enormous amount of data gathered that way? And when? Of course some piece of software could crawl through it and generate statistical data, like how many times “the hell” was used. But honestly, I am not so much interested in knowledge like that [but of course, I collect statistical data, too].Especially as it does not reflect my view of the anthropological approach. Which leads us to the second point: The anthropologer shall strive to adopt the habitus of “his people” to a certain degree. To absorb practices enables to make alike experiences, and ultimately to approach the emic perspective. No one of “my people” reads whole forums. Aside from being impossible (because of the sheer sizes), it simply is not interesting. They have their own ways through the forums which of course is a manifestation or symptom of culture and to a certain degree of social structure.

The links in the automated notification-mails may lead to content of a public forum [that is: potentially viewable for everyone with Internet access], or to a hidden forum reserved for a defined group of people. The team-forum of ↑Rogue-Ops, an ↵MP2–↵mod project of which I am a prowd team-member, is a current example. [Indeed the lion’s share of the interaction between the members of my community takes place via private, restricted, hidden channels. That’s true for synchronous and asynchronous interaction.] At that phase of my daily routine it doesn’t matter to me if the reached forum-thread is public or not. I read, react, and save. Once arrived at a forum I normally check my private messages (PMs) there [if any], and start to read around, react, and save. More often than not the BB-systems used by the community display [normally somewhere on the forum’s start-page] that you are currently browsing the forum. This sometimes leads to synchronous interaction via another service. Also if not, you still are visible and present, the others know that you are online and at the same forum, which induces a sense of being in the same place at the same time—even some kind of communitas.

Having worked myself through the notification-mails, respectively through what they referenced to, I am going through what is left of public [links are at the lower end of my blog’s sidebar] and private forums [no links available for ethical reasons ;-] of my community. Same procedure as above.

All the while the synchronous-services clients are up and running, which normally leads to diverse interaction, oftentimes in many windows at the same time, to the usage of other interactive applications like FTP, SSH, and BitTorrent clients. But all that and its consequences are unpredictable, as well as other activities like working on mod-projects, acquiring skills and knowledge via synchronous and/or asynchronous tutorship by community members, exchanging files of all kinds, and so on. Hence all that can not be counted to be part of the daily routine—the things which make my participation “thick” (↵Spittler 2001) are a topic in itself. But part of the daily routine is continuous reflection on and documentation of all these interactions and activities. Mostly by jotting down notes into the day’s fieldnotes.txt-file, but also by saving files and taking screenshots of applications and captures of the whole screen. Everything is safely stored away into the day’s folder.

During the course of the day, but usually towards its end, I try to generate weblog-entries out of my fieldnotes—unfortunately there is no time and energy left for that in most cases. Finally, at the definitive end of the ‘day in the field’—whenever that is—I go offline and move the log-files created by diverse clients from their cradles into the day’s folder. If I am not too tired I do a review of the day’s material, preprocess some of it, maybe put it online, and jot down notes. Then I switch off my machines.

I guess that’s it, concerning the daily routine of doing thick participation online among the gamemodders I acquired till now.

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max payne related machinima

xirdalium Posted on by

As a result of my fighting hard against the virulent ↵wandering astray online—the getting lost in the cyber trenches—I finally started to fill up the ↵machinima-section of my collection of artefacts created by members of ‘my cyberian tribe’, the ↵MP-modding community. As everything around here inside my anthropologist’s hut online, the section still is very much ↵WIP, but I am dedicated to not let the work on it idle again.

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history, generations, the Internet, and cyberculture

xirdalium Posted on by

With the decline of Kulturhistorie in German sociocultural anthropology diachronic approaches to culture and society somehow went out of fashion, sometimes even got ostracised, and synchronical approaches started to reign supremely—became tacitly paradigmatic, became fashion. Speaking in a bold and simple style. But I learned that there is no modern sociocultural anthropology without a historical component. In other words: There is hardly any sensible approach to society and culture which completely neglects the diachronic dimension. This is true for all kinds of cultures, e.g for cyberculture, and for academical cultures.
 

The cultures of sociocultural anthropology—that is what anthropologists did and do, thought and think—can be categorized differently. ↑Alan Barnard for instance proposes the following divisions: a) by diachronic, synchronic, and interactive perspectives (↵Barnard 2000:9) b) by perspectives on society and on culture (11). But, when trying to get an overview of anthropology more often than not one falls back on a diachronical order. Barnard’s book is organized in exactly that fashion.
 

I started to talk about diachronical accounts of academical cultures because academical discourse is inseparably intertwined with both cyberculture and the rise of ‘modern ICTs’. Cyberculture and ICTs in turn are intertwined, too. ↑Jakub Macek‘s Defining Cyberculture (v. 2) (↵Macek 2005) does justice to this circumstance and historically divides cyberculture into early and contemporary cyberculture. The former—upon which the essay’s focus lies—is subdivided into four historical periods. Having established this, Macek focusses on cybercultural narratives which he senses to be “the key defining characteristics and the most important symbolic inheritance of the mainstream from cyberculture.”:
 

Early cyberculture, which I understand as a diversified cluster of social groups and their discourses and cultural practices, can best be characterized in my opinion with the help of cybercultural narratives, i.e. accounts of the nature of advanced information and communication technologies that emerge within its framework. Although these narratives cover a wide range of topics they have an identifiable core that ascribes certain typical characteristics to technology. They describe it as an agent of social and cultural change, as a means of empowerment but also as the tool of new forms of power, they link it with the emergence of a new cultural space of temporary freedom and a catalyst of change in relation to the authenticity of lived experience.

While reading and reviewing broadly scoped essays and articles on cyberculture and analogous issues it struck me that in most cases a diachronical approach is at least one of the essential pillars of interpretation and/or analysis. Building upon his essay Lessons from the history of the Internet (↵Castells 2001a) ↑Manuel Castells in The culture of the Internet (↵Castells 2001b) identifies and describes “four layers of the culture that, together, produced and shaped the Internet.” (60) This layers can, or better: have to be understood both diachronically and synchronically. That means that with the emergence and development of ‘modern ICTs’ they came into being one after another. But in my understanding one historical layer did not replace its predecessor. Rather all layers remained and from a certain point on exist side-by-side. Albeit not in there ‘original’ form. The layers are: the techno-meritocratic culture, the hacker culture, the online communes, and the Internet entrepreneurs. Castells sums it up like this:
 

The culture of the Internet is a culture made up of a technocratic belief in the progress of humans through technology, enacted by communities of hackers thriving on free and open technological creativity, embedded in virtual networks aimed at reinventing society, and materialized by money-driven entrepreneurs into the workings of the new economy. (61)

↑Christine Hine‘s diachronic review of the academic approaches to the Internet is divided into two parts. She strives to clarify her argument of the Internet as culture and cultural artefact and hence at first reviews the approaches that have established the Internet as a culture. Then she reviews the approaches which take the Internet to be socially shaped in production and use. (↵Hine 2000:14-40)
 

But also articles which ‘only’ review academical approaches to cyberculture follow the historically oriented pattern. For example ↑David Silver‘s Looking backwards, looking forward: Cyberculture studies 1990-2000 (↵Silver 2000), which was written as an introduction to Web.studies: Rewiring media studies for the digital age (↵Gauntlett 2000):
 

In an attempt to contextualize the chapters found in this volume, this essay traces the major works of scholarship on cyberculture from the last ten years, seen in three stages or generations. The first stage, popular cyberculture, is marked by its journalistic origins and characterized by its descriptive nature, limited dualism, and use of the Internet-as-frontier metaphor. The second stage, cyberculture studies, focuses largely on virtual communities and online identities and benefits from an influx of academic scholars. The third stage, critical cyberculture studies, expands the notion of cyberculture to include four areas of study—online interactions, digital discourses, access and denial to the Internet, and interface design of cyberspace—and explores the intersections and interdependencies between any and all four domains.

And then there is the classic piece The anthropology of online communities (↵Wilson & Peterson 2002) by ↑Samuel M.Wilson and ↑Leighton C. Peterson:
 

This article addresses the phenomenon of Internet-based groups and collectives, generally referred to as online communities. In reviewing anthropological approaches to these groups, we must raise several questions: How have scholars approached online communities and online communication in general? Is the concept of community itself misleading? How are issues of power and access manifested in this arena? And given that the Internet and the communication technologies based upon it—as well as all the texts and other media that exist there—are themselves culturalproducts, will an anthropological approach to these phenomena necessarily differ from other types of anthropological investigation? (449-450)

In my view the five texts briefly discussed above (↵Macek 2005, ↵Castells 2001b, ↵Hine 2000:14-40, ↵Gauntlett 2000, ↵Wilson & Peterson 2002) mutually complement each other and are obligatory reads for everybody who wants to academically belabour cyberculture, the Internet, and related issues—particularly obligatory for ‘cyberanthropologists’.

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fun

xirdalium Posted on by

After last year’s excellent Rules of play (↵Salen & Zimmerman 2004) now everybody recommends:
 

KOSTER, RAPH. 2005. A theory of fun for game design. Scottsdale, Arizona: Paraglyph Press.
 

For background information see the according ↑entry at game matters with extensive comments, and ↑Conversation with Raph Koster by Celia Pearce. And if we’re talking about ‘definitive’ books on computergames, here’s a hint: Chris Crawford’s classic ↑The art of computer game design is online already since 1997. Just to round it up, the ludologist ↑points to ↑The evolution of gaming: computers, consoles, and arcade, another take on game history. And then, academics concerned with games, get ↑always_black and its repository of non-fiction articles, the ↑black_box on your radar, just as Rex ↑has proposed—tnx for that. Not that I am an evolutionist, stating that graphic novels are the evolutionary predecessor to computergames, but of course there are connections between those ‘genres’. Hence another classic:
 

MCCLOUD, SCOTT. 1993. Understanding comics: the invisible art. Northampton, MA: Tundra Publications.

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the awakening

xirdalium Posted on by

The Awakening
 

↵Machinima is not only about using resources available in the game which’s engine is used to ‘shoot’ and produce a movie. Like for game-mod[ification]s, for machinima all resources available are put to use. That means all kinds of visual and audio material to be found scattered all over the Internet and in meatspace. That means for example hiring voice-talent. Furthermore, again analogous to mods, machinima most of the time are collaborative efforts. That means online and offline peers and friends help out and contribute—be it by providing material, or by offering skills and workforce/time, or both. And, again like mods, machinima often are artistic expressions, not bricolages, but collages, bringing together, rearranging, ascribing new meanings and metaphors, commenting and associating scores of aspects of popular- and cyberculture. ↑The Awakening by April Hoffmann—which just recently won the ↑bitfilm award 2005 in the category machinima—is a perfect example. Watch the three parts in the correct order, get grasped by the story, try to grasp the allusions and citations, and have a look at the credits, too. Machinima is neither a revolution nor a counterculture. At best it’s a subculture of cyberculture—one that perfectly fits in.

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molyneux’ machinima movies

xirdalium Posted on by

The Movies↑The Movies, a new game by game-designer legend ↑Peter Molyneux of ↑Black & White fame has hit the shelves just recently. The game allows the player to take over the part of a Hollywood mogul, to design a movie studio, shape movie-stars’ careers, and finally produce and shoot movies. This ultimate results are of course ↵machinima—according to the strict sense of the latter’s definition. The release of The Movies has triggered an ↑article by Jürgen Schmieder [in German], published in the Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) [the SZ is one of the more respected transregional daily newspapers in Germany; as ↑2R correctly has ↑observed and stated, the SZ’s coverage and comments of and on gaming culture and related issues have substantially improved during the last year, both in frequency and quality] which reflects a bit on the game and the phenomenon of machinima in general. Schmieder argues that machinima once was a revolution, but now no more is, and that both The Movies and machinima in general create a new hybrid out of movies and games. When hearing or reading “revolution” I always feel a bit uneasy, as it implies replacing one thing with a radically other one. For example, I do not take the Open Source movement[s] to be a revolution, but to be a manifestation of resistance. Open Source does not thrive to overthrow the current global economic system, but it strives to install changes in procedures and new policies within that very system. Likewise I do not take machinima to be a revolution—striving to destroy and replace ‘traditional movie making’. Whatever the latter may be, or did it ever really exist? In my view the phenomenon of machinima is a result of the cultural appropriation of computergames, heavily related to the demoscene.

I do not understand the concept of machinima to be a term for a genre of movies, merely referring to the technicalities of production. The ↑Wikipedia-entry for machinima hits it right home:
 

Machinima (a portmanteau word for machine cinema and/or “machine” “animation”) is both a collection of associated production techniques and a film genre (film created by such production techniques).
 

As a production technique, the term concerns the rendering of computer-generated imagery (CGI) using low-end 3D engines (as opposed to high-end and complex 3D engines used by professionals) in video games (typically, engines in first person shooters games have been used). Consequently, the rendering can be done in real-time using PCs (either using the computer of the creator or the viewer), rather than with complex 3D engines using huge render farms.
 

As a film genre, the term refers to movies created by the techniques described above. Usually, machinimas are produced using tools (demo recording, camera angle, level editor, script editor, etc.) and resources (backgrounds, levels, characters, skins, etc.) available in a game.
 

Machinima is an example of emergent gameplay, a process of putting game tools to unexpected ends, and of artistic computer game modification. ↑[…]

The Movies in turn means the commodification of creating machinima in the form of a consumable commercial computergame. In my opinion the interesting things in respect to cyberculture will be the mods for The Movies—if there will be any.
 

See also ↵
strong and ↵dreamscream. For loads of machinima see ↑machinima.com—there’s an ↑Interview with Stephen Wood, one of the designers of The Movies, too.
 

machinima.com
initially via entry at 2R

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negotiation of ethnicity on the Internet

xirdalium Posted on by
The Internet—the new global media, linking people transnationally, providing a public for the marginalised, fostering democracy—versus the internet—virtual irreality, detached from the real world, space for escape, leading to social isolation. From these extreme views research has moved to ethnographic analyses of what actually happens online. Especially young people around the world have adopted the internet as their medium, creating their own virtual spaces. The research project “↑The virtual second generation” [in German | parts in English] analyses how, why and with what consequences second generation Indians in Germany do this.

via entry at ethno::log

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