Boardgames as Complex Cultural Artifacts, part III: Design, Control and the Analog/Digital Divide

It has been several months since I last wrote in my series on boardgames (here is Part I and Part II) and I wanted to introduce some new concepts I've come across with regards to the study of gaming.  A large inspiration for my investigation into boardgames arose out of playing Twilight Struggle, a card driven board game that pits two players, as either the US or USSR, in a global contest of growing influence networks.  The first two parts of this series focused on analyzing Twilight Struggle as a complex cultural artifact, essentially a 'dense text' that is capable of encoding several layers of the milieu that went into its creation.  Playing the game brings both players into a simulated experience of cold war tensions, ultimately helping to craft a narrative of the period that is shared between the two.  While I said in my last post that Part III would look at the materials of Twilight Struggle, these posts will veer away a bit and focus on a new topic that I became aware of through my further reading of studies related to gaming.  In this post I want to introduce the issue of 'Design' and 'Control' as discussed in recent works on digital gaming, then expand this argument to incorporate the characteristics, both in similarity and difference, of digital and analog games.

Photo by Jill Clardy

There is no way I could dissect a topic this large in one post, so my hope is to introduce the initial ideas and concepts here through the exploration of texts associated with our topic of design, control and the analog/digital divide.

To begin, I want to take a quick look at Gilles Deleuze's short essay, 'Postscript on the Societies of Control', as it succinctly defines and places the issue of 'control' as the primary concern for modern societies.  Next, I want to visit the essays of Alexander Galloway, who wrote on the nature of what he termed 'algorithmic culture' in gaming.  Galloway is a contemporary theorist who draws inspiration from Deleuze, among others, in framing his ideas on the nature of 'control' in digital games.  Having set the ground of our analysis, I then want to look at how other scholars attempted to address issues of 'control' in, primarily, digital games.  The works of Tom Apperley addressing 'Gaming Rhythms', T.L. Taylor and her look at the designer/player interaction and Jennifer Whitson's investigation in the methods of making and breaking rules in player behavior all provide further avenues for the questioning the deeper relationship between games and 'control'.

Photo by {Guerrilla Futures | Jason Tester}

While these are excellent evaluations in their own right, they focus largely on the digital side of gaming and leave little room for bringing in the analog experience found, for example, in tabletop board games.  It is my belief that in the matter of 'control', analog games present different issues than those encountered in digital games, and I want to end this introductory post by briefly outlining some of those issues.  Definitely a text heavy post- but one I think will bring these questions to a larger audience while also allowing me to gather my thoughts and assemble them into a somewhat coherent whole.  At least, that's the goal.

Deleuze & 'Societies of Control'

Gilles Deleuze, the French philosopher, wrote several tracts during his lifetime, many of which directly inform the analysis of the analog/digital divide in games,  but today I want to specifically focus on one of his shorter works, 'Postscript on the Societies of Control'.  It is within these few pages that Deleuze begins by describing how his friend, Michel Foucault, famous for his works on describing the inception and growth of the 'disciplinary society' in works like Discipline and Punish, recognized the transience of the societies he analyzed.  Deleuze suggests that the disciplinary society is breaking down, and that 'societies of control' are replacing them, represented by the rise of the corporation that no longer seeks to sells goods but instead services, that no longer influences markets by lowering the costs but instead by fixing exchange rates, and that no longer seeks specialization of production but instead transformation of the product through marketing.  'Control' is not so much the use of power, but rather the use of mobility to define the execution of power.  In another work, 'What is the Creative Act?', Deleuze further elaborates on 'control':

Control is not discipline.  You do not confine people with a highway.  But by making highways, you multiply the means of control.  I am not saying this is the only aim of highways, but people can travel infinitely and "freely" without being confined while being perfectly controlled.  That is our future.

Photo by .faramarz

The machine most indicative of the 'society of control' is the computer, which has made data ubiquitous and dependent on 'code'.  Whereas the 'disciplinary societies' relied upon watchwords to regulate access, the 'societies of control' utilize passwords to authenticate or deny access.  The code of a computer is like the highway described above, in that it allows you freedom to do things like surf the internet or create a document; yet these capabilities are entirely dependent on what the creator of the program allows the user to do.  This idea that the computer, or more specifically the code of the computer, exercises 'control' over our  own agency of power is the crux of many recent works on digital gaming and is also a major concern of Galloway and his analysis of gamic action.

Alexander Galloway & Algorithmic Culture

In his wide ranging work, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture, Alexander Galloway explores the ideas presented by Deleuze and others on the 'control society' in the realm of playing digital games.  The act of play is very important to Galloway, and it certainly is a key component of my own analysis of Twilight Struggle.  Instead of probing the narrative value of digital games, Galloway focuses instead on creating a classification system to define the spectrum of actions encountered while the player, or operator, interacts with the game, or machine.  Borrowing terms from film and literature studies, Galloway spends much of the first essay defining what constitutes 'diegetic' and 'nondiegetic' action; diegetic elements are defined as a digital game's total world or narrative action both on and offscreen, while nondiegetic defines those elements that are within the gaming apparatus yet distinctly outside the portion of the apparatus that define the fictional world and story.  With these four defining characteristics (the operator, the machine, diegetic and nondiegetic action) Galloway creates a classifiable scale that can organize the varied styles and designs digital games embrace in the operation of play.  

However, defining the action of play in digital games is only one aspect of Galloway's analysis.  In his later essays, the topic shifts to the issue of digital games using 'informatics':

But how may one critically approach these video games, these uniquely algorithmic cultural objects? Certainly they would have something revealing to say about life inside today’s global informatic networks. They might even suggest a new approach to critical interpretation itself, one that is as computercentric as its object of study.

Using the very popular Civilization series of pc games, created by famed designer Sid Meier,  Galloway extends his thoughts quoted above:

Video games don’t attempt to hide informatic control; they flaunt it. Look to the auteur work of game designers like Hideo Kojima, Yu Suzuki, or Sid Meier. In the work of Meier, the gamer is not simply playing this or that historical simulation. The gamer is instead learning, internalizing, and becoming intimate with a massive, multipart, global algorithm. To play the game means to play the code of the game. To win means to know the system. And thus to interpret a game means to interpret its algorithm (to discover its parallel “allegorithm”).... 

I suggest that video games are, at their structural core, in direct synchronization with the political realities of the informatic age. If Meier’s work is about anything, it is about information society itself. It is about knowing systems and knowing code, or, I should say, knowing the system and knowing the code. “The way computer games teach structures of thought,” writes Ted Friedman on Meier’s game series Civilization, “is by getting you to internalize the logic of the program. To win, you can’t just do whatever you want. You have to figure out what will work within the rules of the game. You must learn to predict the consequences of each move, and anticipate the computer’s response. Eventually, your decisions become intuitive, as smooth and rapid-fire as the computer’s own machinations.” Meier makes no effort to hide this essential char- acteristic behind a veil, either, as would popular cinema. The massive electronic network of command and control that I have elsewhere called “protocol” is precisely the visible, active, essential, and core ingredient of Meier’s work in particular and video games in general. 

Photo by Gabriela Camerotti

While this is only a *small* selection of Galloway's writings, it does highlight the fundamental issue of how 'control' is exercised through the play of digital games.  While I didn't label it 'control', I noted similar effects encountered when playing Twilight Struggle in that the design embraced both game theory and domino theory as core components of tension building and winning the game.  However, one of the main differences between digital games and their analog brethren is that board games tend to, generally, openly display the 'informatics' contained in their design- the game board for Twilight Struggle represents countries as little 'dominoes' and the card driven mechanism that moves play forward incorporates elements of 'management' familiar to the 'min-max' solutions of game theory.  

Yet, despite this openness, board games too can code informatics in a way not easily read by the player.  In a discussion group I follow that focuses on the academic exploration of conflict simulation games (consims), one member noted how Brein Miller's submarine warfare designs utilized copious amounts of statistical data related to the historical operation of submarines- sortie rates, losses, tonnage sunk, etc... that a player will never see when playing his games.  In this way, the 'code' that governs the action of digital games, which for all practical purposes is 'invisible' to the player, finds correlation to the design motivations and sources used by designers to create the 'code' for board games, which can also be made 'invisible' to the player.  But in this similarity there is a fine distinction to be made, that being the ability of the player to engage in modifications of a game.  Looking towards the works of Tom Apperley and T.L. Taylor, we can begin to elaborate the differences and similarities of digital and analog games with regards to the issue of control highlighted by Deleuze and Galloway.

Tom Apperley and 'Gaming Rhythms'

Apperley, much like Galloway, sees in the play of digital games an avenue towards understanding the effects of the control society in our regular lives.  Yet, while Galloway advocates little opportunity for 'players' to escape the effects of control as found in digital games algorithmic culture, Apperley proposes to use 'rhythmanalysis' as a means to evaluate the interaction between player and game in the localized setting in an attempt to demonstrate that not only do games shape and change players, but players shape and change games through their act of play.  This two-way interaction is explained through the idea of 'counterplay':

Counterplay suggests a leveler, a global connection that can be traced through common rhythms in the practices of play that resonate in the local. As a practice, counterplay suggests that whatever games may do to us, this issue is inseparable from what we do to them. It is easy to focus on the futility or banality, of digital game play, to suggest that their digital environ- ments are characterized by choices and configurations that are largely meaningless, or at best devoid of politics. Counterplay provides a counterpoint to this view. (8)

Acknowledging Galloway's concerns, Apperley nonetheless suggests rhythmanalysis demonstrates that the imposition of everyday life into the gaming process produces new forms of power, i.e. 'control', but also allows for the player to re-configure their conception of the everyday and produce new creative forms.  This sidesteps the assertion of Galloway that digital games exercise only control over the player and instead brings in the key concept of modification of either the game itself or the experience drawn from playing the game.  For Apperley, the body becomes the conduit through which the various rhythms of play travel and enact themselves, whereas Galloway marks the center of action the algorithmic code the digital game operates upon.  Apperley defines this process as 'situated gaming':

Situated gaming is an approach to examining digital games that is based upon two core principles: the materiality of the embodied experience of gaming, ‘the gaming body’, which is influenced by conditions stemming from the local cultures and contexts of play; and that the game experience is played out as a negotiation between the ‘global’ immateriality of the virtual worlds of the digital game ecology and the myriad material situated ecologies that are manifestations of the ‘local’. The concept frames the gaming body as a node in the communicative network where the global medium of digital games encounters numerous local contexts. While, in terms of global production digital games follow a particular hierarchal dynamic, the ergodic process of play is in the framework of situated gaming, open to wider ‘cultural inputs’ that are both characterized by the local and by global influences. This situated approach to gaming acknowledges the imbrication of the local and the global, and explores it in its embedded context. (35-36)

This approach has several implications for games in general, without being tied specifically to the digital realm.  Take, for example, Twilight Struggle- part of the process of playing the game is recreating, in abbreviated form for sure, a narrative of the Cold War.  I called this process 'narrative shaped memory', as the limited simulative nature of Twilight Struggle restricts players full choice of moves (you can only do what the rules allow- thus, 'control' as explained by Galloway) but in doing so each game presents a multitude of narrative experiences that are created not by the game itself but by the players themselves as they combine the media presentations of board construction and card play (much like the 'situated gaming' explored above).  'Control' is far from absolute, although the issues related to control are manifest in the expressions of both digital and analog games.  This idea is further explored in the writings of T.L. Taylor, who analyzes the relationship between player and designer in Massively Multiplayer Online Games, or MMOG's.

MMOG's and the Designer/Player Interaction

For the final piece to be reviewed, we turn now to T.L. Taylor and her work, "Command Lines: The Emergence of Governance in Global Cyberspace."  One major trend in digital gaming of the 21st century has been the rise of MMOG's, best evidenced by the wildly popular World of Warcraft (WoW), run and maintained by Blizzard Entertainment.  In case you have no idea what I'm talking about, WoW is, at a very basic level, simply a traditional Role Playing Game (RPG) where instead of one player in the game universe there are tens of thousands of players, all of whom are pursuing different goals or objectives.  You perform various tasks to gain experience and gold, both of which are used, respectively, to 'level up' the character and buy increasingly more effective weaponry and armor.  

For Taylor, MMOG's provide an interesting digital medium in which to study the interaction between designer and player, because once a MMOG is released to the public it becomes something beyond what the initial designers envisioned through the process of play and modification.  

Designers are always already working with a model of the user (sometimes real, but just as often imagined) when they approach the process of creation. This formulation plays a powerful role in how the space is circumscribed for the eventual user in terms of what is deemed not only legitimate use, but more fundamentally, what identities are sanctioned and inscribed within the artifact. Designers construct not only a product, but attempt to embed within it particular forms of use and, by extension, particular users. Actual users then engage in an ongoing act of negotiation with devices and systems, often reinscribing and remaking them. This process can then, especially in the case of MMOGs, simultaneously feed back to designers (not to mention marketing and customer service departments who have their own often competing formulations) which themselves then reorient and adapt. Rather than a linear, top–down process, ultimately what we find is a complex co–construction of technologies that occurs between designers, users, and the artifacts themselves. (2)

This circulation, and subsequent reorientation and adaptation, of the MMOG among the myriad players and chosen designers is the exciting point of contact requiring further study.  While designers strive to create these universes and imbue them with facilitations and restrictions that either spur or shun the desired behavior among their target audience, the players themselves, through the act of playing, actively challenge preconceived design notions, especially when those notions run counter to the desired play outcomes.  As Taylor notes, when players give their friends the user name and password to log on as one of their high-level 'characters', they are breaking the End User Licence Agreement (EULA) but are doing so in order to gain the desired play outcome.  Again, this approach attempts to show that play of digital games is about more than direct issues of 'control' through code, that in fact players have quite a wide range of agency when it comes to actually playing a game.  Taylor explains there are many avenues players pursue that result in the changing of the game itself:

We might also think of the ways players make intensive contributions to game mechanics and interfaces through serving as unpaid play–testers, software developers via the creation of user interface modifications or other add–ons, and generally providers of vast amounts of feedback through message board sites. The player produced catalogue of user interface modifications surrounding World of Warcraft provides an impressive example not only of the ways players can directly intervene in the technical aspect of the game, but how those interventions reshape the experience of play itself. (7)

Questions For Further Study

One issue all of the above works possess is that they tackle, primarily, digital games.  There is almost nothing in these texts that deal specifically with analog games.  While some questions are applicable to both digital and analog games- namely the issues related to 'control'- there are areas that are common to both yet follow different forms and means of expression dependent on their respective mediums.  Modifications represent a topic that spans both digital and analog, yet their implementation follow very different paths in both spheres of gaming.  This is one area I would like to tackle in a future post, especially because the idea of modification also steps on other interesting areas- say, intellectual property for one example.  Regardless, as the articles above demonstrate, there is very fertile ground for the exploration of the player/game interaction, especially in the oft neglected analog world.