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- Convenors:
-
Katherine Buse
(University of Chicago)
Ranjodh Dhaliwal (University of Notre Dame)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract:
This panel puts STS work on infrastructure, organization, and data studies in conversation with scholarship on media, games, experimentation, and speculation to ask how order is generated and maintained in our technological world today, and how to organize with/against these existing organizations.
Long Abstract:
Digital technologies order our world today. Ordinary life is organized increasingly by systems with computers (quite literally ordinateur in French). From Amazon to Uber, things are put in their place via datafied registries of transactions, predictions, and traveling salesmen. But it is not just institutional frameworks that are in the business of ordering, be it as a command, as a practice, or ultimately as an epistemology. So too do our assemblages of play. To wit, what do sticks, shovels, carbon-based gemstones, and muscular organs have in common? Not much, unless you’re playing cards. Basic elements of play are often logics and orderings (rules and constraints) that travel and spread, teaching us to follow suit. Game studies has recently been outlining the possibilities offered by odd couplings, queer assemblages, and experimental setups generated by sociotechnical systems of play (Milburn, Ruberg, Jagoda). How might these possibilities correlate with the experimental possibilities of technoscience (Rheinberger)?
At different scales–as models, representations, or narratives–games (and the gamified worlds we live in) offer us sites of playing with/against orders. For example, if models in technoscience engage in useful reductions for fidelity and theorization, game models do so for play and pleasure (a point often missed by AI researchers teaching their systems through training on games). What then can studies of order and organization in STS learn from, or teach, registers of playfulness, which can sometimes be perverse, fantastical, mischievous, or chaotic? How can we, if at all, play with order? This open panel brings together scholars interested in questions of organization, infrastructure, technical media, video games, play, and experimentation to think about the many ways in which order is imposed upon worlds of play, and the affordances of play as we intervene into (organize towards?) the systems of ordering that increasingly dominate our technogenic worlds.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Ruth Dorothea Eggel (University of Bonn)
Long abstract:
Thousands of gamers gather regularly at video game events to celebrate spectacles of technoscience intertwined with embodied enactments of play. Based on a multi-modal ethnography of 17 gaming festivals across Europe, this contribution explores different strategies of ludic practices, illustrating how game, play, and playfulness are embodied in ambiguous forms that navigate between orders and indeterminacies.
The events dedicated to digital games incorporate orders of play, including preformed procedures, repetitions, and rule-sets. But beyond formal game frames, participants engage in more open-ended modes of play and embrace a playful attitude that transcends established boundaries of games, generating paradoxical states of reality solely for the sake of play itself.
Metacommunicative frames of play, such as declaring tasks as quests, emerge as complementary strategies to commercialized gamification processes prevalent in contemporary gaming culture. Furthermore, playfulness permeates interactions, serving as both a consequence of and a requirement for engaging in play. Such open-ended dispositions of play continuously draw on indeterminacy to create lucky chances, celebrating modes of serendipity in which players find what they were not looking for.
As game studies tend to focus on conventional notions of game and gameplay, embodied dimensions of playing and open-ended dispositions of play receive little attention. The ludic practices at events illustrate the transformative potential of embodied enactments of play and highlight challenges in replicating indeterminacy in digital systems. Examining serendipitous play as embodied practice, this research exemplifies the inherent constraints of digital games and highlights the profound implications for sociotechnical systems of play.
Geoffrey Hondroudakis (University of Melbourne)
Long abstract:
This paper takes two forms of scaling in video games - the zoom and the level - as instances of a scalar order that holds across computational cultures today. This order is a productive, symbiotic impasse between discrete and continuous modes of mediation, which I argue should be grasped as an antinomy of scale.
Video games offer useful examples with which to think through this antinomy as a mediatic order. Interfacial zooms — the smooth panning in, out, and across associated with RTS games, the camera flows and dynamic movement of first and third-person combat games, and the increasingly prevalent function of 'dropping' from a higher map to a more granular environment — are a 'smooth-scaling' that orders differences into a consistent spatio-temporal schema that can be traversed without transformation. On the other side of the antinomy, levels are perhaps the most widely recognized and influential units of organisation in video games: they structure the ascending hierarchies of difficulty of classic arcade games, individuate separate game environments, and form the basis of the RPG ranking and progression systems that now pervade games of numerous genres.
Approaching zooms and levels as (1) essentially scalar techniques, and (2) examples of a mutually imbricated antinomy that must be resolved, offers insights into how scale is ordered more generally in contemporary technocultures. I contend that taking seriously scale’s primacy to mediation offers ways to think beyond the antinomy of scale indexed by levels and zooms, opening up more 'transsystematic' orders of media.
Katherine Buse (University of Chicago)
Long abstract:
This presentation explores how the databases of video game design operate as information infrastructures that produce aesthetic experiences for players. An implication of many of the earliest discussions of database aesthetics was that a database—as simply a structured collection of data— cannot itself have aesthetics. In this view, any aesthetic effect comes from the database’s interface, or from how data is selected and presented. However, there has been considerable development in the world of data management since these discussions, including the emergence of new ways of ordering and structuring data, as well as a change in the scope and scale of databases: to wit, we live in a world increasingly digitized and penetrated by the logics and effects of data processing. In this context, I will argue, video game databases comprise smaller-scale models that encourage players to intuit the structure and logics of data. Specifically, the position I explore in this talk is that databases can and do have aesthetics, and that video games train players to comprehend databases by reading for database aesthetics. I explore examples of video game databases directly via code, data structures, and database entries; and indirectly via objects, inventories, lists, and interactions in gameplay. I ask the following question: what aspects of their databases do video games communicate to players, and to what extent can aesthetic judgements help publics to perceive, engage with, and comprehend the logics that increasingly order our technogenic world?
Attila Bruni (Trento University) Alessandro Franzó (University of Milan)
Long abstract:
Gaming has reached unprecedented heights nowadays: the gamification of important sectors of daily life introduced gaming among the leading global entertainment industries, and esports gathered incredible cultural and economic value. While media studies approached gaming phenomena mainly from the users’ side, this contribution shifts the focus to a local articulation of professional gaming: gaming houses, places where groups of professional video game players train and live together for a predetermined period of time. Based on a review of various documents (mainly scientific and grey literature, together with online materials) we highlight how gaming houses construct themselves as crucial environments for developing a professional career in competitive gaming thanks to three essential features: their digital infrastructure; their physical and built environment; and their social structure. Through the analysis, we illustrate how these features’ integration allows gaming houses to become proper organizational spaces, where gaming practices are molded into working ones, and the figure of the professional player is crafted.
Florian Hoof (Goethe-University Frankfurt)
Long abstract:
My paper focuses on the gamification of cybersecurity as an epistemological shift in the organization of trust in digital technologies. It describes how this has paved the way for new aesthetic practices and politics in the field of IT security. Within the cybersecurity industry, digital trust has long been treated as a problem to be solved by heavily fortifying digital technology. The ubiquity of digital networks, security breaches, and state-sponsored cyberattacks have challenged this vision and given rise to perimeterless approaches such as the "zero trust" security model. They focus on the social fabric of society to identify and respond to potential security risks. Digital trust no longer appears as a question of a stable technological object to be fortified and then turning into a "transparent" infrastructure that " sinks into the background" (Star & Ruhleder 1996). Rather, it is the oscillation between infrastructural visibility and invisibility that the field of cybersecurity is focused on today. To account for this gray area, there is a reliance on "worlding through play" (Jagoda et al. 2015), which is reflected in the gamification of cybersecurity through serious games such as "Cyber Fortress Enterprise - Simulation-Strategic Game" or the "National Cyber League". It seeks to open up the "middle ground between knowledge and non-knowledge" (Simmel 1922) in digital infrastructure, establishing a system of "second-order institutional trust" (Warren 2018) through aesthetics, strategies and concepts that are created through play.
John Cheney-Lippold (University of Michigan)
Long abstract:
Developed in 1950 by American-Hungarian physicist Arpad Elo, the Elo algorithm originally served to rank chess players through a groundbreaking quantitative assessment of skill. Since its inception, the Elo algorithm has transcended its initial purpose, finding widespread application in diverse fields ranging from e-sports, online matchmaking, prediction markets, and even the study of animal behavior. This paper theorizes Elo's pervasiveness by attributing its adoption to an innovative procedural design: the ability to generate and sustain a relative value scale within the dynamics of zero-sum games. Additionally, it explores the algorithm's broader implications within the specific contexts of digital platforms and the monopolistic control of data, suggesting that the Elo system not only serves as a tool for relative evaluation but also inherently promotes a centralization of ownership over data, competitors, and the competitive landscape itself.
By tracing the evolution of the Elo algorithm from its chess-centric origins to its applications in platforms like Tinder and games such as League of Legends, this paper illustrates how Elo ratings establish a transhistorical and objective standard of value. It further examines how the Elo system circumvents the pitfalls of inflation, deflation, and data falsification, arguing that its algorithm provides a nuanced replacement to more universal claims to value—as found in, for example, captialist exchange value that structurally require expansion—through an exclusive reliance on statistical functions and closed systems. This emphasis on closedness, versus openness, highlights the value that Elo-related systems provide to a game or app, a platform, or a regulated community.