Playful Participatory Practices: Theoretical and Methodological Reflections

163 Pages·2020·4.064 MB·English

by  Pablo Abend, Benjamin Beil, Vanessa Ossa

Perspektiven der Game Studies
Pablo Abend · Benjamin Beil
Vanessa Ossa Editors
Playful Participatory
Practices
Theoretical and Methodological
Reflections
Perspektiven der Game Studies
Series Editor
Andreas Rauscher, Universität Siegen, Siegen, Deutschland
Videospiele haben ihren Nischenstatus verlassen und sind im gesellschaftlichen
Mainstream angekommen. Mit dem Comeback der virtuellen Realität, diesmal
nicht als Science-Fiction-Gedankenspiel, sondern als Konsole für den Haus-
gebrauch ergeben sich neue Fragestellungen bezüglich der Erfahrung spieler-
ischer Simulationen und des Eintauchens in diese.
Die zu Beginn der 2000er Jahre begründete Disziplin der Games Studies steht
vor neuen Herausforderungen. Diese können nur im methodischen Multi-Player-
Modus als Zusammenspiel zwischen einer zukünftigen Ludologie und anderen
Disziplinen von Film-, Kunst-, Literatur-, Architektur- und Medienwissenschaft
bis hin zu Sozial- und Kulturwissenschaften bewältigt werden.
Die Reihe bietet sowohl einen zugänglichen und informativen Einblick in die akt-
uellen Forschungsaktivitäten in diesem Bereich, als auch Einsteiger freundliche
Einführungen zu den prägenden Diskursfeldern der Disziplin. Besondere Schw-
erpunkte bilden u.a. die Beschäftigung mit dem oft vernachlässigten Bereich der
Game-Ästhetik, die Ausgestaltung von Ansätzen zu einer Game-Historiographie,
sowie die medienspezifischen Austauschprozesse der Videospiele mit anderen
Kunstformen und kulturellen Praktiken.
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/15768
Pablo Abend · Benjamin Beil ·
Vanessa Ossa
Editors
Playful Participatory
Practices
Theoretical and Methodological
Reflections
Editors
Pablo Abend Benjamin Beil
Graduiertenkolleg Locating Media Institut Medienkultur & Theater
Universität Siegen Universität zu Köln
Siegen, Germany Cologne, Germany
Vanessa Ossa
Sonderforschungsbereich 923
Universtiät Tübingen
Tübingen, Germany
ISSN 2524-3241 ISSN 2524-325X (electronic)
Perspektiven der Game Studies
ISBN 978-3-658-28618-7 ISBN 978-3-658-28619-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-28619-4
© Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020
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Contents
Introduction: Playful Participatory Practices ...................... 1
Pablo Abend, Benjamin Beil and Vanessa Ossa
Institutions in Play: Practices of Legitimation in Games ............. 15
Thomas M. Malaby
Intrinsic Research—a Practice-Based Approach to Computer
Game Modding ............................................... 31
Thomas Hawranke
Editor Games: Digital Construction Kits at the Beginning
and End of a Participatory Gaming Culture ....................... 55
Pablo Abend
Ecologies of Friends: Boy Masters of Craft, Live-Streaming
Jocks, and Pockets of Others . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
Anne-Marie Schleiner
Modding the Stage ............................................ 95
Friedrich Kirschner and Heiko Kirschner
Digging Deep—Mud as Medium. Playful Encounters with the Soil .... 111
Léa Perraudin
Expanded Game Art and Neurointerfaces as Means of Produsage .... 131
Margarete Jahrmann
On Action ................................................... 149
Michael Nitsche
V
Introduction: Playful Participatory
Practices
Pablo Abend, Benjamin Beil and Vanessa Ossa
1 Introduction
This volume addresses the matter of participatory media practices as play-
ful appropriations of media technology within current digital media cultures. It
introduces case studies, concepts, and methodologies at a time when participa-
tion seems to be the general condition of media culture (Barney et al. 2016)—a
condition, one might be tempted to label post-participatory (Basbaum 2011).
Commonly understood as becoming involved in doing “something” or as tak-
ing part in “something”,1 in the context of media use, participation is commonly
associated with a changing attitude of consumers towards the contents of media
products. Most notably, Henry Jenkins (1988, 1992, 2006) uses the term “par-
ticipatory culture” to describe how fans of popular formats—television shows and
1As indicated in the German translation of participation as “Teilnahme”, which literally
means “taking (a) part” in something, compared to “Teilhabe”, which points to the rather
less active state of being involved in something, or “having a part” in something.
P. Abend (*)
Siegen, Germany
e-mail: [email protected]
B. Beil
Cologne, Germany
e-mail: [email protected]
V. Ossa
Tübingen, Germany
e-mail: [email protected]
© Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 1
P. Abend et al. (eds.), Playful Participatory Practices, Perspektiven der Game
Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-28619-4_1
2 P. Abend et al.
books—were no longer satisfied with passive spectatorship but started to write
their own storylines (fan fictions) which they based on original characters and
shared with fellow aficionados. Drawing on Michel de Certeau’s (1984) descrip-
tion of the popular reader as one who travels through a land of foreign ownership,
taking the text apart into bits and pieces and putting them back together in order
to make sense of their own lifeworlds, Jenkins characterizes these transformative
practices as “poaching” (1988, 1992). This term already indicates the conflicts of
interest arising from participatory practices and hints to the tension arising from
fans challenging the authority of professional creators.
A lot has changed since Jenkins’ first notion of participatory culture. After the
rise of the World Wide Web, and especially since its transformation into the Web
2.0 (O’Reilly 2005), participation is no longer bound to practices within fan cul-
tures but has become a general promise closely linked to the “spreadability” of
digital media (Jenkins et al. 2013). Through the availability of professional edit-
ing software for the layman and distribution platforms for home-made content
and home-brewed software, transformative or co-creative practices have prolif-
erated (Banks 2013). Within today’s participatory condition we see a myriad of
practices and new artefacts evolving: sampling, mashups, mods, remixes, memes,
etc. It no longer makes sense to speak of participatory culture as if it was a single
coherent phenomenon. One has to speak of many participatory cultures instead.
But all of these terms share the notion or promise that everybody can take part in
the processes of cultural production. This puts participatory cultures in stark con-
trast to the slowly perishing culture of mass media.
“The term, participatory culture, contrasts with older notions of passive media spec-
tatorship. Rather than talking about media producers and consumers as occupying
separate roles, we might now see them as participants who interact with each other
according to a new set of rules that none of us fully understands” (Jenkins 2006,
p. 3).
There the passive consumer, spectator, or recipient (‘the one who receives’),
here the active creator, participant, or bricoleur (Lévi-Strauss 1966). As Jenkins
indicates, there is a political dimension of participatory culture that comes with
more active forms of engagement and leads to a change in established relations
between producers and consumers. When consumers use productive tools in
order to create alternative signs, icons and narratives based on already existing
materials, the results can differ from, oppose or contrast prescribed meanings and
affordances.
Introduction: Playful Participatory Practices 3
These much-discussed shifting boundaries between production and consump-
tion are famously expressed by neologisms like “prosuming”, a concept Alvin
Toffler famously introduced in his book The Third Wave in 1980. He arrived at
his thesis of the fusion of production and consumption practices by looking at
totally diverse analogue phenomena such as self-service, do-it-yourself activities
or self-help groups. Nevertheless, the concept has been used to describe the active
role of Internet users. The fact that the original concept of prosuming is already
quite fuzzy seems less to cause a problematization, but rather to contribute to the
success and the constant fascination of the term, as ever new phenomena are gath-
ered under the label “prosuming”. Toffler’s concept has been further developed by
Bruns (2006), who in his investigations of do-it-yourself cultures and user-gener-
ated content focusses on the social and creative interactions on the consumer side,
as the central term of his approach “produser” shows. Leaving the fuzziness of
these terms aside, as the concepts of prosuming and produsing indicate, participa-
tory practices are often caught up in between and are used to describe practices
that all derive from the idea of a process-oriented cooperation between users and
producers—which results in forms of collective authorship, distributed creativity
and collaborative production aesthetics, or as newer works emphasize: co-produc-
tion, co-creation, and co-creativity (Abend 2016).
This also puts an emphasis on the bottom-up nature and collective nature of
participatory cultures. Amateur producers seldomly remain alone. They social-
ize on the basis of their shared skills and form collectives in which knowledge is
accumulated, maintained and shared. Over time, these socio-technical communi-
ties of practice (Lave and Wenger 1991; Wenger 1998) develop their own moral
economy with a sometimes strong consensus about the acceptable norms and
practices. Following the ethologist Marcel Mauss (1966), this has been described
in terms of the gift economy (e.g. Schleiner 2017), in which works done by non-
professionals are shared as gifts with others in the community or with the general
public. Free and open-source software (FOSS) initiatives are a case in point here.
They strongly build on the idea of collective production and ownership, sharing
the understanding that products developed within the community are to be shared
free of charge and that everybody can reuse existing technologies. This promotes
the myth of the pure gift in modern societies, Mauss (1966) already problema-
tized (p. 46 ff.). He was inspired by the Potlatch feast among the indigenous peo-
ples of the North-Western Pacific, where the gift seems superficially optional and
does not have to be returned. Yet in practice the gift incorporates a twofold obli-
gation: it must be given and there has to be a returned gift in the sense of recip-
rocation. Mauss implies in the transference of his ethnographic observations to
4 P. Abend et al.
modern societies that the pure gift uncoupled from any expectation is an inven-
tion of collaboratively organized, industrialized, and highly specialized modern
societies (Parry 1986, p. 453). It is only in a society where exchange is managed
hierarchically and the structure is increasingly scaled-down, in which objects of
exchange are almost completely detached from the individual, that a myth of the
altruistic gift can come into being. As far-fetched as this analogy may seem in
reference to consumer culture at large, it is however very apt to describe the ide-
ology within the moral economy of many amateur communities within contempo-
rary participatory cultures, where precisely this idea of the pure gift is defended.
Obviously, when this myth meets industry interests, tensions may occur.
The practice of computer game modding (see the chapter by Thomas Haw-
ranke in this volume) is a case in point for this ambiguity surrounding par-
ticipatory practices. Commonly defined as the alteration of level structures,
characters, items, sounds, or rule sets of a computer game by non-professionals
(Postigo 2007; Newman 2008, p. 129), it is compatible with other fan cultures
that produce user-generated content based on already existing commercial cul-
tural artefacts. But unlike other forms of fandom it is more closely connected to
the industry on several levels (Postigo 2010; Sotamaa 2010). In contrast to the
composing of fan fiction or the dressing up in cosplay practices, computer game
modding is not possible without the same, or at least similar tools of produc-
tion used by professional game designers. In addition, modding is not a practice
that gives rise to independent derivatives but aims at the alteration of the cultural
artefact itself through changes in the data structure or the code. While the moral
economy of the modding scene (Schleiner 2017) demands the free distribution
of modifications, the producers can with the help of copyright law and end-
user licence agreements gain the rights to any user-generated content and then
monetize by bundling and reselling level designs. Another way is incorporating
modding teams by hiring programmers, designers and artists. This has led to a
critical view in which modding is a form of “immaterial labour” (Terranova 2000)
that emerges when formerly non-commercial uses of technology get monetized
and integrated in value chains. The main difference between this critical stance
and the research on participatory culture, above represented by Henry Jenkins,
comes down to the question of agency: in participatory culture the fan practices
are granted the possibility of challenging existing representations within media
and technology while in the critical (neo-Marxist) viewpoint the users’ roles are
limited since they are already caught up in a structure they cannot fully compre-
hend (Postigo 2008). This volume aims to present more nuanced approaches.
The examples show that participatory practices can bridge or challenge existing
power relations (see Kirschner in this volume) but they are by no means abolish-