GE lanyard design: Magical bond and transcending game playing experience beyond fun and social enjoyment

On the left is a lanyard designed by Keo-Hime following Granado Espada theme. I thought the design was incredibly fantastic. There seems to be interest from IAH for the design. Whatever happens, I hope Keo-Hime gets her share of monetary reward for her effort.

Anyway, what interest me the most about the lanyard is what I draw from insights I gain making commentaries on an article post by Aldo Tolino in Gamasutra and a blog post by Henry Jenkins. The lanyard is an example of ludic artifact and it transcends game playing experience beyond the game environment. What is interesting about the lanyard is that while it is product of a player, but it came through from collective effort of critical friends who are fans of GE. There seems to be a kind of magical bond created from the process of making the lanyard that brings the designer and her critical friends together if not closer, and this magical bond transcends beyond this circle to include all GE players as the creator dedicates her design to all. Amazing.

I am at odds trying to reconcile how lanyard is situated in the designer's exploration of her subjectivity and experimentations with many identities while searching for meaning to her existence and her relations to the social environment around her. I can see that the process of making the lanyard afford her some degree of recognition from her circle of close GE friends and overall, the GE community. This is very empowering and she has established herself in the community (even IAH notices her now).

So her playing experience transcend what we normally associated games with- fun and social enjoyment. For her, it is bigger and one that potentially affects and mediates her future. We cannot dismiss that she also sees playing as empowering and providing opportunities to explore her potential and interest. It will be interesting if I could interview her and find out more about how she read GE and what she takes away from playing.

Players' generated narratives = players reading of games?

Last month, City of Heroes (COH) introduced an authoring tool built-into its game called Mission Architect that allows players to create their own adventures, share them with other players in the game and have them rated. I would bet that the affordances would make the game more popular and extend its longevity. Tolino wouldn't classify these players' generated adventures as ludic artifacts because they remain within the confine of the game environment. But I would say that the opportunity to share one's own narratives in the form of game play and have it rated by others would stir up a lot of interest and encourage participation.

Well, I was right theoretically but in real practice, players abuse the opportunity to create short cut to level up the characters quickly. Micheal Abbot's posting, Rouge architect describes in greater detail of these abuses. I find this quote from him explains in a nutshell players' motivation to abuse the system (bold added):

While I'm sympathetic to the devs' desire to maintain a level playing field in their MMO, gaming the system and figuring out its loopholes is a game with a certain seductiveness all its own. Players are drawn to exploits like moths to flames.

I have been thinking about narrative and what players take from playing. I have a hypothesis that what players read from playing may have nothing to do with narrative their create. In the COH episode, I would to believe that players were likely to take away lesson on ingenuity in finding loopholes and capitalizing on the weakness of game design than reading into the lesson of good triumphing over evil (or vice versa) from the adventures they created. Well, I could be wrong? Hmm...I hope my research can shed light on this.

Framework to understand players' generated content

Call it grey literature if you like. All I can say is that it has really helped me in shaping my ideas for my dissertation. I guess for my study I need both: literature review of academic endeavours and everything I can dig from the blogsphere. I learn a lot from the latter from the few weeks of commentaries I have been giving to postings and articles from members of the gaming community in cybersapce.

And again, today I find an excellent article by Aldo Tolino in Gamasutra: Beyond Play: Analyzing Player-Generated Creations. Tolino analyzes player-generated creations inspired by videogames and calls them ludic artifacts. He makes a distinction that ludic artifacts only refers to artifacts that are made available in the internet beyond the confine of the game environment. He proposes a framework or what he calls "a taxanomy of ludic artifacts" to "better understanding player-created content and the motivation for players to creatively expand on their gaming experience" and for designers to design games in a way "which encourages players to not only play the game, but to transcend the video game itself and invent their own game-based creations".

We have learnt from Klastrup that a player's “continuous presence…helps keep the fiction of the world alive”. A player's presence and gameplay not only mediates the fiction of the gameworld, but also the fictions other players create. He becomes "part of the many "texts" which enable the collective and ongoing (re)creation of the world". I wonder whether players will get hook to a game longer if he is able to create his own content. Furthermore, the practices of generating ludic artifacts also transcend game playing experience beyond the game environment. How will these practices mediate the game playing expeirence, what player read from the games and the conversation he carries within and beyond the game?

Before reading the article, my understanding of players' generated contents is too narrow. There are many practices in Granada Espada that I see now as such. Tolino explains how players' motivation to create can be understood from any of the six categories he proposes. And within each categories, the practices can be situated to represent whether they afford players denser immersion into the games (which means the practices are closely linked to the rules of playing the games) or transcend players beyond the confine of the game environment. Again, excellent piece of writing!