| Diane Carr |
| Thursday, 13 July 2006 | ||||
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Diane Carr is an undead tailor warlock. Or a two-toed blue troll huntress. Depending on which day you catch her on. What are you working on? I'm in the final year of a three-year project funded by the Eduserv Foundation called Digital technologies, learning and game formats: Computer games, motivation and gender in educational contexts. So I’m looking at things to do with computer games, learning and meaning, pleasure and gender issues. Not just getting girls to play more games? Ha - I was at a girls’ computer gaming club at a school for a term and there was a waiting list to get in; it's not like we had to encourage them. For these girls at that age, 12 and 13, games were just an everyday part of their childhood.
I’ve also looked at games and motivation. I’m quite interested by games that manage to be un-motivating. So you can have a game with all these supposed assets - strong links to a popular franchise, a 3D world to be explored and good looking avatars and expensive cut-scenes – but it may not work when you play it. Game versions of films have a terrible reputation (which they’ve earned) but it’s interesting to consider this stuff alongside the work that’s being done on the potential of ‘transmedia storytelling’ (as Henry Jenkins’ has called it) and issues of convergence. Catherine Beavis gave a seminar here last month; she’s been looking at games, convergence and product placement (like World of Warcraft references in a Chinese soft-drink ad). She’s looking into issues of literacy in relation to media convergence. Anyway, it was Enter the Matrix that inspired me to look into film/game relations, perhaps as a kind of revenge because I didn’t like playing it. It seemed hobbled by its ties to the film franchise and its commitment to storytelling - it didn’t work. I think that annoying games can tell us a lot about motivation – in a roundabout way. I’ve also been doing stuff about contexts – so thinking about gaming in the home, in classrooms and online. For games at home, I wanted to think about ways that analysts can speak about the game, and gameplay, and players all at the same time. Carey Jewitt has developed a way of working that combines activity theory with multimodality and social semiotics for her work on digital technologies in classrooms… and that seems promising for games and play, so we’ve been working together. We watched and recorded a game session at my flat with three members of Carey’s family (I think at the time they were 8, 15 and 17 years old) and we’ve been thinking about the distribution and delegation of things that went on, on the sofa, and the game we were playing was this beautiful game called Ico – where the two lead characters also have particular attributes that they have to use in combination. We did a paper at CAL 2005 about this and we will convert it into a journal article.
Now the project is in its later stages and I’m looking at online games. Six people here at LKL, all experts in learning and technology, have volunteered to test run their favorite learning theories in World of Warcraft – the idea is that we’ll have all their expertise directed at the game, and thinking about stuff through a first-hand, player-perspective. So it’s raising questions of methodology too… and its supposed to be speculative, an experiment really. The first game I choose for this work was actually Second Life, but it’s so huge that when I downloaded it, my PC was immobilized. What are your favourite games? I’ve been playing World of Warcraft for a couple of months too, for the experiment and I’m really enjoying that. My favourite character is an undead warlock tailor. I’ve no idea why something as prosaic as sewing should seem so interesting… In terms of gameplay I think its accessible compared to some online games, but its pretty expensive by the time you have your computer and broadband and the game subscription – I use the computers here at LKL. One of the best things about it is that there are all these other people going about their own business in the game world, all beyond your control – I guess this relates to ideas of social presence...? And I can't explain it really but there’s something about other players’ autonomy, and that they're an unknown quantity. You can find out about the game, but you can't quantify the other players. One of the game-experiment volunteers related something similar – he described this moment of pleasure when he was flying over the game world and seeing all this drama and stuff going on below. Sid Meier’s Civilization III is another favourite despite the fact that the theme (the terra nullus overtones, conquest, invasion etc.) is dodgy, taste-wise. It's a strategy game, and the arrangement of information – you actually feel yourself sinking through these levels of detail and going further and further down, tweaking and tinkering; totally beguiling. I haven't played Civilization IV, which moves into a 3D environment, which means I guess that Civ III will start to look a bit retro – it's isometric, there's no narrative elaboration or anything.
The latest Tomb Raider was a nice surprise, and fun - but so short. And I wasn’t crazy about the boss fights. And another one we like is Katamari Damacy – but I think it was making me seasick. It is gorgeous though, really sweet. Film studies, women's studies and visual arts – mostly a night-school education actually. And I was playing games before I became an academic; I was a player before I started writing about them, not a theorist looking for something to write about. I do write about narrative, but that's because I often write about role-playing games and action adventure games which tend to invest a lot of their resources in telling a story. I think that structuralist models of narrative – they might be old-fashioned in terms of literary theory, but I think they're really helpful when you're looking at games because they're all about plotting stuff in time and space; the arrangement of events, actions, actors, settings. So I think they have something to offer games analysts, even though I wouldn't argue that ‘games are narrative’. People seem to think that if you study games, you must be really good at them. But I'm not. I don't care; I don't see what being good at it has to do with it really – fun is fun. And in my house it's just a normal part of the popular culture that we enjoy, not some strange subterranean activity. And it's a fun thing to study because it is relatively new – you've got people coming from all sorts of disciplines. People in the game studies community here in the UK are doing great stuff – then there’s the overlap with the games and education community, which overlaps into training and education game design circles. Definitely not just teachers using SimCity in the classroom. Diane Carr's LKL profile |
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