Chris Bateman

Game design is conditioned by the practice, both formal and inormal, of drawing from previous designs as a source of knowledge and inspiration. Innovation in game design is thus often the result of old ideas recombined in novel ways. We propose the concept of the game design lineage as a framework for tracing, analyzing, understanding and explaining the historical significance of specific design elements in games. In addition to game design elements, a design lineage should consider a game’s socio-cultural context, including the design and player practices of its creators, and the relationship between these and the prevailing player practices of the time. We contrast this with approaches that consider individual games  as their unit of analysis – e.g. comparing different games with each other and establishing connections between them without considering the historical context of their player practices. We feel this approach, while insightful for understanding changes between games that are superficially similar, risks implying a strict Linnaean-style inheritance pattern (inheritance by genre), and thus struggles to account for games with a diversity of design elements that originate elsewhere. We argue that the flow of influences in game design is typically fluid and heterogeneous, and not constrained by genre. Key to this concept of a game design lineage is the role of player practices; i.e. how players receive, perceive and interact with games, and the ways these have shaped the ideas that are then implemented. We illustrate the game design lineage approach with an analysis of Minecraft’s inventory system, tracing its different elements across multiple games, genres, designers, and player practices.

The contrast between work and play as activities collapses if play is seen, following anthropologist Thomas Malaby, as a disposition towards the indeterminate. Once play is positioned as a state of mind, activities that constitute work need not be disjunct from playful behavior. Yet for most workers, work is rarely if ever playful, and attempts to import play behavior into the workplace (‘gamification’) do not result in greater playfulness. Part of this problem results from specific aesthetic values for games having dominated both work and play. As Roger Caillois warned half a century ago, sport-like values have increasingly saturated the culture of the overdeveloped world. Meanwhile, gamification processes have only been able to export task-focussed reward structures from the domain of play – practices that descend from Dungeons & Dragons, but that have been denuded of their playful qualities. In parallel to the gamification of work has been the gamification of games, namely an increasing emphasis on tasks to structure video game play (e.g., achievements), and thus make them more compelling yet less playful. In so much as this entails forcing particular patterns of understanding onto both players and workers, this makes gamification a parallel to Jacques Rancière's stultification in education: a binding of wills instead of an emancipation. If we want a world where work could be more playful, we must begin by breaking the cultural dominance of sport-like and task-like aesthetics of play, and endeavour to overcome the underlying fears that prevent work from being played.

"Game deisgner and philosopher Chris Bateman explores cyborg virtue through problems such as cyberbullying, 'fake news' and the indifference of computers to human needs. Bateman reveals our shallow-sighteness in the face of the unfathomable complexity of our cybernetic networks. Critical yet optimistic, The Virtuous Cyborg rises to the challenge of the twenty-first century by asking us to ponder the question of what kind of cyborgs we want to become."-- Back cover. Includes bibliographical references (pages 179-188).

Serious games are interventions with potential for tackling pressing issues by raising awareness and inciting behaviour change. However, it is unclear which design choices maximise efficient production or intervention efficacy. For example, health games and games tackling social crises may have radically different audiences. Furthermore, players of serious games don't self-select like audiences for entertainment games, suggesting a need to examine and discuss the outcomes of any and all serious games built upon clear design principles for clearly-defined scenarios. This paper presents a case study of Green My Place, a series game promoting energy-efficiency. GMP deployed unique site-specific metrics distinguishing it from similar projects 'disembodied' from the environments they are intended to affect. The game's design methodology-an MMOG framework with atomic mini-games linked to specific learning materials-offers a scaleable generic solution applicable to any domain entailing awareness/education. Field study evaluations show (weak) positive evidence of a positive impact, but lack of traction hindered success. We examine these outcomes and their possible causes, concluding that although the game itself was a noble failure, the evidence suggests that successful behavioural influence may be independent of degree of engagement-a finding with potential significance for any game with learning objectives.

What can we learn about play by examining it from a historical perspective? Using Foucault’s archaeological methods to examine the history of player practices in terms of their artefacts, a series of cross-sections through five millennia of play are developed around the key props (in Walton’s representational sense of this term) that have been deployed in games. The specific patterns considered are the contract, the die, the board, the pawn, the set, and the coin. In each case except the first, a material object serves a prescribed role in play, requiring players to imagine specific things that make certain kinds of games possible. The changes in the representational aspects of these props demonstrate both the continuity of player practices over time, and the significant changes that have emerged over the last few centuries.

The discourses around games have tended to focus upon either their artefactual qualities or the phenomenological experience of play. In both cases, games are primarily to be understood singularly. An alternative approach, related to Foucault’s archaeological methods, is to focus upon the manner in which games share player practices with earlier games. This technique can be applied to all eras of games, and is not merely restricted to videogames – indeed, a significant proportion of the player practices of videogames descend directly from the player practices of tabletop games, especially in terms of the progenitive role of tabletop role-playing games for contemporary digital entertainment. Such player practices can be broadly understood in terms of interface (how the player engages with the game), world (what the player imagines is happening), or the agency practices that connect the interface and the world.
Three propositions concerning the relationships between fictional setting and designed rule systems within games are explored, the last of which stresses the idea that ‘no-one plays alone’ i.e. that all play entails continuity of its practices over and above variation of those practices. These propositions are used to demonstrate three aesthetic flaws that are peculiar to, or particularly relevant for, videogames. This in turn leads to a discussion of the ways that commercially successful games have always proceeded by leveraging the existing networks of practice. The result is an alternative perspective for game design, game scholarship, or game critique, one that foregrounds the role of player practices.

What does the Wikipedia know, and how can it know it? More to the point, how can anyone using an anonymously edited source, the contents of which change on a daily basis, know that what they are reading constitutes knowledge? In this provocative challenge to contemporary concepts of objectivity, four figures of knowledge – the Wikipedia, scientific experiments, anonymous peer review, and school education – are investigated in order to question the way we understand the world around us.

Does each generation invent its own ways of playing, or is there a historical connectivity behind play that can be traced backwards through time? Building upon aesthetics of play on the one hand and genealogical lineages of player practices on the other, this paper sketches an argument for the continuity of play, and the connectivity between art, toys, and games, as well as between human and animal play.
The paper is structured both by the aesthetic motives for play (a tentative inventory of motivations for pursuing play of any kind) and by a novel concept of logarithmic time, that simplifies historical reference into arbitrary but carefully structured intervals in order to describe the transitions and developments (whether putative or archaeological) in the player practices that constitute play. The result is a whistle-stop journey 'through time' in order to examine the lineages of play.