The Dark Side of Game Play

Controversial Issues in Playful Environments

Torill Elvira Mortensen, Jonas Linderoth, Ashley ML Brown, Torill Elvira Mortensen, Jonas Linderoth, Ashley ML Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317574453
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: History

Games allow players to experiment and play with subject positions, values and moral choice. In game worlds players can take on the role of antagonists; they allow us to play with behaviour that would be offensive, illegal or immoral if it happened outside of the game sphere. While contemporary games have always handled certain problematic topics, such as war, disasters, human decay, post-apocalyptic futures, cruelty and betrayal, lately even the most playful of genres are introducing situations in which players are presented with difficult ethical and moral dilemmas. This volume is an investigation of "dark play" in video games, or game play with controversial themes as well as controversial play behaviour. It covers such questions as: Why do some games stir up political controversies? How do games invite, or even push players towards dark play through their design? Where are the boundaries for what can be presented in a games? Are these boundaries different from other media such as film and books, and if so why? What is the allure of dark play and why do players engage in these practices?

Part I Introduction

1 Dark Play

The Aesthetics of Controversial Playfulness

Jonas Linderoth and Torill Elvira Mortensen

DOI: 10.4324/9781315738680-1

In the 1991 movie remake of The Addams Family (Sonnenfeld), there is a scene where Gomez and Morticia are visiting their children’s school. They meet a worried teacher who points out that when assigned to make a poster about someone they admire, Wednesday, their daughter, has written about a witch who was burnt to death. The teacher points out other children chose people such as ‘the president’, in this case George H. W. Bush. After meeting with the teacher, they go to see the students’ talent show. After an act where children dressed up as flowers sing and dance, the Addams family children go on stage and perform the fencing scene from Hamlet. Their version is a hilarious over-the-top splatter scene. While reciting Shakespeare, the children hit each other with swords and blood sprays in fountains all over the stage, splattering shocked teachers and parents in the first row.

In these scenes from The Addams family, our notions of childhood and violence are put to the test as director Barry Sonnenfeld juxtaposes the macabre against the stereotype of the white American middle class. In doing this, he makes the Addams family seem as the sound alternative, the healthy subversion of reactionary values. The Hamlet scene is laminated with layers of meanings that speak to the audience’s ability to read figuratively. The scene begs the viewers to add context themselves, to trust in the meta-communicative signals. Not only is this scene taking place in a movie, the scene as such portrays the portrayal of violence on a stage. It is a frame within a frame that speaks to us, saying that even though we face the dark, horrible reality of someone piercing a human body with a rapier, there are so many layers of transformation added that what the audience sees here and now on the screen is play, dark play.

Transformations of controversial themes are always vulnerable projects. They can themselves be transformed and open up whole realms of meanings about what is tasteful, suitable, or harmful. The audience of dark play always runs the risk of being held morally accountable for allowing and appreciating the controversial theme to be played with.

Playfulness and Dark Play

Nowhere is the tension between playfulness and the portrayal of the controversial as obvious as within the medium of digital games. Digital games seem especially inclined to incorporate controversial themes such as war, disasters, human decay, post-apocalyptic futures, cruelty, and betrayal. Lately, even the most playful of genres are introducing situations in which players are presented with difficult ethical and moral dilemmas. Games frequently provide the opportunity to play as morally doubtful characters. We can be assassins, megalomaniac super villains, mafia members, criminal bikers, vampires, werewolves, and even Nazis. It can even be argued that violent themes are associated with digital games to such a degree that it is one of the traits that constitutes them as an independent form of culture (Kirkpatrick 2012).

Digital games are also the latest target for the social processes referred to as moral panic. Mainstream media coverage of game culture actively seeks spectacular stories about gaming and there is a common understanding that suggests the dark themes of digital play affect the player in negative ways. The stakes of this ongoing issue are extremely high as it is loaded with explanatory value used in political debates. This debate is the topic of Faltin Karlsen’s contribution, in which he discusses media panics as historical phenomena and questions the rhetoric of fear as a device for hegemonic control in times of rapid technological change.

While much of the critique against the game medium has come from sources outside game culture, lately the audience as well as the gaming press are scrutinising the work of developers and some of the values that games reproduce. Voices are raised from within game culture against the ways in which some games enforce sexist portrayals of women and glorify military violence. Our views on what themes and topics can be playfully transformed seem ambiguous. On the one hand, gamers draw the line and want the medium to grow up, and on the other we seem to have an urge to play with the controversial, forbidden, and subversive.

Not only are games facilitating playfulness in relation to controversial themes, games can also be deliberately designed to encourage players to connive and deceive each other. The practice of grief-playing, which means taking pleasure in spoiling the game experience for others, is well documented among online gamers. While this kind of gameplay is an unwanted side effect in some games, it is part of the aesthetic appeal of others, as we will see in Marcus Carter’s chapter on play in Eve Online in this anthology.

Another kind of dark play happens when the game plays the player. Digital games direct and control the actions of the player, forcing a certain procedure on the individual in order to achieve the goals of the game. This can be the simple point-and-click process of small, casual games or a physically challenging process of playing a game with a controller that asks for large, rapid movements. However, some games are deliberately difficult to the point of mocking the player and inspiring frustration rather than offering the expected rewards, such as Takeshi’s Challenge mentioned in Miguel Sicart’s chapter. These games can be referred to as abusive in their relationship to the player. Abusive games are a genre that touches on art performances and brings games back to the aesthetic of playfulness through, for instance, performance studies or Dada experiments and concepts.

This anthology is an investigation of several of these aspects of dark play, playing with controversial themes (such as sexual violence and murder) as well as controversial play behaviours (such as deception). The concept ‘dark play’ has been previously used by game scholars (see Montola 2012; Stenros 2012; Stenros, Montola, and Mäyrä 2007) that mainly draw on Schechner’s (1988) work. In the field of performance studies, Schechner (1988) has used dark play as concept for situations in which not all players are aware of the fact they are taking part in an activity that for others is playful – in other words, actions and utterances are not literal or true. Schechner (2013, 103) discusses Bateson’s (1972) concept of metacommunicative cues that aid us (as well as animals) to understand something is play. This describes a play space similar to Salen and Zimmerman’s understanding of the magic circle as they present it in their discussion of Bateson’s metacommunication in play (Salen and Zimmerman 2004, 371). Schechner points out that dark play is the subversion of these meta-cues that tell us actions and utterances are supposed to be understood as playful. Dark play is thus a form of deception closely related to what Sutton-Smith (1997) labelled as ‘cruel play’ (108).

Both these concepts are instances of what Goffman (1974) called fabrications, meaning activities where not all participants are aware of what is going on, as described in this volume by Staffan Björk. Indeed, this kind of deception is part of what we, in this book, consider dark play. However, we treat dark play as a broader concept that has to do with issues such as playful transformations of problematic themes in game actions and behaviours that are deviant and controversial content in games.

By ‘dark’ we thus refer to content, themes, or actions that occur within games that in some contexts would be problematic, subversive, controversial, deviant, or tasteless. ‘Play’ simply refers to the fact these matters occur in a game, which means we make no statements about whether or not the participant perceives these games as playful. Playful is, after all, a much more problematic concept to define. From a discussion of the boundaries of play as everything from an attitude to a world, Jaakko Stenros (2012) arrives at a synthesis of the many metaphors for the boundaries of play. The synthesis contains a psychological bubble that allows for a playful mind set, a social contract he describes as the magic circle of play and a conceptual site of play that can also be spatial or temporal (Stenros 2012, 15). Stenros concludes: “The idea of a magic circle of play is that as playing begins, a special space with a porous boundary is created through social negotiation” (2012, 16).

In this volume, we understand playfulness as a state of mind, one filled with tension. Tension is a topic that keeps recurring in descriptions of play. Huizinga describes how all who play strive to overcome and then recreate tension (1971, 11), while Csikszentmihalyi describes flow as a balance between mastery and challenge, a tense and narrow path people use game-like techniques to hopefully achieve (2002). These are just two of several examples that describe the state of play as something precarious, a balance that needs to be maintained unbroken but that at the same time needs to be challenged and put at risk in order to remain interesting. In this volume, we understand the playful state, or playfulness, to be created through several positions of tension. The player is suspended between forces rather than in a protected space, pulled in different directions rather than resting in a bubble.

The suspension points in this metaphor undulate and change. One player can find the state of playfulness while balanced between rules, abilities, and goals while another can find it between fiction, actions and reality – or any combination of these and several other aspects of what we recognize as games. This means that in our understanding of play and playfulness, playing with intertextuality and playing with a football on a field are essentially the same state of mind, even if the physical actions are performed differently. The playfulness then depends on each player’s ability to maintain a balance between the many forces that pull them in different directions.

The volume is divided into four interrelated themes that all touch on various aspects of dark play: discourses of dark play; dark play or darkly played?; dark play and situated meaning; and designing for dark play.

Discourses of Dark Play

In the first part of the volume, discourses of dark play, the authors focus on different ways dark play is being talked about and how death as a theme works in the context of the game medium. The first chapter in this anthology, Faltin Karlsen’s “Analysing game controversies: A historical approach to moral panics and digital games”, positions the anthology firmly in the middle of the common debate around digital games, in which the provocative aspect of the violence and aggression often gets all the attention and the actual practice of play is ignored. The article offers a historical overview of so-called moral panic, understood as how some forms of culture are perceived to threaten social order. In this chapter Karlsen gives an overview of how public discourses about digital games have been instances of moral panic. He focuses his discussion on controversy during the mid-’90s, which led to the development of regulation systems: the Entertainment Software Review Board (ESRB) in the US and Pan European Game Information (PEGI) in Europe. Karlsen shows there is a trajectory in how public discourse uses a health frame in order to stress political agendas.

One of the main issues the public has with digital games is how opposition, victory, and failure are expressed through the metaphor of a battle to the death. As a phenomenon, dying is so deeply associated with digital gaming that it has been argued the term is dissociated from its everyday meaning (Cf. Johansson 2000; Linderoth 2004; Sanger, Wilson, Davis, and Whittaker 1997). There is no doubt that killing enemies is one of the core traits of digital gaming. In the first chapter in this section, “Of Heroes and Henchmen: The conventions of killing generic expendables in video games”, René Glas discusses how some games ask players to portray a good hero while at the same time tasking them to violently kill hundreds of enemies. By juxtaposing games with storytelling conventions in movies, Glas investigates the role and function of killing expendable characters in games. The chapter illustrates how the ethics of killing generic adversaries in digital games is the result of long-standing conventions going back to the melodrama genre.

While Glas’s analysis contextualizes death in games with a socio-cultural framework, Emily Flynn-Jones uses psychoanalysis as a point of departure for similar issues. In her chapter “Don’t Forget to Die: A software update is available for the death drive”, she writes that while death in games, as a dark, controversial theme, mostly is discussed on a representational level, there is an underlying in-game death that exists at a structural level. Flynn-Jones focuses on how this design of character death is reminiscent of what psychoanalysis has described as the death drive’s original game fort-da, the pleasure of playing with something that disappears and reappears.

Dark Play or Darkly Played?

The second section of this volume is labelled “Dark Play or Darkly Played?” The chapters in this section place dark play in relation to the activities of the player and player agency. Here we focus on how the players create meaning and take advantage of design. We discuss the practice of play: whether it is the intertextual conversation between the game and the surrounding world, the players’ agency in creating their own dark play in otherwise innocent games, or how the design plays the player.

The first chapter in this section ties into the issue of moral panic but focuses on how the critique against certain themes is an active agent in shaping the content available for play. In the chapter “Killing Digital Children; Design, discourse, and player agency”, Björn Sjöblom looks at representations of children in digital games. He stresses that children in open-world action-adventure games present a certain moral problem, both for designers and players, given that violence against children is considered taboo. Designers have to take into account the high levels of violence in their games as well as player agency when featuring children as non-player characters. Sjöblom’s analysis identifies different design strategies that allow designers to control the morality of the player’s actions in relation to in-game children. Additionally, player responses to these design choices, ranging from those expressing indignation to those basking in the transgressive self-indulgence of simulated child-massacres, are considered in this chapter.

While Sjöblom’s chapter deals with the representation of children as a problematic theme in games, the second chapter in this section, “Little Evils: Subversive uses of children’s games” by Frans Mäyrä, looks at how game content for children is designed. There are strict protective practices and classification systems, such as the ESRB (Entertainment Software Rating Board) and PEGI (Pan European Game Information), which aim to keep games with violence, sex, or those that feature adult language away from the hands of children. As Mäyrä points out, however, children are often capable of coming up with politically incorrect uses of ‘safe’ children’s games themselves. This chapter investigates this dialectic through the examples provided by the popular LEGO video games, particularly LEGO Star Wars and LEGO Lord of the Rings. These games are analysed to highlight what kind of design choices have been made in o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Other Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• PART I Introduction
• Part II Discourses of Dark Play
• Part III Dark Play or Darkly Played?
• Part IV Dark Play and Situated Meaning
• Part V Designing for Dark Play
• Contributors
• Index