Understanding Counterplay in Video Games

Alan F. Meades

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138804920
• eBook ISBN: 9781317618799
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Computer Science

This book offers insight into one of the most problematic and universal issues within multiplayer videogames: antisocial and oppositional play forms such as cheating, player harassment, the use of exploits, illicit game modifications, and system hacking, known collectively as counterplay. Using ethnographic research, Alan Meades not only to gives voice to counterplayers, but reframes counterplay as a complex practice with contradictory motivations that is anything but reducible to simply being hostile to play, players, or commercial videogames. The book offers a grounded and pragmatic exploration of counterplay, framing it as an unavoidable by-product of interaction of mass audiences with compelling and culturally important texts.

1 What is Counterplay?

The concept of counterplay was first applied to video games by Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter, who saw video-game development and, by extension, the consumption and use of video games by players as an act of “Empire”, an exploitative structure in which value was extracted from workers and players alike (2005). For Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, “Digital games are produced by and productive of the multi-layered arrangement of military, economic, and subjective forces associated with the form of imperial power. …” This, through concepts such as “work as play” and the commercial adoption of game mods, constituted an “apparatus of capture”.

While this kind of system is not necessarily problematic in itself, there are times where unfairness, inequality, and exploitation may be sensed, such as the incompatibility of game development careers and family life, or when players realize the content they are producing is effectively subsidizing the development of the game for which they have already paid. In cases where individuals become aware of the exploitative context, they may push against and resist its power, something Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter call “counter-mobilization”:

Game designers and audiences creatively re-orientating their playful dispositions and intellectual capacities towards the subversion of the very logics of expropriation, commodification, and corporatisation that sustain the digital play industry in particular and global capital in general.

(Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter 2005)

It is this application of playful dispositions and intellectual capacities within the context of video-game development and consumption that constitutes counterplay, a way of playing that works against the video-game production, video-game consumption, and therefore ways of playing that interrupt, fracture, or subvert the experience of play or the process of becoming a player. Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter talk of counterplay in the same way as other more recognizable forms of resistance and opposition, connecting a “wide occurrence of tactical media, activism, free and open source software, and distributed computing generating tumults through the circuits of Empire” (2005).

Looking back at Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter’s counterplay ten years on we can see a number of changes within video-game development and distribution, such as the rise of indie gaming, the emergence of alternate platforms and delivery methods, and the widespread adoption of networked online game-play. Some of these changes may have made game development more equitable, but the shift to online play and increasingly mandatory Internet connections has profoundly altered the relationship between developer, publisher, platform-holder, and player. Video games are often purchased through online systems, require connections and updates to operate, are subject to security challenges that mitigate against unauthorized modifications or piracy, and player behaviour is subject to scrutiny and captured as metric data in order to encourage appropriate play and to inform future designs. This is a strong example of the apparatus of capture that Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter write about and the immaterial labour of playing games.

Simultaneously, players have increasingly become the very content of video games, such as in the case of competitive multiplayer games such as the Call of Duty franchise (2003-present), around which much of this book is focused. In these games, players become teammates and, more importantly, opponents, and it is their human intelligence and strategizing that become the compelling challenge of the game, not the game content. This shifts the meaning and role of games and players. The games become more like platforms or spaces that players populate, and as many would confirm, a Call of Duty game without other human players soon becomes a rather dull affair.

Yet despite this, there are times when the platform and use of players-as-content fail or become conspicuously exploitative, such as the bewildering cases where games fail to adequately act as platforms and to deliver their promises. We see this in Battlefield 4’s conspicuous launch issues, such as the in-game-lag, the rubber-banding as the server and player are repeatedly synchronized, or the outright server failures that boot players to the title screen at random, the result of apparently insufficiently tested code and an inadequate hardware infrastructure. A similar story is seen with Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Unity’s (2014) hugely problematic launch and review embargo policy. The game, launched in November 2014, had an embargo that forbade games sites and media outlets from publishing reviews set to twelve hours after release, at which point many players would have purchased the game, not wishing to miss the launch window. Shortly after its release, and in the face of widespread consumer protest, Yannis Mallat, CEO of Ubisoft Montreal and Toronto, announced, “At launch, the overall quality of the game was diminished by bugs and technical issues” and after releasing three major patches responding to over three hundred reported flaws, Ubisoft announced its intention to discontinue the premium “season pass” for the release, offering those who had purchased it a free game as compensation (Jackson 2014). In a different way we see the same failure in Halo Master Chief Collection’s (2014) curious decision to ship with only one 65gb capacity blu-ray disc and require all players to download a 20gb core-data file, not an update, before they can play. These examples, alongside the cases of on-disk DLC or “bullshots”, where the promotional imagery fails to correspond with the final game, draw the relationship of players and game institutions into sharp relief. The idea of a game-as-platform and the player as content feels inequitable, exploitative, and problematic.

Within the model of the contemporary video game that utilizes players as content, the security and reliability of the network, its platform, data, operation, and service become an intrinsic part of the game, and the attitude and behaviour of players become equally critical to the game experience. Players take on the role that would have been given to NPCs in previous pre-networked games. However, players are autonomous and unpredictable, and unlike NPCs may readily go off-script. This necessitates the careful management of players, both within the game and beyond, and thus video games now utilize player managers who engage with players and keep them excited and on-message. These managers actively interact with players through social networks, responding to queries, questions, and suggestions and doing whatever is necessary to establish and maintain meaningful interactions, sustain appropriate player populations, and the long-term success of the games.

Despite these significant changes since Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter’s paper, it might be tempting to say very little differs structurally. Video games are still imperial, they still rely upon development cultures of work as play, are global, utilize immaterial labour, and thematically support military-industrial perspectives. But what has changed considerably is the individual player’s relationship and visibility within the system. Each individual, whether in-game, on a social network, or a video-game forum, has become a constituent part of the system as customer, as an opponent within a multiplayer game, as a metric with which to compare progress, or another voice within a community. Each player inadvertently contributes to the success of a game through a multitude of channels: purchasing and reviewing a game online, commenting on forums, responding to community tweets, or simply playing the game.

This is a highly advantageous system for developers and publishers, offloading some of the conventional work of game algorithms, advertising, and community-building onto the players themselves, but this is also precarious due to the reach and connectivity of networked systems and communities. If players are content and complicit, their positive attitude will harmoniously reinforce the game product, but when there is dissent, the networks become channels for protest, targets for attack, and spaces for counterplay. It is the behaviours that run counter to the expectations of contemporary video-game play systems, not necessarily the creation and circulation of incendiary content, the grief-play, the harassment of commentators, the hacking and attacking of gaming networks, and the myriad ways of undermining and challenging expectations of play that constitute contemporary counterplay.

In 2010 Tom Apperley revisited the concept of counterplay, shifting it from Dyer-Witheford’s and de Peuter’s vision of counter-mobilization to a more generalized antagonism between the digital game ecosystem and players, and in particular its “encoded algorithms”:

Counterplay challenges the validity of models of play that suggest digital games compel the players to play according to encoded algorithms, which they must follow exactly in order to succeed. Instead, it opens the possibility of an antagonistic relationship between the digital game and player. An antagonism that is considerably more high stakes than the player overcoming the simulated enemies, goals and challenges that the game provides, rather it is directed towards the ludic rules that govern the digital games configurations, processes, rhythms, spaces, and structures.

(Apperley 2010, 102–103)

And, as we have already identified, when other players constitute a significant part of the digital game by becoming competitors, allies, or content producers, as they do in almost all multiplayer games, the antagonism of counterplay may equally be channelled at or through players. Thus counterplay shifts in its meaning. Initially it consisted primarily of antagonism towards structures of development and consumption but later expanded to include a hostility towards the game, its systems, and, by extension, rules, other players, community networks, and as Apperley states, “configurations, processes, rhythms, spaces, and structures” (2010). Thus counterplay is in opposition to the experience of play, the units that enable the system to operate, and its commercial prerogatives.

Counterplay is in contrast to the norm and, through its opposition, the structures, contexts, and expectations related to the game: etiquette, rules, its spirit, and discourses of legitimacy, ideology, and/or law. To engage in counterplay is to embrace the implicit risk of being identified and punished. Thus counterplay shares aspects of, and overlaps with, a number of other similar concepts within game studies: games of order/disorder (Sutton-Smith 1977), dark play (Schehner 1988, 2013), pre-rational play (Spariosu 1989), agonistic play (Spariosu 1997), transgressive play (Aarseth 2007), countergaming (Galloway 2006), deludology (Kücklich 2007), and bad play (Myers 2005, 2010). While each has its own specific peculiarities and variations, they can generally be understood as ways of playing that prioritize anti-structure and the opposition of rule.

This denial of rules is especially problematic when placed within the context not of play but of gameplay – the playing of formal or organized games, as the existence and observation of rules are considered by many as an intrinsic factor. Let us remember video games are simulations constructed out of encoded rules and other logical statements that are carefully interwoven to create game-play that is enjoyable and meaningful. Many scholars have offered a definition of games that sketches their controlled, rule-based nature and therefore the edges of counterplay. Bernard Suits’ attempt in The Grasshopper, Games, Life and Utopia (1978, 41) is, for me, one of the most useful for approaching counterplay:

To play a game is to attempt to achieve a specific state of affairs [prelusory goal], using only means permitted by rules [lusory means], where the rules prohibit use of more efficient in favour of less efficient means [constitutive rules], and where the rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity [lusory attitude].

(Suits 1978, 41)

The important elements are that game-play necessitates behaviour informed by the restricted means enabled by the rules, and this in turn is part of the “lusory attitude” of the player – the appropriately playful way of approaching a game. The lusory attitude is then the willingness to be restricted rules in order to play a game. Without this attitude, play can still take place but not game-play, and therefore the experience is not fun or pleasurable in the ways originally set out by the designers of the game. Marc Prensky makes the link between a game and rules even more clear:

Rules are what differentiate games from other kinds of play. Probably the most basic definition of a game is that it is organized play, that is to say rule-based. If you don’t have rules you have free play, not a game.

(Prensky 2001)

Counterplay is not a game, is not game-play, but may still consist of a different, divergent mode of play. Within a non-digital game the lusory attitude is precisely that. Despite the infinite possibility of behaviour and activity as defined by the rules of physics, the game player chooses to adopt the inefficient means. However, in a video game some of this decision-making is taken from the player and resides in the affordances offered by the game simulation. The game is coded to require certain behaviours, will only respond to certain stimuli, and rewards certain activities over others. Therefore the game system enforces some degree of alignment with lusory activity irrespective of the players’ attitude. Instead of proactively choosing to adopt the rules, one could, as Espen Aarseth does, see the rigid code-based rules of a video game not as a platform and possibility but a reduction and imposition (2007):

By accepting to play, the player subjects herself to the rules and structures of the game and this defines the player: a person subjected to a rule-based system; no longer a complete, free subject with the power to decide what to do next.

(Aarseth 2007, 130)

This reminds us that playing games can therefore be regarded as only one, rather restrictive way of playing, and we can imagine a continuum of play, with regulated game-play on one end and chaotic, unbound free play on the other, archetypes Roger Caillois defined as “ludus” and “paidia” respectively (2001, 1961). For Caillois, paidia was a natural form of play, “common to diversion, turbulence, free improvisation, and carefree gaiety”, a pleasurable, spontaneous, and often physical activity (2001, 1961, 14). In contrast, ludus represents paidia bound by “arbitrary, imperative, and purposely tedious conventions” (Caillois 2001, 1961, 13). The rules may be arbitrary and tedious, but what they create is a set of pleasurable activities with purpose and meaning that can be communicated and thus become shared and collective. The benefit of becoming subservient to arbitrary and tedious rules is the pleasure and communality of game-play. The activity transforms into something more meaningful than the sum of its parts, and as anyone who plays games will attest, this can be euphoric. Play shifts from being individual, carefree turbulence into something regulated and formal. We become players, teams, and in doing so we can work together and compete in a collectively meaningful social activity.

While the written or coded rules of the game are fundamental in constituting the game, player, and game-play, these rules are subject to constant challenge, renegotiation, and redefinition. As Jesper Juul explains, “Gameplay is not a mirror of the rules of the game, but a consequence of the game rules and the dispositions of the game players” (Juul 2005, 88). Game-play is therefore the product of contestation. Within non-digital games the originator decides the rules that are then validated or altered when other players inhabit the game and its spaces. Within video games the same process occurs, but as De Paoli and Kerr point out (2010), alteration or inscription is restricted by the extent to which t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 What is Counterplay?
• 2 The Challenges of Studying Counterplay
• 3 Approaching Grief Play
• 4 Boosting and Glitching
• 5 Hardware-Hacking
• 6 Illicit Modding
• 7 Understanding Counterplay in Video Games
• Index