Psychomachia, or conflict of the soul, is the title of a Latin poem from the early fifth century, a sort of literary Super Smash Bros. of personified virtues and vices. I used the concept as a metaphor to explore the player experience of push your luck games like Can’t Stop, in order to discuss play at its ethical boundaries.
I was inspired to take this on by the call from The Well Played Journal, a forum for in-depth close readings of video games that parse out the various meanings to be found in the experience of playing a game. Last winter they announced a special issue exploring ethics and videogames and what it means for a game to have been “well played.” From successfully cheating, to winning at all costs, to playing casually, to being a good sport, playing well can seem to have different connotations. This special call asked us to consider an ethical instance to highlight issues about players and their values and who they are, or aspire to be as people.
I decided to dig deep into how, during the first year of the pandemic, I choose to aggressively play a digitized version of an old board game called Can’t Stop. I aimed to explore how I used it first to maintain engagement at work and then later to produce a state of psychomachia in order to work. These two uses combined to showcase examples of playing when one is only supposed to be working, and working when one is only supposed to be playing. My piece was designed to answer the following question: When the two are combined – the ludological and the non-ludological – in a manner not transparent to others, is this behavior unethical?
While I submitted the piece to be peer-reviewed by the Journal, I also submitted it to the Well Played lecture series at the returned Games, Learning, and Society conference. To my delighted, it was accepted by both!
My session presenting it at GLS this past June was deeply meaningful for me. I have been attending Well Played sessions at both GLS and Games For Changes for years, usually coming away transformed by experiencing new ways to approach game design, and learning about games that would go on to be played by both myself and my family. It was here, for example, that I first learned of The World of Goo, Gorogoa, and Thomas Was Alone – games which inspired and moved me. Now that I had a chance to present my own Well Played, it felt, in a sense, that I had leveled up. It was an honor.
While there is no video of the presentation, the deck can be viewed here.
And this month the Journal itself was published. The ETC Press is an academic and open-source publishing imprint that distributes its work in print, electronic and digital form, an “experiment and an evolution in publishing, bridging virtual and physical media to redefine the future of publication.” What does that mean for you? It means you can download the entire issue, including my chapter, for free, right now, from their web site. It also means, for under $10, you can order a print-on-demand version as well.
If you read the article, please let me know what it makes you think about regarding the various ways you play games.
Here is a sample, from the opening section:
Introduction
The following story should not be taken as fact. It comes from an undocumented, unverifiable memory nearly two decades old. Perhaps best to treat as allegory.
I am in New York City in a long, thin second floor office in Chinatown. The walls are decorated with the boxes of classic tabletop games, nostalgic inspiration for the young indie game designers around me. This is the office of GameLab, founded just a few years earlier by game designers Eric Zimmerman and Peter Seung-Taek Lee, in the years leading up to their release of both Diner Dash and Gamestar Mechanic. Eric is at the whiteboard, brainstorming early design concepts for what would eventually be launched as Ayiti: The Cost of Life, the first video game I ever produced (a worker-placement game about access to health care and education for a poor rural family in Haiti).
At the time, I worked at Global Kids, a youth development organization. Next to me is my supervisor, Evie, the Deputy Director, who came to youth work from a training in children’s theater. Across from us sits Cornelia Brunnner, Deputy Director of the Center for Children and Technology, the organization hired to embed some “stealth assessments” within the game, to learn if player attitudes changed after playing the game.
While Eric was at the board, and all eyes focused on his illustrations, one set was elsewhere, on their device, playing a game. In my memory Cornelia was looking at her iPhone, but that can’t be, as Ayiti was launched before Apple’s invention. But in any case, Cornelia was playing a mobile game throughout. She may have mentioned she was testing a game under development. The game designers had no problem with this, incorporating her feedback when the topic would shift to Cornelia’s area of expertise, but I could tell staff from Global Kids were put off. They wouldn’t say anything about it, at least not until we exited, but I could tell by their expressions this behavior was seen as less than professional.
We were supposed to all be working. Why did Cornelia think she could also be playing? Personally, I found it fascinating, like a child seeing an adult getting away with acting in a way they didn’t know was allowed.
This was the first time I recall seeing this occur, someone playing when they were at the same time working. A few years later, in 2008, I had the opportunity to do it myself. I was in Madison, Wisconsin at the Games, Learning and Society Conference. The GLS always offered an amazing arcade, full of fantastic games to be played between sessions. I was supervising one of my students who I had accompanied to present and who, now free, was spending hours effortlessly killing it at Dance Dance Revolution. She was done working. She was just playing.
I, however, was still at work. I finished my round of Guitar Hero, a game I’d just discovered, but now I was late to a session on my schedule. Too late, it turned out; the room was full. Luckily, headsets were available for those wishing to listen remotely. I donned a set and, listening to the lecture, wandered back into the arcade, watching others play Guitar Hero (even though I could not hear). A guitar was offered. At first I declined then, recalling Cornelia, thought: Why not? I removed one side of the headset, allowing the music from the game to fill that side of my ear while the lecture continued in my other.
Strumming to Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” while listening to a panel on games and learning, I was finally doing it: working and playing at the same time.
