Esports is my primary area of focus in gaming as it stands. It is something that is very interesting to me, as I love the competition aspect to it, and I would love to try and make a career out of it one day.

An interesting thing brought up in “Player power: Networked careers in esports” by Emma Witkowski and James Manning is the idea of coaches in esports. Early on in esports, there was very little coaching (if any at all). As time has gone on and coaching has become more of a recognized thing, however, it is increasingly clear just how important they are. If left alone, the machinations of a group of teenagers with impaired social skills can be disastrous. Most of the coaches that are around now were former players at one point. It must also be noted, however, that a lot of esports players were (especially in North America) incredibly resistant to coaches. “This guy is just some washed up pro. Why do I have to listen to him?” Is an overriding sentiment, the spectre of which looms over the entire topic of coaching in esports.

It was not that Valve ruled no coaches are allowed, just that they weren’t allowed to talk in-game anymore. Instead, there was a number of timeouts for both teams added, and the coaches were relegated to only talking in these 4 30 second intervals per map. In some cases, as referenced in the article, a player from the team would get kicked and the coach would jump in as an in-game leader. Some teams designed themselves entirely around coaches being able to talk mid-round, and when that was taken away, certain teams were screwed over badly.

This also ties rather deep into one of the core issues facing many esports today, which is the fact that the games get patched and change heavily. In a MOBA, a champion that you fall in love with can become completely invalidated and unviable just from a few lines of code changing a number or two. This is one of the factors that lead to esports players having rather short career lengths, especially compared to that of traditional sports.  The example they use in CS:GO, such as small changes to bomb sites, can dramatically affect a players career. If you are an amazing sniper and then the sniper gets nerfed to to the point it is unviable; you could be screwed out of a job.

On one hand, I can see how its important to keep updating the game as it keeps it fresh for the more casual players, which brings in revenue and, supposedly, viewership. On the other hand, it can also be incredibly awkward to come back to a game after a few years of not playing it. I recently came back to Dota 2 for the first time since 2016, and the game has been terraformed into something that barely resembles the game I remember, and I’ve had to spend time learning a lot of it all over again.

First Person Shooters is what a majority of the games that I have played are, especially in recent years (my time spamming Brood War is gone). I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the culture surrounding this genre, as I dive deeper and deeper into the world of esports, primarily Counter-Strike.

Firstly, I feel as if the FPS genre is, broadly speaking, the genre with the most elitists. The people who think that their games are the hardest, and therefore they are the most skilled gamers, and that translates in their mind to them having the right to look down on others. This is a genre that is often associated with being skillful and expressing dominance over your opponents, and that type of game attracts a specific type of personality. One of the most common reason people who don’t play FPS gives to me as to why that is the case is because “the game is hard” and/or “I suck at it and can’t aim.”  Even for the people who don’t play the games in a serious or competitive manner, the aspect of skill is still the dominant conversation. This, I think, speaks to the culture developed around FPS games more than anything else listed here.

The second thing worth mentioning is that, as it is referenced in the article “Examination of the Relationship between gender, performance, and enjoyment of a first-person shooter game” by Toby Hopp and Jolene Fisher, FPS games are often a male dominated space, both to play and spectate. I wasn’t able to find a source for this, but I recall once seeing a statistic for CS:GO tournaments throughout 2018 and the male:female viewership ratio was something along the lines of 94:6. Interestingly, this article concluded that the female players often associated their skill level with their enjoyment more than the males playing did. This is something that, on face value, I assumed would be the opposite. In hindsight, however, the reasoning makes sense. The article states “We predicted that women’s game enjoyment would rest, In large part, on their ability to positively violate stereotype-motivated expectancies associated with FPS games by performing at a high level.” As to what any of this means, I am honestly unsure, as there are a variety of cultural factors at play here. It makes sense, however, that people get enjoyment out of breaking the expectations that people set for them. Breaking the stereotype of “female gamers suck” seems to be a logical thing to attach enjoyment onto.

Final thing I would like to say on this is the fact that, even now, when I show FPS players games like StarCraft, World of Warcraft, or even League of Legends, they often fail to understand the aspects that make it skillful. The sentiment is usually something along the lines of “You’re just watching little dudes shoot at each other…”. The skill behind other types of games often, I find, does not translate well to FPS player’s minds.

I have a lot of criticisms to direct towards Riot Games, for a myriad of reasons. I also used to spend far too much time playing League of Legends (breaching past 2k hours in about 2 years, off and on) and have been following the release of Valorant closely. I have, and continue to be, rather impressed with the systems Riot has implemented in order to stop rampant harassment.

The article “How League of Legends could make the internet a better place” is one with a title that is perhaps too ambitious, which bothers me slightly, but the sentiment is understood. This piece even concedes that a vast majority of online harassment comes from people who are just having a bad day. I would argue it is fundamentally immoral to punish people who rarely lash out in the same way as those who do it all the time. We must not forget nuance, lest we amplify the problem.

First, Riot’s honor system is a good idea. You identify rewards that players want, gatekeep it behind a system that rewards good in-game behavior, profit. It is extraordinarily simple, and yet effective. It also serves as a bit of a social stigma. When you click on someone’s profile and see honor level 0, that serves as a black mark in the eyes of the community. People always fear rejection and being judged, and putting it on their public profile is a good way to tap into that fear. Fear sometimes works better than punishment.

There is no perfect solution to stopping people from harassing others online. To imply that you had a perfect solution to stop all of it would be incredibly bold.  You will not be able to stop a person who is generally fine from lashing out online after having a bad day.

Also, more broadly speaking, I am not a fan of banning accounts for typing in chat. I much more ascribe to chat restrictions and removing ability to type or use voice chat than I am to ban accounts. I think account bans should only be held for people who use cheats, who trade/sell accounts, and who are caught boosting (paying someone to raise your rank).

Harassment in chat and voice is one of the reasons most often cited by people who don’t play  online games as to why that is. I love some of these games, and wish more people would be willing to get in there, and this is just one stupid and unnecessary barrier that is stopping this from happening. I find these games beautiful, and I hope we one day get to a state where these issues are managed, but it is a slow process and it seems unlikely to be fixed anytime soon.

The idea of user-generated content has always been something that fasincated me in gaming. Whether it be mods like Counter-Strike and Dota, or open-ended games like Minecraft or Terraria. The ability for a game to sustain itself beyond what is made by the developer is very interesting. Sometimes it may even lead to an entire new genre being developed, such as with MOBA’s with Dota and autobattlers with Auto Chess.

One of the ideas that James Newman harps on about in his HTPVG chapter “Minecraft: User Generated Content” is how difficult it is to identify exactly what Minecraft is because of how many different forms it takes. Between the game itself having dramatically different games in Creative and Survival, there is also all the fan-made game modes that are included. When someone says, “I play Minecraft,” there are so many different styles and different things that it means that it’s very hard to define it. I, for example, almost entirely play the game (back when I played it consistently) in creative, except for the few times I had played in a private survival server with friends.

This is one of the most fascinating aspects of multiplayer gaming in general. While the communities can be harsh, unwelcoming, and perhaps even gatekeeping, there is something beautiful about it as well. The fact that fans themselves are able to come up with new things to give old games multiple new leases on life over the years is incredible. I’ve always believed that the best games are the ones that are able to sustain themselves over a long period of time purely due to the fanbases love of the game.  All of this is amplified further by the addition of things such as opening the source code for modding (credit to John Carmack for being the main pioneer of this idea), and this leads to games often becoming sustainable for far longer than we have seen in the past. Some modern multiplayer games, such as Activision Blizzard’s Overwatch, even opened up a mode where you could modify server settings and mess with physics and the like just for people to try and create their own game modes within the existing engine.

Newman also invokes the concept of watching “Let’s Players” playing game modes that they either create themselves, or are sent in by fans. This is a brilliant way to increase “shelf life (a metaphorical term in this digital age)”. It increases the longevity of the game even further, since if a certain content creator gets popular enough, then that can lead to fans of them wanting to play the mods that the creator is playing, and it theoretically creates a self-sustaining circle (which will, of course, inevitably end at some point).

I love the topic of modding in games, especially since the games most important to me were originally mods themselves.

Newman, James. “Minecraft: User-Generated Content.” How to Play Video Games, by Matthew Thomas Payne and Nina Huntemann, New York University Press, 2019, pp. 277–284.

As someone who is heavily invested in the competitive side of gaming and esports, I have always struggled to reconcile the views I had on “casual” vs “hardcore” games.

Generally, I consider games to fall into one of these categories based on their skill ceiling. Therefore, I would have games like Quake and StarCraft (which are famously brutally difficult) as being the absolute peak of “hardcore” gaming, with other games. On the other hand, games like the newly released Animal Crossing barely have any “skill” requirement attached to them whatsoever. It is merely (in this context; not saying it’s a bad game) a chill game to be played for fun where you can move at your own pace.

One has to accept that different people play games for different purposes. For some (such as players of the aforementioned Quake and StarCraft), the goal is mastery. They see an impossible ceiling when they see players like Anton “Cooller” Singov and Lee “Flash” Young Ho and spend time trying to reach that absurd height of perfection. There is also the kind of person like my mother, whose only dabbles into gaming is occasionally playing puzzle/point-and-click adventure games on her phone and laptop. There is nothing wrong with either of these groups of people. Both are valid and have their own strengths, weaknesses, and reasons for playing their own way. To me, the problem arises when the two clash together. It’s extremely rare for a game to be successful at capturing both audiences, and when companies try they ends up with neither. Also, I think it’s fair to assume those two groups fundamentally fall into different personality types and character traits. The issue there is that there will always be some sort of a disconnect. The guy who only occasionally plays Angry Birds on his phone won’t understand his friend who spends 6 hours on their free days grinding deathmatch to work on their aim.

The latter of those groups is what is focused on in the article we read in class, titled “Social networks, casual games and mobile devices.” In it, Wilson and Leaver set the premise that the number of ways games can be played has increased dramatically over the years, and as a result, more people have different ways of playing games. From this, it logically follows that people will play games, and that leads to an increased volume of “casual” gamers.  Of course, as more people enter into the space, there are always going to be people who want different things out of it, which leads to the more elitist types of personalities trying to push people out who don’t fit their vision of what their perfect gaming landscape is. What’s confusing about this to me is why people are, in general, so obsessed with the way other people play games. I’ve lost contact with some people over the years over the fundamental philosophical differences we reached, and none of us hold much of a grudge against each other.

We also talked more specifically about Pokemon Go and how that was considered as the ultimate pinnacle of casual games, yet it was (and still is) one of the most popular games on the planet. I remember having 50 year old teachers at my High School who would pull out their phone and hunt pokemon while we were doing an assignment. It was surreal.

In order for gaming to evolve, one must accept that concessions are going to be made on both sides. There are plenty of different types of games, and not every game is going to be for everyone; and that’s perfectly fine.

The only “walking simulator” I had played and liked before Gone Home for this class was What Remains of Edith Finch (which was phenomenal). It was always hard for that genre to impress me, and Mrs. Finch was the first to show me that the storytelling potential of this genre was immense. At first, Gone Home did not impress me. I felt like it was thoroughly average and didn’t give it much more thought. Then I read this article, titled On Gone Home by Merrit Kopas. It was interesting to see such a different perspective on the game and it brought light to certain things that I was ignorant about. Now I see this game in a slightly different manner. I still don’t personally love this game and don’t think I ever will, since the content in it is something that I simply do not connect with. However, I now recognize just how important this is to people who relate with these issues. To me, Gone Home was just an average story about adolescence and coming of age at first. To the people that felt connected to it, however, it was something far greater than I could understand.

Even with this, the one part of Gone Home that I was able to relate to was the nostalgia and a desire to go back to the past. This part of the game is undeniably brilliant. You play as an older college student who is returning to home from her studies. While wandering around the house, you see all these things reminiscent of a person growing up. It creates a sense of longing. For both innocence and the past. To see someone catalog their experiences with their first love, writing their own stupid short stories, making their own awful grunge knock off music, etc.. Despite the rather adolescent themes present in the game, it does feel like a game that is made moreso for people in their 20’s. It seems like it is meant to be a flashback for these people who are older in their age. Looking at two people who grew up in the same household through at two different points in time.

This relates to the paragraph at the end of the article. “I don’t want to be Katie anymore. I want to be Sam. I want to be present in my youth.” I never realized exactly how much my childhood represented until I looked back one day and realized it was suddenly over. No more sitting around for 8 hours a day playing World of Warcraft or League of Legends. I just woke up one day to find that I had changed, and the things I had wanted before weren’t working for me anymore. I still find pieces of my past, such as an old journal I would write random stuff in, around the house from time to time when cleaning up. That was the feeling Gone Home invoked for me.

I really don’t have a specific thing to point out with this. It’s just some random thoughts I threw down.

The Entire concept that Chess talks about with putting games into the categories of “player one” and “player two” games is a foreign one to me. I had always put games into categories on whether they were “hardcore” or “casual,” two admittedly loaded terms.

The game I found myself thinking about most in regard to Player One/Player Two is League of Legends. The game has managed to capture an audience broader than any other competitive multiplayer game, with a significant gap between it and number 2 (which is currently, at least for the PC market, CS:GO). Therefore, one must conclude that Riot has done a good job with bringing in the more casual players (again, not trying to use “casual” in a demeaning manner). It’s easier to run on low-end PC’s and Laptops than most other, the game has a welcoming and colorful visual style, and admittedly good marketing. It has a bunch of different characters who all fulfill their own roles. All the while, however, Riot promotes their esports scene in an attempt to get people to keep playing and try to improve.

So, which category does it fall under? You could argue player one since it is a competitive game with a large skill gap, but then player two because it does a good job at inclusion and bringing in new players. This raises the question to me of whether a game can be meant for both “Player One” and “Player Two.” It’s a commonly accepted marketing strategy to find a specific target audience for your game. If you find yourself trying to bridge the gap between two completely different demographics, often you’ll find neither demographic feeling just right, and end up having no audience. But League of Legends seems to have tapped into something rather unique there in that it appeals, at least to some extent, to both demographics. One can easily argue, as I would, that the game appeals moreso to the more casual side of things (especially when put in comparison to other similar games such as Starcraft II and Dota 2) but the point still stands that it has attracted. If we were to use the 10 different categories that are outlined by Chess (which are, to refresh peoples memories, Thematic, Collaborative, Time positive, Low risk, creative expression, lush aesthetics, nonsexualized, avatar selection, low violence and low harassment), I would firmly put League of Legends into Low Risk (if you lose a game you just play another), Time Positive (matches are incredibly short for multiplayer games), Collaborative (5v5), and Lush aesthetics. There is also a possibility you can put it into low violence, as it is all cartoon graphics and there is very little blood, with no gore to be seen.

Nintendo’s Super Smash Bros (particularly the newer entries, as Melee tends to be incredibly unforgiving to beginners) is another game that has done this successfully.

If a game were to hypothetically fall into both Player One and Two categories at the same time, then what would that mean for it? Is it possible, even?

Nostalgia is a powerful thing in entertainment. It’s easy to get people to buy “remasters” of old games and make them pay for it all over again.  It is rare to see remasters done with any kind of polish, and they are often simply ported to and slapped onto a modern console rather than the love letter they should be treated as. Separate from remasters, however, there are also entirely new games coming out with an old style.

Shovel Knight is, as pointed out by John Vanderhoef in the HTPVG chapter “Shovel Knight: Nostalgia” one of many games in a recent trend of intentionally using the older style graphics in an attempt to bring back some of that feel of the older games. These are interesting because they seem to thrive almost entirely on nostalgia. Not to say the games are poorly made, but they

I think of the Mega Man series. The first 6 games are all on the NES, and as thus they use the 8-bit engine that the NES is known for. In the transitions to Mega Man 7 and 8, which used the engines of the SNES and Saturn/PS1 respectively, something didn’t translate quite righ. The games felt slower, clunkier and less fluid. So, in 2008, Capcom had the idea to make Mega Man 9, and bring back the old 8-bit feel of the games. It was even marketed primarily towards the Nintendo Wii, a system where you could use the controller on its side to emulate an NES Controller. It was the perfect storm for a nostalgia trip.

And it worked. The game did very well, ended up being released on multiple systems (PSN, XBLA and Wii Shop) and single handedly returned interest to the Mega Man series. Sales of the older games on the Virtual Console even improved noticeably in the weeks following 9’s release. This also led to the release of Mega Man 10, which also had the same 8-bit style.

But eventually the nostalgia wasn’t working anymore.

For Mega Man 11, the developers would return to a more modern engine and graphical style. The implications of this decision are what is most interesting to me. Of course, it makes sense for them to return back to the 8-bit style for 9 & 10; what was going on before simply wasn’t working. 11, however, is seen simultaneously as a step forward and backwards. Forward in the sense that it is yet another attempt to push the series into modern times, but backwards in that it seemed to be the opposite of what the fans wanted.

Restorative Nostalgia was what ruled the fate of the Mega Man franchise. The series developers constantly fought between wanting to move forward and do new things and the wishes of the fans. The series ended up hitting a stalemate, and other than the recent releases of collections of the older titles, it is looking rather unlikely for a future for the Mega Man series.

Sean Cheney

3/8/2020

One of the topics that we talked about this week in class (Primarily on Tuedsay) is that of platform, through the lens of the How to Play Video Games chapter titled “Pele’s Soccer: Platform” by Ian Bogost. In this chapter, it talked about the Atari 2600 game “Pele’s Soccer,” which is described as being “a terrible game.” However, what makes it interesting is the following quote:

“Understanding something about the material constraints of the Atari suddenly makes Pele’s Soccer more comprehensible, not to mention intriguing. It’s not so much a terrible rendition of soccer, as it is a unique and curious implementation of soccer on a piece of equipment that wasn’t intended to make soccer possible in the first place (HTPVG 266).” This was the paragraph that intrigued me the most.

Pele’s Soccer is still a bad game (according to Bogost, at the very least) but it derives value in a different way. It derives value from the fact that it dared to attempt to translate a game as complex as soccer into a video game system that had 128 bytes of RAM and used purple squares to represent people. If you view it from that perspective then Pele’s Soccer can be considered, at the very least, a meaningful attempt at something greater.

I personally find it obnoxious when people try to make video games into something they’re not. Complaining about a sports video game for not being a sport seems very contrived. It is not a direct representation of that sport, nor is it intended to be. I see this as being in the same vein as complaining that Counter-Strike or Call of Duty doesn’t have realistic shooting. I fail to see what the point is. No, it doesn’t have realistic shooting, but it’s not supposed to and to suggest it should entirely misses the point. What makes these games fun in the first place is that they aren’t realistic. Nobody would want to play a shooter game where you sit in one spot waiting for 10 hours for a target to appear.

Another interesting concept that was brought up in class was the culture that exists surrounding different game platforms. Specifically in class we focused on PC Gaming and the elitist culture that has developed around it. I am primarily a PC Gamer and will tend to gravitate towards getting something (especially online games) on PC over consoles if there is a choice. Of course, for exclusive games I still have a PS4 and Nintendo Switch (and many older Nintendo consoles). However, if given the choice, PC is by far the preference.

The class got me to thinking about why that was. I ended up finding myself reaching three reasons. The first was because at a base level, it was where all of my friends were. Everyone was playing League of Legends and World of Warcraft when I was younger and I wasn’t able to play with them on my terrible laptop. This led to the purchase of my first PC. The second reason was that I genuinely found myself preferring PC play to console.

I myself have fallen into some of the traps of #PCMasterRace (I’ll even jokingly use the hashtag in attempts to make fun of friends). I think it’s completely fine to have a preference, and even to have the opinion that one thing is “objectively” superior to another. It’s even ok to make jokes (within your specific friends boundaries) about things along those lines. However, preference quickly devolves into superiority and elitism.

It is well known and commonly accepted that gaming is historically a predominantly male pastime. It can be stated with a degree of accuracy that early games mostly fulfilled the male fantasy (not that there is anything inherently wrong with this; to be clear). Super Mario Bros. is a classic tale of saving the girl, while early multiplayer games like Quake and Counter-Strike scratched the itch of totally dominating the opposition.

The case of The Last of Us (as presented in Murray’s chapter in How to Play Video Games, titled “The Last of Us: Masculinity) that is brought up is interesting because it subverts a lot of the masculinity tropes while adhering to some of them itself. For example, Joel is presented not only as a strong, aggressive, dominating figure; but he is also shown to be losing his touch as he is aging, as Ellie starts to fulfill more of a self-sufficient role as the game progresses. There is also an issue of the role that Masculinity fulfills in the overall narrative of The Last of Us. As the game goes on and Ellie becomes more self-dependent (with that storyline reaching its peak during the David section of the game, without giving spoilers), Joel’s role starts to become more and more diminished. However, right at the end of the game, the power balance ends up shifting right back into Joel, as he makes a decision to break Ellie out of the hospital, in a selfish and desperate attempt to hold onto the connection that the two of them have formed. Right as it seems like Ellie is starting to take control, Joel takes the reigns over Ellie’s life again. Also worth noting that in the trailer for The Last of Us, Ellie has grown into a full adult and it seems as if she is going to be the one taking over, with her being shown as the playable protagonist in the sequel.

As mentioned in the article written by our professor, Cody Mejeur, in collaboration with Amanda Cote, Bladezz in the Netflix series The Guild goes through a series of emasculating moments. However, as mentioned in the article, he is able to empower himself through the world of gaming. This goes to show that gaming can serve as a form of strengthening masculinity. The fact that you are completely separate entirely from your real person (a vast majority of gamers don’t even use their real names online; even at the professional level). The power of an identity can be a strong thing, creating two separate people (the in-person you and the online you) who come together to form a single, sharpened identity.

This, to me, is a large part of the power of online gaming (which is my primary emphasis). It allows you to empower yourself in a way that you can’t in the real world. Hopping into a server and showing that you’re the best in that server is a feeling that only gaming can provide, and there is absolutely a certain power in that.

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