Rewards, pacing, and dopamine

Rewards and pacing

There is something mysterious when people read through 1000 pages of Cryptonomicon, a 1999 novel from Stephenson, or through the thousands of pages of Martin's A song of ice and fire. What keeps people reading? Here are some rewards that both authors use throughout their books:

Reward	Pacing	Description
Character progression	Randomly (but fits the story)	The protagonist learns new skills, grows up, meets love, learns a lesson of life, or gets rich. We care about this character's well-being because we empathize.
Action and passion	Every 3-10 pages	When stuck in difficult situations, the reader knows that the hero can not die, so she asks herself: how is the hero going to get out of this alive? (Except sometimes, main characters actually die, leaving us in shock). The same applies for romantic scenes, where we wonder not if, but how it's going to work out between two characters.
Story progression	Every 10-30 pages	Right from the start, the authors put under the reader's nose a bunch of questions: what is happening, why is this guy so mysterious, and so on. The reader wants to know the answers, so she keeps reading until answers are provided, along with new mysteries to figure out.

Looking at blockbuster action movies such as The Bourne Ultimatum, the same kind of pacing emerges: action scenes are followed by the protagonist learning about his past. Then the plot moves on, the character meets new people, finds himself new tasks to do, and back to action scenes.

These rewards and pacing also echo those found in games and mentioned in a class on game balance from Ian Schreiber: gains in character power, discovery of new areas, and progression of the story are rewards to be used at irregular intervals to keep the player engaged. So reading books, watching movies, and playing games seem to provide similar rewards.

Dopamine

Let's dig down to the physiological level of rewards. Most of the articles dealing with the physiological response of gaming revolve around addiction. For instance, a 2012 NY Times article reports that Zynga helps addict millions of people to dopamine, a neurochemical that has been shown to be released by pleasurable activities, including video game playing, but also is understood to play a major role in the cycle of addiction.. To that, the Zynga co-founder replies: Given that we're human, we already want dopamine. And that does not calm things down. So let's look at a less controversial topic: the physiological response of reading. This is not a survey of the field, but rather some picks from a few Google searches - nothing very serious.

First, according to Farland, a current writer, the dramatic structure of stories (exposition - action - climax - denouement) matches the bio-feedback of hormones such as dopamine, adrenaline, and cortisol. He says: As a person "hunts" for clues, or for a way out of a problem, the brain rewards the person by releasing dopamine as a reward. [...] When you reach the climax of the novel, [...] you reach the climax of your emotional exercise. When the story ends [...] your stress is released. The adrenaline and cortisol stop flowing.

As notes from a psychology class on stress can tell us, cortisol is the key hormone of stress. Adrenaline is the hormone that tells our body to be alert. And finally, dopamine is in charge of rewarding our brain.

So what happens when we start reading? Some have guessed that we are having pleasure because reading is a tough task, and our brain rewards us for completing such a hard task. This seems confirmed by a 2001 study who showed that transitioning from rest to reading produces the same increase in dopamine concentration as transitioning from rest to memory-intensive tasks (something cognitively demanding). Although, a 2000 study seems to reject this hypothesis. Something that might be worth investing is whether reading a microwave-oven manual generates as much dopamine as reading an exciting short story where the action starts right from the start.

It may actually be more complicated: the dopamine concentration could actually not indicate our pleasure, but our expectation of pleasure: dopamine motivates us, increasing our energy and drive and compelling us to engage in the pleasurable activity. If everything is as nice as the brain predicted, dopamine levels remain elevated. If things turn out even better than the brain hoped, dopamine levels are increased; we engage in the pleasurable activity even more vigorously. If, on the other hand, the activity is less pleasurable than we thought it would be, dopamine levels plummet.

Back to games

So, what can we conclude about games? First, much like movies and books, reward us by generating dopamine when we succeed at a difficult cognitive tasks such as a head-shot in an FPS, or a successful Chess trap. That is pretty close to fiero, and in fact, Bateman already suggested in 2008 that fiero is a cocktail of epinephrine and dopamine. So, nothing brand new here.

Perhaps more interesting, long-term enjoyment seems to require the dopamine to yo-yo - which is bad. Let us assume that our brain produces dopamine by expecting a nice event. Then when our brain is done with those nice events, the dopamine level will decrease. That would be a horrible yo-yo if there were only one kind of event, but books, movies, and games, have at least three: action, story, and character events. So alternating events and interweaving them in such a way that our brain is always on the lookout may keep dopamine, and pleasure, at high levels instead of making it yo-yo.

There might be a few gotchas, though. First, the magnitude and the lifespan of the dopamine burst depends on a lot factors. Grinding monsters for a drop is only pleasurable so long as the brain is expecting that item to drop. After a couple days, the dopamine is all gone, and it's just boring. Some studies should investigate the average magnitude of an "achievement unlocked!", or the lifespan of a boss kill or a level up.

Second, dopamine bursts may not stack. The brain may be too busy expecting a story progression event that it may ignore, or even worse, be displeased, by a character progression event: it was not expecting it! This limitation does not seem cognitive, but rather emotional, so maybe people with higher EI could stack expectations and dopamine bursts more easily than indifferent people who say "it's just a game"?

Third, and to finish as we started, with books: Stephenson and Martin alternate their character viewpoints chapter after chapter, possibly to keep the reader's attention. By the way, they rarely handle more than 7 characters at the same time, since 7 is a magic cognitive number. These changes in views often cut short the action, so the reader may get frustrated, or even vexed for being tricked to continue reading by the exact same three mechanisms every chapter. It is interesting to know why people keep reading those long books, but that last reason is exactly why I stopped.

Freakonomics - Levitt 2006

Freakonomics, Levitt and Dubner, 2006

• Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life
• Conventional wisdon is often wrong
• Experts use their own informational advantage to server their own agenda
• Knowing wht to measure and how simplifies a complicated world

Incentives/deterrents can be economic, moral (I feel good about it) and social (pressure from society, shame). Experiment: The first rule was "Parents must pick up their kids before 5pm". When this rule was in place, only a few parents picked up their kids late. When changing the rule to "Parents who pick up their kids late are charged $3", many more parents picked up their kids late. Parents who used to feel morally responsible could now buy off their guilt. And the low fine signaled that it was no big deal to pick up your kids late. In the same "vein" of examples, paying people $5 to give blood results in less donors. Replacing the moral incentive by an economic one changed the way they saw the situation: while saving lives could justify the hassle/pain, $5 is not enough. People also cheat to abuse the incentive and get more for less. Cheating is more likely to happen for clear outcomes (e.g. sports or politics) than if the benefit or its recipient are not obvious.

Asymmetric information: people with exclusive info can cause fear (e.g. the USA don't know when terrorists are going to attack) and respect/gratitude (e.g. experts such as realtor agents know how much your house is worth on the market, or doctor can tell what disease you have). Internet is decreasing the information asymmetry. Experts need journalists to spread their opinion, but journalists need experts to write about new interesting/provocative topics.

What people say is not what people do. Examples: profiles on dating websites (most people rate their look "above average"), or voting for extreme right (people are ashamed?).

Four factors determine wage: specialized skill, unpleasantness, demand for the job, and supply of workers. That's why prostitutes earn more than architects per hour.

Risk: We suck at assessing risk: we measure it (implicitly) as risk = hazard + fear, while it should only be risk = hazard. When fear > hazard, we over-react. Hence the most hazardous risks are not always the scariest. Risks we don't have control over are scarier, while familiarity decreases fear. [This echoes the class on stress] Examples: heart attacks cause more deaths than terrorist attacks, yet people still eat fast-food. People fear more plane accidents than car accidents, even though they happen as often per hour spent in them.

[Except the first 2 chapters, I found this book focused too much on poor Blacks vs rich Whites.]

What MEUPORG can teach us

Yann Leroux wrote on March 27th a blog article entitled Ce que MEUPORG nous enseigne (what MEUPORG can teach us). It is an account of what happened on the Internet after a French TV journalist tried to explain what MMORPGs were, and somehow failed. Since the article is in French, here is a (rough) translation.

The MEUPORG story is very insightful. There is not only in it about how video games are mistreated in our society. There is also about how gamers are organized today and how a TV channel reacted to a crisis that happened on the Internet. The beginning of the story is quite ordinary:

1. Journalist Nathanael de Rincquesen has one minute to summarize a topic in Télé Matin. In one single minute, he can but only rush through it.
2. He relies on a news article from a French newspaper - Libération - and copying-and-pasting does not help thinking.
3. He stumbles upon an acronym.
4. William Leymergie, the host of the morning TV program, interrupts him mischievously.
5. The journalist continues in his error.

Elements of popular imagination have always been attacked by the media. Then, those media become the elite's spokesperson. But the 21st century has something different; opinions are no more confined in pubs or workshops. The Internet is one of the places where they are created, transmitted and spread. We have now entered an era of commentary economics. It can be rejoicing or deplorable, but it is a fact that should be taken into account. Unlike the past century, the Internet offers a place where opinions can sprout nearly immediately. Some people in the audience are next to their laptop or their smart phone. They are looking for interactivity and will look for online places where they can express what they want to say.

The birth of a meme

A first video is posted on Youtube, it is soberly titled France 2 - télématin - MMORPG . Among others, Korben relays it. The video is seen and commented by a considerable number of people. Starting with this first video, the MEUPORG meme is born. Images, websites, tee-shirts or Facebook fan groups, all relay the journalist's error. The first Youtube video is edited and remixed.

The traditional media have not yet seized the strength of this movement. France Télévision stood silent on Twitter. Journalist de Rincquesen has not yet realized his name is now attached to MEUPORG. The program forum thread is burning and the journalist's Facebook page is filled with ironical comments. Certainly, one might bet this buzz is nothing more than another flash in the pan which the Internet is used to. However, the movement is much deeper. It is not a riot, it is a revolution sign. For those who would not take seriously the puerile lol machine, maybe the Union pour un Meuporg Populaire (translates as Union for a Popular Meuporg, a parody of the UMP French political party name) will provide fuel for thoughts. Gamers are not teenagers entrenched in their bedrooms and isolated from the outside world. Most of them are young adults, aware of what happens in their society. And they know how to make themselves heard.

The media side

The TV channel is living what Mc Luhan coined as the medium is the message: the shockwave has hit it so strongly that it is as if it were anesthetized. France 2 strikes one as being unable to take measures and handle the crisis. However, no doubt about it: crises like this one will multiply and grow in intensity. They do not only concern TV channels. Currently, Nestlé is the target of such an attack on Facebook. Online places are places not only to gather a passive audience but also to question and protest. Some end up finding themselves among wolves when they thought they could shear sheep. Internet will be one of the places where our societies' malaise will seep out.

Every morning, 1.4 million people in average watch Télé Matin. That means the first video posted on Youtube has generated 54% (760.000 views as of August 2010) of their audience. Obviously, this video was not watched 760.000 times in one day - but the 1.4 million do watch the program every day. Anyway, such an increase in the awareness of the TV program or channel among Internet inhabitants would be most welcome if it were positively conveyed. Unfortunately, it is more about destroying the image of the journalist, the TV program, the TV channel and mainstream media in general. The community managers of the TV channel would be expected to intervene and help get out of the crisis. Some are missing the opportunity to show how useful they can be in such undesirable times.

Comparing video games to films - 3/4

You can read the first, second, third and fourth parts of this article.

Findings

During my research on the respective histories of early Gothic horror movies and early video games, I have noted several similarities and differences between the two media.

The earliest film of Human history was Roundhay Garden Scene in 1888. The earliest video game was the Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device in 1947. Both have the same nanoscopic size in today's cultural literacy: aside from field experts or historians, no one knows about them. In 1902, ie 14 years after the first movie, Le Voyage dans la Lune was realized by Méliès. The movie stays notable and even praised in our modern society. More than a century after its release, Ebert even wrote the movie had artistry and imagination. Surprisingly, the video game released fourteen year after the first video game was ... Spacewar!. Some mention modern video games owe a lot to Spacewar!.

However, Steve Russell is much less famous than Georges Méliès. Ebert considers games are not art because Video games by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control. Could video games be more artistic if their authorial intentionality was stronger and more obvious? The Civilization series have not (yet) been considered artistic by Ebert, although the name of their designer, Sid Meier, is clearly associated to the title. The same way James Cameron (and not the actors) is mentioned on Avatar's poster.

The early video game industry seems to have been much more competitive and business-oriented than the film industry. For example, Atari and other companies were "inspired" by the Odissey to make their own home console. Hence in 1975, Magnavox started filling lawsuits against everyone. I do not think such a hard competition happened between early film makers.

Moreover, while the first movies were not much more than recorded theater plays, the first video games were geeky electronic hacks. Tennis for two had been created to attract people to the exposition. It seems many console companies jumped at the chance of copying Odissey just to make money. Moreover, computer game developers of the 1970's such as Don Daglow were just writing games for each other for fun. These approaches differed a lot from the clearly artistic approaches taken by the early movies of the 10's or 20's.

Video games are seeking legitimacy

In September 2008, Steve Gaynor, a game designer, formulated what legitimacy was: a broad cultural relevance to the lives of the general population. In other words, it is not exactly whether video games as a whole have an impact on society at large (financially and so forth) but whether content of the medium itself is relevant to, say, your grandmother. Did Battlezone or Centipede speak to her personal experience?. He gave another illustration when he mentioned that a senator villifying [sic] video games to get his name on people's lips means that the medium is divisive. It also means that the works themselves are completely irrelevant to the senator as pieces of entertainment or expression, or else he'd be enjoying and defending them.

Leigh Alexander asked in April 2009: aren't the cultural and practical differences between film and games so broad that it's useless to analogize? Later in November, she detailed her point: repeatedly raising Kane is amateurish and useless. It's self-defeating shorthand for what Bogost and Wasteland correctly identify as the real desire: legitimacy for games. Matthew Wasteland (a gamer/game critique) formulated the real issue behind the Citizen Kane effigy: people want games that will artistically legitimize them to everyone who doesn’t play them. Eric Swain paraphrased that the "Citizen Kane of games" buzz is about gamer's insecurities and wanting a title to point to that everyone [society] will recognize, though may not have played, as art like Citizen Kane. They [gamers] want that so they wont feel insecure when they talk about thier [sic] hobby. The whole question has nothing to do with intellectual stimulation.

Bogost argued that the artistry of a media can not be established as it used to be half a century ago: Legitimacy has become distributed, a mesh. Indeed, video games are not movies, and the social context has changed a lot between the establishment of film legitimacy and video games birth. With the recent social changes in mind, Lafarge gave in the second paragraph of WINSIDE OUT several areas of change that she thought made games metamorphosing into a richly expressive medium:

• the convergence of games with fiction and art
• shifts in representation and the deployment of information in games
• the assimilation of a filmic first-person point of view
• the growth of a culture of cheating and hacking
• rethinking of the win-lose dichotomy
• the development of immersive role-playing and emergence of cooperative relationships as central to game play

Read the fourth part.

Chatroulette and video-chat

It might be a bit too early to talk about Chatroulette as the website is still at the center of a lot of controversy, buzz and viral videos/phenomena. However, I think current Chatroulette issues can provide interesting insights about what to do or not to do in potential MMOG video-chat systems.

Chatroulette

You should try Chatroulette to make your own opinion. Danah Boyd explains that teens usually use Internet to connect with people they know, bu Chatroulette brings back the old randomness of the Internet when wandering anonymously in chat rooms was what kids did. She also adds that there are still a small percentage of folks out there looking for some amusement because they’re bored and they want to connect with randomness, folks who recognize the joy of meeting strangers in a safer space than most physical spaces where that’s possible. I realize that this creates the potential for seeing some pretty gross and/or problematic things and I certainly don’t want to dismiss that, but I’m pretty certain that teens are responding the same way that I’m responding – by clicking Next. Is that ideal? Probably not. For Yann Leroux, Chatroulette is the opposite of social networking: it is not at all building a social relationship, it is a social deconstruction. Indeed, even though people show their face, Chatroulette stays a very anonymous place. No doubt people like to scroll faces pressing f9. But Chatroulette also made me wonder how long is Internet going to stay in this moral panic state. Sarita Yardi explains that We’re still searching for the right balance between protecting our own privacy and being able to live out our social lives online without feeling that the rest of the world is out to get us. I feel like MMOG can be instrumental in setting up this balance.

But before talking about MMOG, it is worth looking at some recent uses of Chatroulette. Merton improvised piano pieces to the people he met on Chatroulette. The Merton viral video inspired other people such as Looking for Merton#1, or even Ben Folds who improvised on Chatroulette during a 2000-fan live improvisation concert. The Nurses even streamed their live concert on Chatroulette.

Video-chat in MMOG

Technically speaking, MMOG already feature voice-chat. It will not be long before video-chat becomes supported, or even the norm. A software could detect if a player is smiling at her/his webcam, and transmits this data to the game, making her/his avatar smile. Such software system could also transform "where players look in the screen" into "which direction the avatar is currently looking to". More realistic and more social. I am sure this is technically feasible and scalable: Chatroulette is a very simple Peer-to-Peer Flash website using RTMFP. AAA MMOG could include this same Peer-to-Peer system in their client code. It would be surprising that CCP developers could include an in-game browser to EVE Online, while peer-to-peer-based webcam discussions could not be implemented between players.

Not a significant source of chat, from Virtual Shackles.

Socially speaking, I tend to follow Ami Bruckman: either teens over time will learn to be more careful with their personal information or we as a culture will learn to be more tolerant of what people do in their personal lives, especially as youth. In any of those cases, I think the magic circle will prevent MMOG from having video-chat channels spoiled like Chatroulette by exhibitionists, drunks or voyeurs: people come to play. Obviously, MMOG also have their stories, but way less than Chatroulette. While one may wonder what the norm is on Chatroulette, playing or chatting is definitely the norm in MMOG, not exhibitionism. Several reasons:

• Playing keeps one's hands busy (although some eat, but that is digressing)
• In-game, there is nexting is impossible. A bothering avatar stays where it is. One can choose to ignore someone else's utterances, but /ignore does not kick a player out of one's field of vision.
• Reporting is much more possible: in Chatroulette, exhibitionists go too fast for me to be able to report them. In MMOG, there is usually a minimum 5 to 10 seconds during which one can not disconnect one's avatar.
• And it's too much hassle to go through an application process and eventually pay $15 per month simply to show one's anatomy to the world.

At the moment, MMOG players, and most people in our society, are not really ready to let their webcam show their emotions or reactions, even if it is through an avatar. However, video-chat in MMOG means a lot of interesting challenges. Technically, this means improving/implementing in-game character facial expression, realistic or not, sensitive webcams, filters, etc. As for game design: Which member of the group is this NPC looking to? What is this dumb NPC trying to tell me in looking at this particular equipment piece of mine? Which zone of the map is my partner pointing at?

[Literature] Cyberpunk views of virtual worlds - Neuromancer and Snow Crash

I have read Neuromancer and Snow Crash in French, so I am not giving quotes from these books. However, I am giving quotes from Count Zero, the second book from the same trilogy as Neuromancer. As for Snow Crash, the quotes come from digitalspace.com (I did not check them, but I can remember having read many of them in French).

William Gibson wrote Neuromancer in 1984. Neuromancer is the first book of the Sprawl trilogy, the last book of this series was published in 1988. Gibson's official website mentions With Neuromancer, William Gibson introduced the world to cyberspace. The cyberspace (also called "matrix" in the books) in the Sprawl trilogy is not accessible to everyone: only cowboys jacking-in with electrodes on their skull are directly linked so intensely that sometimes the feedback ate into his [a protagonist's] nervous system (Count Zero, p21-22). The visions inside the cyberspace are complex geometric forms inside a three-dimensional space, with planes, rectangles, lines and layers of ice protecting multinational companies' systems from cowboy - hackers ride a deck to enter the cyberspace (Count Zero, p104-105).

Neal Stephenson wrote Snow Crash in 1992. In this novel, nearly everyone can log into the virtual world, called metaverse: dating teenagers, business men and hackers. he sees two young couples, probably using their parents' computers for a double date in the Metaverse. He is not seeing real people, of course. This is all a part of the moving illustration drawn by his computer. (Snowcrash, p35). The connection with the virtual world is less intrusive for the users because they only need to wear glasses to see what happens in it. What the virtual world contains is more a Second Life-like reproduction of a city with bars and houses than a geometrical representation of big companies' software systems. Hiro is approaching the Street. It is the Broadway, the Champs Elysees of the Metaverse. It is the brilliantly lit boulevard that can be seen, miniaturized and backward, reflected in the lenses of his goggles. But right now, millions of people are walking up and down it. (Snow Crash, p24). Moreover, there is room for UGC: Developers can build their own small streets feeding off of the main one. They can build buildings, parks, signs, as well as things that do not exist in Reality (Snow Crash, p24-25).

Conclusion

The earliest cyberpunk vision of cyberspace is dated from 1980's - the term cyberspace was first coined by Gibson. Only few people access the cyberspace to hack systems. It seems that in the 1990's, the metaverse has become a more public place following the same rules as reality (eg gravity). I have not yet read cyberpunk novels dealing with virtual worlds and published in the 2000's. However, movies like eXistenZ (1999), The Matrix (1999-2003), Avalon (2001) [see my post about some of the aspects these three movies share] or Paprika (2006) seem to have accepted that virtual worlds are accessible and comparable to the real world. Moreover, these movies have raised issues to the public: becoming locked/imprisoned inside virtual worlds, being able to make the distinction between real and virtual, or using the technology to achieve personal goals, whether morally good (helping clients solve their psychological problems) or bad (governing the world!).

Reactions to Moral Kombat - politicians, industry and academia

This post follows this first post and this second post. It is a bit long, so here is my
tl;dr: The Good (Henry), The Bad (attorney) and the Queen (industry) (and shake your head)

Movie premiere and Thompson-Lanning debate at VGXPO

The premiere of the movie happened at the Video Game Expo (VGXPO) in Philadelphia on November 3rd, 2007 (see page 12 of the press clippings). A panel was held shortly after the movie at VGXPO the same day: Jack Thompson was sitting to the left of moderator N’Gai Croal, with Lorne Lanning on the right (according to Gamelife). Maybe mentioning a little bit about Thompson and Lannings could be useful. Thompson is an attorney anti-violence in video games. He is supposed to be the "bad" guy in the story. His bodyguard first tells the audience that informed the crowd, in no uncertain terms, that he would not be putting up with any bullshit during this debate. Lannings is a game industry guy, so at VGXPO he was supposed to be the "good" guy. That is why some journalists suggested before the debate: we are about to witness a nightmare.

This event was largely covered by game journalists. In random order of popularity, Wired/Gamelife, thebbps.com, 1up.com and Joystick had journalists at the debate to take notes (they were first in the media line and then sitting together at the front where they chatted amiably). I think these 3 articles combined give a quite neutral and detailed report of the debate. qj.net refers to the article as a via Joystick so I guess no journalist from there was at the debate. Kotaku quotes some bits of page 12 of the press clippings, so I guess no one from Kotaku was there either. ripten.com fully quote Joystick for their coverage of the event. For the journalists who were there, they could only take notes as In the theater itself, no photography or filming is permitted, save the cameras already on tripods in front. [...] the panel's taping is planned as Moral Kombat's DVD bonus footage (source).

Gamepolitics.com collected some quotes from a post-debate interview of Lannings by gamesindustry.biz (second part of the interview). Gamepolitics.com also mentioned a motion filed to the Florida court by Thompson on November 5th, 2007. In this motion, Thompson who wanted to appear to the next Board of Governors' meeting put forward the fact that he went into the “lions’ den” in Pennsylvania. Thompson also wrote:

Because of the quality and coherence of my presentation, I was then asked by the GDC to reprise the Philadelphia debate, this time in February in San Francisco in a 5000 seat arena, as the keynote event.

There has been a big mess following this news: more than 500 comments such as:

• Well well, THompson overinflated his self importance again
• Allow me to offer you the first, "Heil Mein Furor," salute, JT. Heil Thompson!
• What would be nice is if [Thompson] was able to debate without taking cheap shots at people and making gamers out to be worse than paedophiles.
• I see the folly in debating Jack Thompson now. [...] So debating this man is not constructive; it just gives him a sense of position and authority to continue making the crazy claims once he's out of earshot of smart people.
• Dear Manta: First of all, stop being a coward and use a real name. (comment from Thompson)

But finally, the GDC committee, surprised by this news, denied that the Thompson-Lannings debate would happen again at GDC, as is reported in gamepolitics.com: It is, perhaps, unfortunate, but given today's controversy it looks like any potential debate involving Thompson and GDC is a dead issue. Thompson answered to the GDC committee that Since this is how the video game industry treats its critics, no wonder it has a public relations problem with parents. I share the conclusion of gamepolitics.com: In the end, one has to wonder exactly what Thompson hoped to accomplish here. Had the deal been finalized, the GDC event could have been fascinating for attendees and beneficial to Thompson in an image sense. Very little, if anything, was to be gained by adding the prospect of a GDC appearance to the U.S. District Court record, which publicly exposed it to media scrutiny.

Thompson and the video game community

The selfish, childish video game industry accepts no harness. Their freedom is pure license. They are about to pay a wicked price, and I aim to make sure they pay it.
-- Jack Thompson, at cbsnews.com in February 2005

Federal regulation of your industry is coming because you folks simply can’t figure out why parents don’t trust you. Fine. When the regulation comes, and it will, don’t blame me.
-- Jack Thompson in a letter to the GDC Committee, November 2007, retrieved from gamepolitics.com

Thompson has been keeping a certain level of permanent buzz in the video game community (industry and players) since at least 2005. He is one of the principal opponents of the game industry lobby group. In this lobby group is the Entertainment Consumer Association (ECA). One of the websites of the ECA is gamepolitics.com, which contains more than 300 posts in its "Jack Thompson" category (which started in September 2006). As a comparison, the Obama category of gamepolitics.com only contains less than 120 articles (since January 2008).

While Thompson's warhorse only is violent video-games and not video games in general, many among the video game community have been considering him as the main video games opponent. Gamepolitics.com writes: To be sure, GamePolitics wasn't the only game site in Thompson's crosshairs. He filed a lawsuit against Kotaku in 2007. He threatened My Extra Life over a Jack Thompson Photoshop contest. He tried to get the Seattle Police to bust Penny Arcade, and when he found out PA isn't actually in Seattle (doh!), he called the FBI, instead. Interestingly, he has become the man who united gamers to the same cause. According to gamepolitics.com Thompson definitely helped to rally gamers together, even if, by and large, they rallied to oppose him. Indeed some gamers tried to launch grou protests, such as the United Gamers Against Jack Thompson (i started this band to see how many people agree. and Slogan: HUNT HIM DOWN!!!) or Gamers Unite to Stop Jack Thompson (United like this, we can stop him.). Meanwhile, other very famous politicians in the US and in other countries have taken strong stances against violence in video games. Hilary Clinton protested against the GTA:SA Hot-Coffee mode, Barack Obama about kids playing GTA IV and Hugo Chavez government outlaw the sale of video games (reaction of a player from Venezuela at boingboing). But none of them has been rallying gamers as much as Thompson did.

The reactions of industry leaders to Thompson's attacks have been very different. Doug Lowenstein had chosen to ignore Thompson. Lowenstein was followed in 2005 by David Walsh who asked Thompson to stop using his or the group's name to give people the impression that the NIMF supports his efforts. Thompson answered about Walsh's decision: A child psychologist who would give a heads up to Doug Lowenstein in such a matter without confronting me directly man-to-man is a person who has lost his way. Others like Hal Halpin have decided in December 2007 to reply to Thompson's pikes, finding that Lowenstein's strategy did not work: Turns out that the “ignore him and he’ll go away” strategy backfired... [Thompson]... is intelligent, articulate, passionate, and camera-ready. [...] It’s time to fight back!. In September 2008, Lowenstein sent a letter to Kotaku in which he asked for Kotaku not to give Thompson a platform he might not have had for as long as he did. Lowenstein wrote that Kotaku can help set the tone for mainstream media coverage and if you validate extremists you give license to the less informed to follow your lead, ie Kotaku should ignore Thompson for a while. Gamepolitics.com (publication of the ECA which founder is Hal Haltin, Spencer Haltin's brother) strongly disagreed with Doug Lowenstein's position: by refusing to respond, Doug dropped the ball. Thompson, finding no resistance from the top of the video game industry, was empowered to push harder.

Academia

I could not find a lot of reactions from the academia about Moral Kombat: the only articles I found are from terranova and Henry Jenkins.

Terranova

Terra Nova actually mentions violence in video games a lot, but no coverage of Moral Kombat has been done. There was a shy attempt to mention Jack Thompson and game regulation policies in August 2005, and a joke about the ascendancy of Jack Thompson to Emperor in May 2006. Another note in December 2007 mentioning that Polemical rhetoric [...] taken too far, one diminishes one's credibility (Jack Thompson is a pro at this). The closest I could find to Moral Kombat was a report from Dan Hunter about the Canadian Red Cross asking video game developers to stop using their logo in games. In cause was the demonization of games and the whole "Jack Thompson and Hilary Clinton and Every Other Politician vs The Games Industry" Punch-and-Judy show, this quote being a link to a gamepolitics.com article. But this article was written in February 2006 ... So little about Thompson from terranova and nothing about Moral Kombat.

Jenkins

Henry Jenkins played himself in the movie so he surely has a reaction. Jenkins even reviewed the movie just after its premiere. The first article deals more with the content of the movie (ie violence in video games) but the second article praises the movie for its artistic innovations and creativity. The beggining of the first article is very straightforward: Spencer Halpin's Moral Kombat is perhaps the most important film ever made about video games and you should see it if you get a chance.

At the end of the first post, Jenkins wrote some quotes he found interesting from some participants. Put in a nutshell, some interviewees recognized there was violence in video games, others put forward that games are artistic, that parents should realize what games really are, and it was also mentioned that game designers are responsible for the content of the game. I already mentioned these points in this post.

Jenkins also explains that the media tend to polarize the debate into 2 clans while the contrast is more gray/grey. When I start to describe the film, most people want to know "which side" it takes. I see this as both a reflection of how polarized the debate often becomes and also how accustomed we have become in thinking about documentaries as a form of public advocacy. Moreover, the fact that longtime video game critic and trial lawyer Jack Thompson appeared to be a central focus poured kerosene on the flames. Having watched the trailer through a gamer and somewhat academic eye, David Sutherland commented that the movie smacks of sensationalized tactics often employed in arguments against video games. This could explain the hostile reactions of players to the trailer: death threats thrown to Spencer Haltin and people in the game community who wanted to censor [Spencer Haltin's] work because of what they perceived as its pro-censorship bias. But these reactions only followed the trailer put on Youtube, and Jenkins points out: don't judge this film by its preview because the preview presents such an unbalanced perspective on the issues. Finally, the researcher underlines that The absence of game designers in public discussions of game violence allows stereotypes about who they are and what they think to gain traction. One of the reasons why Jenkins paeticularly liked the movie is because game designers (such as Lannings or McGee) appeared in this movie and talked about their art. So Henry Jenkins is the "good" grey guy in the story.

Interestingly, Jenkins reply to a (supposed) comment from Thompson wanting to debate these issues on a college campus. Jenkins replied he could certainly see why a "bout" between the two of us would generate a great deal of buzz and hype around the issues -- a bit like a battle between a cheetah and a giant squid, say. This seems to indicate there have been (being?) frictions between Thompson and Jenkins.

Reactions to Moral Kombat - Trailer and Players

This post follows my previous one introducing Moral Kombat.

Since the movie has been screened only a few times (once at VGXPO in Philadelphia, once at USC and once in few other movie festivals), the only material most people have had until now to appreciate Spencer Halpin's movie was its trailer.

I found the trailer, put on youtube in December 2006, was a mirror of the first 25 minutes of the movie: it focuses on the anti-violent video games side of the debate. Kotaku also found this difference between the overall movie and the trailer: The documentary seeks to provide unbiased views from both sides of the battle against violent video games, despite its own trailer which projects a definite anti-video game vibe. Even Henry Jenkins explained in November 2007, just before the movie premiere: I will admit to having had a crisis of faith when I first saw the trailer. It felt sensationalistic and one-sided. Jenkins also suggests: don't judge a book by its cover and don't judge this film by its preview That is why I understand it was badly received by the gamer community: 1.5/5 stars rating on youtube, more than 2400 comments for more than 240,000 views. Even Spencer Haltin admitted in November 2009 how a negative reaction (that) the trailer got on YouTube [...] from gamers who were concerned that the film would be biased. Most of the time, the Youtube comments came from players who wanted to write how much they disliked the trailer. Some examples (taken from the first page of the video comments as of February 2010):

• god danm it!! old people are taking away our gamez!! (lol :D )
• tl;dr- Sensationalist rubbish at it's very best.
• yeah death to america
• So when I play Borderlands I really am a Brick? What? Are you saying I'm dumb?

Some gamers even slightly misinterpreted the meaning of sentences pronounced in the movie. For instance, sk-gaming.net explained: Spencer Halpin's upcoming hullabaioo documentary film Moral Kombat takes on videogames violency and blames that videogames caused the 9/11 incident and lpcepxress.org reports According to a documentary titled, "Moral Kombat" by Spencer Halpin, violent video games caused Sept. 11. But the only mention of the 9/11 accident (at 1:20 of the trailer) is: they learned enough from a flight simulator to fly jets they had never touched before into the World Trade Center.

The comic above from pennyarcade was another reaction from players about the movie trailer (it was published in May 2007, far before the premiere of the movie in November 2007). As of 2009, this video of Q&A between Halpin, Lannings and game journalists shows that things seem to have calmed down a little.

[Cinema] Moral Kombat

Moral Kombat is a documentary from Spencer Halpin published in 2007. Apparently, the movie could be free to watch for only 20 days (ie until the end of February) at babelgum.com, so hurry! The Video Info says

Moral Kombat takes a look into the controversial subject of violence in video games. Director Spencer Halpin shows the constant conflict between the game creators' first amendment right to make a violent game and the imminent threat that violence poses on the next generation. In addition, the film is full of the latest green screen and high-definition technology that allow watchers to actually envision the world of gaming. Filled with interviews from lead game designers, politicians, parents, and psychologists, this film provides a candid take on the influence games have on youth today.

Moral Kombat was the first movie made by Spencer Halpin. Still, it required $650,000 (Wikipedia says between $650,000 and $1M) and was entirely shot, edited and finished in HD.

I feel like it is more relevant to first detail which parts of the movie are about what. This might be useful for those who have not watch the movie and do not want to spend time watching it. I also write down, from time to time, the comments I had while watching the movie [inside square brackets]. So much has been said, written, debated and repeated, that the post-Moral Kombat reactions are worth another entire post. In this post, I will rather bring the quotes from the people [stars?] who were interviewed during the movie. You will see when I do not remember who said exactly what ...

Quotes and talks

The first 15 minutes introduce violence in video games with games such as Doom, Mortal Kombat. Virtual flesh and blood. Senator Lieberman, attorney Jack Thompson and head of Mothers Against Violence in America Pamela Eakes as well as some video game industry insiders mention how video games are violent. [idealist.org mentions mavia.org is the MAVIA website, but mavia.org looks pretty broken. Maybe it has been hacked, maybe MAVIA do not have any website?]. Lorne Lanning explains that since the early video games like Pong or Asteroids, it was easier to cancel things from the screen/system than adding things. [this echoes what Montfort and Bogost write in Racing the beam about their Atari VCS and the inherent game design of its games]. A publisher says if we as publishers say what is inside the product we have done our job.

Columbine: Pamela Eakes says that video games may have contributed to their deadliness [of the murderers], it's more to it than a video game. A voice [that I did not recognize, Thompson?] says when it came time for them to act out their anger, where did they get the ideas?. Other voices say lots of studies over the years have shown connexions between violence in the media and violence in real life, games have played a central role in killings, a kid became an expert shooter because of games. [Instead of forbidding games, forbid guns!] Jenkins report that there has only been badly designed research about violence in video-games and kids.

At the 25th minute, I found the tone changed, it became a kind of response of the pro-video game side and the game developers. Jenkins mentions that the 60's moral panic was comic books and that video games can become like movies, going up, or down like comics. [there has been a lot said in the last few months about comparing video games to other medias, both in the research community and in the industry; by the way, I do not really think comics are a lower-zone media than movies: some European or Japan comics are very deep and can be compared to movies]. Jason Della Rocca mentions the speech from Stephen Limbaugh Sr.: "video games contain no conveyance of ideas, expression or anything else that could possibly amout to free speech" and reacts: He had no understanding of games as an art form.

People talk about GTA. A publisher [was it John Marmaduke?] notices that since 7 million people have bought this game they may consider it acceptable. [poor defense...] Jenkins says we have not pushed this medium to ask what the role of violence in society is. Jenkins also adds that nothing suggests a normal kid is likely to become agressive simply because he played a violent VG. Nearly everyone seems to agree that our society is violent: we have a gun society, we need to see violence, we are naturally attracted by violence. [but no one says the utopic "why do we not change it with games?"]

Then about the Sims: from a genius are words that come back [but the background images are Picasso, Dali or Renaissance paintings ... there is not even any photo of The Sims' designer, Wright! That is a shame!].

An interesting part follows: there is a difference between your right to make something and your moral or ethical right to make something and As an editor, you have editorial responsibilities were said by a publisher. Jenkins continues we think of video games as violence only [while there could be one violent choice and another choice to solve the same issue in a game; there could be diminishing violence rather than decreasing]. Fable is mentioned. Hal Halpin does not think violent games are not a responsibility for designers, they are a responsibility for publishers: designers and developers want to create but publishers want money, and violence sells.

Then the discussion turns towards parents: someone says he would rather have his kid play a RTS with no gore than a FPS war game. [once again, the background only shows images from FPS war games with blood everywhere!]. A publisher [I think?] says the industry has to be honest with themselves. Pamela Eaks remarks that sex and violence sell and someone else reports wheteher it's a game, a movie, or music, the sales grow as violence grows. Back to GTA, Rockstar is gonna make the game that sells.

Retailers are in the spot light of the discussions [even though no one represents them among the participants] for a while: some retailers have seen it as part of their responsibility to keep inapropriate materials out of the hand of kids, other retailers have done absolutely nothing. But the parents responsibilities quickly come back: all we can do is talk with our child about the game. Maybe Michael Rich [good link?] compares games and other art forms and the parents' awareness of these art forms for their kids. FOr instance, parents will go out of a concert if it is bad for their children. So parents should play with their children, and if they do not, they have big problems and have no communication. If the child gets GTA from the parents, it is a failure of the parents, no one else. There is no silver bullet: it is parent's role.

Finally, the last words from Thompson: the industry needs to be careful. Eakes asks video game developers to face a mirror and ask "Am I doing something good for children?" all the time. [but not all games are for children ... It is not because in general older people do not play that only children play. Currently, youth often means video games, but the opposite is false.] Jenkins suggests we should grow up as parents, as government and as designers about what we can do with this media. A publisher wonders what is our responsibility as publishers? At some point, the line is going to be completely lost between what's right and what's wrong.

Apologies

Looking back, I feel I have put too many comments above and not been precise enough. I have completely forgotten some people's names and not taken notes really seriously. But I did not want to spend 4 hours watching the movie. So once again, if you want to make your own mind about it, watch it. I apologize, but I have more to say about the movie making in itself.

I did not like the mise en scène. The background images were very complex, useless and above all irrelevant to the speaker's point. For instance, showing printed circuit boards in a transparent background when someone is talking, or replacing a Serious Sam monster's head by the speaker's head seem to emphasize on the urban legend grey goo-like fear that machines are going to invade our society insidiously and kill us all. Henry Jenkins seems to agree: Watching the film twice, I still struggle to make sense of the relationship between spoken words and images. In the same kind of low-level image-words matching, when someone mentioned hard science from university the background turned into E=mc²... The videos we see in the background of World of Warcraft or Serious Sam for instance are only the violent parts of these (not-totally violent) games. WoW early trailer and Serious Sam battles do not show at any time the exploratory side of the game, or even the stealth part.

In the speakers, there were politicians, people from nearly any level of the industry (lobbyists, game designers, publishers, journalists) and people from the society on a broader view (parents). But only Jenkins for the research community. Even though Jenkins is a cheetah and he is very good at what he does, I think one is not enough.