‘Playful Identities’ research blog

(Via Mobile Cowboys)

British site www.modyourmob.co.uk is dedicated to modding the phone. Modding the phone in moderate ways already happens quite often, I think, as a means of personalize your phone. But now telcom operator Orange has stepped into it and gives away prizes to the best mods.

Interestingly btw how the site at more than one place speaks about how this modding supposedly is “big in Japan and it’s going to be massive over here”. This sounds more like a strategy to encourage people to get into it, since we al now Japan is the furthest of al countries in mobile phone development, craze & hype, and we don’t want to stay behind, now don’t we..?

Last week, Saturday June 18 I was at the “Old curtains, new screens” conference, organized by our colleagues from the NWO-TKC project. The conference was mainly about the use of internet for/by minority groups in eastern Europe. One of the more interesting talks was by Aniko Imre. She discussed ludic aspects in a Hungarian anime-film, translated as The District. Some ludic aspects that were brought forward are: the medium (an anime, which is normally connected to children’s entertainment), ludic use of techniques (weird flat bodies with natural-looking heads based on photographs of real people), playing with identities through language-use, confirmation yet also reversals of stereotypes (The Gypsies, the lower-class, the police, the Russians, women, etc.) and a kind of meta-ludic statement that playing with identity is fun!

See http://www.debalie.nl/artikel.jsp?articleid=52781&podiumid=media for the program.

Came across the website of Ludicorp today, the business responsible for creating and developing social software like Flickr. I think their “corporate philosophy� - which they take from Disclosing New Worlds: Entrepreneurship, Democratic Action and the Cultivation of Solidarity by Charles Spinosa, Fernando Flores & Hubert Dreyfus (MIT Press 1997) - reflects quite a bit of what our research will be about:

Business owners do not normally work for money either. They work for the enjoyment of their competitive skill, in the context of a life where competing skillfully makes sense. The money they earn supports this way of life. The same is true of their businesses. One might think that they view their businesses as nothing more than machines to produce profits, since they do closely monitor their accounts to keep tabs on those profits.

But this way of thinking replaces the point of the machine’s activity with a diagnostic test of how well it is performing. Normally, one senses whether one is performing skillfully. A basketball player does not need to count baskets to know whether the team as a whole is in flow. Saying that the point of business is to produce profit is like saying that the whole point of playing basketball is to make as many baskets as possible. One could make many more baskets by having no opponent.

The game and styles of playing the game are what matter because they produce identities people care about. Likewise, a business develops an identity by providing a product or a service to people. To do that it needs capital, and it needs to make a profit, but no more than it needs to have competent employees or customers or any other thing that enables production to take place. None of this is the goal of the activity.

Now, what are the parts that triggered me?

“work for the enjoyment of their competitive skill”

> This ‘work ethic’ is also called the ‘ProAm’ revolution (Leadbeater) where professional amateurs become numerous and deliver high quality products and services, because they are amateurs in the original sense of the word (”doing something for the love of it”).
> Points to the blurring of work and leisure. ‘Play’ is to feel free of necessity (of work).

A basketball player does not need to count baskets to know whether the team as a whole is in flow.

> ‘Flow’ is the state of experiencing only the present, of feeling in charge, of wanting to participate, of suspending disbelief, etc. (term by the guy with the impossible name: Csikszentmihalyi).

The game and styles of playing the game are what matter because they produce identities people care about.

> Points to the intrinsic quality and value of the product one is producing, of the ‘magic’ in the object one is creating, just as Marcel Mauss shows is the case with reciprocate gift exchange (1908). It is not simply about the transaction that has a purely economic value, but about giving away something that is infused with one’s own personality and identity.

Saturday, November 19, the 27th Dutch/Flemish Philosophy-day took place. The motto was “Thinking without Borders: challenges for philosophy in the 21st century” (Grenzeloos denken: uitdagingen voor de Filosofie in de 21ste eeuw). It was the first time I attended. The programme started at 10:00 in the morning, which I of course didn’t make quite on time… I’m not that much of a morning person, especially not on a weekend day :).

After seeing the last part of the plenary session I attended the breakout session “Man & culture” chaired by Jos de Mul. The papers presented by both Flemish & Dutch PhD researchers were pretty technical in my opinion. As I lack serious background in philosophical thought - and probably even more troublesome: acquaintance with the discourse by which philosophers tend to express themselves - I had a hard time understanding what was said from time to time. Nevertheless, some speakers provoked thoughts in me, so I made a few scribbly notes which I have transcribed below. Here we go:

(more…)

What: opening exhibition “Alter Ego” - photo’s of gamers and their online avatars
Who: British artist Robbie Cooper
Where: Home Gallery, Prinsengracht 548, Amsterdam
When: 9 - 24 november 2005 (Thursday - Sunday), 13:00 - 19:00
URL: www.alterego.net & www.seeingtakesasecond.com.

Wednesday evening, November 9, I was at the opening of the exhibition “Alter Ego” at Home Gallery. I was kinda late, supposed to meet my GF there at 21:30, but got stopped along the way by a police woman for cycling without light. She gave me a ticket, what a bummer… }:-(.
Anyway, the gallery is located in a nice old canal house between Leidsestraat & Spiegelstraat. About 25 large images are dangling from fish cords on the wall, each displaying a photograph of a ‘real’ person on the left hand side and a screenshot of his/her virtual personality on the right side. The split-images are accompanied by a text that tells the individual’s story: who he/she is in real life, who she/he is online in what game, and what motives he/she has for choosing this particular character.

The people portrayed are pretty diverse, considering that game culture appears to be mostly restricted to Asian and Western - American - cultures: there are pictures of physically disabled people, two black men, quite a lot of females (Asian & Western) and of course the (stereo)typical geek.

A lot of people make their online character into a ‘better self’: the men often create a sort of super-hero character and the women a strong, beautiful female warrior. Not everybody though: there is a portrait of this US redneck kinda guy who plays a beautiful heroine, and two good-looking Asian girls tell that they switched to playing ugly creatures after being harassed all the time by men in the game.

The stories can be roughly devided in stories that are about “becoming” in the sense of developing oneself: from being a bit shy at first to becoming more and more friendly and sociable, from being averagely handsome to being beautiful. Another theme is “escape”: escape from boredom (the trucker fantasising about playing a spaceship), escape from physical constraints (the handicapped people), escape from social/cultural pressure (the Chinese gay boy playing “guys he wanted to meet” & the US macho-guy playing a woman). The theme of “sameness” in the sense of “living one’s identity”, or simply “being” is apparent too: someone says he behaves the same way online as offline, and the Texan business woman tells she likes bossing around online just like in real life. Finally, attention is given to the economics of gaming culture: a few people explain that they make quite a bit of money from gaming, whether it’s by developing characters for other people, or by writing software that can upgrade players levels by playing for them at night, or a girl that has become popular through gaming and has become a professional model.

Some critical remarks: the split screen portayal of people & their online identity suggests that people have only one online identity instead of multiple. By choosing a form of presentation that juxtaposes offline and online identities, the artist stresses the devide between them in a visual way, although the artist probably intented otherwise. On the other hand, the split-screen portayal suggests that offline and online characters are equal in some way: the online character being the ‘mirrored image’ of the real life character. And finally, the artist seems to have deliberately wanted to portray a diverse group of people, while underplaying the homogeneity of game worlds, as apparent from one of the group photo of an ‘old’ game guild (I forgot the name) that is almost totally white and predominantly between 20-40.

The exposition is sponsored by EA (Electronic Arts - the largest (?) and best-known game developer in the world); Playstation2 by Sony. The gallery itself is a space owned by Dutch party/event-organiser Duncan Stutterheim from ID&T. Certainly no marginal players in the leisure economy …;-)

The BBC has an article about the project: news.bbc.co.uk.

The pictures (and even some more than exibited) + stories can be dowloaded as a PDF file from
www.seeingtakesasecond.com/images/examples_preview.pdf (9 MB).