cgv 2008, gaming 2008

IADIS International Conference Gaming 2008

YO HO HUM: DOES EVERYDAY LIFE MAKE GOOD GAMING? Anita Greenhill Manchester Business School Booth Street West, Manchester M15 6PB, UK

Gordon Fletcher Salford Business School The Crescent, Salford, M5 4WT, UK

ABSTRACT This paper examines the activities and economies of YoHoHo! Puzzle Pirates. YoHoHo! Puzzle Pirates is an online roleplaying game that draws upon puzzle-orientated gameplay to construct a social world. This paper argues that technology (in this case YoHoHo! Puzzle Pirates) can offer a social experience that mimics everyday life including its aspects of mundaneity and repetition. Very little academic research in any environment has considered the interplay and mutual interdependence of spectacular events with the routines of everyday life. It is, however, this mutual dependency that constructs the spectacle as spectacular. Discussion of organisational activities often overlooks the fact that the labour aspects of everyday life are repetitive and mundane and instead prefer to discuss environmental context and social networks. By offering roleplaying and puzzle games with the opportunities to create social bonds in roughly equal proportions YoHoHo! Puzzle Pirates introduces social complexity through its economic structure and the need for a range of different interactions. Rather than acting as a disincentive to the participants, the mundaneity of free market participation in-game is, in fact, its pivotal attraction. This fully articulated economy provides a depth of sophistication that enables 'everyday' activities and social distinctions to be embedded into the environment including tasks associated with mundane labour, the shifting foibles of fashion and social hierarchies of authority and power. The lack of a ‘hack and slash’ Dungeon and Dragons culture or strategy within the game means that the economy is not simply based around the purchase of the best weapons or armour, this shift in focus has also reduced the occurrence of item farming or auction activity outside the game. Examination and interpretation of YoHoHo! Puzzle Pirates offers insight, as a social laboratory, into the interplay of events, labour and power within a complex, albeit sometimes mundane, economy. Sometimes the ‘ho hum’ activities of everyday life can make for good gaming. KEYWORDS MMORPGs, Online Games, Labour, Situationism, Critical theory

1. INTRODUCTION The profusion of research into social media offers an already strong body of work that enables interpretation and analysis of more or less every available variation on this admittedly broad theme. The majority of this work (Grimes 2006; Kolo and Baur 2004; Steinkuehler & Williams 2006; Sherlock 2007) develops a largely sociological perspective that emphasises social engagement and interactions. While most work is cast in a generally critical research approach there is also an underlying implication in much of this work of the generally positive aspects of these interactions. In many ways this observation does not disentangle the generally self-selecting nature of social networking sites, i.e. a participant at a social networking site is present because they are intending or at least hoping to be socialable. In contrast, discussions of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) cast a sometimes less than positive tone over the interactions and associations that can develop in these environments (Jakobsson and Taylor 2003; Griffiths and Light 2008). In effect, the usually warfare oriented basis for MMORPGs results in the need for at least some of the ‘other’ participants to be personal aggressors. More positive discussions of these environments look towards the formations of guilds within the MMORPGs and their internal operations to find social

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engagement (Ducheneaut 2004; Ducheneaut et al 2006). The tribalism (Fletcher et al 2006) of these various social networking and MMORPG environments, however, all necessitate the everpresence of mutual association and sociality. YoHoHo! Puzzle Pirates (Y!PP) offers an unusual combination of these two types of environments that brings benefits richer than the sum of these component concepts. Y!PP has both continuous gameplay and social networking that broadly operate in parallel with each component requiring the other. The interrelationship of social networking and gameplay is brought together through Y!PP’s economic system that is integral to the entire environment. The goal of Y!PP gameplay is to acquire gold coins otherwise known as Pieces of Eight (PoE) and this gameplay requires collaboration, which in many ways is similar to the guilds of MMORPGs. However, the need for social association goes further and is more subtle by enabling individual players to easily change affiliation and roles in order to increase their personal income. From an economic point of view this fluidity more closely reflects the structures of a market-based economy rather than the arguably collectivist economies found in other MMORPGs. The wider-ranging social networking of Y!PP is also reflected in the third-party tools/addins/systems built around Y!PP. Radio Free Cobalt, an online radio station, ArrBay, an auction site for items, and Pirates Community Trader, a type of commodity price ticker all suggests a much more complex and rich economic environment that facilitates in turn a more complex series of socialities. In this paper we utilise the situationist concept of the event to gather data, interpret and understand the social meanings of Y!PP and the relevance of studying these environments in the context of gaming and information systems research. Participant observation of the game was carried out through direct gameplay including labouring on pirate and navy ships, playing gambling games in the various parlours on different islands and participation in the conversations and activities ‘island’ life. Detached observation of additional conversations was also made across the ‘free’ oceans of Y!PP. The situationist approach is useful for Y!PP as it enables identification of an element of the gameplay that is usually left unacknowledged – the mundane and repetitious aspects of social interaction irrespective of provenance. Complex free market exchange economies also model other aspects of everyday life that enable understanding of parallel environments. This “social laboratory” perspective has already been acknowledged by Kolo and Baur (2004) and by Fefferman (2007) in the context of World of Warcraft and the “corrupted blood” plague that infected the game in 2005. Examination and analysis of social activities in-game not only reveals developing forms of contemporary sociality but also offers evidence of the machinations of social life and experience in a wider context – in effect, the game and activities associated with it are part of the participants’ everyday lives.

2. YOHOHO! PUZZLE PIRATES – A CASE DESCRIPTION The various reviews for Y!PP reveal the core features and appeal of the game to its estimated 2 million registered users and 30,000 paying subscribers (Schubert 2007). Navarro (2005) says, “Massively multiplayer online puzzle game. Those are the only possible terms you can use to properly describe Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates, one of the weirdest and most original puzzle games we've come across in quite a while… Imagine a persistent online world where people's little avatars - essentially Lego people in pirate regalia - sail the open seas, sword fight with one another, swab the decks, and even get in a few friendly parlor games, all through the magic of simple puzzles derived from some of the best concepts out there, like Tetris and Bejeweled. Now throw in a cutesy art style and a community chock-full of crazy people who want to talk like pirates, and you've got a pretty entertaining experience all around.” Krause (2004) more directly identifies the economy of the game as a key aspect of Y!PP. “One of the more interesting features of Puzzle Pirates is its fully player-driven economy. Player labor is responsible for all items in the game, from ships to swords. Governors of islands issue deeds to players to have shops built, which are then constructed, again, by player labor... The distilling puzzle is quite fun, but in order to play the puzzle, you must find a distillery that is hiring. The player owners of the shops decide whether they want to hire or not and set wages. Players who take jobs in shops will affect the speed with which goods are produced. Some things, like wood and iron, are foraged off deserted islands and sold to the player shops (or they can be bought from markets). The player shops then turn those things into something usable and sell them to players or other shops.”

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Pieces of Eight (PoE) are earned by either jobbing with one of the various navies, the safest option as a relatively fixed financial reward for labour is guaranteed, or by joining a pirate band to share in the uncertain proceeds of raids and pillages. Pirates are not guaranteed any reward for working but when a ship is successful the amount each pirate receives is usually higher than navy payments. As either a sailor or pirate labour is undertaken by playing puzzle games. Depending on the size of the ship there are a variety of duty stations such as bilging, carpentry or navigation. Some tasks require that the sailor (or pirate) be more skilled and the game will prevent an unskilled labourer from undertaking skilled tasks. The speed and accuracy with which the games are completed has an impact on the performance of a vessel. Failure to bilge rapidly will fill the ship with water and slow the speed of travel. The actions of a weak navigator, who must already be an experienced player, will result in the ship drifting and missing islands or other ships. The full scope of activities available to players, however, is much more expansive and in many respects playing the puzzles, in effect labouring, becomes the most mundane, albeit the necessary, aspect of the game (Figure 1). Arguably, the most mundane activity of all is the gameplay associated with sword-fighting. Despite the swashbuckling and romantic label the game is a graphically updated 2-player or team version of Tetris (Figure 2). Good swordfighting skills are essential for in-game success, and like all the tasks, players are rated on their abilities. Personal player ratings – almost an in-game CV - also affect which crews will consider which players. Better crews tend to be choosier and more tightly knit than those composed of primarily new players. All of the games and the activities associated with being on a sailing vessel are contextualised to reflect the pirate theme including player chat that is regularly interspersed with phrases like “me hearties” and “yar”. This observation may appear trivial but it is this themeing and the preparedness of players to engage directly with the theme that contributes to the immersiveness of the game and its sociality.

Figure 1. Labouring at Carpentry

Figure 2. Swordfighting

As players acquire PoE through their labours they are able to buy a wide variety of goods. It is also possible, on the free-to-play oceans, to buy Doubloons. This higher value currency allows players to more rapidly advance in the game. For example, a labour badge which is required to work in a shop can be bought in this way. A Doubloon costs approximately twenty US cents and enables the developers to provide free access to the game in an economically sustainable way. One of the primary items for purchase are the variety of clothing. These items reflect the game’s heightened fashion consciousness. Some items, such as certain types of boots and hats are extremely expensive and require the owner to have large amounts of disposable income (Figure 3). The players who appear ‘in rags’ have usually lost their money in the gambling parlours found on the populated islands. Players initially start with a minimally respectable pirate outfit but as with normal clothing these and a number of other items in the game eventually wear out and require replacement. Deterioration of clothing produces a situation where it is visually possible to make some immediate judgements about an individual’s wealth and relative position within the game.

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Figure 3. Current fashions in Puzzle Pirates

Figure 4. A painted shack

The other key way that players can spend their hard-earned PoE is through furnishing their homes. Each new player receives a shack on a random island that is complete with tattered curtains but unpainted and without furniture (Figure 4). A player must buy paint and a paintbrush for their shack from an apothecary shoppe. After this they are able to buy furniture from one of the furniture shoppes.

Figure 5. The Puzzle Pirates economy (yppedia.puzzlepirates.com/Economy_diagram)

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All of this activity results in a range of secondary services and careers that support those working directly upon vessels. The differential prices for commodities on different islands make trading an attractive option for earning PoE. The third party tool, Pirate Commodity Trader with Bleach (pctb.crabdance.com), encourages players to examine the current prices of items from across the game in a reporting style that echoes conventional trading rooms. The tool often reveals major discrepancies in price, for example Yellow Paint (on 29/11/07) had a sell price on Viridis Island of 5 PoE but was 114 PoE on Sakejima Island. Commodities also require manufacture and some players choose to purchase a labour badge that permits them to work in one of the many shoppes. Ultimately, some players take this route even further and purchase their own stall or shoppe – and take profit from the shoppe’s activities rather than labouring. Shoppes and stalls also pay taxes to the island’s fort or palace. Unlike conventional taxes the game designers require this type of payment to prevent rampant inflation; activities that take PoE out of the economy and thereby avoiding the devaluing of PoE are described as “PoE Sinks”. Inflation was a significant issue in the earliest versions of the game and this made it difficult for new players to build up sufficient wealth within the economy to fully participate. The designers have now thoroughly mapped the games economy to explain the complex interrelationships of commodities and PoE (Figure 5).

3. SITUATIONISM, OBJECTS AND EVENTS Our interest in the Y!PP environment is not specifically focussed on the economy of the game but instead on the way that specific events, both spectacular and mundane inter-relate with specific artefacts that similarly range from the rarest to the mundane. Our interest lies in how the interrelationship of these events and things produce forms of political dissidence and consensus. We gathered data through observable events and examining in detail what occurs between the user and the artifact, the artifact and the user, the users and other users, and the artifacts themselves. By taking this approach we endeavour to disentangle the impact that these artefacts and events have on in-game cultural practices. Most importantly, is the way that artefacts are utilised in ways that resist, extend or conflict with the designers’ original purposes. The mapping of the Y!PP economy (Figure 5) articulates the designers’ ‘expected’ use of individual items and their relationship to one another. This mapping also reveals, by implication, the interplay of ‘everyday life’ within the Y!PP environment. The roles that players can assume and the labour that they must perform are also reflected through this map. For example, the distillery task is positioned within the distillery located on each islands and requires the input of specific raw materials. Successful completion of the distillery also produces new products that are equally required within other aspects of the game’s economy. Without the labour undertaken in the distillery both the apothecaries and furnishers on the various islands will only be able to engage in the economy in limited ways. The significance of artefacts within everyday life places an additional dimension to the already complex debate regarding the relationship between people, artefacts and sociality. The examination of role-playing games enables a fresh examination of the reasons why and how social groups form. As with business organisations, groups of players must necessary come together and support one another to benefit from the gathering, accumulation and distribution of artefacts. Within most traditional examinations of organisations the importance of artefacts is disregarded. The extent of this oversight is emphasised in the observation that “organisations need people” without acknowledgement of the corollary that organisations (and other social groups) also require artefacts. We claim that ignoring artefacts implies a tacit support for the conventional mainstream meanings and hegemonic forms of power with which all artefacts are intertwined. Examination of a game environment enables this position to be understood ab initio and invokes the utility of digital environments as social laboratories. Artefacts are pivotal aspects of everyday life that clearly define and limit what can and cannot be ‘done’. Situationist thought is expansive and somewhat incoherent but we focus specifically on the concept of the event (de Bord 1994; de Certeau 1988; Plant 1997; Lefebvre 1992; Baudrillard 1993, 1998) and its relationship to artefacts. The event is a key aspect of everyday life that balances the mundane against the spectacle that is both personally achieved and that which is observed as a third party (de Bord 1994). The interplay of events crafts polysemous experience that is simultaneously the logic and illogic of everyday life filled with the expected and the unforeseen. This interplay of extremes is arguably a feature found to varying degrees in all MMORPGs and assists in creation of their internal social stability. Each event is shaped by

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specific context and circumstances that defines and forms it. As participants in the routines of everyday life ‘we’ are drawn to the spectacular and spectacle of ‘other’ events to offset the mundane and routine (Greenhill and Fletcher 2007). Spectacular events can unexpectedly arrive in-game in a variety of ways, as a pirate attack, a change to game rules or the arrival of new players. Regular and planned spectacles also shape experience – for example, free access to gambling parlours. It is particularly these latter crafted and managed events that reinforce and define hegemonic power relations – in the context of gaming hegemonic control is at least perceived to rest in the hands of the designers. Artefacts are intimately tied to event culture. In-game the accoutrements of fashion, weaponry and furniture all shape what events can coalesce around a player and to which events they can only be a third party. In a game such as Y!PP with such a heavy emphasis on economic exchange the ownership – even if is a shared ownership – of a vessel ties the coarse measure of wealth to the capabilities offered by material possession. Vessel-owning pirates can freely travel and define their own strategies and goals within the game – the direct parallels with corporate ownership are not coincidental. Everyday life is predominately carried out as a series of regular and planned events; the intertwining of events, artifacts and human interpretation, shapes organisational and in-game experience. Through social interaction and participation we are drawn to the spectacle and therefore actively contribute to the power relations bound within individual events. The presence of artefacts is significant for the maintenance of this power as their meaning is defined through and by social group or groups (Hodder 1995). A significant aspect of being ascribed with meaning is that artefacts can at least partially convey meaning without the presence of a third person (or the original designers or inventors). The construction of meaning is a fluid and imprecise form of communication that requires shared cultural knowledges and interpretation. In this way artefacts are a form of imprecise proxy for direct human presence. It is also the mechanism that allows artefacts to be conduits of hegemonic power perpetuating and passing meaning to others. Despite the general imperfection of communication between artefacts and people it is the meanings of mainstream hegemonic power that are most readily communicated in these exchanges as modes of hegemonic power are the most pervasive and most regularly reinforced through a network of shared cultural knowledges. In the case of Y!PP this hegemonic power reinforces the ‘normality’ of free trade and enterprise while also contributing to the mainstream romanticisation and acceptability of piracy. Continued practices of daily in-game routine reproduces imperfect renderings of meaning and most readily reinforces hegemonic meaning.

4. THE MUNDANE AND THE SOCIAL LABORATORY Tyler (2002, 204) and Tomas (1991, 31) promote the potential of the Internet as a ‘social laboratory’ that offers the means to rapidly and continuously identify the activities and interest of contemporary everyday life. The social laboratory perspective contrasts with positions that argue for the significance of the Internet and game spaces as distinct experiential spaces (Stone 1991; Stallabrass 2003; cf. Liff, Steward & Watts 2002, 97). Distinctions between organisational and game spaces do not alter the variability of use, form and purpose of artefacts in a social network. The human ability to alter and repurpose artefacts to suit immediate and shifting needs prevents any definitional quality to remain singularly fixed or specifically confined to a particular realm of human activity. Artefacts resist any stability of meaning by being continuously disassembled and reassembled into newly meaningful assemblages. Our world (or worlds if a distinction is required for in-game experiences) is constructed by the human ability to alter and repurpose the meaning and understanding of ‘things’ in all situations. In this paper we present a theoretical exploration of the deeper issues and implications that mundane social interaction has for and within gaming. We show that by drawing on existing sociological thought such as that of the situationists we can reveal the significance of existing continued practices of daily routine for social interaction and networking. We have drawn upon YoHoHo! Puzzle Pirates (Y!PP) as it offers an unusual combination of gaming and social networking environments. There is a mutual dependence or system of operation between gameplay and social networking, in which one requires the other – effectively becoming a social laboratory. We show how the most mundane activity of all - in the gameplay - is swordfighting. However, good sword-fighting skills – as a social skill – are important in the game. Another example drawn upon in relation to the significance of the mundane and artefacts is found in the purchase of clothing. Clothing acts a symbol of in-game experience and wealth that is directly understood by experienced

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players and rapidly learned by new players. This study through its examination of the culture of Y!PP also illustrates the significant interrelationship of artefacts and events within everyday life and the ways in which the power of the designers’ is exerted in subtle and complex ways. Examination of role-playing games also enables fresh experimental examination of the reasons why and how organisations form. These observations show game designers and researchers that the ho hum activities of every day life do make good gaming as this mundaneity interacts with, and emphasises the entertainment and excitement of planned events and moments of spectacle. The combination of spectacle and mundane labour also reinforces the need for the support of social networks to succeed individually within a complex economic environment.

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Shah, R. & Romine, J. (1995) Playing MUDs on the Internet, John Wiley and Sons, New York. Sherlock, L. (2007) “When Social Networking Meets Online Games: The Activity System of Grouping in World of Warcraft”, SIGDOC’07, 22-24 October, El Paso, Texas. Stallabrass, J. (2003) Internet Art: The Online Clash of Culture and Commerce, Tate Publishing, London. Steinkuelher, C. and Williams, D. (2006) “Where Everybody Knows your (Screen) Name: Online Games as “Third Places””, Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, 11, pp.885-909. Stone, A. (1991) “Will the Real Body Please Stand Up: Boundary Stories about Virtual Cultures.” Cyberspace: First Steps. Ed. M. Benedikt. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Tomas, D.(1991) “Old Ritual for New Spaces.” Cyberspace: First Steps. Ed. M. Benedikt. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Tyler, T. (2002) “Is the Internet Changing Social Life? It Seems the More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same.” Journal of Social Issues, 58(1), 195-205.

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