Glory to Trumpistan! MLA abstracts

One of my favorite parts of academia is writing up abstracts for conferences 8 months away so you can brainstorm directions you might want to work towards. Here are two gaming-oriented ones I just sent off:

Glory to Trumpistan! Procedural Ethics and Transformative Play in Papers, Please

Papers, Please, the unlikely hit indie video game of 2013, viscerally gamifies the moral quandaries of being a border agent in a repressive state. You play as a guard of the fictitious Arstotzka, an eastern European dictatorship circa 1982. During each six-minute day, you process the paperwork of as many entrants as possible at five dollars per person, highlighting discrepancies with reference to a rulebook and denying anyone whose papers seem amiss. Harsh penalties disincentivize casual play—your meager salary must cover rent, food, heat, and medicine for your family, and you must correctly process ten people per day to sustain them. This despite increasingly complicated regulations, your growing paranoia about terrorists from neighboring Kolechia, and the tragic stories of human trafficking and separated families that come across your desk. This paper looks at the game’s procedural ethics—how does its design motivate you to act? How do its procedures intersect with the cultural, political, and historical systems it simulates?—in conjunction with the extremely active, politically inflected gamer culture that has grown up around it. Dozens of Youtubers offer playthroughs of the game referencing Donald Trump, offering political commentary, or transforming play by performing “Donald Trump runs,” a strategy that results in an inevitable loss by day 3. In analyzing these examples of transformative play, this paper suggests ways that intentional mis-play can draw critical attention to injustices in real-world global or national systems by subverting the (much more constrained and symbolic) systems in which a simulation operates.

Wandering, Protest, and Mis-Play in Walking Simulators

Pedestrian performance, one of the many names for site-specific, immersive theatrical experiments made famous by groups like Punchdrunk and Wrights & Sites, offers its audiences an interactivity unavailable in the theater. In these pieces, a theatergoer walks through an experience often designed to challenge a political status-quo. Wrights & Sites’ A Mis-guide to Anywhere, for example, encourages anti-capitalist ways of movement to re-conceptualize land ownership and urban space, descending philosophically from the psychogeographical experiments of the Situationist International and the revolutions of 1968. The distinctions between pedestrian performance, protest march, and occupation are often hard to disentangle. This paper attempts to trace these connections as they manifest in a particular kind of video game called a “Walking Simulator,” a derogatory nickname given by hardcore gamers to games in which one largely wanders around a surreal landscape, exploring and experiencing a story without achieving goals or racking up points as in a conventional game. I argue that Walking Sims are a type of transformative play—an intentional mis-play of traditional gaming conventions, works which use the language of videogaming to make anti-games. I will analyze the critically-acclaimed games Gone Home, Journey, and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture to show how mis-play (and games as works designed to be mis-played) can challenge, protest, and build political momentum.

#proceduralEthics #transformativePlay #academic