“Dance is created by the embodied brain, influenced by culture and shaped and inspired by our relationship to and our perception of the environment” (Mason, 2009:28).

Some readers may already be familiar with a diagram that was posted on the neuroanthropology blog Paul Mason:  Slides on Neuroanthropology at the beginning of 2008. I also included a black and white version of this diagram on page 109 of an article that I published in Bahasa Indonesia:
Mason, P.H. (2007) Alam, Otak dan Kebudayaan: Perkembangan Baru Tentang Pengetahuan Musik dan Tari. Gema Seni: Jurnal Komunikasi, Informasi, dan Dokumentasi Seni, Vol 2, no. 4, pp. 108-119.

More recently, I incorporated the image in an article for Brolga: An Australian Journal About Dance; Jun2009 Issue 30, p27-34, which discusses the evolutionary properties of collaborative choreography (Mason 2009). I hypothesize that collaborative choreography is characterised by evolutionary processes at multiple levels of complexity. An ethnography of choreographic methods in contemporary dance practices, I believe, can provide insight into intersubjective interactions, reveal the development of shared perceptions and elucidate the cultural processes of creativity, meaning construction and distributed cognition.

In Australian Contemporary Dance, it is common for a new dance work to commence with the exploration of a choreographic intention through guided improvisation tasks. From this raw movement material, the choreographic ensemble will select sequences and phrases that are then memorised and organised until a choreographic product is prepared for performance.

“Improvisation is represented as the downwards pointing triangle that narrows as the triangle of choreography expands. In theory, an infinite amount of movement possibilities generated through improvisation are degenerated into the finite world of a choreographed performance” (Mason, 2009:29).

If you’re looking to read the article (or cite the diagrams), it is available through EBSCOhost:
MASON, Paul Howard (2009) Brain, Dance and Culture: The choreographer, the dancing scientist and interdisciplinary collaboration., Brolga: An Australian Journal About Dance; Jun2009 Issue 30, p27-34, 8p, 1 diagram, 1 bw

I would also recommend Janice Fournier’s article How a creative “system” learns: the distributed activity of choreography (2004), John Sutton’s Moving and Thinking together in Dance, and Thinking in Four Dimensions edited by Robin Grove, Catherine Stevens and Shirley McKechnie

Over the last century, anthropologists have often chosen to study exotic symbolic systems — rituals, myth, art — and frequently managed to illuminate the cultural logic underlying what seem initially to be “irrational” practices.

So why haven’t anthropologists leapt to study one of the most exotic and powerful symbolic systems in human history? I’m talking about the Western (and predominantly American) system of “entertainment”. Not only is this system central to contemporary Western culture, it has arguably played a major role in the breakdown of the cultures of many indigenous communities.

Entertainment should be a significant focus of anthropological inquiry. Alas, it is not.

Admittedly, some interest in the topic has emerged in the last couple of decades. Much of this material is promising; often authors pursue the insight that in some ways entertainment activities are similar to rituals. This is not only an accurate observation, but it points to the possibility of beginning to map how entertainment works to establish some of the central meanings of contemporary life.

I have usually been disappointed, however, by the level of insight provided by such studies. Much of this work turns out not to have a lot to say when it comes to explaining the specifics of how these entertainment rituals undergird our social order. This is one of the reasons I have urged an alternative approach, namely, considering entertainment activities as forms of play. Another reason is that for the most part those who participate in entertainment regard it not as ritual but as play.

Students of play have often pointed to the importance of the experience of becoming deeply immersed in play. We can become so caught up in a game or a narrative or an episode of pretending that we become entirely focused on the activity and to some extent lose track of our everyday co-ordinates.

In my new book Caught in Play: How Entertainment Works on You (2009,Stanford), I argue that such experiences are akin to Durkheimian episodes of collective effervescence, they are moments of ecstasy wherein the importance of key cultural powers and values is palpably felt.

What has this to do with neuroanthropology? Plenty, it turns out. These ecstatic experiences, which seem to be especially likely to occur in play, ritual, and intense social interaction, are built (at least in part) from automatic neural processes such as imitation, emotional contagion, and attentional absorption.

To take a single example: Increasingly, neuroscientists argue that a mirror neuron system in humans is implicated in our enormous capacity for imitation and “mind-reading,” the ability to grasp what our conspecifics are up to. And this ability to adopt the perspective of another is evident not only in social interaction, it also underlies our imaginative play and by extension our understanding of narratives. In other words, recent findings on imitation and mirroring help us to begin to understand why we should be so easily and powerfully “carried away” into imaginative situations.

There is still much to be learned here. However, it is now clear that the play of entertainment is not a sociological triviality. Rather, entertainment is a privileged site through which some of the key values of consumption are fused with emotional power through experiences that seem to transcend the everyday. Neuroanthropology can play a vital role in building a theory of the culture of entertainment, a symbolic system that is at the very foundation of the contemporary political and economic order.

Let me end with one example – Michael Jackson. He shows how powerful modern entertainment is as a symbolic system that catches us up in play, absorption and mimicry. Thriller became popular through MTV, a music video that caught us up in a playful story and dance moves many tried to match. It has even been acted out on large scale by Philippine prison inmates!

Drawing on the enormous wealth built through his music, Jackson built a theme park for a home, but when his actions crossed from play to something more threatening and damaging for children, his legal troubles started at Neverland Ranch. The changes in his appearance were discussed endlessly for their symbolic value about modern identity, race, and more. With his recent death, right before a London comeback concert tour (already 50 sold-out dates), entertainers of all sorts have moonwalked, sung, danced, and worn a sequined glove for all of us to watch. This is modern entertainment.

-//-

Peter Stromberg is professor of anthropology at the University of Tulsa. If you want to read more, you can see our coverage of his new book Caught in Play: How Entertainment Works on You.

You can also access his 2008 article (pdf), Symbolic Valorization in the Culture of Entertainment: The Example of Legal Drug Use, which uses the examples of smoking and drinking to discuss how modern entertainment works as a symbolic and emotional system through transformative experience and play as a social practice.

Caught in Play is written by Peter Stromberg, professor of anthropology at Tulsa and blogger for PsychologyToday. Published by Stanford University Press, this book examines the following themes:

Most of us have, at some point, become so immersed in a book or game or movie that the activity temporarily assumes a profound significance and the importance of the outside world begins to fade… [Yet] basic questions remain unanswered [about this immersion].

What do we know about the overall effect of living in a society in which entertainment is so central? What do we know about how entertainment affects society and the people who participate in it? Why are entertainment activities so important to us, yet frequently dismissed as being unworthy of serious reflection?

Chapters begin with “Caught Up in the Game” and end with “Entertainment and Our Understanding of Self.” In between we get romantic realism, role playing, play and agency in legal drug use, and more.

Caught in Play matters because most psychological and neurological approaches reduce experience and activity to something run only through brain processes without attending to the nature of the activity and experience themselves. These real-world phenomena also bring foundational elements to the overall pattern. We get caught up because of brain and culture, and how experience and behavior link both.

Yet cultural anthropologists often want to cut out aspects of individual life, of processes located in and through bodies, from their analyses. Stromberg attends to play, boredom, imagination, and role taking as equal partners in understanding the captivating power of the streams of entertainment delivered to us today. He also shows how modern forms of entertainment, caught up in capitalism and consumerism, are distinctive in how they play on our own individual engagements, often to extreme ends and for the profit of others.

Peter has set up a great website for Caught in Play. You can read an excerpt on romance and popular advice and keep up to date through Peter’s blog. I enjoyed this post on beliefs, explanations and why we really enjoy entertainment. Peter also considers the applied and negative side of his work on entertainment, play and modernity. He offers us resources on addiction, with more resources to come.

For those looking for other reviews, here’s an Amazon customer:

From the first page, Caught in Play captured my attention and opened my eyes to a world of entertainment and advertising that has become essential to our modern lives. Relatable and entertaining, this book gave me incredible insight to a side of my own character that I had not yet acknowledged.

Engrossing stories about the worlds of Role Playing Games, romance novels, and the development of television commercials left me laughing at myself and those I knew, for who among us has not, themselves, been caught up in their favorite movie, TV show, or book?

And Bradd Shore and Daniel Linger have the more academic views:

The surfaces of play mask some surprising hidden dynamics of modern life. Stromberg delivers a high-flying set of reflections on what lies behind our capacity to get caught up completely in the world of entertainment. Exploring our ever-intensifying ‘stimulus hunger,’ his excursion into the history of modern desire provides a new way to think about the forces shaping contemporary entertainment.

With its lively, ambitious examination of how entertainment has replaced ritual as a means of creating and affirming social ideals and motivations, Caught in Play extends the insights of major social theorists such as Durkheim, Weber, and Goffman. It is a stimulating read that will evoke productive debate over the effects of contemporary forms of imaginative involvement.

Dr. Charles Whitehead

I especially like his piece with Prof. Robert Turner, downloadable here, on the effects of collective representations on the brain. In particular, the Turner and Whitehead article argues that the idea that certain areas of the brain are networked into a ‘social brain’ — implying that the rest of the brain is ‘not social’ — is hard to support. I’ll admit that I don’t necessarily use the same language or conceive of how the brain works in the ways described by Turner and Whitehead, but it is well worth the read to check it out, if for no other reason that it provides a corrective to some emerging ways of theorizing brain enculturation.

Turner and Whitehead take the multiple senses of the word, ‘representation,’ especially the conflicting use by anthropologists and social scientists, on the one hand, and brain sciences, as a point of departure. Normally, I just find the overlap annoying and have argued that it is one reason that anthropologists don’t ‘get it’ when it comes to neurosciences (for example, in Beyond Bourdieu’s ‘body’ — giving too much credit?). But Turner and Whitehead have something more constructive to say about the unstable term (from their conclusion):

We have tried to emphasize the contingent nature of much of our experience as social actors — which must qualify the way that we perceive ourselves, each other and the world — as we refer to a collectively defined system of concepts, rules, beliefs and even physical structures in order to givemeaning to our actions and find meaning in each others’ actions. Durkheim characterized this system by the term ‘collective representations’. In neuropsychology the term ‘representation’ has become commonplace for the action of the brain in forming material counterparts for mental processes, and so it is attractive to consider the relationship between these two types of representation: the collective and the cortical. We think it is well demonstrated that some collective representations can have well-defined cortical representations. (Turner and Whitehead 2008:54-55)

One section I did strongly agree with discusses the evidence for the idea that the same skills can be achieved through different areas of the brain, depending upon how a person learns a task (see page 52).

Dr. Whitehead’s own research is on play, social display, Some of the pages aren’t yet fully functioning, but it looks like he’s going to take on some topics that I fear to broach, including religion and ‘anomalous experience’ from a neurosciences, anthropological, and evolutionary perspective. From his bio:

Charles Whitehead was creative director of an advertising agency for twenty years before gaining his PhD in social anthropology at University College London. He teaches anthropology to cognitive science students at the University of Westminster, and is currently involved in brain imaging research on pretend play at the Wellcome Department of Imaging Neuroscience. His research interests include self-consciousness, social display, and the evolution of the human brain. A central aim is to bridge the extraordinary conceptual gulfs dividing the various disciplines that attempt to understand human thought, behaviour, and consciousness.

References
Turner, Robert, and Charles Whitehead. 2008. How collective representations can change the structure of the brain. Journal of Consciousness Studies 15 (10/11): 43-57. (download pdf)

I know, I know, this is way too long, but I guess this might be my own obsessive ritual. But if you really do want more, you can check out my last video game round-up, which had a brain/psychology flavor and linked to my own stuff here on the Neuroanth blog.

Top of the List

Brain Crecente, Three Developers Explain LittleBigPlanet Level Design to a 7-Year-Old
If you want the basic basic about how to make a great game, this is the place to start. Plus, how cool for this kid!
Designers have more insight into human nature than most anthropologists and neuroscientists (after all, they rely on people to get what they are doing…). And when trying to explain that to a kid, they get like your favorite uncle after a few beers crossed with Yoda. Some wisdom here… and a few exploding barrels.

Andy Chalk, LittleBigPlanet Delayed over Religious Controversy
The highly anticipated Sony game is delayed because a featured song contains Arabic words taken from the Qur’an. Some Muslims consider it sacrilegious to mix popular music and holy text; the initial discussion started on Arabic gaming sites.
For more on the song “Tapha Niang” by Toumani Diabaté, a Grammy-award winning musician from Mali, see this article. You can also listen to the song here.
Toumani Diabate defends the use of the Qur’an in his music, calling it both normal and a way to inspire people towards Islam. Even more reactions here by players, Sony and others interested parties. Finally, the American Islam Forum for Democracy objects to the censorship.

Jeremy Adam Smith, Playing the Blame Game: Video Games Pros and Cons
A balanced piece on how video games affect adolescents based on the research of Cheryl Olson and Lawrence Kutner

Social Issues

Michael Abbott, Games to Help
Several examples of games that aim to make a difference – money to cancer, social awareness, and more

Jay Alabaster, Japan’s Online Social Scene Isn’t So Social
“Welcome to Japan’s online social scene, where you’re unlikely to meet anyone you don’t know already.”

Kate Schneider, Video Games Social, Not Violent, Study Finds
Teenagers socialize through video games – not just sitting in a basement blowing things up alone

Newser, Online Gamers Leaner Than Your Average Couch Potato
Watching TV is the big potato; gamers just have more mental health problems. At least among EverQuest players. For more on this study, see here and here.

Simon Carless, How Turning Players Into Data Processors Is Changing The Game
A post, complete with excerpt, about the new book Changing Game, which examines “how web-based games such as The ESP Game and Fold.it can be used to get humans to process important data sets — for free!”

Game Politics, Who Owns Your Little Big Planet Creations? (Hint: probably not you)
LittleBigPlanet is all about user-generated content and the sharing of creative levels (here’s a cute marriage proposal one!). Now Sony changes its terms of use, indicating its ability to take your work and sell it themselves.

Kathyrn Grim, Get Real! Virtual Campaign Draws Followers
Obama and McCain supporters campaign in Second Life

Erin Hoffman, We the Gamers
A Gamers’ Bill of Rights is under discussion! For more, see Gamasutra.

Wagner James Au, Confirmed: Obama Is Campaigning on Xbox 360!
In-game billboards with Obama on them!

Earnest Cavalli, ‘Cultural Sensitivities’ Bar Fallout 3 from India
Mutant cows and offending names lead to the ban

The Game Anthropologist, Mega Man 9 and the Bridging of Cultures
A period piece and the bridging of generations – a new phenomena for video games

The Brainy Gamer, No More Game Shame
One gamer rejects game shame. Why can’t we just embrace play-for-play’s sake? For more, see The Problem with Play

Game Design

Tom Magrino, BlizzCon 2008: Staying True to Diablo
Blizzard’s game design philosophy for Diablo 3 – visceral yet stylistic, with replayability and randomness

Randolph Ramsey, TGS 2008: Turbine’s Crowley on Socializing MMOs
“Crowley believes MMOs need to evolve further to include the social networking elements of sites such as Facebook and MySpace to cater for the demands of their audience.”

David Houghton, Why Games Fail at Storytelling
Can gameplay and narrative mix? Not much, says this critic, as he looks at cutscenes and more

Ernest Adams, The Designer’s Notebook: Bad Game Designer, No Twinkie!
Nine things not to do when designing your game

Brian Ashcraft, Phil Harrison Talks Development Mistakes
The biggest? Accelerating development and pushing a product to market without taking care of every step along the way

Tom Endo, From the Barrel of a Gun
The mythos of guns in games – and the two-dimensional failures therein

Yahoo News, New Video Game Literally a Mind Game
Neurosky translates willpower into game action. At least that’s the premise of the new headset Mindset from Neurosky.

Clive Thompson, Halo 3: How Microsoft Labs Invented a New Science of Play
Studying the fun of gaming in the lab! And using the results to perfect game design.

The Academic Side

Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins, Chess for Girls? Feminism and Computer Games
Chapter in the book From Barbie to Mortal Combat

Kiri Miller, Grove Street Grimm: Grand Theft Auto and Digital Folklore
The latest article from Kiri. “I discuss Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas as a story collection, a frame for performance, a virtual museum of vernacular culture, and a widely circulated pop culture artifact whose double-voiced aesthetic has given rise to diverse interpretive communities.”
For more on Kiri Miller, check out her Brown University webpage. She also is starting research on Guitar Hero, including a blog!

DigiPlay Initiative: Understanding Digital Games
A scholarly initiative featuring the “largest database of academic and research articles on game freely available on the web” and its own original papers

Jo Bryce and Jason Rutter, An Introduction to Understanding Digital Games
Pdf of a chapter that surveys academic gaming research

Nick Yee and Jeremy Bailenson, The Proteus Effect: The Effect of Transformed Self-Representation on Behavior
Pdf of research on digital self-representation – avatars make us who we are. For more on Nick Yee and his research on online games and immersive virtual reality, check out his website.

The Brainy Gamer, The GTA Bookshelf
Academic works and musing about Grand Theft Auto

Patricia Greenfield and colleagues, The Impact of Computer Use on Children’s and Adolescents’ Development
Pdf of a 2001 article. For more, check out the UCLA Children Digital Media Center

Funny Stuff (you need that after the academic stuff…)

Mike Fahey, Stan Bush Wants “The Touch” In Guitar Hero, Rock Band
THE missing song from recent music games – the theme song “The Touch” to the 1980s cartoon The Transformers. Includes a great video of the song performed by Stan Bush himself, complete with cartoon clips. Very funny.

Owen Good, Invade Stormwind? You and What Arm– oh, That One
Just go check out the picture. The extreme of geekdom (and a lot of cash). This guy can play 36 World of Warcraft players at once. His one-man wreaking crew. For more, see here.

Game Politics, Joe the Plumber vs. Joe Six Pack
Funny video as these two election-year creations duke it out Mortal Kombat style

Games Games Games

New Mirror’s Edge Trailer
Some of you know I think parkour/free running is pretty cool. Now it’s in a great-looking game. This clip even includes the running legend Sebastien Foucan, who appeared in the James Bond movie Casino Royale.

Glenn Chapman, Family-friendly Wii Out to Win Battle-loving Gamers
Hard core games for the Wii? Just check out Mad World and The Conduit

Chris Ward, The Most OCD Video Games: Q-Bert, LEGO Batman, Mercenaries 2, and More
1980s video games and obsessive-compulsive tendencies. Do recent games match up? Is it OCD or just ritual?

The Brainy Gamer, Fallout 180
Michael Abbott makes his students play the two original Fallout games. They struggled at first and then they got it. Conversion process, anyone? And now they are rabid against Fallout 3 too! (Hey, I loved Oblivion!)

Game Informer, PlayStation 2: The Games That Defined a Generation
The 25 games or series that represent the best of the last console generation

Education, Learning and More

Winnie Hu, Video Game Helps Math Students Vanquish an Archfiend: Algebra
NY Times on The Dimension M game. Here’s one student: “I used to hate math, but I’ve started to like it. I actually understand it more.”

Associated Press, Microsoft Backs Using Video Games as Teaching Tools
The Games for Learning Institute, a new university-industry consortium for education through gaming. These are the people behind the Dimension M game, featured just above.

Roger Shank, Grandparent Games
The educator connects with his grandchildren through gaming (and learning). Here is his GranparentGames website.

Simon Harvey, Computer and Video Games Are Good for Us!!
Church and charity leaders draw that conclusion at a panel discussion in London

Pam Willenz, Playing Video Games Offers Learning across Life Span, Say Studies
Report on an American Psychological Association convention panel – plenty of research leads here if you want to show video games are good for you

Owen Good, More Wiisearch: Helping Stroke Patients
Wii is useful for monitoring progress in physiotherapy. And I just thought the high score mattered…

Yahoo Tech, Allstate Testing Whether Games Can Improve Driving
The insurance company wants drivers over 50 to play their video games!

Motoko Rich, The Future of Reading: Using Video Games as Bait to Hook Readers
Novels meet games, and the promise therein, over at the NY Times. Check out PJ Haarsma’s game The Rings of Orbis.
I don’t know how much to buy into this, after all I’ve seen my boys alternate between intense gaming and intense reading. But I did have a student who told me about getting into writing through World of Warcraft – about sharing and creating ideas and scenarios between friends online. That has made me think different about the possibilities since then…

Bad Mixing of Interests

So, some of you know that my main research interest in substance use and abuse. So I couldn’t quite resist these really BAD mixings of gaming and the world of use.

Mike Fahey, The Ultimate Drunk Driving Home Arcade Experience
Dream Arcades creates a drunk driving arcade game, complete with beer: “a custom built driving arcade cabinet featuring a 120 inch HD projection screen, a 5.1 audio system, a home theater PC complete with 12 classic racing games, a PlayStation 3 compatible steering wheel, and of course, dual beer taps, front and rear”

Anna Caldwell, Three Charged Over Ecstasy Hidden in Mailed PlayStation
Australian police take down three drug smugglers – the funny thing, the ecstasy was going to “Surfers Paradise”. I didn’t make that up, check the photo!

This particular Silent Rave took place in Boston’s Copley Square, and was promoted through both Facebook and MySpace. Here’s the MySpace ad:

WHAT IS A SILENT RAVE?? A silent rave is a dance party where everyone listens to their own music. Imagine looking out and seeing hundreds of people dancing, but hearing nothing. Pretty cool, eh?

This Myspace page will keep all you ravers updated on upcoming events. It’ll also help promote this event, and attract more people to the raves.

Basically, what you do at a silent rave is bring your MP3 player and headphones. After the countdown to the start time of the event (typically in the evening, but who knows!), everyone presses play at the same time, listening to their own favorite jams. Everyone then starts dancing (dancing, jumping up and down, flailing arms around wildly, it’s all the same at a rave!).

What’s the point? Well, it’s just an event where a bunch of people can get together to have fun, expend pent-up energy, and meet tons of new people with similar interests. These silent raves are supremely exciting (well, with the right attitude) and fun. Silent raves will normally be short and sweet, but everyone is more than welcome to stay afterwards to party and mingle with fellow ravers.

Simple guidelines:
-please Please PLEASE respect the locations where the silent raves are held, i.e. don’t litter and no violence. We don’t want to be attracting any unwanted attention from local authorities…
-Wait for the countdown to start raving, otherwise it’ll be a mess.
-Have fun.

In the States one of the biggest Silent Raves was held last April in NYC’s Union Square. Both the NY Times and ABC News covered it. I’ve included a photo from that rave. For some video go to this You Tube clip.

The odd thing for me was that the You Tube clip included music! I suppose that makes sense for showing off what you were listening to, but as a curious anthropologist (and a guy just out of current style, one of my students commented yesterday) it didn’t help me capture the overall feel of the event. So here’s a video from Calgary. A lot smaller silent rave, but this one gives a better sense of what it looks like to someone on the outside.

And then there was this massive flash mob silent rave in Victoria Station in London!

Together all three round ups provide the background for approaching video games through neuroanthropology. Ideally this background would then serve to inform specific research on gaming, which I have addressed previously in discussing avatars, MMORPGs, and Grand Theft Auto, probably my most synthetic piece.

To place that work in context, you can also check out the popular post One Day at Kotaku: Understanding Video Games and Other Modern Obsessions. See also: video games and the neuroanthropology of interaction and gaming and cultural perception.

This round-up draws more on published research than the previous two. At times the best I could provide is a link to an abstract; where possible, I have tracked down pdfs. And if there are other good papers out there that I don’t mention, please leave a comment!

Games and Neuroscience

Shawn Green and Daphne Bavelier, The Cognitive Neuroscience of Video Games
Pdf of a comprehensive chapter that appeared in the book Digital Media: Transformations in Human Communication

Klaus Mathiak & Rene Weber, Toward Brain Correlates of Natural Behavior: fMRI during Violent Video Games
“We propose that virtual environments can be used to study neuronal processes involved in semi-naturalistic behavior as determined by content analysis. Importantly, the activation pattern reflects brain-environment interactions rather than stimulus responses as observed in classical experimental designs.”

Niklas Ravaja et al., Spatial Presence and Emotions during Video Game Playing: Does It Matter with Whom You Play?
Yes it does—playing against another person is different than playing against a computer

CS Green & D. Bavelier, Action-Video-Game Experience Alters the Spatial Resolution of Vision
“Compared with nonplayers, action-video-game players could tolerate smaller target-distractor distances. Thus, the spatial resolution of visual processing is enhanced in this population. Critically, similar effects were observed in non-video-game players who were trained on an action video game; this result verifies a causative relationship between video-game play and augmented spatial resolution.” Gaming can also reduce gender differences in spatial cognition.

Fumiko Hoeft et al., Gender Differences in the Mesocorticolimbic System during Computer Game-play
“males showed greater activation and functional connectivity compared to females in the mesocorticolimbic system. These findings may be attributable to higher motivational states in males, as well as gender differences in reward prediction, learning reward values and cognitive state during computer video games”

MJ Koepp et al., Evidence for Striatal Dopamine Release during a Video Game
Pdf of well-received 1998 Nature paper on reward, dopamine and gaming. Slightly dated now with its view of reward and dopamine, but definitely a foundational piece.

Niklas Ravaja, The Psychophysiology of Video Gaming: Phasic Emotional Responses to Game Events
Ever wonder why it’s fun? Both positive and negative game events when players actively involved in playing elicited “positive emotional responses in terms of facial EMG activity” (pdf)

Games and Embodiment

James Paul Gee, Video Games and Embodiment
Recent article in Games and Culture laying out Gee’s view on gaming and human thinking as both “situated and embodied”.

Edward Schneider, Death with a Story: How Story Impacts Emotional, Motivational, and Physiological Responses to First-Person Shooter Video Games
“When story was present, game players felt greater identification, sense of presence, and physiological arousal. The presence of story did not affect self-reported arousal or dominance.”

Delwin Clark & P. Robert Duimering, How Computer Gamers Experience the Game Situation: A Behavioral Study
First person shooters and qualitative research on what players focus on

Scott Klemer et al., How Bodies Matter: Five Themes for Interaction Design
Experiencing, understanding, interacting and how that shapes and should shape design of interactive or immersive technologies (pdf)

Gaming, Immersion and Addiction

Richard Wood et al., The Structural Characteristics of Video Games: A Psycho-Structural Analysis
The main inducements for gaming based on work with self-identified gamers

Nicholas Yee, The Psychology of Massively Multi-User Online Role-Playing Games: Motivations, Emotional Investment, Relationships and Problematic Usage
What players find absorbing about MMORPGs (pdf)

Paul Cairns et al., Quantifying the Experience of Immersion in Games
Pdf on how to understand and quantify what counts as “immersion” when gaming (pdf)

Peter Voderer, Explaining the Enjoyment of Playing Video Games: The Role of Competition
Finally someone looks at the obvious, and lo and behold, the competition matters

Mind Hacks, Why There Is No Such Thing as Internet Addiction
Compulsive, repetitive behaviors are about the activity, not the medium (gaming vs. games); and exist along a range of normal to problematic to pathological involvement

Joshua Smyth, Beyond Self-Selection in Video Game Play: An Experimental Examination of the Consequences of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game Play
Assigned to play a MMORGP? After one month, participants reported “more hours spent playing, worse health, worse sleep quality, and greater interference in “real-life” socializing and academic work. In contrast, this group also reported greater enjoyment in playing, greater interest in continuing to play, and greater acquisition of new friendships.” Cognitive Daily describes this study in more depth

Pauline Askin, Video Game Addicts Are Not Shy Nerds
“Our findings strongly suggest that gaming doesn’t cause social problems, and social problems are not driving people to gaming.”

Games, Cognition and Learning

Cognitive Daily, Will Video Games Solve Sex-Discrimination in Science?
Men get better visuospatial, and thus math, skills from gaming?

Cognitive Daily, One More Way Video Games Might Be Good for You
Cognitive training, including an on-line demonstration

Matthew Peter Jacob Habgood, The Effective Integration of Digital Games and Learning Content
Thesis covering examples and theories for how to integrate gaming and learning (pdf)

Steve LeBlanc, Studies: Video Games Can Aid Students, Surgeons
AP article on recent research outlining how gaming helps specific types of learning

Games and Violence

Edge, Review: Grand Theft Childhood
Do violent games create violence? A balanced review of a balanced book

Christoph Klimmt et al., How Players Manage Moral Concerns to Make Video Game Violence Enjoyable
Qualitative research on how gamers can do things they would normally never do in real life

Christopher John Ferguson, The Good, The Bad and the Ugly: A Meta-analytic Review of Positive and Negative Effects of Violent Video Games
When effect sizes and publication bias are taken into account, video games appear to not impact violence. But effects are shown for greater visuospatial cognition.

Here’s another round up, where I have focused on more traditional social science/anthropological themes, as well as related articles and blogging about game design.

Meaning

Sande Chen, Towards More Meaningful Games: A Multidisciplinary Approach
“how to ratchet up emotional intensity – through narrative design, visuals, and music – to create more meaningful games”

The Brainy Gamer, The Elusiveness of Meaning
“Ueda’s process begins with an image and grows from that place, informing the way the game plays, how it feels, and what it means… The meaning of the image is conveyed through a beautiful weave of gameplay and narrative.”

Kyle Stallock, Diablo Fans Petition Against III’s Artistic Direction
New game demo with brighter environments and more color creates a fan backlash: they want a visual style for Diable III “coherent with the universe it belongs to”. See the video report here

The Escapist, The Age of World Builders
“That’s when it really hit me: This wasn’t just some level in a game. This was my vacation home in a digital environment.”

Ian Bogost, The End of Gamers
Gaming matures as a medium, and takes myriad forms

Owen Good, Can a Game Be a Tearjerker?
A journalist asks, and online readers respond about their saddest gaming experiences.

The Brainy Gamer, Narrative Manifesto
Video games and delivering “genuinely interactive narrative experiences to the player”

Language

Brent Ellison, Defining Dialogue Systems
Dialogue as interaction, and how to build that into a game

Brain Ashcarft, The Meaning of Ninjy
Translators take the stage for big international hits, in this case Ninja Gaiden II. What would a ninja actually say?

Aaron Britt, Avatar
The definition and social history of the word

Design Issues

Michael Abbott, Embedding Social Activist Principles in Game Design
“every design decision ‘can potentially have social, moral, and political implications, and that each design feature can potentially convey social, moral, and political content’.”

Barbara Ortutay, Game Characters Get Smarter — and Less Predictable
Dynamic programming and users’ imagination make for changes

Only a Game, A Game Isn’t A Series of Interesting Decisions
Going beyond the “strategic decision” approach to game design to invoke other ways of being/involvement in a game

John Brandon, Simple, Innovative Games Offer a Breath of Fresh Air
Games beyond shooting, strategy, and the typical puzzles. Besides the games mentioned in the piece, forthcoming titles like Little Big Planer and Spore also offer innovation.

Brandon Sheffield, Dreaming of a New Day: Heavy Rain’s David Cage
Realism, emotion and gaming—an interview with the head designer of an anticipated game

Adam Barenblat, New Battlefield Bad Company Dev Diary Talks Audio
Nice video about the creative process that goes into the audio aspect of a game

Duncan Fyfe, Video Games Are the Silver Bullet
Video games, the potential for learning, and AAA titles

Michael French, Gaming Audience Will Hit 2.5bln by 2011
But only 3 in 10 games succeed financially

N’Gai Croal, Welcoming Our New Sweatshop Overlords, Part I: Will Wright On Outsourcing Content Production To the Players of Spore
Players drive content and thus design, not just the programmers. Click for Part II and Part III on the internet as sweatshop (damn, I am blogging and doing work for others for nothing…)

Gender

Leigh Alexander, Body Types: Why Ivy’s Boobs Are Such a Big, Big Deal
Gender stereotypes, “the flesh is weak,” and the lack of backlash—a female gamer and reporter provides her reflective take

Michael Thompson, Entertainment Software Association Study: 40 Percent of US Gamers Are Women
Get the social facts here

Edge, The Growing Role of Women in Gaming
Women increasingly come to gaming as players and developers

Tom Francis, The Dating Game
“Is a multiplayer game a stupid place to look for love?” Quite funny.

The Brainy Gamer, Venus and Mars in My Living Room
Male:Female::Xbox360:PS3?

Tracey John, Designer: ‘Diablo III’ Gender Choice A ‘Big Debate’
The move from one-sex classes to being able to choose gender, and the debates within

Social Science

Tom Boellstorff, Ethnographic Methods and Virtual Worlds: Notes Towards a Typology
Studying virtual worlds and video gaming through qualitative methods, by the anthropologist who studies Second Life

Synthetic Worlds Institute, Arden: The World of William Shakespeare
Lessons learned from building a digital world in “which we could conduct social science experiments.” For some of their results, see here.

Terra Nova
A blog about virtual worlds, and the academics who study them

The Brainy Gamer, GLS – Beyond Games and the Future of Learning
James Gee, “passion communities,” and real knowledge. Media/anthropology has more on Gee and his “affinity spaces”

David Williamson Schaffer et al., Video Games and the Future of Learning
Educators and psychologists show how video games can be incorporated into school-based learning

Kurt Squire, Cultural Framing of Computer/Video Games
2002 article assessing the state of the research—good overview of relevant themes and literature

Jan Simons, Narrative, Games and Theory
Examining story and play through gaming

Mattathias Schwartz, The Trolls among Us
“Malwebolence”—NY Times Magazine piece on people who intentionally disrupt online communities

David Itzkoff, Rec-Room Wizard
Profile of Chris Chike, the teenage Guitar Hero phenom

Tom Magrino, NPD Breaks Down Gamer Habits
Extreme gamers as 3% of gaming US population, and play games on average 45 hours per week

History

PodBlack Cat, Dungeons and Dragons – Or Mazes and Monsters?
Returning to the roots of gaming through flow, the occult, and D&D

PC Zone, The Complete History of Open World Games: Part One and Part Two
Historical accounting of the genre in two brief parts

Heather Chaplin, Is That Just Some Game? No, It’s a Cultural Artifact
Preserving the game canon

Maggie Greene, Inside Out: The Pokemon Conundrum
Game studies meets Japanese history…

Steve Fulton, Atari: The Golden Years
Asteroids through Battlezone – how Atari changed gaming from 1977 to 1981

Tom Chatfield, Rage Against the Machines
Do games stunt minds and create addictions? Good overview of what people really do when they sit down to play. “Games are human products, and lie within our control.” See readers’ comments here.

Eric Sofge, Video Games (Finally) Grow Up
Esquire article covers how video games have matured—storytelling, moral complexity, artistry and more

Rob Fahey, It’s Inevitable: Soon We Will All Be Gamers
Video games out of teenagers’ rooms and into everyday life

Louis Bedigian, Professor James Paul Gee Shows the World the Importance of Video Games
Learning doesn’t just happen in school, and that’s a good thing. Or, trying to understand why people put so much effort into mastering a game

Vaio at VG Chartz, Why We Game
Worth it for the starting photo alone. Illuminating discussion by gamers about why they do it

Criticisms

Susan Greenfield, Modern Technology Is Changing The Way Our Brains Work
Neuroscientist presents a critical take—games and pharmaceuticals are changing brain function and creating unhealthy dependencies. For more on Greenfield and her views, click here.

Etelmik, Self-Abuse in Game Play
“We talk about games being therapeutic, educational, beautiful, aesthetic, or enlightening. We also talk of them as being cheap, derivative, or boring. But it occurred to me in the last two weeks that sometimes they can be devastating, depressing, destructive and discouraging.”

Stephen Totilo, Are Games Our Fantasies?
“Let’s talk, finally, about what that means.” Racial imagery, murderous violence, and the debate between “it shouldn’t matter” and “it does matter”

Mike Smith, New Startup Tackles Stereotypes
Gaming just for boys? Here’s a company run by women! “Worldwide Biggies spans the gender gap”

Don Reisinger, Correcting the Violent Video Game Rhetoric
At least mentions the critics and their thoughts before disagreeing

Funny Stuff

Shawn at Gaming Today, MIT Urinal Video Game Test Those Too Pissed To Drive
Ah, what will MIT geeks come up with next? A pissing game to see if you can point, and supposedly, drive straight. Puts new meaning to the phrase “pissing contests”

GraphJam, A Gamer’s Buying Guide
Very funny take on a decision flow chart for the current generation of gaming systems. I am a PC gamer naturally… (Note: scroll down past the MTV chart to see)

Intersections

Seth Schiessel, Face to Face: A Council of Online Gamers
Self-governance online: Eve Online and how a company and democracy are merging over managing a beloved game’s future

Mo at Neurophilosophy, Brain-Computer Interface for Controlling Second Life Avatars
Moving around in Second Life on brain power alone. For more, read this story about a paralyzed man using this technology to “walk.”

Mo at Neurophilosophy, Nintendo Wii as It Might Look in 2010
Mind control and the future of gaming—blasting aliens with your brain

Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown, Why Virtual Worlds Can Matter
Real time coordination and interaction bind players together—the significance of “being there”

Jeff Orkin & Deb Roy, The Restaurant Game: Learning Social Behavior and Language from Thousands of Players Online
Large pdf on building a computational approach for “conversational virtual agents”

Chris Watters, Spore Updated Hands-On
Why Spore is a strategy game, and not really about evolution

Games as Art, Games as Games

The Brainy Gamer, NY Times Op-Ed on… Video Games
Asks: Where are the video games worthy of a NY Times op-ed? See the original op-ed by Daniel Radosh, The Play’s The Thing, about recovering from his Halo 3 haze.

The Brainy Gamer, A Good Day for Gamers
AAA games today, reminisces for the past. Gaming has evolved, but do we enjoy it any more?

Leigh Alexander, Laughing and Crying
Is Metal Gear Solid 4 the Citizen Kane of video games? For more of Leigh, see her other MGS4 post The Sorrow and the Joy at Sexy VideoGameland

The Brainy Gamer, Kojima and the Theory of Everything
Metal Gear Solid 4: Throwing everything in, and the necessity of artistic choices

Leigh Alexander, Industry Apologetics: It’s Not Just A Game
Stop being on the defensive—how the gaming industry can justify its art

Chuck Klosterman, The Lester Bangs of Video Games
Where video game criticism should go. For agreement, see Keith Stewart’s take.

Keith Stewart, State of Play: Is There A Role for the New Games Journalism? Ten Unmissable Examples of New Games Journalism
Pushing the edges of video game journalism, through criticism and through the player’s own experience

Anthropologists and Associated Brethern

David Itzkoff, The Shootout Over Hidden Meanings in a Video Game
Metal Gear Solid 4: For or against the “necessity of war”?

The Game Anthropologist
An entire series under such a name! Michael Walbridge provides us insights and more. A recent entry covers why Team Fortress 2, violent to its core, is still polite and well-mannered in gamers’ interactions.

Alexander Knorr, The Online Nomads of Cyberia
Examining the tribes of cyberspace

Colin Campbell, Game Anthropologist Watches the Natives
Anthropologist studies consumer responses, and helps drive game design

Jim Rossignol, Start Your Pre-Orders Now
Obsessed worker becomes gamer and successful journalist! What a mix! Now travels the world to report on gaming in his book, The Gaming Life. For more from Jim, check out his blog in general.

Rex at Savage Minds, Warcraft and the Craftsman: Grinding, Crafting and Craft
Reflections on the grind and the experience of skill in World of Warcraft and our everyday world

Savage Minds, Extended discussion of Tom Boellstorff’s ethnography on “Second Life”
Three posts: Ethnography of the Virtual, More on Coming of Age in Second Life, and The Presentation of Self in Virtual Life

Tom Boellstorff’s Virtual Office “Ethnographia”, Located in Dowden in Second Life
Click for a visit. First click gives you the overhead real estate view, but you need to be signed up for Second Life to actually visit. You can also visit the American Anthropologist virtual campus!

Games and Culture
An academic journal publishing some of the best stuff on gaming and the social sciences. There is generally a free sample issue available, so look for that. You can also see their 50 most read and most cited articles.

Alex Golub, Anthropology 3830: The Anthropology of Virtual Worlds
Syllabus for Alex’s class

Beth Kolko, Some Website Resources
Eclectic mix of reading and links on games and gaming

Games with a Purpose

NPR, Using Video Games to Get Kids Excited about Science
“Can video games help kids develop in meaningful ways?”

NPR, High Tech Sex Ed
Video games, podcasts, and social networking to get the sex ed message out

NPR, ‘Virtual Iraq’ Game Aims to Help Vets with PTSD
Immersion therapy through a game. See Sue Halpern’s New Yorker article on Virtual Iraq as well

Educational Games Research, The Top 10 Free Educational Video Games
One site’s take on the best out there

Claudia Parsons, Retired Justice O’Connor Unveils Video Game
World of Justice as addicting as World of Warcraft?

Mission to Learn, 26 Learning Games to Change the World
The title says it all—lots of links to some interesting games

Meagan VanBurkleo, Games for Health: Digital Games Meet Rehab, Therapy and Healthcare
How gaming can help make us better

Impact Lab, Study: Video Games Shown to Reduce Pain
Gaming can provide significant levels of pain distraction

Games and Learning

Jason Craft, Review: What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy
Review of James Paul Gee’s book. Video games as literary practice and full of situated learning, and something that teachers can imitate. See also the professor become gamer’s own article Why Video Games Are Good for Learning.

games + learning + society
Research group run by James Paul Gee on learning systems, technology, and social practices. For more on their specific research, see here.

Sean Maelstrom, Secret to the “Casual”
Long but interesting comparison between effective teaching and the rise of casual gaming—hardcore academics and gamers beware…

Brenda Brathwaite, The Myth of the Media Myth
“I’m a game designer and a professor,” she says, followed by the inevitable politics of academic respect and disputes over the morals of video games.

Grand Theft Auto IV comes out tomorrow. Looks like it might be the best in the series, certainly one of the best games of the year. The early reviews gathered at Metacritic have an average score of 99 out of 100 as I write this. Rockstar Games, the gaming company that has made Grand Theft Auto, estimates a pre-order demand around $400 million. So it’s big. Huge.

But why?

I will make a simple argument. It is the combination of creative anthropology, sophisticated game design and game play, and the right brain hooks that makes video games like Grand Theft Auto work so well.

And the reviews show it. In the rest of the piece, I will draw excerpts from three places, the IGN review, the New York Times review, and the highlight quotes from Metacritic.

Creative Anthropology

Take creative fiction, and add world-building and a do-it-yourself story, and then you have what I mean by creative anthropology. Some Geek Love through role playing and fantasy, mixed with narrative to get the cultural buy-in.

So here’s GameSpy: “The very nature of the American Dream is the central theme in Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto IV, a gaming masterpiece that is a picture-perfect snapshot of the underworld of today’s big cities.”

The New York Times gushes, “The real star of the game is the city itself. It looks like New York. It sounds like New York. It feels like New York. Liberty City has been so meticulously created it almost even smells like New York.”

And now for the characters, as described by IGN and the NY Times.

The wild cast of characters is part of the reason things are so entertaining. The voice acting is top notch and the characters are each immediately identifiable and unique. Some are loveable, but there are many who are despicable. There are cringe-worthy conversations, where you see Niko being sucked into the depravity of these peoples’ lives to earn a few bucks or gain a long-sought revenge… [These are] characters that you’re immediately able to connect to. They’re almost all bad people, to be sure, but each of them has character weaknesses and vulnerabilities that make them real. Characters have reasons for doing what they do, and it’s apparent that they also have morals and inner demons as well. The cast plays perfectly into a fascinating story that is not only is easily the best of the franchise, but one of the best you’ll find in gaming anytime soon.

Besides the nuanced Niko the game is populated by a winsome procession of grifters, hustlers, drug peddlers and other gloriously unrepentant lowlifes, each a caricature less politically correct than the last. Hardly a demographic escapes skewering. In addition to various Italian and Irish crime families, there are venal Russian gangsters, black crack slingers, argyle-sporting Jamaican potheads, Puerto Rican hoodlums, a corrupt police commissioner, a steroid-addled Brooklyn knucklehead named Brucie Kibbutz and a former Eastern European soldier who has become a twee Upper West Side metrosexual.

Start with a dream and a place, and then add the characters. That is the creative anthropology. Or maybe just good storytelling.

The Game Play

Too many games are ruined by bad game play. It gets in the way of both a good story and those brain hooks. But Grand Theft Auto IV takes no liberties in this domain. It is the flesh that ties together culture and brain.

But it’s technical flesh, gaming flesh. Here’s IGN. “Though many missions boil down to the same basic parameter — go to location, kill people to get to target, chase target, kill target — it never feels repetitive. The locations of missions, the variety in the enemies, the dynamic aspects of the AI, and the dialogue keep GTA IV from ever feeling stale. In fact, this is a game that can be enjoyed with multiple playthroughs. It’s just that good.”

The cellphone as mission interface, the new combat system and the new cover system get covered, and then the physics. “You will see the effects of NaturalMotion [video demonstration] throughout the game, whether it’s how bodies react when you slam your car into them or the way a gangbanger leaps away from a grenade. The physics system is the connective tissue that grounds the action into something resembling reality. And it’s one of the main factors that makes GTA such an impressive-looking game.”

It all adds up: “That a game with great AI, an awesome physics engine and a detailed open world runs so well and with such short load times is a technical marvel.”

Seth Schiesel in New York dials in on a different but equally dynamic aspect of game design:

At least as impressive as the city’s virtual topography is the range of the game’s audio and music production, delivered through an entire dial’s worth of radio stations available in almost any of the dozens of different cars, trucks and motorcycles a player can steal. From the jazz channel (billed as “music from when America was cool”) through the salsa, alt-rock, jazz, metal and multiple reggae and hip-hop stations, Lazlow Jones, Ivan Pavlovich and the rest of Rockstar’s audio team demonstrate a musical erudition beyond anything heard before in a video game… It is not faint praise to point out that at times, simply driving around the city listening to the radio — seguing from “Moanin’ ” by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers to the Isley Brothers’ “Footsteps in the Dark” to “The Crack House” by Fat Joe featuring Lil Wayne — can be as enjoyable as anything the game has to offer.

Brain Hooks

Immersion, reward, desire, and avoiding frustration and boredom—these are the brain hooks that set a game apart. The best games will make them run together into addictive fun.

So here’s immersion, Schiesel style: “I’ve spent almost 60 hours practically sequestered in a (real world) Manhattan hotel room in recent weeks playing through Grand Theft Auto IV’s main story line and the game still says I have found only 64 percent of its content. I won’t ever reach 100 percent, not least because I won’t hunt down all 200 of the target pigeons (known as flying rats here) that the designers have hidden around the city. But like millions of other players I will happily spend untold hours cruising Liberty City’s bridges and byways, hitting the clubs, grooving to the radio and running from the cops. Even when the real New York City is right outside.”

Reward? IGN shows how GTA IV does it at levels well beyond having a good score. “The dialogue in GTA IV is rich, funny, brilliant, insightful, and engaging. So many times your reward for beating a mission isn’t a new weapon or an elaborate cinematic cut-scene — it’s just dialogue. That is often reward enough.”

The good gameplay keeps the hours from getting frustrating, no sand thrown onto the brain gears. And little boredom either, not when there is so much to do: “The glittery urban landscape was almost enough to make me forget about the warehouse of cocaine dealers I was headed uptown to rip off. Soon I would get bored, though, and carjack a luxury sedan. I’d meet my Rasta buddy Little Jacob, then check out a late show by Ricky Gervais at a comedy club around the corner. Afterward I’d head north to confront the dealers, at least if I could elude the cops. I heard their sirens before I saw them and peeled out, tires squealing.”

Finally you’ve got to want to keep playing. Reward and immersion knit together by technical flesh with such a felt world can do that. That’s what makes it compelling, as we hear from Game Informer. “It’s been days since Grand Theft Auto IV’s credits rolled, yet I can’t seem to construct a coherent thought without my mind wandering off into a daydream about the game. I just want to drop everything in my life so I can play it again. Experience it again. Live it again…”

The Wrap Up

Anthropology prides itself on being a holistic discipline, on providing rich and varied examinations of human phenomenon. That’s definitely a part of neuroanthropology. And video games too.

“Everything in GTA IV works in harmony. The story would be nothing without the city; the city gains realism from the physics engine; the physics complement the improved AI; the AI would make no sense without the new cover system. And on and on.”