Steven Johnson
I think one of the most important trends unfolding in the world of games is the normalization of the idea of having an avatar: a virtual extension of yourself who "lives" in an alternate networked world, and who has an entire inventory of possessions: a house, clothes, some form of transportation, not to mention the magic spells and scepters. Tens of millions of these avatars exist now, and they are fundamentally different from the characters that players would temporarily inhabit in earlier games: you got to be Mario playing Donkey Kong and its descendants, but you never felt like Mario was an extension of your personality. Because your avatar persists over time, and because he/she is visible to other people, there's a tremendous emotional investment in these creations. And because they have become so lifelike thanks to the graphics — and the focus on things like facial expressions — they are fundamentally different from our other virtual identities online: our MySpace pages or IM accounts. ...read more

Steven Johnson
I think one of the most important trends unfolding in the world of games is the normalization of the idea of having an avatar: a virtual extension of yourself who "lives" in an alternate networked world, and who has an entire inventory of possessions: a house, clothes, some form of transportation, not to mention the magic spells and scepters. Tens of millions of these avatars exist now, and they are fundamentally different from the characters that players would temporarily inhabit in earlier games: you got to be Mario playing Donkey Kong and its descendants, but you never felt like Mario was an extension of your personality. Because your avatar persists over time, and because he/she is visible to other people, there's a tremendous emotional investment in these creations. And because they have become so lifelike thanks to the graphics — and the focus on things like facial expressions — they are fundamentally different from our other virtual identities online: our MySpace pages or IM accounts. To date, these avatars have largely flourished in game environments like Ultima or World of Warcraft, but they are migrating out into social spaces that are only tangentially about games — like Second Life and There. And complex social systems are emerging in the games as well. It is inevitable that flirting, romance, sex will flourish in these environments, assuming that the gender balance improves. The question I have is this: as the AI gets increasingly powerful, and your avatar starts to act more autonomously, will avatars develop flirtations on their own? You'll log into your account in the morning, and your avatar will greet you by saying: "I met the greatest guy last night..." click to close

Brenda Brathwaite
Will they? They already have! Cybering in video games goes back to the earliest MUDs — if you have players and a chat interface, it's a certainty. Games from World of Warcraft to Second Life have plenty of cybering going on, and at least four games that are in development now are going to take this a step further — Black Love Interactive's Rapture Online (www.blackloveinteractive.com), Republic Games' Spend the Night (www.spendthenight.com), Heavenly Bodies by Nest Egg Studios and one other whose title is pending. Not so ironically, three of the four have women behind them.

To me, these MMOEG (massively multiplayer erotic games) are the next logical extension of services like match.com. They'll allow people to meet, interact with and find each other.

Henry Jenkins
It is certainly the case that the kids who grew up playing Super Mario Brothershave continued to play games into their adulthood, allowing the games market to expand upward in age with each passing year. But that trend in and of itself explains little if we don't see it as part of a larger pattern in which adults in the early twenty-first century continue to play and fantasize actively well past the age when previous generations of adults would have put aside the pleasures of their childhood. There has been a shift in the ways our culture thinks about what it means to be an adult — one which allows more space for creativity, imagination, and pleasure as valuable on their own terms. We can see this change take place over several generations. The postwar generation of men were taught that play was valuable because it allowed them to be a better father, a pal to their sons and daughters, and because it refreshed them after the dullness of their work days. The next generation was taught that it was not selfish to seek pleasure for themselves, whether this involved recreational sex or simply fun and games. After a while, people started bragging that whoever dies with the most toys wins. And indeed, there is a growing recognition that the future economy needs to be a creative economy — one where imaginative play actively increases the value of what we produce as a culture. We can see this push towards adult play across all sectors of popular culture most comics readers are adults and the superheroes have grown up with their readers, you can now buy really expensive action figures tied to properties which at no point were aimed at kids, we are seeing more and more animated series and films targeting more mature viewers; a large chunk of the trade on eBay centers around reclaiming toys and collectables that our moms threw out when we went off to college, and it continues all the way down the line.

The emergence of the adult games market, then, is part of this larger pattern and impacts not simply those who grew up playing computer games. There is growing evidence of senior citizen interest in games as a form of armchair tourism. I don't simply mean card games or chess but massively multiplayer fantasy games — at least those which don't require twitch speed — spaces where seniors can be bards and innkeepers, can travel vast virtual landscapes and interact with many people, enjoy a rich community life within the guilds, even if they are no longer able to leave their own homes. A previous generation would have found parading around as an elf to be beneath their dignity but for the current generation, it can be almost as normal as getting together with the bridge club or playing bingo in the church basement.

Now, this shift of the game market towards adult consumers has repercussions for the censorship discussion we had yesterday. The games industry is more and more producing content targeting this older demographic, less and less creating content targeting children. And this is creating confusion in the marketplace as many parents still assume that games are for kids and do not pay attention to the ratings systems that are in place. You would know that an R-rated movie was not appropriate for all ages; many seem not to be able to imagine that an M-rated game might not be the best thing for the younger members of their families. And so there is a sense of moral confusion, even outrage, about the idea of mature-content games — not because our culture looks down on adults for playing but rather because they still assume that this particular medium is for kids only. We?ve seen this pattern before.

The same thing happened to comics coming out of World War II. Lots of G.I.s read comics on the frontlines because they were cheap and light weight. Coming out of the war, they continued to read them but demanded more mature content. Thus, we saw the emergence of crime and horror comics titles, which quickly became the focus of moral backlash from reform groups who felt this material was totally inappropriate to children. And it was in that context that the Comics Code was born, essentially restricting the content to only that material which could be regarded as appropriate for every member of the family. This was devastating to comics at a time when they needed all the help they could get to compete with television and comics has never fully recovered from the marginalization which occurred in the wake of that backlash.

Many of us fear this is what could also happen to games. Games seem poised to become a mass media consumed by all sectors of our society but they also seem in danger of becoming a niche medium, like comics, increasingly cut off from the mainstream, either because their content is so restricted that it becomes only a children's medium again or because they go for mature content at the expense of the family market. The challenge is to teach consumers how to distinguish which titles are family appropriate and which are for mature audiences only. click to clo

Henry Jenkins
The social dimensions of gaming have implications for every single aspect of human culture. People are already starting to explore what kinds of transactions occur within virtual economies, what kinds of learning occur when participants can pool their knowledge across geographic distances and solve problems together, what kinds of models of leadership and team work emerge which may have value within the business community. I suggested in a recent interview with the Harvard Business Review that in the future, companies might recruit not single individuals but teams of gamers, knowing that they already know how to solve problems well together and already have a melding of skills which make them more effective as a group than any member may be as an individual. So, why shouldn’t we think about social gaming as contributing to erotic experience as well? ...read more

Henry Jenkins
The social dimensions of gaming have implications for every single aspect of human culture. People are already starting to explore what kinds of transactions occur within virtual economies, what kinds of learning occur when participants can pool their knowledge across geographic distances and solve problems together, what kinds of models of leadership and team work emerge which may have value within the business community. I suggested in a recent interview with the Harvard Business Review that in the future, companies might recruit not single individuals but teams of gamers, knowing that they already know how to solve problems well together and already have a melding of skills which make them more effective as a group than any member may be as an individual. So, why shouldn’t we think about social gaming as contributing to erotic experience as well?
 
The difference between single-player games and multiplayer games is a bit like the difference between whacking off and fucking — things get a lot more interesting when there are more than one person involved! Keep in mind that role play has long been part of human sexuality — often we need some way to escape from mundane reality before we can turn each other on. That's why we dim the lights, turn the music up, change into fancy clothes, use pet names, you name it. And that's just to imagine the most vanilla kinds of sex — once you get into kinks, a large percentage of them involve adopting some kind of fictional persona. John Campbell has written a fascinating book, Getting It On Online, which explores the kinds of identity play which takes place in gay chat rooms, which he reads both in terms of real sexual experience — what people do in their own bodies — and virtual body fantasies - the kinds of larger than life personas they construct for themselves as part of the courtship dance that gets everyone in the right spirit.

Will we reach a point when people proclaim a sexual preference for broad-sword wielding elves? Maybe not. But for a growing number of people, being a gamer is part of what they look for in a mate and online games are where they are prowling for partners. Most gamers probably already know couples who met in Everquest or some other kind of massively multiplayer game. There have been scandals already about child prostitute in the Sims Online. And there are whole web communities focused on folks whose kink is having sex in games — see mmorgy.com or World of Porncraft.

Games will be a place where people can play around with alternative gender and sexual identities. The "magic circle" of gaming will be a safe space to experiment with alternative forms of erotic experience — safe in the knowledge that nothing is really happening. People will try on masks, imagine coming together in various combinations, experiment with different fantasies, and then pull back and say it was all just a game. It's all about plausible deniability. At the same time, we will learn to read each other's avatars as a projection of who we really are underneath our clothes and underneath all of the other ways we mask ourselves in our real world social encounters. Might even married couples want to do things when they game together that they were not willing to broach to each other face to face or flesh to flesh? As a culture, we will increasingly struggle with how seriously we should be taking our fantasy lives. Is my sexuality simply what I do in bed or is it also what I do in my head?

In many ways, all of this is old news. Cybersex has been part of the internet from the very beginning. People were doing this in MUDS and MOOS a decade or so ago. But as more and more people are gaming, the phenomenon shifts from a cult or avant garde practice among the geek elite and becomes a more widespread social practice. A growing percentage of people will have their first sexual experiences through gaming. Who knows whether a decade ago gamers will be more interesting in beating each other's pants off or simply getting into each other's pants. click to close

Ian Bogost
Certainly people are already using massively multiplayer games and virtual worlds as social forums as much as games. But I'm much more interested in how games can use rule-based representation to create commentary about social interaction that might change players perception and behavior. One of the common arguments in favor of multiplayer games is that having real people creates richer interaction than computer characters can ever hope for. But that approach only makes open, social spaces possible. What types of people and interactions each player has is left up to chance. Procedural agents — characters programmed with specific behaviors and motivated inner-lives — are much more likely to telegraph specific arguments about social interaction. For example, The Sims, and especially the original "Hot Date" add-on, enforced a particular kind of dating experience that defamiliarized the chance encounter and, in my view, asked players to think critically about the conventions that drive social interaction in the contemporary world.

Rob Levine
Certainly an increasing number of adults — a category in which I only reluctantly include myself — play video games. But before everyone gets too excited, that average age of thirty comes from the Entertainment Software Association, an industry lobbyist group which also says that 75 percent of American heads of household play video games. They arrive at these numbers by using a very loose definition of video games that encompasses everything from online card games to the solitaire programs that come with some computers. (Gaming executives are also fond of saying that the video game business is bigger than Hollywood, which is true only if you compare sales of game hardware and software to the theatrical side of the film industry; comparing apples to apples, or rather silver discs to silver discs, DVD sales in 2004 were worth $15 billion and video game software was about half that. But I digress.) Let's be honest: The vast majority of video games are made for kids. And, let's be honest: That's cool. Many of the most creative and sophisticated games made in recent years — Pikmin, Nintendogs, Mister Mosquito — are aimed at kids. Many of the games ostensibly aimed at adults are simply attempt to replicate a cinematic experience — and just as television went beyond its origins as radio with pictures, games will move beyond movies with joysticks. And many of them are full of what's thought of as adult content — violence, swearing or what have you — but think that just means they're aimed at teenage boys. (I'm talking mostly about console games here — there are lots of online games and simulation games for PCs that are very sophisticated and intended for adults.) Think about the movie version of Doom and the animated movie Spirited Away. The first features what might be thought of as adult content, but the second — ostensibly aimed at children — is far more sophisticated. I'm not saying video games are just for kids — I just want to let some of the air out of the hype balloon. Plenty of twenty- and thirty-somethings play games, simply because they enjoyed them as teenagers and never found a reason to stop. I think that's a matter of demographics: People who were raised on games kept playing them and became adults who preferred Grand Theft Auto to golf. As with Baby Boomers listening to rock in their retirement, a form of entertainment is now considered suitable for adults partly because the generation that grew up with it didn't grow out of it.click to close

Eric Zimmerman
When we talk about computer and videogames, we need to remember that they are part of a much longer tradition of games and play off the computer. People have been playing games with each other for thousands of years, and generally speaking these games have been social experiences — a context for group interaction. In this respect, the past couple decades of singleplayer videogames is a very brief anomaly in the millennia-old history of group gameplay. The rise in the last several years of computer games that allow for multiplayer interaction isn't anything new — it's just games returning their roots as social experience. ...read more

Eric Zimmerman
When we talk about computer and videogames, we need to remember that they are part of a much longer tradition of games and play off the computer. People have been playing games with each other for thousands of years, and generally speaking these games have been social experiences — a context for group interaction. In this respect, the past couple decades of singleplayer videogames is a very brief anomaly in the millennia-old history of group gameplay. The rise in the last several years of computer games that allow for multiplayer interaction isn't anything new — it's just games returning their roots as social experience.

There are some interesting overlaps between online games and online interaction in general. Playing a game often means playing with identity, whether your identity is a plastic token on a gameboard or a joystick-controlled 3-D avatar viewed over-the-shoulder on a television screen. As sociologist Gary Allen Fine has pointed out, a game player is at once a person in the real world, a player that is aware of playing a game, and a character in the narrativized world of the game being played. Part of the pleasure of a game is taking on and playing with this layered identity. Similarly, through internet-mediated social interaction like IM and dating sites (the two examples cited in the question), participants take on playful identities that overlap with but also diverge from their own. In dating sites like hooksexup.com's own, expert users often have multiple identities, each with unique characteristics and specialties, not unlike the multiple characters of a hardcore MMOG player.

So what is the difference between playing a game and interacting socially? One distinction is that people play games in order to win or to advance in the system of the game. Games have rules, and winner and losers: they are a mathematically defined conflict (think of the rules of chess or Dungeons and Dragons that define how players resolve each action). The "rules" of social interaction are much more fuzzy and complex, even when they are stylized through electronic media. There are no quantifiable win/lose conditions in IMing and online dating (yes, even in dating)

One part of what we're seeing in online games is that they are appropriating forms of online communication, absorbing them into the play-activities of the game. World of Warcraft clan members IM and email to each other in and out of game, using the social tools available to them to accomplish the complex orchestration of action necessary to succeed and progress. (Engineering a forty-person dungeon raid is no easy feat!) These cutting-edge social games are blurring the lines between games and real life — NOT that players believe that they live inside the game, but in the sense that their everyday internet social lives blur into their online game lives and identities. This is one of the challenges of social game design: to create new kinds of games that don't try and reinvent the wheel of multiplayer interaction, but that can insert themselves into the active social lives of players. click to close

Rob Levine
This is an interesting question, because right now in online games like "Everquest" and "World of Warcraft" you see very sophisticated social interactions. But few of them relate to dating simply because there aren't that many women. You see some. But you don't see enough for that kind of behavior to become a vigorous part of the game.

I don't think this is an inherent limit of the medium. I think the reason you don't see a lot of women playing online games is that those games don't offer them anything they want to do. (My understanding of women is, alas, limited, but slaying dragons doesn't seem to appeal to many of them.) If you look at some of the online games that have been less oriented around male fantasies, such as The Sims Online and Second Life, the percentage of women is substantially higher. But those games don't reach the hardcore gamers that would make them commercial hits. ...read more

Rob Levine
This is an interesting question, because right now in online games like "Everquest" and "World of Warcraft" you see very sophisticated social interactions. But few of them relate to dating simply because there aren't that many women. You see some. But you don't see enough for that kind of behavior to become a vigorous part of the game.

I don't think this is an inherent limit of the medium. I think the reason you don't see a lot of women playing online games is that those games don't offer them anything they want to do. (My understanding of women is, alas, limited, but slaying dragons doesn't seem to appeal to many of them.) If you look at some of the online games that have been less oriented around male fantasies, such as The Sims Online and Second Life, the percentage of women is substantially higher. But those games don't reach the hardcore gamers that would make them commercial hits.

Eventually, the audience for these games will look a lot more like the audience online in general. And when that happens I think you'll see a lot of these interactions. What they'll be like, though, is hard to predict. Will online "dating" be part of real-life dating, an analog to it, or something in between? When I was playing The Sims Online, I met two people who were a couple in the game. They were both unhappily married in real life, and they both got something out of this relationship emotionally. But one of them thought this relationship would progress into having a physical component — this was just the first step. The other compartmentalized it, kept it as separate from life as Fantasy Football is from the NFL. They were in the same relationship, but it meant completely different things to each of them. I think that raises all kinds of interesting issues. At one point does the simulacrum of a relationship provide some of the aspects of a real one? And, if it does, at what point does it become a real one? click to close

Katie Salen
This has already happened, of course. One of the strongest features of any multiplayer game is the context it creates for social interaction. Any massively multiplayer online game will be filled with people flirting and hooking up — sometimes the hook up is character to character, as in "my Sim sleeps with your Sim"; other times it is player to player. There are virtual weddings everyday in places like Second Life or Sims Online and the chat feature of any game provides an immediate opportunity for intense personal interaction. Even games like online Texas Hold 'Em Poker provide spaces of flirtation and sexual innuendo. Games are, as they say, the great social lubricant.

Katie Salen
Gamers that are thirty are of the Nintendo generation, they are babies of the digital sphere, and they grew up with games as something they did every day. Games have always been integrated into their lifestyle. For most gamers, it's an important part of how they define their leisure time, how they stay connected with friends, how they learn new things, and simply, how they play. It would never occur to them that this is something to be given up once someone enters "adulthood." I think it's silly to think of games as something that only children play and that one would only begin to play again as some form of midlife crisis. Historically adults have always played games, long into adulthood, be it chess, bridge, poker, golf, etc. There is no reason to think that the desire to play games goes away just because the games themselves have gone digital.  n° click to close