In Mary Flanagan’s Critical Play: Radical Game Design, she touches on mobile media and locative media as ways to foster collaboration and cultural change – and she gives several organized events that happened in New York City – but oddly her examples are pointedly non-technology based (mapscotch, Cruel 2 B Kind, Samara Smith’s Chain Reaction). I gather this focus is reflected in the chapter’s title, “Artists’ Locative Games,” rather than talking about commercial or popular organized public play games.

After the Pokemon Go augmented reality craze hit America in 2016, Flanagan work was cited in warning about “entertainment colonization” in which “the players unwillingly commoditize unaware bystanders.” This problem seems to have evolved and echoes in later social media stunt videos, like the public outrage livestreams that currently has Johnny Somali in custody in South Korea. I think a venn diagram on this topic would show a lot of overlap among greed, attention/validation, and “public media” technology.

This impulse runs counter to my personal experience with locative games. As a teenager, and briefly in my 20s, I took part in various live-action role-playing games (LARPs). The earliest was a kids’ game called “Assassination” (aka “Mafia”), akin to Cruel 2 B Kind but with “kills” being accomplished by shooting rubber bands at your target. The “Masquerade” LARP had players take on the roles of vampires secretly existing among modern humanity inside real nightclub venues while pursuing byzantine political schemes between rival factions of the undead. In both cases, a feature of each LARP was playing in public WITHOUT drawing attention to what was happening. Players used shared hand signs to indicate character actions, but getting “caught” playing was grounds for elimination from the game. The liminal “magic circle” was more of a social compact rather than a discrete physical space.

I never got into geocaching, the hobby of using GPS devices to find player logs hidden all over the world. I’m curious about WhereIGo.com, a game by the biggest geocaching company, where the GPS-based “treasure hunt” is paired with puzzles and a storytelling narrative. From the marketing info: “Participants following a narrative or series of tasks that unfold as they reach specific GPS locations, known as ‘zones.’ The concept combines elements of outdoor exploration, puzzle-solving, and role-playing, as players follow storylines and complete challenges in real-world settings. Each WhereIGo ‘cartridge’ (a digital game file) offers a unique experience, which can vary widely in theme and objective.”

Has anyone done this sort of locative gaming?

AI is coming for poets’ jobs — or so researchers at OpenAI, most famously known as the maker of ChatGPT, would like you to think. In a paper published in 2023 examining the “Labor Market Impact Potential of Large Language Models,” 4 researchers (three of whom were employed by the AI company) posited that “Poets, Lyricists and Creative Writers” are among the occupations most highly exposed to being automated by AI models like that underpinning ChatGPT.

While it may be hard to imagine poetry being a prime target for automation, this is already in motion. The Poem Booth, designed by Dutch design studio VOUW, emerges from the notion that yes, writing a poem is work, and yes, in human hands, that work is performed much too slowly. 

The tech object — an actual photo booth that snaps a picture of users, then programmatically writes a few rhyming couples about the portrait in a matter of seconds — uses a fine-tuned version of ChatGPT to wow users with rapidly penned, personalized poems. Thus far, The Poem Booth has been touted as a crowd-pleaser at conferences and conventions, though VOUW also puts it up for rent (in tech parlance, we might say “Poem-as-a-Service”) for the price of EUR 950 for 6 hours.

But are The Poem Booth’s couplets any good? Do they have the capacity to move, to spark action, to speak from one heart to another? That is to say, are they even poetry?

My research paper will investigate the extent to which The Poem Booth and other commercial attempts to automate the poet (see Google’s “Bard” chatbot or Anthropic’s “Haiku” and “Sonnet” AI models) run antithetical to the spirit of poetry as a craft. I will also explore the potentialities of the web as “a space of poiesis” — Loss Pequeño Glazier’s term — in which new forms of poetry can take root. 

Glazier’s words appeared in the early 2000s, when the web looked vastly different, both in its ethos and in its capabilities. I will approach this same space from the vantage point of the mid-2020s, in a post-ChatGPT age. There is now a digital poetics at the margins of the internet that seeks to wake readers up — not only to their own existence, but to their habituated experience of a web that has become too heavily trafficked and commoditized. I will use recently published examples from online journals like the html review, Taper, and Crawlspace in my formulation of a potent, born-digital poetics that rescues language from the maw of large language models.

Play serves as the undertow of this new digital poetics: browsers that play text, code that puts text into play, readers-as-interactors (to use Nick Montfort’s term) that play with and within the text. In an extension of Ian Bogost’s procedural rhetorics, this digital poetics seeks expression through a flash of double-rhetoric — that of computational procedure and written text. In particular, digital poetics’ embrace of kinetic and multimedia structures privilege a simultaneous, integrated act of persuasion.

Brandon Smith
Digital, Building, Playing, Thinking
DHUM 7800
11/6

MLA Format

The Roots of Gamification and Its Relationship with Economic and Political Theory

Research Question:
How have early theories of play and gamification, rooted in economics and political conflict, influenced the development of contemporary gamification practices, particularly in economic modeling and political simulations?

Proposal
This proposal seeks to examine the intellectual roots of gamification by tracing its early foundations in economics and political theory. By analyzing seminal works, such as John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern’s Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944), Clark Abt’s contributions to the “serious games” movement during the Cold War, and H.G. Wells’s Floor Games (1911) as an early example of wargaming, I aim to investigate how these theories of game mechanics intersected with serious fields like economic modeling and political conflict theory. This study will explore how these early applications of game theory contributed to our current understanding of gamification, laying the groundwork for the integration of game elements into non-game contexts.

Background
The notion of applying game-like structures to real-world problems has a long-standing history that predates modern “gamification” as we understand it today. Game theory, a branch of mathematics formulated by von Neumann and Morgenstern, aimed to provide a framework for rational decision-making in economic contexts. Their work was revolutionary, introducing the idea that competitive interactions could be modeled mathematically, thus bridging the gap between economics and strategic decision-making.

During the Cold War, Clark Abt expanded on these principles in a new context, advocating for “serious games” to simulate potential political and military scenarios. His contributions are essential to the gamification discourse, as they illustrate how play could serve as a strategic tool for understanding real-world conflicts and ideological struggles. Abt’s theories laid the groundwork for using simulation as an educational and policy-making tool, encouraging interactive learning and active participation in hypothetical scenarios.

Additionally, H.G. Wells’s Floor Games and later Little Wars (1913) represent early forms of wargaming, which transformed “play” into a structured and rule-governed way of engaging with military strategy. Wells’s work highlighted the potential of games to serve not only as entertainment but also as a vehicle for strategic thought, contributing to an early conceptualization of “gaming” as a valuable intellectual exercise.

My Reasons
This research aims to:

1. Examine how early game theory by von Neumann and Morgenstern influenced economic and strategic thinking, particularly focusing on decision-making under competitive conditions.
2. Analyze how Clark Abt’s concept of serious games contributed to the idea of gamification, specifically in political and educational contexts.
3. Investigate how H.G. Wells’s early wargaming efforts offered insights into play as a tool for understanding military and political strategy.
4. Synthesize these early theories to understand the philosophical underpinnings of gamification and its applications today.

Methodology and Sources
To address these objectives, the study will involve a close reading of primary texts and an analysis of secondary scholarship:

• Theory of Games and Economic Behavior by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern will be used to unpack how competitive strategy was mathematically modeled and how these theories were applied to real-world economic and political scenarios.
• Clark Abt’s concept of serious games, discussed in Serious Games (1970), will be examined to understand how gamified structures have been used to simulate political conflicts, with emphasis on Cold War military and ideological scenarios.
• H.G. Wells’s Floor Games and Little Wars provide a historical example of wargaming, where play served as a method for exploring and understanding military strategies in an accessible, simulated form.

These sources, alongside secondary analyses from digital humanities scholars on the influence of games on societal structures, will help contextualize these theories within a broader historical trajectory of gamification.

Literature Review and Theoretical Context:
Several scholars have examined the influence of game theory on both economics and politics, such as Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman’s Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, which contextualizes game mechanics and design within larger social frameworks. Jane McGonigal’s work on the psychological impacts of gamification, particularly in Reality Is Broken, offers insights into how gamified experiences impact individual behavior and decision-making in structured environments. These texts provide a modern interpretation of gamification, which builds upon the foundational theories of von Neumann, Morgenstern, Abt, and Wells.

What I aim to find
This research is expected to reveal how early theories of play, decision-making, and simulation provided intellectual frameworks that have influenced the gamification of non-game environments today. Specifically, by grounding gamification in fields like economics and political theory, we can better understand the ethical and practical implications of applying game mechanics to areas such as business, education, and policy-making.

The findings may also provide insights into potential risks, such as oversimplification in gamified models or ethical concerns when “playing” with real-world scenarios. Ultimately, this research hopes to contribute to the digital humanities field by examining the philosophical underpinnings of gamification and how these early theories continue to shape our understanding of interactive, simulated experiences in both digital and real-world environments.

Conclusion:
Through this study, I intend to deepen our understanding of gamification by exploring its roots in economic and political theory. By situating gamification within this historical context, I hope to accomplish long-lasting efforts to ongoing conversations in the digital humanities about the transformative potential of game mechanics, as well as the ethical considerations that arise when applying these theories to serious fields.

The Preface:
I have spent a lot of time lately reflecting about the ways in which play has always been deeply interconnected to my understanding of personal identity. From the gravitational pull of youth sports on my childhood existence to the policing of my body at play as an effeminate young boy in Hawaii, play occupied a space of tension. Learning and internalizing that the play, interests and curiosities that felt natural to me were acts of disobedience and dishonor to my family, meant a growing weariness in a trust of self or identity; a distrust in intuition and instinct. In this sense, the question of self was not inherent, but introduced.

Without belief in my own sense of self, the craving for systems and rules to understand how to live life “well” became a fixation. The “game” afoot was to learn the unsaid, invisible guidelines for the performance (mimicry) of passing as straight. Growing up in the closet demanded a rigorous archeology of culture and constant governance of the body and self. Finding the rules, embodying the rules and believing the rules meant success; protection is promised in the magic circle.

Needless to say, there are moments in this lifetime that have both inspired self acceptance, and others that have slammed the closet door shut. I didn’t come out as gay until five years ago, and I have been wondering about the inflection points that exist in my memories, and in my journey to the present, that serve as a kaleidoscopic memoir — a winding web of moments of consequence.

I believe that games and play have the ability to serve as a radical tool for self reflection. This final project is an opportunity for me to experiment further with the idea of play through a queer studies, narrative studies and archival studies lens. I hope to build a game — or rather, a system that is anchored to my own experience of sexuality, acceptance and coming out of the closet. I believe that both “playing” the game system and the process of creating the system itself will offer a cathartic experience of self-reflection. Especially right now, in a political environment that endorses a mentality of threatening different identities and peoples, there is an imperative to continue the act of reflection, of finding acceptance outside of the system.

The Project Overview:
I plan to develop a game system, inspired by tabletop role-playing games (such as Dungeons & Dragons), but pointed at narrative and reflection. The goal is to employ the mechanics and structure of TTRPG systems, which are most frequently understood as play mechanics for war and violent conquest, towards reflexivity and an exploration of identity and acceptance. This isn’t at all to assert that TTRPGs are unable to deliver an exploration of identity (I actually believe that these kinds of games are inherently good at critiquing society’s belief systems on identity), there is always an argument of identity that’s made in the codifying of a player in terms of measured attributes like strength and intelligence. My hope is to explore how this kind of play experience transforms when the system points at different metrics of identity.

The Project Process and Details:
There is a scale and time factor to this project that I’m still in the process of working out completely. I’m excited about this idea so I’ve imagined a huge undertaking with lots of parts (and hopes). But I also know that I’ve got to be realistic given how fast it has already become November, and soon enough the end of the semester. For that reason, I’ve decided to break down my process and what I hope to produce at each phase to introduce a bit more pragmatism into the ambitions of this TTRPG system project.

The final project will come together as a multimedia presentation that details the process and outcomes of each phase. This could take the shape of a chapbook, zine, or website — or some kind of graphic “packaging up” of the game system for sharing. I’ll likely pair it with a short essay or reflection that unpacks the choices I’ve made as well as the inspirations, references and scholarship that I hope my project is in dialogue with.

Apologies for the length of the proposal, I wanted to make sure I was able to contextualize the project with larger aspirations for continued development this beyond this class.

RE: https://dh780fall24.commons.gc.cuny.edu/final-project/

PROJECT PROPOSAL: A scratch-built procedural text-based hex crawl game template (that may include kinetic poetry or images), with the ability for other designers to “re-skin” the encounter prompts to fit other stories and genres (for example, fantasy, espionage, or science-fiction adventures). Imagine a cross between “Mad Libs” (fill-in-the-blank details) and “Zork” (text-based adventure crawl).
* DESIGN: Web-based interface using PHP-based scaffolding, returning array-generated modular text prompts with three input/response options per hex/encounter.
* ARGUMENTATION: The flow of the game will be based on a hex crawl, with each hex returning a text prompt with three player response options.
* AUDIENCE: The modular scaffolding (details driven by arrays) will allow other instances to adjust pitch toward different audiences (age range, knowledge level, interests, and values).
* REFLECTIVENESS: The prompt writing guide will allow future instances to explain not just what to say or what the object is but why certain choices could be made in relation to the audience and the adventure’s purpose (persuasion, education, simulation). The player may select a specific goal (affecting change in one inventory item) as a “victory condition” of play.

PLAYER INPUTS: Text prompts will give three options (from possible seven options). Players will earn and lose modifiers to each option based on initial decisions (character creation) and gameplay (consequences of decisions and random task resolutions).
* Fight: Attack with weapons or magic to harm a target.
* Hide: Avoid conflict but remain in the encounter area; bonus to then: Fight or Move but risk discovery/harm.
* Move: Leave the encounter in a new hex encounter (N, NE, SE, S, SW, NW).
* Rest: Do nothing and see what happens or recover from harm.
* Study: Closely examine an object, creature, or area for detailed information.
* Sway: Communicate with a target to persuade its attitude.
* Special: A unique ability fitting the genre (use magic, call in airstrike, reroute auxiliary power).

An alternate input option will be the text prompt: What is the answer to X? (pattern matching to text string – a password, correct name of the guilty suspect, whatever.)

TRACKED INVENTORY VALUABLES
* Health: Harm from encounters creates penalty modifiers on actions.
* Influences: A rating of favor/disfavor among NPC factions (noble houses, rival spy agencies, planetary governments).
* Treasure: Abstract game-world valuable resource (gold, SIGINT and assets, dilithium).
* Information: Clues to answer an endgame/encounter riddle.
* Time: Limited number of moves/days before ending game back at home hex.

HEX ENCOUNTER TYPES/FORMATS
* Chase (flee from a threat or catch a fleeing NPC)
* Combat (fight NPC/monster => influence or treasure)
* Discovery (plot clues, source of new resource => information)
* Race (ticking clock, decisions to limited resources first)
* Riddle (code, puzzle, missing formula => information)
* Role-play/Social (dialog/drame, response => relationships/bonds => influence)
* Scandal (secret to protect or expose, ethical/moral dilemma => influence)
* Random (unexpected challenge, villain attack, NPC in need, priority of ideals)

Following up on Leonard’s great Dungeons & Dragons presentation from last night: If anyone is curious what a D&D character sheet looks like, check out my site at https://fastcharacter.com (disclaimer: it’s free but I make $$$ off its ads and donors). There you’ll find character maker options for the D&D 5th edition rules Leonard was talking about, the “new” 2024 updated rules, and a throwback version to the “B/X” rules from 1981.

In 2013, indie developer Lucas Pope released his cult classic game Papers Please, in which the player becomes a citizen of fictional Arisotzka and is chosen by lottery to work in Border Patrol. The player must follow an increasingly complex set of rules to determine whether or not to accept or reject people trying to enter the country and make enough money to pay for rent, heat, food, and other expenses for his family. This simple and rather bleak game to me embodies Bogost’s idea of procedural rhetoric.

The rules the player faces increase in their harshness – at first, only anyone who is an Aristotzkan citizen may enter – simple enough. Then, each day, more complications are added until the player must ensure that the would be entrant has every detail on their passport valid (including gender presentation matching listed sex, appearance matching the photo, accurate country symbol on the front cover, accurate issuing city, accurate date of birth, and accurate expiration date), has a visa with every detail valid, and is not on any wanted list. If a player finds a discrepancy, then they must identify that discrepancy using their rule book and interrogate (or x-ray) the entrant before denying them. Failure to process someone by the  book results in a citation. Citations dock the player’s pay, risking them falling into debt, or their family starving or freezing to death due to lack of funds. Any of these events result in a game over.

The true story of the game happens in response to the player’s input. Each day has its own plot, yes. After the first day, there will be a terrorist attack outside of the player’s control for example. However, the predetermined plot exists more as flavor text to inform the player’s decision than as a leash pulling the player through the story. As Bogost asserts, “The imposition of rules creates expression” (7). The player is highly incentivized, not ultimately forced, to follow the rules. The player can choose to do whatever they want, (likely resulting in a game over at the end of the day), but they can also work within the game’s system to mount their small rebellions. Interestingly, this game gives the player the option to object. The player can choose to break the rules and let some people through provided that they become good enough at the game to compensate for the pay loss. The players then must choose which cases are worth fighting for. Will they help the masked people of EZIC mount their revolution? Will they let in the woman who’s husband let you know lost their passport after months of travel? Will they refuse to demean entrants whose gender expression do not match the listed sex on their passport with an invasive X-ray scan? The player creates their own story and their own moral code that they will follow and break as they see fit. The simulation gap is where the meat of this game resides.

The simplicity of the game also follows Bogost’s observations. The process of comparing documents, rules, appearances, etc. is the crux of the game, so this is the most detailed that it gets. The only other mechanic in the game is choosing whether or not you will pay for heat or food for your family (if you can afford it), which consists of a simple black screen showing the health of your family members, what you earned during your shift minus your rent, how much food and heat cost, and a set of check boxes allowing you to select what you will pay for. Your home life and your family are entirely abstract. You don’t see your character wake up, eat breakfast, play with their kids, walk to work, none of it. Because that’s not what matters. What matters is that you have lives on the line and that the status of their welfare hangs over every decision you make. Whether the player cares about them or not is irrelevant. The player is responsible for this family. If they die, the game is over.

As an aside, the games tight mechanics and constant moral quandaries evoke the vividness of harsh reality in the player. It counters Bogost’s idea that visual fidelity equals authority as the player will feel affected by the pixel graphics of a person telling you to go to hell when you condemn them to return to the torturous life they were trying to escape because their passport expired.

Furthermore, there is something about the abstractness of the fictitious game world. Set in a clearly Soviet-like 1980s nation, the player must decide whether to let people in from various nations. While some of them may seem analogous to real world regions, the symbols on the passport are ultimately arbitrary in meaning. It doesn’t matter if Aristotzka starts a war with Republia, what matters is that the player is strongly incentivized to act according to rules set in response to a particular political landscape, even if they trespass on  what may be considered common decency. This forced adherence to political bureaucracy and attempt to find a loophole in the system transcends the Soviet-like environment of the game, causing the player to hold a mirror up to their own government’s policies and their own complacency.

So, Papers Please derives its story from procedure (rules) rather than a flat literary plot and gains furthers its affect through arbitrary symbols. But, what is its rhetoric aiming to persuade the player to believe? That we are all under the thumb of bureaucracy? That adulting is hard? I think the game is trying to emphasize the power of choice in the moment. Despite all of your efforts on a large level, the system will prevail. It may change hats through revolution, but you will still be working the border. You can however make an impact on the people you meet. Some will let you know the impact of your decisions, some won’t, and some will prove to be tricking you. But ultimately, you must choose what’s important in this life. You must choose what lines you will and won’t cross. And, though small, you can make an impact for better. . . or worse.

A few weeks ago in class, I touched on “The Walking Dead” video games and how interactive mediums can push storytelling beyond what is ordinarily possible in most traditional media forms. Now we have Bogost’s definition of “procedural rhetoric” and how video games can make arguments or teach lessons through their rules and mechanics, rather than just telling you something directly. As such, I’d like to take another brief look at this game to discuss how it approaches a “coming of age” story that directly uses its interactive format to allow the user to experience this growth alongside the protagonist rather than simply observing it as an outsider.

In Season 1, the player controls Lee, an adult who is a father figure to a young child named Clementine who has lost her parents. During this section, players make decisions in the narrative with clear knowledge of what consequences will arise from them. It’s obvious which dialogue options appeal to which philosophies and which characters. Choosing to save one character over another or accusing a person of betrayal or anything else will have straightforward and logical ramifications. The game’s mechanics reflect an adult’s understanding of the world – choices have clear consequences, and the player can generally predict the outcome of their decisions, mirroring an adult’s ability to understand cause and effect.

However, in Season 2, when the player takes control of Clementine as a slightly older child, the game’s mechanics transform to reflect her perspective. Up until this point, Clementine had all her decisions made for her by Lee, so with him gone, she makes the mistake of leaving her gun unattended and getting her friend killed. The player has absolutely no agency in this, Clementine isn’t used to considering the ramifications of her actions, so the player isn’t allowed to either. As the game progresses from this starting point of her character, decisions made have a murky aura in what their consequences will be. A simple act of kindness to a friend can unexpectedly cause a man’s death. A seemingly neutral statement may unexpectedly cause hatred and resentment from other characters. Minor choices sometimes have massive unforeseen consequences, while apparently major decisions might prove meaningless. This mechanical shift isn’t just a part of the story; it’s procedural rhetoric in action, using the game’s systems to show the nature of growing up and how children’s uncertainty and inexperience have them perceive the world.

The game culminates in its final decision, where the two adult figures get into a climactic argument that ends in a violent brawl. Clementine then chooses, does she let one character get killed, or shoot the other to save them? After a season of uncertain decisions and ambiguity, this is interestingly the only time in the game where Clementine as a character, and we as a player, have a clear understanding of the consequences of our decision. In this sense, the game is clearly about this growth, this development from having no-agency to complete-agency, and the murky path needed to reach this point. It’s about becoming Lee, and by using clarity in the game’s systems themselves, players don’t just observe Clementine’s coming-of-age story – they feel it directly through their interaction with the game’s mechanics.

In this way, The Walking Dead demonstrates one of the unique strengths of procedural rhetoric in video games – the ability to make arguments not just through what the player sees or is told, but through how they interact with the game itself. The game doesn’t just tell us about growing up; it creates a system that lets us experience that transition from childhood uncertainty to adult understanding through its very mechanics. This approach to storytelling would be impossible (or very difficult) in traditional media forms like books or film, which can only show us these transitions from the outside. By leveraging the interactive nature of video games and carefully designing its systems to reflect its themes, The Walking Dead creates a uniquely powerful coming-of-age story that exemplifies Bogost’s concept of procedural rhetoric.