Paparazzi Ethnography

One of the things that I like about Berkeley, and by extension, the Bay Area, is that people are so clever. And I notice this especially in those instances when I attend a presentation by someone speaking on problems at the intersection of gameplay, aesthetics, and technology.

I didn’t realize that gameplay designers (and want to be designers) are some of the most creative speakers and thinkers today. They really have enormous capacities of energy and more importantly inspiration, to throw into their work.

Ask yourself the question, for example: On what topic do you throw hundreds of hours of your free labor without regard for the time of day, but simply because you’re possessed with the sense of play that comes from your inspiration on a project?

The answer for a lot of folks in the Bay Area is game design.

Tonight I attended a talk by Chris Hecker who does not consider game design as a shoot’em up plot driven model. Instead, he really wants to understanding games as a working art form, that crosses into craft.

Speaking like an committed advocate, he introduced us to his working game design called SpyParty, where the focus is on interactivity, subtle human behavior and deception.

There were a number of themes he spoke to which were fabulous, including questions he asks about his games, but also his work more generally, such as, how do you spend your time, how much attention do you give, how connected are you? And these are great questions to ask, especially concerning the aesthetics of ethnographic sites, for example, when I consider the emotional involvement of my own informants.

How ARE my informants in the energy industry different from game designers like, for example, Mr. Hecker?

Here’s a guy for whom art and entertainment in games, film, comics, are totally meaningful and where attention is a resource. Speaking of which, during his talk he made quite a few references to comics and film, comparing gaming at this point in history, to where film was in about 1910.


He lamented that comics never rose above superhero fictions, even though attempts by certain artists brought attention to comics as an art form, the industry and productivity as a whole, remained pretty much on the same level.

For film, he was more flattering, referring to the industry as much more vibrant in its ability to provide society with a rich aesthetic treatment of ourselves and imagination — but, there were turning points, early on, for example, Citizen Kane or Birth of a Nation.

In that sense, he wonders what the future of games will be– whether it will get stuck in a trench of money making mass produced pulp, or rise above to become the 21st century’s aesthetic landscape of imagination.