Book Review: Cheating by Mia Consalvo

"Playing the game is almost superfluous"--(Consalvo 179)


I have a confession to make. I use the built-in dictionary feature in the Scrabble Facebook app. I use it, and I don't intend to stop.

As far as confessions go, this is hardly earth-shattering. At best, it could muster the energy to stir a bit of mud, but only if that mud was especially viscous. This is because, in large part, for the Scrabble app, the dictionary is built in. You actually can't enter a word that doesn't appear in its built-in dictionary, so using the app to look up a word or two seems less like a crime and more like a time-saving device. Of course, if anyone attempted to go to a word-generating site, that would clearly be wrong. And you could never play a word that you got from that site. It would be immoral. Unconscionable. Unthinkable. Unless it was a really, really good word.

My point here is not that I am a huge cheater (if I was, I'd have a much higher Scrabble rating) but that breaking the rules, cheating, isn't always a black-and-white thing. It is, however, an issue of social convention, and a process of constant negotiation. At least, that's the argument Mia Consalvo presents in her 2007 book Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames.

In the book, Consalvo investigates cheating in video games, taking an ethnographic approach that involves in-depth interviews, a perusal of the archives of the Nintendo Power magazine, and a whopping 500 hours of personal experience in Final Fantasy XI. The book is decidedly not theory-heavy, but there are two concepts in particular that Consalvo borrows heavily for her argument. First, she uses Gerard Gennette's definition of the term "paratext," which loosely refers to everything about a text that influences the reading of that text but isn't actually a part of it. A preview is part of the paratext of a movie, a review is part of the paratext of a book, and the gift shop is paratext for a trip through a museum--although as that last example shows, the line between text and paratext is blurry. The other concept she uses is Pierre Bourdieu's notion of cultural capital, the way participation in culture defines a particular class or group of people. In particular, she argues that it is by participating in the paratext of videogames that gamers accumulate "gaming" capital, and esteem in that particular group. For example, if Player X joins forum discussions on the preview for a game, writes a lengthy walkthrough on a website, and eventually creates a mod that allows players to instantly kill other players in the game, she has accumulated a great deal to her personal gaming capital regarding that game, even if it's largely in a way that its designers wouldn't approve of. There's also repeated reference to Huizinga's conception of the magic circle (that players of a game agree to dwell within a "magic circle" where the rules of the game apply), but Consalvo is not so much using this idea as challenging it. Finally, there's an occasional reference to Foucault's discussion of the diffusion of power flow, as it regards to the power between game companies and game players.

The book is divided into three parts, and eight chapters. The first part is a more historical view of videogames and cheating, tacitly endorsed or otherwise. Chapter One looks at the history of game cheating in terms of the paratext of the early Nintendo console games--ie.) Nintendo Power. Derided at times for being a propaganda tool for the larger game company, Nintendo Power also played a decisive role in determining what constituted proper game play behavior. For example, it published strategy guide articles and walkthroughs in its main coverage of a game, but relegated codes and secrets to other sections, implying there was a difference between consulting these walkthroughs and using the cheats. At the same time, it implied that the truly savvy gameplayer was aware of all the game's secrets, cheating or otherwise. Nintendo cultivated a generation of game players, and other magazines followed suit.

Chapter Two looks at the strategy guide market, and how it fulfilled its own version of what a "proper" game experience should look like. Its evolution, from cheap paperbacks promising thousands of secrets to glossy productions sold with the game itself, marks how cheating--in the form of consulting a walkthrough--can become part of the official paratext of a game and welcomed into the larger corporate market.

Finally, the third chapter starts to push some boundaries, with a discussion of game enhancers such as Game Genie and Game Shark, and game mod chips that allow the play of pirated or ported games. Clearly, there's a limit as to what third party products a console company is going to allow, or at least challenge. (The original Game Genie manufacturers, for example, were sued by Nintendo for creating "derivative works" and experiences that dampened Nintendo's own profits--and Nintendo not only lost, but were ordered to pay the company $13 million to compensate for suspending sales during the trial.)

The second half of the book looks at player experiences, both Consalvo's own and those of the people she interviewed. Chapter 4 examines player-defined determinations of cheating, as presented by the people Consalvo interviews. Cheating can be conceived of as occurring on a subjective scale: there's the purist, who regards any sort of outside help as cheating--no hints, no walkthroughs. There's those who allow walkthroughs, but refuse codes. And there's those who believe that it's not cheating and can't be cheating, as long as no other person is involved. As to why people cheat, the most common reasons include getting stuck, ludic pleasure in stomping around with godlike power, or the desire to see the game through when time demands don't allow a full play.

Chapter 5 shifts the focus from cheating in single-person games to cheating in multiplayer contexts. She identifies four main types: exploiting glitches, exploiting other players, exploiting codes, and using third party programs. The first is often seen not so much as cheating but manipulating the environment of the game--unless you push the limits and exploit something such as an item duplication system. The second is your basic manipulation or phishing schemes. The third is the use of aimbots or wallhacks, to improve your play artificially. And the last refers to going further than hacks and using fully developed programs to automate your characters.

Chapter 6 looks at the means through which companies contest these cheaters, and how these approaches define different versions of cheating. One company prevents any form of cheating, and thus treats it as an anonymous force. One counters the effects of cheating, and thus sees it as an action, rather than a group of people. And one collects and bans any who cheat, regarding cheating as a permanent identity.

Chapter 7 is on Consalvo's play of FFXI Online, and an investigation into cheating and the grey areas of rules as the come up in that game. Specifically, she looks at power leveling, bot farming, and gil-selling (that is, selling in-game money for real money), and how each creates challenges, both in player discourse and in the way the designers attempt to eliminate the problem. In general, Consalvo argues for a punishment system that incorporates player input. The final chapter and section is a bit of a round-up of what's been discussed, and a quick discussion of things that didn't fit earlier. Namely, she briefly discusses user-generated walkthroughs, such as Alakhazam and GameFAQs and their contributions to game capital. The book ends with a repeat of Consalvo's main argument: that cheating should not be regarded as a form of identity, but as a practice, a behavior that many people indulge in while playing in some form or other, and a practice that allows us to fully examine what it means to play by the rules.

It's a pretty good book, and it manages to say a lot without being overly pedantic or technical. I'll admit that it took me a while to figure out why Consalvo was emphasizing industry in a book on what seemed like a type of player practice, but as I read on, it became increasingly difficult to refute that the game industry does its best to manage the concept of the ideal, capital-laden gamer to their own advantage, up to and including what forms of cheating are permissible or not. It's especially interesting in a case such as mod chips where cheating goes as far as real-world legality. Consalvo never quite goes this far in her discussion, but it seems like you could fairly extend many parts of her discussion on negotiating the meaning of cheating to negotiating the meaning of breaking the law in general, and where grey areas do or do not exist.

If there is a flaw in the book, it's in the history of the early stages of cheating, in that it's entirely console-heavy and ignores the similar histories and movements going on at the same time on the PC side of things. Considering that Consalvo's argument later delves into hacks for online games, I think a discussion of such early hacking mentalities and how they constitute their own form of gaming capital is an essential missing piece in her historic approach. I think she does address this omission at some point, but it still seems like a large missing piece.

But it's still a great book. I was worried that Consalvo would focus on paratext to the exclusivity of the actual games, but the chapter on FFXI alleviated that concern. (And in passing, Consalvo has definitely gotten a lot of mileage out of that game--"http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifLag, Language, and Lingo: Theorizing Noise in Online Game Spaces" in the Video Game Theory Reader 2 also focuses heavily on the game, but utilizes an entirely different set of elements in it) And I tend to distrust ethnographic approaches; after reading a few books on stat-balancing and survey design, I realized how easy it is to skew the results in your favor. But Consalvo supports her findings through other means, and relies on them more for context for her argument than as set-in-stone supporting points.

If anyone finds the issues Consalvo's raised interesting (I know I did), I can recommend some further reading. On the player behavior side of things, this link goes to an account by a user named Nightfreeze, on how he got even with some dirty dealers in Eve Online. And if you want something a little more scholarly, I'd recommend Steven Downing's "Online Gaming and the Social Construction of Virtual Victimization" in Eludamos 4.2. While it's not about cheating per se, it does cover players' responses to various forms of victimization, including responses to being cheated. As for me, I'm going to pursue the corporate business angle that Consalvo raised, first by reading Digital Play by Stephen Kline, Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig De Peuter. And then I'll follow Dyer-Witheford and De Peuter to Games of Empire. Well, that's going to take the rest of my summer, then.
Later Days.

Friday Quotations: That's in the Hammock District.

"Of course I’ve gone mad with power! Have you ever tried going mad without power? It’s boring and no one listens to you!" --Albert Brooks, The Simpsons Movie

...and there's music, and an improbable couch, and then they all fall into the fountain: Ottawa Trip Part II

It's been a few days now, and the requests for Ottawa blog posts stand at... zero. I'd rave about that result, but it's not like I was really expecting any different, and I don't think most of my regulars have realized I've returned to blogging after the break, so I can't really blame them. Thus, I will choose the topic I want to address first, and the one that is the most difficult: time with friends. I hasten to add that this difficulty doesn't stem from the people I was spending time with (who are awesome) nor the activities (which were awesome) nor the locale (Ottawa's... well, if not awesome then Pretty Okay). Rather, it stems from a realization I made a few months ago that I've stopped talking about some of the more personal stuff on the blog, and, without causing any ripples among the tranquil pond of my life, I'd like to start doing that again. Hence the potential difficult start. Bear with, brave readers, bear with.

I think of myself as a pretty shy person. When I do start talking, it's usually about something that I'm very interested in. The problem is, I don't do a very good job in differentiating between my work interests and my personal interests, or the difference between the listener's interest and my own. So as a result of the shyness and the personal interests, I think I often come off as aloof and an intellectual snob. And as a result of that, I have trouble making a good first impression. (Or, as Occam's Razor would have it, I'm an aloof intellectual snob, and thus have trouble making a good first impression. YMMV.) I'm personally grateful, then, to have had three different friends I could rely on for this trip: one for the ride there and back, one for a place to sleep, and one for a night out on the town last Saturday during the long weekend.

It was a particularly interesting experience because I have to admit, for all three, I don't really know them that well, and yet each has had a very marked effect on my life. To offer an example, it's through the effort of one of them in particular that I struck up a friendship with the guys that are currently my roommate. Now, don't get me wrong here--they are amazing people, and if I was closer friends with each of them, I'd consider myself richer for it. (And I think I have become a little closer with them, and the one I shared a car ride with in particular--you don't spend six hours in a car with someone without getting to know them a little better.) But in each case, we've drifted apart a bit, whether it's because they live in a different city, or because they're running in different social groups. In the case of the friends I reconnected with in Ottawa in particular, you combine that distance with the relative brevity of my stay, and it feels like that I what I got from both of them was a glimpse into their lives.

One of them has been--well, I don't want to say "domesticated" because that has negative connotations, and "settled down" has the same problem. And I want to avoid any negative connotations, because neither really conveys the reality of the situation, nor the experience of witnessing it. Rather, what she has is an apartment, a fiance, and a pair of cats, and honestly, I've never seen her happier. Her life is full and her future has, if I may borrow some nautical imagery, not so much a rigid destination as a clear course, and I kind of envy her that.

The other friend invited me to a BBQ her group of friends was hosting. I met a large group of people having a pretty damn good time. There was, quite literally and liberally, wine, women, and song. What I got to view in this case was a close-knit group of really good people who had fun together without alienating any newcomers (as I can personally attest to). It was a little strange, seeing her in an entirely new group than the one I had previously associated with her (with the both of us), but a good strange, like seeing a favorite actor appear in a well-received new show; there's a sense that things have worked out for the best.

In both cases, the experience was eye-opening, and a little humbling. It reminded me that I'm not the center of the universe. All right,I already knew that, not being entirely an idiot. But seeing them both in their respective elements carried a realization that the lives of people carry on whether I'm involved or not, and there are good people out there worth putting the effort into knowing. And that's what I'm taking from this: that it was because I got to know these friends that I got to experience this weekend in the first place, and if I put the effort into getting to know more people, I'll gain further perspective outside my own head.

(Granted, a lot of the momentum of that vow is negated by virtue of the fact that I stayed home from an invitation to spend some time with new people in order to type this blog post. Baby steps, people.)

Okay, now this is getting a little maudlin and melodramatic, so let's end on the essentials. From one friend, I got a place to stay, some cats to play with (awesome), and Monday morning pancakes (more awesome). From another, I got a ride ranging some 1000 km in total. And from another, I got a night out involving 3/4 a bottle of wine; two drinks, one of which I split on myself and blamed on clumsiness rather than inebriation (it was probably a 50-50 effort); rounds of Taboo, which is a great game for someone who can never spit out the proper name for something anyway; 3 rounds of Queen-based karaoke; a 4:00 am bedtime; and the full realization of why you should aim not to have five hours sleep and a hangover when presenting on a morning panel. All of which is also awesome.

Oh, and friendship is a rich mosaic, one that grows richer if one takes care to add a bit
of variety and depth.


(The title here is supposed to be referencing Friends, in case that's unclear. As in, the subject of today's post is "friends," without the capital. Some of the aesthetics of Taboo are still in my system.)

Later Days.

I Have No Mouth, and I Must Blog: Ottawa Trip, Part 1

And so I return from the sojourn out... east, I'm going to say, shaky knowledge of Canadian geography firmly at the fore. East, and north. I'm back from a conference in Ottawa, and it might have been the most successful conference I've attended to date. The paper went well, the sessions generated both good connections and good conversations, and I've got some future to links to develop based on that. And there was some nice personal stuff too: I got to spend time with two different friends that I haven't seen in a while, and explore a new town, which is also interesting--you don't realize how spatially attuned you are to your surroundings until you're not. Even the ride up was a good chance to get to know a third friend better, and to examine the "Book-on-Tape" in its native element. I'd love to talk about any of these things--but I don't want to talk about all of them. So take your pick readers: fun with friends, Ottawa exploration, conference video game stuff, or road trip. Whaddaya want to hear about? My voice is ready to give word.

Figuratively ready. After the combination of Thursday's rough start, Friday's cat hair shock, and Saturday's Karaoke, I've pretty much lost my voice for the time being--after the paper, thankfully, but only a few hours after. So if anyone wants to hear me talk about the trip, the blog'll be the best place--face-to-face conversations will have to operate on pantomime for the immediate future.

Later Days.

Friday Quotations: Better Early Than Never

"A journey without a destination is an endless journey." --Lost Odyssey.


Later Days.

What Have I Done? What Am I Doing? What Will I Do?: Ottawa Edition

It is my current theory that each person contains within themselves a finite limit of focus, and once that limit has been exhausted, they are doomed to flit helplessly from task to task, until events resolve themselves out of pity. At least, that's what I surmise is the case given the last few days and my work on the paper for this Ottawa conference. Readers of the blog are painfully aware of the research effort I put into the game, and if you haven't caught up on that experience, I suggest you go here for a recap. In all, I put together 200 pages of notes, transcripts, and musing, amassing the last 40 pages of it in a single day. And then I spent three days with the attention span of a gnat.
For a sample of my mental state, here's a conversation that happened between me and my roommate last night:

Me: What's that word for when you put together a lot of information, and then compile it all in one place?

Roommate: ....

Me: Oh wait. It's compile. The word is compile. (I stare at him for a few seconds, then amble off.)

The paper, all 10 pages of it, is written, though I have to confess that wasn't much of a feat--between my comp exam last year, the Stiegler files, and the game play, all of the research had been done long ago--all I had to do was stay focused long enough to put it all down on paper, and frankly, that was enough of a challenge. I also put together a slide show, which is really more of a collection of backgrounds to add some flavor to my script than anything especially relevant to my discussion. Ah well. I plan to read through it tomorrow for time and clarity, then print off the final draft.

Other preparations for the trip seem to be going smoothly. My Ipod is updated with a selection of audiobooks for road travel (David Sedaris, Gene Wolfe, and Charlaine Harris, because I enjoy being eclectic), my memory stick has a copy of the paper as well as a movie or two just in case, I've got a set of snacks for the road, and I've picked out my five books. (Previous trips have determined that my own piece of mind requires me to bring a minimum of five books on any trip over 24 hours, to ensure peace of mind.)

I've got to print off choice parts of google maps tomorrow along with the paper, as well as a few phone numbers and a schedule of the conference. The drive up is set, and I've got tentative plans to meet up with at least one person I want to check in on during the stay. The only thing that hasn't been confirmed quite yet is my sleeping arrangements, and hopefully the kink in that will be worked out soon. (He said, fearing the worst with every 64 inches of his body.) Internet access during the trip may be rather sporadic, so don't expect much in terms of updating here till I get back next Monday. To that end, I've decided to do my Friday Quotations ahead of time, on the basis that I can if I want to, so there.

I'm a bit of a homebody (understatement), so the idea of any amount of traveling makes me uneasy (also understatement). Combine this with the uncertainty about where I'm staying and the general anxiety towards presenting a paper, and I am a bundle of nerves. Hell, I'm a whole ganglion. Wish me well, everyone.
*UPDATE* sleeping sitch solved. Which is good, because it means I can rechannel my worrying powers to meeting new people and not looking too nervous--which only makes me look MORE nervous!
Later Days.

My Confessions: Word Smash

I was very disappointed today to learn that the word "comprendium," a mash-up of comprehend and compendium, does not actually exist. Portmontage, make it so!

*UPDATE* I am also very disappointed to learn that the word is "portmanteau," not "portmontage."

Later Days.