Digital games have not been around that long and, considering that they are purposefully made to be fantastical representations of other worlds or real life, it is weird to ask for an authentic game experience. In an industry that thrives on sequels, movie tie-ins, and cloned games it’s hard to see the relevance of being authentic verses being fake.

But what can be said to be authentic or fake about games? Is any remake of a game, fake? Do game developers need to create new IP in order to be authentic? Are the old arcade machine’s the authentic platforms and the new generation PCs consoles the fake ones?

In the book Authenticity, James Gilmore and Joseph Pine spin epic business tales of what makes a company authentic. The theories and practices found in Authenticity grew out of the authors’ other book The Experience Economy where they describe the stages that businesses can operate within: Commodities, Goods, Services, Experiences, and Transformations. Giving examples of each: Commodities are well … commodities, like coal or wood; Goods are products produced from commodities; Services are waiters, tech-support, etc.; Experiences are what you get at Starbucks of Disney World; and Transformations are experiences that change something about the consumer, consulting is one way (transformation could be a property of an experience but let’s roll with it for now).

One problem with Goods, Services and Experiences is that they can be commoditized (see the figure below), think Wal-mart and what it has done for providing cheap goods and services (you can get your oil changed at a Wal-mart?). Some consumers do not care what brand they buy when prices are so low. Companies must stand out amongst this down turn in brand recognition. One way businesses can do that is to allow the customization of their products, focus on consumers specific desires. Another way, and one not mutually exclusive with customization, is to become more authentic.

Gilmore and Pine say that being authentic is a popular property that consumers ask for in today’s market. For each of the five stages where businesses can operate there is a way to bring about authenticity. With commodities one can be more natural, Starbuck uses earth tone colors and elegant woods in their coffee shops for instance. Goods need to be original, Apple has a good track record of building “original” products. Services need to strive for exceptionality, which means better social interaction and caring workers. Experiences should refer to some other context, for example referring to history such as ancient Rome in an Italian restaurant. Finally, transformations can be authentic through perceived influence, think of Opera and how she has the power to sway large groups of people (popularity begets popularity).

One thing that should be pointed out is that businesses can only create a perceived authenticity. The authors pull from such theorists like Baudrillard and Eco when talking about what is real or fake in society. Since anything man-made is ultimately a fake or alteration of the natural Gilmore and Pine say that no business can provide absolute authenticity. However, ultimately no person can have an unauthentic experience because each of us perceives experiences in our own way (which mainly goes against Baudrillard and Eco who down played a person’s subjective experience). Businesses need to provide for their customers as close to an authentic experience as possible so that those customers feel they are having an authentic experience. There are so many ways that you can poke and prod this argument it is not funny but, for reference, that is how they frame their theories.

In the book, games are mentioned sparingly, mainly referring to Second Life and MMPORGs (yes, that is how they spell the acronym, they are business consultants not authentic players). This led me to wonder how games would fit into their grand scheme of business stages and what an authentic game would entail.

In the business world, games would fall under the Goods category with other features like multiplayer servers, digital download and online community websites falling under the Service category. Perhaps E3 and BlizzCon are the Experiences in the industory and things like code, computer hardware and power are the commodities, just to round it out. However, I would argue that playing a game operates on every single stage of the Gilmore and Pine’s business chart.

At the point of play a game stops being a good and starts being an experience. As game researchers if we cannot find some shred of truth in that statement then I don’t see how we can study games. Players have their own subjective experience when playing a game, or if you believe that subjectivity is dead than they are at least experiencing something even if it is not entirely their own truthful perception.

Providing an experience means that a game must also provide services. Massive number crunching is the ultimate service a game provides, divvying out processing power to parts like the graphics engine, the mechanics and other game content. Those different parts make up the goods that a game provides, while the commodities are the basic building blocks of the game: graphical primitives, sound files, rudimentary mechanics like jumping, etc.

If we look at games as they are played where does authenticity exist or fakery endure?

Well one area is in the commodities and goods stage. While many people trumpet the theory that graphics are not everything I contend that having well produced graphics, sound and UI design can make or break any game. Even during the prototyping phase if instead of using programmer art, high quality art was used in its place (As Danc over at lostgarden.com has provided before) it can help a team, and buyers, see the potential of any game. Authentic graphics and content can help a game distinguish itself.

On the flip side of that argument, what about game remakes or ports, obvious fakes right, that add enhanced graphics or provide the game on a new platform. Are they authentic? One big concern a lot of gamers have today is that they will have to buy their games over and over as they upgrade their machines or consoles. PC game publishers sometime update old PC games to allow them to work on new hardware, or now console providers have their own services like Nintendo’s virtual console or Xbox arcade where players can buy classic games, for a nominal fee. While it obviously took work to produce those retro-fueled services and port the games, some players perceive these offerings as money grubbing and not authentic.

Then there are game remakes like the new Space Invaders Extreme that, while having a similarity to the old Space Invaders game, adds new mechanics to the game and has generally been well received. But do you need to add new gameplay to be considered an authentic remake? The new Secret of Monkey Island remake will be receiving a graphics over haul however, LucasArts included an interesting feature where a player can switch back and forth between the new and old graphical styles, which is meant to give authentic tribute to the original game. You can even tell in the language that the developers use in the movie to promote the game that they are trying to be as authentic as possible, as they produce a “faithfully re-imaged version” of the game.

Moving on to what makes an authentic service in games we have to bring back the developer into the picture. For single players games, the UI that a developer builds will provide control and information services for the player. If the UI is frustrating to the user, because the interaction is fake, then it can potentially hurt the game. However, in a recent small study it has been found that the usability of the game does not always mean that players will dislike the game.

A main service that players will ultimately face is the multiplayer services that game developers provide. There is a reason why the ESRB does not rate online gameplay. How a company deals with annoying players, cheaters or other griefing behavior sets a tone for how a game developer is perceived to be genuine in providing multiplayer content. Rumors often float around MMO games like CCP’s Eve Online that say the company allows cheating to take place because it would take too much time and money to truly find every cheater and expel them from the game. Blizzard on the other hand makes very bold reports of the number of accounts they expel because of cheating or other undesirable behavior. At least creating the perceived control of their online services can make a game company seem to be authentic. (Even though some people would say that World of Warcraft is like the Walmart of MMOs and Eve is one of the more authentic MMO experiences)

Then there are some games that provide new experiences all together while staying on the fence of whether they are real or fake. Recently there has been an influx of quality made online browser-based games that have taken a game’s IP and made a different game with it. Mirror’s Edge, Infamous, Portal and Left 4 Dead have all been turned into great 2D games. These are obviously fakes that have taken their material from an original AAA game title but you can get lost shooting zombies in Left 4k Dead just as easily as in Left 4 Dead. Gilmore and Pine would call these games fake-reals, since they provide pseudo-experiences. These re-imagined games refer to a source material not their own (fake) but are original in and of themselves (real). The opposite would be a quasi-experience or a real-fake. Those are games that clone another game but have obvious flaws. If a developer made a 3D puzzle game where the player places doors to walk through walls obviously it still would not be Portal. Perhaps that is why no one has made a product that competes with The Sims, they would run the risk of being seen as a real-fakes, or even a fake-fakes, in the face of The Sims’ popularity.

I have only touched on how you could use Gilmore and Pine’s work to describe games. Transformations have similarities to concepts like Games for Change or Bogost’s Persuasive Games. Game companies themselves often suffer from being seen as fakes, such as the power house EA which has continually struggled with their old identity of being a slave-driver and uninnovative. Even the old systems like Atari are thought to have authentic value and need to be preserved.

It is an interesting experiment to take the principles that Gilmore and Pine discuss in their book not only to evaluate games as goods being produced by companies but to evaluate how a player perceives the authenticity of their game experience. We may find that even if a game experience is fake, players can authentically enjoy it.

I was turned on to Cursor*10 by the great Offworld blog. This puzzle game gives players a minute to try and get through a multiple room level to the end. The problem is that the obstacles in the various rooms do not allow the player to get through the level alone in one round. This is why the player gets ten rounds. In each round the player’s cursor movements and clicks are recorded. These records then show up in each subsequent round so that the player is actually playing with themselves, solving the game together. For instance, one obstacle requires a player to click on a box 99 times to get into the next room. Impossible in a minute but with two or three other cursor records clicking the player can get by quickly. It forces the player to strategize how to use each cursor round.

Cursor*10 really hit me because this is the type of stuff that I am doing for my thesis. Recording player data, analyzing it and having the data affect the game in different ways. While Cursor*10 is not analyzing the data it is using recorded data in a novel way. It combines playing with an intelligent player and an ephemeral being, something that was once there but now only a trace is left. I call these Ludophasmas, materialized game spirits, and they offer a way to leave marks in digital games.

One newer game that makes use of Ludophasmas is Mirror’s Edge (ME). In ME’s time trial mode a player can race over rooftops to try and get the best time. Each time a player races they have the ability to save their race data. Next time they play they can race against their own “ghost” which appears as a red, semi-transparent racer in the level (see below). Players can then trade their ghosts with other players, making these Ludophasmas appear in multiple player’s games.

This is very different from the standard high-score screens which have been used since the early arcade days to record player information. Not only are the player’s with the fastest race times given a permanent place in ME’s history but any player can call up a ludophasma that replays that player’s game experience, a ludivestigum (a recorded game experience, just to stick with latin). Going beyond a high score, which can only be viewed as a benchmark for every other player, a player can learn from a ludivestigum. A tutoring interaction is brought into the game, players watch the best players and learn the most optimized way to play.

These ludivestigums are being gathered more and more in games. Recording replays in RTS (Warcraft 3) or FPS (Counter Strike) games have been used often, especially by the professional game competitions to show off their tournament games. Ghost data in racing games is pretty common as well, I race against my ghosts all the time in Mario Kart. Now these ludivestigums are turning into actual experiences that can be shared between players as with the ME ghost time trials. How much is it going to take to use these ludivestigums to produce ludophasmas that can act beyond just replaying the recorded actions of a player?

What every business tries to do with recorded analytic data is to figure out what their user’s motivations and preferences are. Businesses sift through user actions in order to find something that can be used to predict what a user will do in the future (obvious marketing potential). If this can be achieved it brings up another capability, if one can predict what a user will do in the future could not an artificial user be created that acts like the original user? Infused with the same drives and goals of the original player a ludophasma could play games as an artificial player. In a way this would create a living ghost of that player, one that could virtually interact with other live players. This would allow players to live on even after death and interact with their ancestors (maybe even be placed in a robot body to physically interact with them?).

In the future, will we watch replays of Warcraft 3 games or play against recorded Counter Strike NPCs that are infused with our loved one’s ludivestigums in order to be closer to them? Will these be the next form of cherished mementos that we will keep, right next to the digital photos, flash videos or cell phone messages? What if your loved one has past-on, can these ludivestigums be a glimpse into their psyche or decision making processes? What if a program could be built that combines that loved one’s ludivestigums and creates a ludophasma that simulates their same behavior, making it capable of playing new games or just interacting in general? How close would you want to get to realizing Philip K. Dick’s “half-life” beings in his book Ubik?

There is just so much data out there these days that represent our past selves and yet these questions are seldom talked about. People are leaving behind their footprints everywhere and it’s getting easier to store them. Digital artifacts can be copied, stored, even altered if the user chooses but a user can’t interact with the actual people in a photo or movie besides photoshopping them out. What happens when the traces that people are leaving behind allow us to not only see and hear them but also allows us to play with them, to really experience them again? I wish I had some huge insight to end on but I truly do not have any answers. We will have to see where our ludophasmas lead us.

High noon across the cityscape. The sounds of the city below echo among the rooftops. The wind blows and birds rest on a building’s ledge. Suddenly footsteps are heard, swift and quick. A blurred figure runs past and birds take flight. Jumping from building to building the figure blazes forward as shouts can be heard in the distance. Finding safety is the only objective at this point but getting there will not be easy.

Now is that a description of Assassin’s Creed or Mirror’s Edge?

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Finished my general qualifiers today …. just 20 minutes ago. Summer has started. Now I can fix this green blob of a layout I have going on here.

Today in class I brought up the question, Are Janet Murrey’s four requirements for the computer just characteristics of discipline (as defined by Foucault)? Procedural = Organic, Participatory = Combinatory, Encyclopedic = Genetic, and Spatial = Cellular.

Jay Bolter made a commit, a little jokingly, that I may have been the first person to compare these two points. Which for one, hey I don’t get to be the first at many things but really as soon as I finished reading’s Foucault’s chapter on discipline it just made sense. Now I’m not saying that I’m a complete expert on everything he writes in his book “Discipline and Punish, but let me break it down.

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