Layers of Performativity

ACS CROSSROADS 2010, Hong KongCultural Studies and Digital Games

Lori Shyba MFA PhDMontana Tech of the University of Montana

In Will Wright’s Videogame Spore

Video of Creature Stage, created with Camtasiahttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J68ZWzRcFpU

The Layers of PERFORMATIVITY

1. Inspiration

2. The Industry

3. Spectacle

4. The Sacred Sphere

5. Transformation

6. Doubling and Duality

7. Omnipotence

Layer 1: INSPIRATION and The Auteur

“Each of us has an inner dream that we can unfold if we just have the courage to admit what it is. And the faith to trust our own admission.”

– Julia CameronThe Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity

“I’ve always enjoyed making things.…

When I started doing games I wanted to give the player a tool so that they can create things. and then give them context for that creation. To really put the player in the design role.”

– Will Wright, interviewed by Celia Pearce

Will Wright, Auteur: The Sims, Sim Earth, Spore

“Linguist philosophers J.L. Austin and J.R. Searle distinguished between two kinds of utterances: ‘constantives’ or statements, and ‘performatives’ like “I bless you” that perform an act in their being said.”

– Marvin Carlson, Performance: A Critical Introduction

Layer 2: THE INDUSTRY and making it happen

Creative Gamaturgy is a way to infuse sensory discoveries into the game-making process as a creative tool for game designers. This includes sparking up creative teams through improvisation, mapping and modelling of characters and relationships, and ways that visual, physical, and aural texts can work together to assist in the creation of emotionally rich games .

—Lori Shyba, Beyond Fun and Games: Interactive Theatre and Serious Videogames

Layer 3: SPECTACLE: Performance, Music, Mise-en-scène

“The play-element was present and significant from the beginning ... some serious, some playful, but all rooted in ritual and production of culture by allowing in the innate human need for rhythm, harmony, change, contrast and climax to unfold in full richness.”

– Johan Huizinga

Layer 4: SACRED SPHERE and Ritual

Spore Tribal Stage

Layer 5: TRANSFORMATION

“Rite of Passage” is a transformance, changing status of relationship and identity. In “rites of passage” something happens during performance. … both symbolizing and actualizing a change in status.

– Richard Schechner, Performance Theory

The Hunter/Gatherer creature lays an egg!http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrTVqyl0fCM

Layer Six: DOUBLING and DUALITY

“All performance involves a consciousness of doubleness, through which the actual execution of an action is placed in mental comparison with a potential, an idea, or a remembered original model.”

– Richard Bauman

“All the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn’t are not easy to specify.”

– Erving Goffman

Layer 7: OMNIPOTENCE and CAMERA’S EYE

“God Games” are a sub-genre of Simulation Games where the player is in the position of controlling the game as an entity with divine powers.

“What kind of god will the player become? They might be a nurturing god, an incorrigible god, going out and conquesting, or a networking god, building alliances ...”

– Will Wright

Findings and Implications

According to Salen and Zimmerman, “Meaningful Play,” especially as an experiential system, can occur on larger stages of culture.

Conflating and synthesizing these layers of performativity leads to the conclusion that Spore is “Meaningful Play.”

The Montessori Way

“The environment must be rich in motives which lend interest to activity and invite the child to conduct his own experiences.”

– Maria Montessori

“If there is one difference I might be able to make in the world, I’d like to give people a better calibration in Long Term Thinking.”

– Will Wright

TRIPLING (Further to Doubling)

“Doubling” gets amped up as “tripling” where characters perform for each other.

Layered over that is the player, immersed in the action as a “puppeteer,” a performative action of performing for “other,” the “other” being:

a)the other virtual character, and

b)b) intriguingly, others humans in the Spore online community.

Immersion and Gender Shapeshifts

Subjectively, I have been immersed as an embodied participant in the game, discovering the essence of something as it is experienced.

It makes me feel … Overburdoned.

Hunting, Battling, Forming Alliance AND Laying Eggs!

Hence, the power of meaningful/serious games and recognizing one’s values and moral beliefs.