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    Treacherous Play
    Treacherous Play
    Treacherous Play
    Ebook165 pages2 hours

    Treacherous Play

    By Marcus Carter

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    About this ebook

    Examining the ethics and experience of “treacherous play” through 3 games that allow deception and betrayal—EVE Online, DayZ, and the TV series Survivor.

    Deception and betrayal in gameplay are generally considered off-limits, designed out of most multiplayer games. There are a few games, however, in which deception and betrayal are allowed, and even encouraged. In Treacherous Play, Marcus Carter explores the ethics and experience of playing such games, offering detailed explorations of three games in which this kind of “dark play” is both lawful and advantageous: EVE Online, DayZ, and the television series Survivor. Examining aspects of games that are often hidden, ignored, or designed away, Carter shows the appeal of playing treacherously.
     
    Carter looks at EVE Online’s notorious scammers and spies, drawing on his own extensive studies of them, and describes how treacherous play makes EVE successful. Making a distinction between treacherous play and griefing or trolling, he examines the experiences of DayZ players to show how negative experiences can be positive in games, and a core part of their appeal. And he explains how in Survivor’s tribal council votes, a player’s acts of betrayal can exact a cost. Then, considering these games in terms of their design, he discusses how to design for treacherous play. 
     
    Carter’s account challenges the common assumptions that treacherous play is unethical, antisocial, and engaged in by bad people. He doesn’t claim that more games should feature treachery, but that examining this kind of play sheds new light on what play can be.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe MIT Press
    Release dateFeb 8, 2022
    ISBN9780262367530
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      Book preview

      Treacherous Play - Marcus Carter

      Cover Page for Treacherous Play

      Treacherous Play

      Playful Thinking

      Jesper Juul, Geoffrey Long, William Uricchio, and Mia Consalvo, editors

      The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games, Jesper Juul, 2013

      Uncertainty in Games, Greg Costikyan, 2013

      Play Matters, Miguel Sicart, 2014

      Works of Game: On the Aesthetics of Games and Art, John Sharp, 2015

      How Games Move Us: Emotion by Design, Katherine Isbister, 2016

      Playing Smart: On Games, Intelligence, and Artificial Intelligence, Julian Togelius, 2018

      Fun, Taste, & Games: An Aesthetics of the Idle, Unproductive, and Otherwise Playful, John Sharp and David Thomas, 2019

      Real Games: What’s Legitimate and What’s Not in Contemporary Video Games, Mia Consalvo and Christopher A. Paul, 2019

      Achievement Relocked: Loss Aversion and Game Design, Geoffrey Engelstein, 2020

      Play Like a Feminist, Shira Chess, 2020

      Ambient Play, Larissa Hjorth and Ingrid Richardson, 2020

      Making Games: The Politics and Poetics of Game Creation Tools, Stefan Werning, 2021

      Treacherous Play, Marcus Carter, 2022

      Treacherous Play

      Marcus Carter

      The MIT Press

      Cambridge, Massachusetts

      London, England

      © 2022 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

      The MIT Press would like to thank the anonymous peer reviewers who provided comments on drafts of this book. The generous work of academic experts is essential for establishing the authority and quality of our publications. We acknowledge with gratitude the contributions of these otherwise uncredited readers.

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Names: Carter, Marcus, author.

      Title: Treacherous play / Marcus Carter.

      Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, 2022. | Series: Playful thinking | Includes bibliographical references and index.

      Identifiers: LCCN 2021000494 | ISBN 9780262046312 (hardcover)

      Subjects: LCSH: Games--Psychological aspects. | Deception.

      Classification: LCC GV1201.37 .C37 2022 | DDC 790.1--dc23

      LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021000494

      d_r0

      Contents

      On Thinking Playfully

      1 An Introduction to Playing Treacherously

      2 EVE Online: Don’t Trust Anyone!

      3 DayZ: Treachery in the Zombie Apocalypse

      4 Survivor: Treacherous Play as a Spectator Sport

      5 Designing Treacherous Play

      6 Treacherous Assumptions

      Appendix

      Acknowledgments

      Notes

      Bibliography

      Index

      On Thinking Playfully

      Many people (we series editors included) find video games exhilarating, but it can be just as interesting to ponder why that is so. What do video games do? What can they be used for? How do they work? How do they relate to the rest of the world? Why is play both so important and so powerful?

      Playful Thinking is a series of short, readable, and argumentative books that share some playfulness and excitement with the games that they are about. Each book in the series is small enough to fit in a backpack or coat pocket, and combines depth with readability for any reader interested in playing more thoughtfully or thinking more playfully. This includes, but is by no means limited to, academics, game makers, and curious players.

      So, we are casting our net wide. Each book in our series provides a blend of new insights and interesting arguments with overviews of knowledge from game studies and other areas. You will see this reflected not just in the range of titles in our series, but in the range of authors creating them. Our basic assumption is simple: video games are such a flourishing medium that any new perspective on them is likely to show us something unseen or forgotten, including those from such unconventional voices as artists, philosophers, or specialists in other industries or fields of study. These books are bridge builders, cross-pollinating both areas with new knowledge and new ways of thinking.

      At its heart, this is what Playful Thinking is all about: new ways of thinking about games and new ways of using games to think about the rest of the world.

      Jesper Juul

      Geoffrey Long

      William Uricchio

      Mia Consalvo

      1 An Introduction to Playing Treacherously

      Games that are deliberately designed to enable or invite betrayal are extremely rare.

      If you steal from your guild in World of Warcraft, the game’s moderators will return the stolen goods and suspend your account. Most first-person shooter (FPS) games code away the killing of teammates by disabling friendly fire and structuring the competition in such a way that betraying your team would offer no in-game reward. In most tabletop games, where these types of coded rules aren’t possible, trust is implicit.¹ The rules of Monopoly don’t need to say that you must not lie or steal from other players, because deception and betrayal are just assumed to be an illegitimate way of playing the game. Playing treacherously is typically treated as an off-limits type of play that will ruin the experience of other players and is actively designed against in most multiplayer games.

      Indeed, the games scholar Staffan Björk categorizes some games with deception and betrayal as examples of feel-bad games for the unusually negative emotions they provoke in players.² Björk’s example is So Long Sucker, a simple bargaining game designed in the 1950s by the game theorists Mel Hausner, John Forbes Nash (Nobel Prize–winning economist of A Beautiful Mind fame), Lloyd Shapely, and Martin Shubik. Negotiation and agreements are key to winning So Long Sucker, but just as in TV’s Survivor, betrayal is also an implicit necessity for having a chance of winning. Such was the intense emotional experience of playing that Nash nicknamed the game fuck your buddy,³ and Shubik later recalled married couples going home in separate cabs after playing.⁴ I have included the rules for So Long Sucker in the appendix at the end of the book, if you want to test this reputation for yourself.

      But why? Of all the things that seem totally appropriate to do in games, why is treacherous play so polarizing? Why is the emotional experience so exceptional?

      In this book, I explore an underexplored type of play that sits on the border of what is commonly understood to be acceptable or appropriate to do in a game. It is a type of play that is not for everyone. Through case studies of games that explicitly permit betrayal, I illuminate and complicate some assumptions that scholars, designers, and players often make about the limits of competition in multiplayer games; the appeal of negative experiences; how social interactions can be a part of play; and how we draw the lines between who you are in a game, and who you are in real life. To borrow an argument from Jaakko Stenros, transgressive play is still play, and if we only look at half the picture, we cannot grasp the whole phenomenon and its nuances.⁵

      Here I focus specifically on the few examples of where treacherous play is successful. By this, I mean where it occurs within the rules of the game, and where the presence of treachery has undeniably contributed to a game’s appeal and success. This includes play like yelling Friendly! Don’t shoot! when you encounter another player in DayZ, but burying an ax in their head when they turn around; promising another player in Survivor that you will take them to the final three, but then writing their name down at the next tribal council; and being a productive member of an EVE Online corporation while selling military secrets to its enemies. Some of the cases in this book are provocative, but they help uncover aspects of play that often get hidden, ignored, or designed away.

      By looking at this other half of the picture, we can start to imagine more about what the possibilities are for this emerging medium.

      Treacherous Assumptions

      There are three assumptions I often see players and scholars making about treacherous play: gut reactions to the idea of betraying for fun. The purpose of this book is not to dispel these assumptions but to use them to develop a deeper understanding about treacherous play and uncover what it can contribute to how we think about games and play more broadly.

      Assumption 1: Treacherous Play Is Unethical

      The first assumption that I find people make about treacherous play is that using deception and betrayal for in-game advantage in a multiplayer game is—for some reason—unethical. To discuss this idea, we must first consider how competition in a game can be ethical at all.

      C. Thi Nguyen, a philosopher, and José Zagal, a games scholar, have discussed the ethics of competition in multiplayer games, and what it means for a competitive game to be moral. Their starting point is to acknowledge that direct competition in games does involve a form of violence against an opponent, albeit in a highly abstracted form. In a strict Kantian sense, this means that all forms of competition are morally wrong,⁶ but as Nguyen and Zagal argue, some forms of competition seem clearly ethical.⁷ They volunteer the term mere violence to describe and distinguish the forms of violence that are not significant, where such forms are limited in significance to preventing an opponent’s in-game plans, by the means permitted by the rules.

      The standard view in the philosophy of sport is that the two key principles of consent and agreement make competition ethical,⁸ but Nguyen and Zagal usefully extend this rubric through Bernard Suit’s principle of the lusory goal: the in-game goal we establish that is contingent on a series of unnecessary obstacles.⁹ More than just consent, the struggle against these obstacles is what we desire from competitive games. If my only goal was to beat you at poker, I might use a stacked deck to ensure that I win, circumventing those unnecessary obstacles. Here, though, I would no longer just be committing mere violence against your goal of winning but committing violence against your lusory goal and the unnecessary obstacles it is contingent on. For Nguyen and Zagal, the ethics of the transformation of the violence of competition in multiplayer games is contingent on the way the game’s design aligns my mere violence with your desire for struggle.¹⁰

      Consider Fortnite, a battle royale first-person shooter game where up to one hundred players compete to survive on a virtual island. Play is characterized by a few one-on-one battles as players are forced into a smaller and smaller zone with the lusory goal (and the way to win Fortnite) of being the last player standing, having overcome the obstacles that the other ninety-nine players represent. To kill me in Fortnite is to deny me the opportunity to win (an act of mere violence), but attempting to kill me is necessary for my lusory goal. To play Fortnite on a private server with no opponents is not to play Fortnite at all.

      This is a useful lens to start interrogating treacherous play, because it helps us understand how betrayal is unethical in most games. Players who steal from a rival guild in World of Warcraft are not aligning their violence with their opponents’ desire for struggle, since trusting correctly is not an unnecessary obstacle World of Warcraft. This is

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