Reading through Professor Jagoda's chapter on "Participatory Aesthetics," I was particularly interested in how Jagoda often returned to the complication of "sovereignty" or player control in networked games like Between or Journey. In a traditionally single-player game, one might think of the play experience as a conversation between player and developer; whether one reads a game from a procedural or play-centric approach, the experience always comes down to some relationship between those two figures. Now with a networked game, there emerge more figures in this dialogue: you have the player, other players, the developer, and the network itself. Jagoda in this chapter seems to primarily focus on how games designed around networked interactions can complicate our understandings of control: in Between, the two players cannot progress without each other; in Journey, the player affective experience of the game is dependent not on player or designer, but other players. Reading through the chapter though, I thought more about how the network itself might complicate our understandings of control.
This was prompted also by playing We the Giants and experiencing its lack of an ending, which others have touched upon. Here, the networked game has ceased to be networked, and the player is no longer able to play the game in its original incarnation. This is something that's been seen frequently in the rise of network-dependent DRM, which restricts a player's ability to play a game, even a single-player game, without an internet connection. One notorious example is Assassin's Creed II on PC, an entirely single-player game that required the player be connected to the publisher's servers at all time to play. When the servers crashed, players were unable to play the game.
A more recent example is a game I've been playing recently, Hitman 2. Another game that might be traditionally thought of as a "single-player" experience, the game features competitive leaderboards for each level, so that players can compare their progress and abilities with each other. To support the legitimacy of the leaderboard scores, the game requires that the player be connected to the internet to save their progress or access any of their progression in the game. While a player theoretically could play the game without connecting to the network, it would be as if they were starting the game from the beginning each time they played.
In all these games, control is taken away from not only the player, but also the designer, and given to the network itself. For We the Giants, the game was dependent on the developer's continued support, but also the existence of a Twitter API that would support the game's tweet system. In Assassin's Creed II, players had no ability to engage with the game if they did not have a stable internet connection, and the publisher, Ubisoft, equally had little control over the experience when their servers crashed. For Hitman 2, the player loses control over their own progression without a connection the network, and the developer faces problems similar to Ubisoft when unable to support the strain on their servers. While the games that Jagoda explores in "Participatory Aesthetics," might "shake up a sense of networks as monolithic structures," the aforementioned games seem to reinforce the network as a monolith through their giving up control to an uncontrollable network.
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