by Sal Humphreys
Toby Miller is Professor of English, Sociology, and Women's Studies and Director of the Program in Film & Visual Culture at the University of California, Riverside. His teaching and research cover the media, sport, labor, gender, race, citizenship, politics, and cultural policy. Toby is the author and editor of over 20 books, and has published essays in more than 30 journals and 50 volumes. His current research covers the success of Hollywood overseas, the links between culture and citizenship, and anti-Americanism. His forthcoming book is Cultural Citizenship: Cosmopolitanism, Consumerism, and Television in a Neoliberal Age. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
This interview was conducted during Toby's recent stint at QUT as a visiting fellow of the Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation. Toby delivered a lecture on the games industry in which he directed attention both to the production cycle of games hardware and software, and to the historical context of moral panics about new media, where games can be viewed as the latest in a long line of new media to generate anxiety within a culture.
In this interview we canvass the directions that games studies might take, and the issues of production, particularly as they relate to the role of players as producers, and the politics of labour in this new model of networked production.
Sal: I thought a good place to start might be for you to explain your interest in games studies. I mostly know your work through film studies. Why the shift to games?
Toby: I was involved in film studies simply because it was a place where I could be employed. I've rarely if ever been employed doing the things that I'm most interested in or that I most work on, and I am concerned with a project that is about the political economy and the political technology of subjectivity. Another way of saying the institutional power and the discursive experiences of the creation of collective identity. So I'm interested in how that happens at a whole variety of sites and I don't really care what the sites are. So film studies was just an area that was offering jobs where you didn't have to be very smart to do it and you didn't have to know very much. So that's why I got involved in it and it's really just a venue for a whole stack of other projects. Now that I'm in an institutional location that's called English, Sociology and Women's Studies I'm probably more aptly designated in terms of what I do than I have been before, although those are three areas in which I have no formal training - so one could argue that I don't deserve to be in any of them. But I do feel reasonably at home with those departmental descriptions so it's not as though this is a shift from film to games. This is just one more site where I hope to learn both about the specifics of the area and the lessons that it can teach about questions of political economy and political technology, of subjectivity and collective identity.
Sal: So how's it going so far, in terms of what you are finding out about games and how that fits within your framework?
Toby: Well a lot of young faculty in the United States who have worked within the games industry and have fled it to do PhDs don't have many people who are interested in listening to them and talking about their problems. They have plenty of people prepared to talk to them about their passion for gaming, but they don't have any people to talk to about the social relations of it. So they have plenty to teach me and I am a listening post I hope for them. In addition I was asked by Doug Thomas when he established Games and Culture - a Sage journal of which he is the editor - to be an associate editor, along with some other people who are able at some kind of significatory level to offer games studies a location within media and cultural studies to the extent that it wants it, because there is the question of intellectual legitimacy that comes with print journals published by leading entities like Sage. And the idea is to try to be able to allow medium specificity, as with all the different media, but at the same time to give some kind of standing. That's just about, in a sense, old professors and younger professors.
I think the other thing that's been important for me that I've learnt, is that for a great many young people that I teach, who are from mostly very underprivileged backgrounds, mostly first generation college, mostly not white, mostly not from English speaking backgrounds, gaming really is a luxury that's not part of their world. In fact in many ways email and the web are not part of their worlds - it's sms and texting that are part of their worlds. So I think what I'm gaining from all this is that, (sorry it's a long winded answer to start with) it's not good enough to talk about 'the media' anymore, meaning any particular segment, even as you need to know about all of them. I think that's the most important thing that I have gained. And also to see that the telephone, the most intellectually boring media appliance in history, probably is going to be the most important for all these things. It already is so important for games obviously, and the experience of these students is teaching me that. So I think it's allowing me to understand some things about convergence and also about divergence.
Sal: Last night in your lecture you were talking about the production of the hardware as being part of the industry. It's interesting because nobody ever really talks about this and yet the whole industry is predicated on it. It can't exist without it. But no-one really wants to look at it because it's seen as quite a separate area. [There is the notable exception of the work of Kline, Witherspoon and De Peuter (2003)who discuss the labour conditions of the workers who make gaming consoles in chapter nine of their book on computer games.] Can you see ways of marrying it into analyses that are, for instance about content production?
Toby: It's interesting isn't it? Are you talking about bits of cardboard and disks or about consoles and PCs?
Sal: I was thinking of where you addressed the production cycle of consoles and PCs and the environmental impact of those technologies, and the labour that produces them and that pulls it all apart on the rubbish dumps in the third world when they've been discarded.
Toby: Well, I do think that, given the gender issues at play apart from anything else, there's a lot to be done with saying, you know, men get to be creative geniuses - women get to be people who make 'stuff' and women get to clean up afterwards. I mean when you also associate that with the different rates of pay, often the racial differences and of course the locational differences - the men are in the first world, the women are not. All that's going to change, and there are lots of women who write games of course. But the preponderance of the industry's creatives have been male to this point and the preponderance of the people making the 'stuff' has been female, and I think that's important. So what's going to be interesting, one hopes, is that just as the content will change with the feminisation of the workforce, and the feminisation of the audience, along with various other influences, taking it away from its current preoccupations - for market reasons, for social reasons, for feminist reasons, for all kinds of reasons - one hopes that just as users/producers/creators/audiences/however we put people on that complex continuum, change, they will begin to think about these other questions, about the pre-consumption and the post-consumption life of the things they use. Where did this stuff come from, where is it going next and whose labour is involved in producing it?
So that my hope is that one of the things that games studies can get onto very early on, that other areas of media studies have never gotten on to, is that you need to think about not just what it is and how it's received, but who makes it what it is, how it travels, how it's received, how it's remade, and then how it's junked. Of course in gaming a lot of those things are happening at once, it's not as though it's a simple linear progression. There are lots of cycles in it - as there are in other media too - but it's a more obvious feedback cycle of creating and co-creating in the games space. So to try to get people in games studies from the get-go when setting up games studies degrees to say "Where is the Playstation made and where does the Playstation end up?" as well as the fun stuff, is I think terribly important - as a consciousness raising activity, particularly in gender terms right now, just as is the question of militarism and violence and masculinity in the content. Also not just as a matter of consciousness raising, to use a crude old term, but for the sake of completeness. Why not? If you've got a chance to kick-start a new sub-discipline or a new discipline, why not pick up on the best of where the others have gotten to after a century? Rather than imagining everything is new, or replicating things that are rather tired and haven't come up with great new options. That's how I hope it can be related to content.
Sal: It'll be interesting to see what happens with the whole phenomenon of 'off-shoring' labour - of outsourcing what has until now been seen as first world labour [for instance artwork and animation] to third world sweatshops - whether that changes peoples' consciousness about the cycle of production.
Toby: Of course some of that can be very protectionist, can be racist, and can be a masculine reaction to women's opportunities. There are all kinds of things about the new international division of cultural labour that aren't necessarily wicked in any sense, but we should be aware of them and understand what they imply. Especially at the level of environmental protection and other questions of labour exploitation. Not so much at the level of jobs lost, but rather, what are the jobs that have been won?
Sal: While we are on the subject of labour I wanted to ask you about the whole phenomenon of player labour. The unpaid labour of networked production, where the players are actually producing a lot of the content for the publishers. How do you think that's going to play out? Part of what I think is going on in games studies is that people are coming up with a description of what's going on but don't a have a real pathway into theorising the complexity of it. John Banks and I have been talking about how we may need a political economy approach to be able to unpack this material. So I'm interested in what you think a political economy approach can offer.
Toby: Well one of the limitations of political economy has been that it hasn't looked enough at labour when it comes to media. And it hasn't looked at things in a conflictual way - it's tended to look at things in a rather static way, where it's all power to questions of ownership and control, to proprietorship and the state. There's just not been enough consideration of the labour process when it comes to working on the media in general. And that's one of the reasons in general, I think, why political economy was so churlish in its attitudes to the active audience arguments made in media studies, (that are very relevant obviously, to gaming areas) instead of seeing that there was a form of labour being undertaken by active audiences, frequently via feedback loops, frequently through direct and indirect means of having an impact on stories. Had that been picked up, then we would have a pathway that was quite apt for this. Of course it's different because in the networked online multi-user environment it's like everybody's in a focus group and everybody is an active fan, because there's no other way, in a sense, to participate.
Sal: Yes, any engagement actually requires that you produce content.
Toby: Right. Whereas if you are watching a program on television that you like, most people won't bother, but those people that do can have a major impact. Not only are they putting out a lot of labour but they're putting out ideas. There are classic stories of the Star Trek franchise promising to keep Spock alive provided that certain numbers of people turn up dressed as spacemen nine times for a first-run exhibition. So I think we needed to pay much more attention to labour way back when. It's something that I've tried to focus on but it's very hard to do and needs a lot of resources. What's new about this situation - apart from the specificities of online gaming - is the people are already in a community, they're already talking to one another - they're self-selected. The problem is that they're operating under the same sort of conditions as workers in a factory, because the community that they have involves monumental surveillance by the boss.
Sal: Yes, I was going to bring up surveillance as a feature of these environments.
Toby: Exactly. So there's huge surveillance, rather like an old style factory floor. I mean, your keystrokes are being added up, as it were. The number of widgets that you're making and unmaking is under review. So I think that's a really big issue that's hard to get beyond. What has to happen at some level is some combination of people getting angry enough that they find means of connecting beyond the endorsed social network. Or, they operate somehow or other within games to create a discussion that provides direct feedback to the proprietary owner - the publisher, whether it's Sony or EA or whoever - such that it gets addressed by the company that way. Or they petition the company outside the sphere of the social network that is proprietary to the company. Or they connect, as is often the case, with people who work in the industry who are themselves part of the network and give feedback that way. Or they start, and maybe it's an 'and' rather than an 'or', they start militating in public about this question. But part of the problem is, whilst there are many people like yourself, that I meet, who are involved in these communities, who enjoy them but do feel ripped off by the conditions of signing away their intellectual copy rights …
Sal: …most people don't give a toss.
Toby: They don't give a toss because for them it's all fun, where's the problem? So there's a huge, at one level, educational task to be undertaken. At another level of course, the task of accepting that it's their perfect right to stay that way. But let me give you another example.
Sal: Just before you do, of the things that you mention, I think there are currently the mechanisms or channels in place and that people are in fact doing most of the things you mention - so you do get in-game demonstrations, although mostly they are about players wanting this feature or that feature added to the game. However there was an in-game demonstration when the customer service team in Star Wars Galaxies had banned a whole raft of players after a duping scam - they banned anyone who had that item, even though a lot of the people who had it had no idea it was duped - players just bought it in the market place and there was no way of knowing it was duped. They banned a lot of people who shouldn't have been banned. It brought to the surface this idea that the publisher can deny you access and you have no recourse to justice. There was an in-game demonstration, which Sony Customer Service dealt with by banning more accounts or 'flagging' accounts, thereby demonstrating that they are the all-powerful in that world.
Apart from this kind of in-game collective action there's a lot of discussion between developers and players already, via bulletin boards because the developers rely on them to know which direction to go next. So those channels of communication are already open in some ways. The 'outside' game networks also happen - there are great rafts of websites that surround any of the games where players talk to each other on bulletin boards and form communities - which the publishers rely on, but they are slightly less under the control of the publisher.
Toby: The thing is the content has to be critical, rather than purely fan-based.
Sal: Yes, exactly. I was talking with a friend about his experience working as a community manager for a game developer. He would say to management "you know you really need to introduce some equity into your dealings with the fans, as they are making your content for you" and they would say "well actually we're not going to bother because most of them don't care". So they rely on that to maintain their current practices.
Toby: Well this is the subset of the larger problem of being sold the bill of goods that you have rights as a consumer but they're essentially individual and they are separate from the notion of being productive labour. It's a much wider problem. It's one that you see all the time with things like polling and surveying done by marketing firms, where your opinions are sought. And in most cases, other than in focus groups where you might get 50 dollars and a box of chocolates, this is done for free. Most people do not find this a problem or odd, in the same way that most people don't find it a problem or odd that often in order to pass their psychology 100 class or to get extra credit, they have to subject themselves to a bunch of rats-and-stats sadists and show their fascination or otherwise with particular questions about smoking or weight loss or whatever it might be.
In each case, this is, in my opinion, about the intellectual capital, life experiences and opinions of ordinary citizens, in their role either as consumers of education or game players or whatever, being utilised to further the interests of capital. A perfectly reasonable thing to do, but let's understand that that's what it is, and let's work seriously to ensure that just as we worry about a plant variety right being enacted as a consequence of a tiny change being made to the naturally occurring biochemical composition of a plant, and therefore suddenly something that's been used for centuries by people for traditional purposes becoming unavailable in naturally occurring form but instead becoming something that is capable of being patented, just as we're seeing people prepared to protest about that, so we need to see people pondering the intellectual property heritage of the stuff that they hold in their minds and that they share with others. It's part of a really big big issue for the future. That if these corporations are serious about saying we will tear down your children's representations of Mickey Mouse at day-care centres, or we'll tear down your website that talks about Harry Potter, because we own the copyright, then they have to get ready for a group of people (and the group of people will expand) saying we don't want you to take away our ideas so you can sell them for money or improve your professional standing, without giving us some payment. It's part of a really big issue for the future about intellectual property and everyday life.
Sal: Ok, I'd like to move a step beyond the intellectual property issue for now, and talk about proprietary worlds and governance. It seems to me that media publishers of multi-user online games, set up worlds, and they then actually take on the governance of the communities within them. As such they've moved from being property managers to community managers, which is a new role for a publisher in many ways. The terms of governance are part of the EULA (End User Licence Agreement) or part of the Terms of Service and these contracts are always very one-sided - they pretty much always allow the publisher to do what they want. There is never a system of accountability, whereby if you felt you were unfairly denied access to the game where your community exists, you have no recourse because you've clicked through that EULA. So by agreeing to the EULA you've entered into a contractual relationship where your rights are now determined by the contract you made as a consumer rather than by your more collectively held and politically accorded citizen-based rights. What do you make of all that?
Toby: I think commodification and governmentality have often gone together. So this attempt to order conduct is not dissimilar when it's at the level of getting people to buy and enjoy or when it's at the level of getting people to comport themselves. If you think about ways of behaving in a movie theatre or ways of behaving in a museum, there is a long standing attempt to say "you come into this zone, you buy the right to be there, you cannot behave as you wish once you're there, and this is determined by the exercise of property rights." Now that's why free speech in the United States, as protected by the first amendment to the constitution does not include the right to say "fire!" when you're in a movie theatre.
So at some level this is something that happens all the time - because if you're going to charge rent for being somewhere, then you need to make sure that the 'there' remains how you want it to be in order to charge rent for the next people, or for others located thereabouts and that (and this is where of course there is something that isn't about what's utilitarian and pragmatic for capital, particularly for Japanese and US companies I suspect), there is an almost extraordinary obsession with control - a desire for power and control.
If you look at the literature that marketers put out about consumers or audiences or players or whatever, again and again, what they say in public is that this is about the individual making a purchasing choice, behaving as they want. In fact, they write about people as herds, they write about them as collections of barnyard animals who are very hard to control and must be corralled - how can you go about it?
The other factor that's relevant here - again it applies to a certain extent to a movie theatre or museum, but much more in the online domain nowadays - is moral panic. There's a terror at the thought that the wrong kinds of messages about sexuality or religion - hot-ticket items obviously in all media worlds, but especially in ones where there are lots of young people involved in real time. The standing of the company is at risk. Also, when you're dealing with a form of technology where things are relatively open and where a lot of the people who are, in old-fashioned terms, audiences, actually know exactly how to create and unmake code and are capable of hacking, then you have additional anxiety. So I think all those things are probably at play.
One last thing - when you talk about the EULA, it seems to me that at some level that now needs to be conceived not only as a document, virtual or otherwise, that is agreed to in order to gain access to a space, but as akin to a social compact - the mythic social compact at birth, or the actual one you enter into when you make the mature decision to become a citizen, like a seventh-day citizen if you like, or a Baptist or whatever. It seems to me that that document increasingly needs to be discussed and criticised not only in terms of commodity relations but, as you're implying, for political and democratic rights.
Sal: Yes I brought this up with Lawrence Lessig and asked him what he thought about peoples' rights being construed through contracts and if he thought there was a place for regulation of these contracts - should there be some kinds of standards put in place for what contracts can demand of people entering into a proprietary world. He was of the opinion, (and I don't think I'm misconstruing his meaning here) and other Americans I've talked to are of the opinion, that the marketplace will take care of it. That corporations are too scared of alienating their player populations through over-zealous regulation of the game, or over policing it. That they will play fair or they'll lose their player populations, so it's ok to leave it to the market. Do you think there is a place for some kind of regulatory intervention by the state, for instance, or some kind of mechanism other than the market?
Toby: It depends what he means when he says the market in that case. If he means people simply exercising the right not to play, then I doubt it. I think it has to come from organisation of political action. Sometimes when people in the United States use the term market they actually mean social movements organising, getting angry, saying this isn't good enough, and getting things changed. Because you know, one of the ways both self-regulation and external regulation happens is precisely because of interested parties who militate. They may militate in the direction of government, or they may militate in the direction of the corporate world-but that's what often happens. So it's not as though it's just a simple market mechanism. I think one of the problems with the state getting involved is precisely how, within comparatively open societies, as classically understood, you can in fact legislate cross-nationally for such topics. I think it's the ground of legislation, as so often with many things related to the dark arts of the internet, that becomes complicated.
Sal: So how do you think it's going to play out? Because I think that it's not just games that we'll be living parts of our lives through. Increasingly the more we go online to socialise in any way, the more we will be doing that within proprietary spaces and thus increasingly our social lives will be regulated through proprietary means and contracts. It's not just relevant to games, it's a more general question than that. So what's to be done about that? Is that just something we just roll over and die about?
Toby: Oh no, no. I think it's really about organisation and civil society. This is an area where in places like Australia there isn't a lot of experience, because, for better or worse, for the better part of the 20th century, the mechanism of a form of tripartism that allowed so much consultation and palimpsestical thinking between labour, the state, and business - that isn't good enough anymore. It's certainly not good enough in the case that you aptly and accurately lay out. So what has to happen is a discourse of transnational or supranational citizen rights that people argue for; founded on, of course, state-based ideas of citizenship, but taking them beyond that, and making them supranational in just the way that the European Union does, or the United Nations does, or as per many arguments about the alleged wonders of democracy, the alleged wonders of the family, or whatever it might be. So it seems to me that it's not a matter of lying down and accepting what's done to you by the surgeon, as it were, but rather, organising transnationally. There are lots of examples, everything from Star Trek fans to First Peoples and feminists and so forth. People who have the privilege of working in big institutions need to unlock some of the proprietary knowledge that helps to animate and control much of our lives. So, big institutions, whether they are corporate or otherwise, need to make proprietary knowledge as available to everybody as they can.
Faculty of Creative Industries, researching the area of new media studies. She completed a three year study of multiuser online games in 2005 and is working on online communities and creativity.Email: am.humphreys@qut.edu.au