• Religious sign offs (e.g., “M2AF: It’s been great playing with everyone but I need to focus on my life for awhile. I’m selling my Xbox and giving the money to the church. God bless.”);
• The promise of adult pictures or encounters (e.g., “M2AF: Send me a spare XBL Gold membership and I’ll send you a special surprise.”);
• Insider deals (e.g., “M2AF: Microsoft points available at [URL]”);
• Complaints about another player (e.g., “M2AF: Why is [gamertag] so mean to me?”);
• Existential pronouncements (e.g., “M2AF: Anxiety, God help me. Don’t let me mess up again.”);
• Well wishes (e.g., “M2AF: Have an amazing Valentine’s Day everyone ~ <3.”);
• Community maintenance (e.g, “M2AF: I’ve been having 360 issues. Be back when I can.”);
• General announcements (e.g., “M2AF: Mass Effect 3 demo on the 14th of February! Best Valentine’s Day everrr!!”).

What I find surprising about gaming M2AFs is how often they quickly turn intimate, even if the only connection between sender and receivers is an ad hoc one established to gain an achievement (e.g., the “With friends like these…” achievement in Team Fortress 2). It is not uncommon to get a highly personal message of one kind or another.

One reason for the willingness to broadcast—or in this case, “ludocast,” as the messages are playful in origin and delivery—what are often revealing details or requests might be explained by Richard Lingard’s notion that “If you would read a man’s Disposition, see him Game, you will then learn more of him in one hour, than in seven Years Conversation, and little Wagers will try him as soon as great Stakes, for then he is off his Guard” (39). Play often creates extreme closeness, or at least the conditions for such intimacy to develop. This is due to the nature of the play act itself—something Johan Huizinga would contend—and the player being “off his Guard,” but also because play functions to obviate or smooth over difference (in player, personality, prejudice, penchant, and so forth) by a common rule or logic set (i.e., something everyone must adhere to in the play sphere). With game play, there is the possibility for instant common ground, instant shared experience in the learning of and adherence to the game’s demands, which is probably one of the reasons folks friend each other so quickly in all types of games.

Of course, rapid electronic game-based friendship also comes from respect (i.e., from the admiration of talent displayed openly), distance (and the desire it can foster), time spent online and in the company of like-minded souls, and the construction of the avatar—all of which can help foster and intensify a sense of intimacy.

Getting back to Lingard’s analysis, even games with minimal stakes have the power to crack open masks of decorum and decency and leave a deeper self exposed, raising a host of issues. For example, what is the difference between a gaming M2AF and a message sent to gaming friends via Facebook? Is the gaming M2AF drawing on the power of play to disillusion social personae while the Facebook message is relying more on the general power of internet connectivity and anonymity?

In addition, a gaming friend may well be one of the truest friends users have in an online social environment.Games’ power to strip away social pretensions means that anyone who has gamed with another person has likely seen some of his or her worst qualities: unbridled aggression, hateful thoughts, poor decision making, and so on. Only a true friend would keep playing with such a person (or so say my Xbox Live friends).

Finally, it is curious that no matter the stakes a game will likely unfold. If I want to see if I can throw a rock and hit a sign, I may bet you $20 that I can. If you respond that you only have a quarter, it’s likely that I will take the bet. This illustrates the power of play—the urge to play is often far greater than greed. Maybe this is one of the things professional gamblers learn to control: how to say no to play. At any rate, the application to the gaming M2AF is that such messages take advantage of play’s seductive power to motivate discourse that may not actually be game-oriented.

Not surprisingly, game companies seem aware of the importance of ludocasting to the creation and maintenance of playful communities. Microsoft not only recently redesigned the Xbox Live interface to prioritize the social and communicative components of and surrounding play, but created a new way to broadcast one’s availability and desire with the Beacon. It is as if the company now sees more value in game talk than in game play. The thing about beacons in general, though, is that they not only attract (e.g., a black box on a downed aircraft) but can also repel (e.g., a lighthouse). Perhaps the Xbox Live Beacon is an expressly corporate M2AF, one with the same dual power as the siren’s call to stay away and come closer.

It may also be the case that game companies understand that when play is applied to a message, it becomes more tantalizing. Indeed, perhaps it is not that Microsoft and Valve value talk over play necessarily, but rather that the game complex is made dearer still by the pillow talk it enables. Could this be the Eros of play?

Anyway, I would very much like to hear about some of the gaming M2AFs you have received or, better yet, the ones you have sent.

For starters, I got sidetracked thinking about the role of computer game study in the humanities writ large. Then there was the purchase and (ahem) intensive product testing of a new pair of gaming headphones so as to be able to hear with unrivaled precision games’ silence. Finally, there was the fun if ultimately unconvincing conference presentation I saw about the lack of sound in the Zelda series (I say unconvincing because the supportive clips, while certainly sonically spare by many games’ standards, were still loaded with ambient and non-diegetic sounds, making me wonder if games could in fact ever shut up).

The real spanner in the works, though, has been my slow-witted realization that game silence is actually silences–there are all sorts of quiet moments in games, from the abeyance of play in an inter-level break to the stasis of memory registers awaiting incoming data to the constant and ineluctable suppression of electricity in the communication between game hardware, software, and operating system. In addition, these silences are often relative in the flurry of overt, covert, and background noises games produce. It can be hard to hear and differentiate them amidst the hail of hails (e.g., the moment after a game requests an asset from the hard drive and before the hard drive spins up to retrieve that asset versus the moment after the asset is located and before it is loaded into RAM to be utilized in the game).

Needless to say, some of these silences are not particularly interesting, unless perhaps one is pursuing questions of hardware/software optimization or data flows. Others are more compelling, such as the aesthetic and haptic design choices leading to periods of quiet in the rumbles of a force-feedback game controller. Regardless, they pervade the medium and its experiences like so much sand on a beach towel. In some ways it is the silences more than the noises games make that are responsible for ludic experience.

Of course, this theoretical armature of interstitial import is nothing new. Anyone who has ever taken a literature course in college surely recalls the instructor saying “What the text omits is just as important as what it includes.” But I wonder if game silences are any different from those of other media, or if they can illuminate notions of structural space in unusual ways. The line breaks in uncompiled game code certainly resemble the spaces between the still pictures of a strip of movie film, for example, in that both segment their medium and appear to disappear in the exhibition of it. However, one veiling is due to the translation of a programming language into machine code, and the other is a result of a biological phenomenon, the persistence of vision. There are different mechanisms and processes at work, and yet both offer a kind of anti-aliasing of technological expression. Maybe it is here that I strike the next devil’s bargain with myself.

Part of humanities’ ludo-anemia, of course, can be attributed to resources: there are few available these days thanks to the sad state of states’ budgets. Most public institutions are in a period of sustained retrenchment, which is compounding the humanities’ decades-long plight of diminishing allocations and importance in the university hierarchy. Many humanities programs these days are fighting just to stay afloat, and as a result new initiatives are shelved or shot down in intensifying turf wars sparked by the mandate to reorganize in order to preserve departmental missions and core offerings.

That said, part of the humanities’ tentativeness is also probably epistemological. It has been a long time since the humanities were direct-to-market providers, if indeed they ever were. Humanities education is not typically job-specific training, but rather the enhancement of critical and perspectival faculties. The opening in computer games, at this point, is precisely in worker preparation; the industry is hungry for talent to press into service. As a result, there is something of a disconnect between what the humanities do and what games (or at least their commercial developers) require.

Likewise, computer games are an expressly computational medium. From the binary code that underpins them to the screen HUDs that display the quantification and recording of play, computer games are ineluctably about numbers and their calculation, extrapolation, and delimitation. For all their diversity and remarkable ability to explicate the human condition, the humanities are traditionally not so inclined toward calculation (a disinclination further intensified, in many cases, by a strategic and ideological push back against the increasing quantification and corporatization of university processes and assessment).

All this is to say that what came out of the round table was interesting and fun, if perhaps wildly impractical. What I liked most was the idea of computer games as a computationalizer, as a sly way to articulate numerology and humanism. It is a fraught and problematical articulation, to be sure, but a delightfully cheeky one in terms of expanding (rather than always defending) the humanities’ purview at a time when that ken is being so sorely pressed. The timing is also right: so much of human action, communication, expression, and understanding  today is shaped by the binaries and hexadecimals of computer hardware, software, and networks. Who better to understand the workings and implications of this phenomenon than humanists, the very folks who have been probing our species’ behavior for millennia?

So, Antenna community, what do you all make of this? Where does the study of computer games fit in the humanities? Or better yet, where could it fit?

Like the creatures they often contain, computer games (or “video games,” depending on your orientation) tend to be noisy little beasts, constantly calling out to players in a variety of ways. The visuals can strain gamers’ eyes with garish colors or unnervingly dark palettes, audio tracks coax a range of emotions and awarenesses, and puzzle variants taunt from players endless hours of interaction. These entreaties can be overt (e.g., ”Press START”), subtle (e.g., the sound of approaching footsteps), kinaesthetic (e.g., the throb of a force feedback game controller), and aesthetic (e.g., the elegant and futuristic design of a game console); when done well, they all seem natural to players. They also bombard the player and create a cacophonous yet somehow unified command: Pay Attention to Me!

The crass commercial explanation for the making of all this visual, auditory, and kinesthetic noise is that compelling games make money. Games that are capable of holding players’ attention tend to fair better in the market than those that do not, and constantly forcing players to respond is one way to captivate them. A less commercial explanation (though perhaps more controversial) is one my colleague Ken McAllister and I make in our forthcoming book Gaming Matters: Art, Science, Magic, and the Computer Game Medium (University of Alabama Press, Spring 2011): games are fundamentally and intractably boring. Like lonely children, they call out constantly because otherwise players would leave them for something more fun and interesting.

But I would like to offer a third explanation. Computer games are noisy because computer game play is fragile; it dissipates far more readily than it coheres. In some sense, all play is fragile–as an intermezzo, to use Johan Huizinga’s famous descriptor, it is constantly under threat of intrusion from non-play, that which it interrupts and gives pause from. However, computer game play seems especially prone to breakage. Take game hardware, for example. What player has not been victimized by a wireless controller battery running down at the most inopportune moment? Sadly, complete console failure is almost as common (e.g., the Xbox 360’s “Red Ring of Death”), and network latency issues (e.g., lag pockets, high ping) far more so. Game software is even more problematical, with operating system strangeness, bugs, crashes, glitches, cheats, patches, updates, rage quits–all of which disrupt games, their spaces, and play proper (though arguably, and I think interestingly, these also help constitute computer games and their play). It is a miracle that computer games are even playable at all, let alone able to mesmerize players the way they often do.

No wonder, then, that computer games are so noisy. They need to do something to counteract the constant threat and occurrence of violation. Their ceaseless beseechments serve to remind players that games are fun, enveloping experiences, and that these experiences can have a constancy and consistency of meaning.

In the end, perhaps it is its fragility that makes computer game play so potent. Like antique glassware or a desert wildflower, much of games’ beauty and expressive power flows from the contradiction of their delicacy and surprising persistence. In other words, they mean more precisely because they are so easily broken.