Perhaps I should have been clued in when I went to name my city Metropolis, in what I thought was a tongue-in-cheek reference to Fritz Lang’s less-than-sanguine-about-urban-life classic, and discovered that “Metropolis” was actually the default name for CityVille cities! While I’m here, I might as well share some of my favorite working screenshots from CityVille, which collectively demonstrate a somewhat terrifying dedication to population growth, urban sprawl, and “more, more, more” consumerism. I even got to meet Bonnie Nardi, whose book My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of World of WarCraft I recently reviewed (forthcoming), and to talk again with thatgamecompany’s Jenova Chen, whose game Flower for the PlayStation Network I write about in an upcoming issue on contemporary ecocriticism. I enjoyed learning about how the interaction between Chinese and Taiwanese WoW players reflects the nuances of cross-strait relations (Holin Lin), how player communities are often effectively constrained by latency/ping (Graham Candy), and how the stereotype of the “immiserated Asian worker” embodied by the Chinese gold farmer is a dangerous new form of technoorientalism (Lisa Nakamura).
For a veteran World of WarCraft player like me, it was flabbergasting to watch “ The War of Internet Addiction,” a film made by Chinese WoW players expressing both humor and (mostly) anger over the use of electroshock therapy on videogame players in China and the excesses of corporate and governmental control. So much of American game studies scholarship ignores non-American contexts that it was refreshing to see academics and industry representatives coming together to devote two days to cross-cultural comparison and the complex experiences of players and player communities in Korea, Japan, China, and Taiwan. I’ve also been steadily plugging away at my chapter on farm games, and I’ve been halfheartedly maintaining my virtual farms, homesteads, and cities, though I’ve cut the upkeep down to just a few -Villes to save my sanity and my dissertation from even further derailment.Ī few weeks ago I had the opportunity to participate in a small but incredibly rewarding conference sponsored by various centers here at UC Berkeley, called World Craft: The Business and Culture of Gaming in East Asia. In the meantime, I’ve been reading (Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist, Madison Smartt Bell’s The Year of Silence, Paul Burkett’s Marxism and Ecological Economics, Michel Serres’s The Natural Contract, Mitchell Thomashow’s Bringing the Biosphere Home, Aaron Sachs’s The Humboldt Current, Ursula Heise’s Sense of Place and Sense of Planet, and most recently Jane McGonigal’s Reality is Broken).
Yes, it has been months since my last post, which signaled the entry of CityVille onto the Facebook social game scene.
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