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Clay Spinuzzi argues in his book Network that the research and design of communication networks focuses the tensions between “how people work” and “how power works” (p. 32). In the case of computer games, the practice of “co-creation” forms extensive networks that link players, developers, distributors, hardware, software, and internet communication technologies (ICTs) as participants engage in collaborative projects. These relationships involve significant negotiations over both the purpose of the network and the agencies that different participants claim. Moreover, participants, especially players, often encounter what Cooper and Reiman would call different (even conflicting) “representations” of the network’s capabilities and limitations, impacting their perceptions of the network and the activities they can pursue.

This paper presents a case study using the 2008 game, Little Big Planet, that demonstrates some of the usability problems network participants can encounter in co-creative networks. Extending the concept of translation discussed by both Bruno Latour and John Law in actor network theory, I trace moments of rupture in which participants test the limits of the activities they can pursue by testing the capabilities and limitations of both the network and the other participants. The results indicate how participants perceive and enact their roles in co-creative networks, and point to future issues technical communicators face in researching and designing for the tensions between differing participant roles and power in networked communication.

Within these networks, the relationships that player-creators form with the content they generate and with game developers are marked by a series of legal, rhetorical, and technological systems that are often assembled into “black boxes.” In Pandora’s Hope (1999), Bruno Latour describes “blackboxing” as a “process that makes the joint production of actors and artifacts entirely opaque” (p. 183). In other words, the assemblage of components appears, from the outside, to be a single block that does not show the actors contained within. According to actor network theory (ANT), black boxes are actors that stand in for complex tasks, processes, or organizations, appearing to be unified wholes that then bring “to the present” the “force” and “action” of such complexities (p. 185). Clay Spinuzzi (2008) identifies black boxes as critical components of “net work,” or work that distributes labor across space, time, organizational boundaries, and social contexts through “heterogenous” and “multiply linked” networks. For such work, Spinuzzi argues that black boxes need to take the form of mediators (whether human, procedural, or technological) that stabilize communicative genres and systems (pp. 202-203).

Black boxes such as the Playstation 3 console attempt to enforce regimes of content control. The console makes the decisions of network administrators governing player-generated content and practices “opaque,” or hidden (Latour, 1999). Often the work of player-creators must attempt to pry open black boxes in order to see what co-creative activity is supported within the network. Yet, this is a problematic maneuver. Opening the Playstation 3’s operating system to examine the use of digital rights management technologies is forbidden by Sony’s terms of service. And Media Molecule publicly acknowledges that they maintain contradictory policies regarding the use of third-party intellectual property within the system—the terms of service versus a whitelist of permissible content. To this end, opening black boxes means that participants must test the boundaries of what the network permits by risking their participatory agency. Little Big Planet 2 invites imaginative play and participation while also working to channel co-creative practices through specific processes and interactions.

References

Banks, J., & Deuze, M. (2009). Co-creative labour. International Journal of Cultural Studies 12(5), 419-431.

Banks, J. & Potts, J. (2010). Co-creating games: A co-evolutionary analysis. New Media & Society 12(2), 253-270.

Deuze, M. (2007). Media Work. Malden, MA: Polity Press.

Latour, B. (1999). Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Spinuzzi, C. (2008). Network: Theorizing Knowledge Work in Telecommunications. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Our primary interests in this project are to examine the ways tools, policies, and the design of constraints and affordances in these networks impact the user experience of participants seeking to move information rapidly and effectively through social media. Our work suggests that maintaining the rapid mobility of content is a critical factor that user experience researchers and designers must account for when designing social web tools, or other information management tools used to respond quickly to events.

We have so far published two pieces related to this research:

Potts, L. & Jones, D. (2011). Contextualizing experience: Tracing the relationships between people and technologies in the social web. Journal of Business and Technical Communication 25(3), pp. 338-358.

Jones, D. & Potts, L. (2010). Best practices for designing third-party applications for contextually-aware tools. In Proceedings of ACM SIGDOC 2010. Sao Paul, Brazil. 95-102. Available in ACM Digital Library.

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Here is the abstract for my poster session at Meaningful Play 2010:

One of the discussions of games emerging from Cultural Studies corners centers on “co-creation,” or instances in which players within the game community take on roles of designing, developing, and testing game content. Players often receive little in return for their work, while also signing over any rights for much of the intellectual property they help create. One perspective situates co-creation as a system of unfair labor practices in which developers exploit players’ affinities and expertise with media experiences (Terranova, 2000 & 2004; Kuchlick, 2005). Others view co-creation as a “co-evolution” of “economic and cultural factors” situated in a “dynamic open relationship” that is “based on extrinsically-motivated exchange relations and culturally-shaped intrinsically-motivated production relations” (Banks & Potts, 2010, p. 260). Green and Jenkins (2009) inject the notion of a “moral economy” that assembles media corporations, content creators, audiences, and technologies into mutually constructed, if fragile, creative relationships that “require trust” (p. 218) amidst “the social expectations, emotional investments, and cultural transactions that create a shared understanding between all participants within an economic exchange” (p. 214).

Using actor-network theory as presented in Latour (1999), Law (1999), and Potts (2009), I propose a method for first tracing the co-creative networks assembled from the game developers, players, and technologies linked together in co- creative ecosystem surrounding Little Big Planet (Media Molecule, 2008). After mapping the network, I use the concepts of operations actions from activity theory (Kaptelinen and Nardi, 2006; Spinuzzi, 2008) to conceptualize methods of designing for the moral economy of Little Big Planet’s actor-network.