Adaptation? Adoption? (is this even a a good title)

I’m going to look at the readings for Technology in English Studies from this week through the lens of my obsession: the development of an MMORPG space. Though I am not sure I have a good handle on the concepts I am going to focus on the Strategy and tactics conception from the Certeau chapters.

First an explanation of how I understand strategy and tactics through the lens of the concepts of weak and strong force of particle physics…

Strategy is an immobile stance of power. Strategy is like strong force. Strong force binds subatomic particles in the form or shape of a nucleus and then an atom. It also makes molecules possible. It is a foundational force that constructs our physical reality. In terms of cultural studies, strategy is the foundational place from which power enacts its power.

Tactics are weak force. Weak force is the force, technically, of repulsion. The operation of weak force is actually that of exchange. It is weak force in tension with strong force that allows for reactions such as the breakdown of hydrogen in Sol, our sun that then creates energy, which we witness as light. Weak force is the force that causes an exchange of subatomic particles, kind of turning one atom into another resulting in an explosive exchange. In other words, tactics are mobile and deployable. They do not suffer from the necessity of holding a position though tactics result in an exchange of power and control. Tactics reform power relationships through exchange.

In the genera of MMORPG design strategy and tactics can be observed in several “locations”. To the uninitiated, the most obvious place the tension between strategy and tactics can be witnessed is on the forums provided by developers for the users and consumers of their products.  A less obvious place to a general observer the interplay of strategy and tactics is within the virtual environment of MMORPGs themselves.

On the forums for MMORPGs there are two general locus of strategy. The first is the omni-directional presence of the world developers. The second is the user as expert (differentiated from the consumer for they are very different). First, I’ll look at strategy of omni-directional developer.

Typically, in the communication structure between developer and user or consumer the developer, though a reader of the forums, do not involve themselves in forum discussions. Instead, they hire forum moderators or community relations specialists known as community managers (the rhetoric of this job title is not lost to me). The task of these community managers is to read the forums, mine information important to developers, and then report on it. Level importance is determined by the development staff early in the development process via personal contact with the community managers or through technical documentation.

The secondary task of the community manager is to screen the unimportant information developers don’t need while also granting importance to that unimportant information by commenting in those discussion threads, not commenting in those discussion threads, or locking those threads down so they can no longer be commented on.

The strategy here is that of silent dictation to protect the design of the product. The fact that an actual developer rarely, if ever, comments on forums other than a dictation that cannot be challenged through conversation (because the developer who publishes such dictations never responds to comments, there is no interaction between the dictator and the subject) is a very recognizable and transparent manifestation of manipulating power dynamics. Another aspect of that strategy is the community managers do comment on such dictations in response to subjects’ posts. They speak for the developers but because they are not the developers, their addresses and statements can be brushed off by the developers as being not the voice of the developers.

This is where tactics comes in. tactics are employed by the users and some consumers to take from the developers some amount of control over the product. This is also where the “user as expert” comes into play. The tactics used can be likened to rhetorical hit and run operations. Users respond to or create various threads poking and prodding, looking for weaknesses in developer strategy. The measure of weakness is being able to say something that elicits a response from the community managers. Then, users employ the comments from community managers to further weaken the developer position. This is enacted through the use of ‘quote-as-ammunition”. Quotes are then deployed as out right misquotes or intentionally deployed as alternate readings of said quotes (users do actually understand the contextual meaning of statements. Generally, users are sophisticated enough in their understandings to know what was actually intended by a statement made by a community manager).

The result of this tactical process is the users force the alterations they desire in the virtual environment through an evolving and changing rhetoric based on the need of the moment. The strategic response to this is to not provide alterations to the virtual environment at the level or degree requested by the users. The position of the developers essentially does not alter. They are the administrators, the dictators, of the virtual environment. It is in their best interest to retain the original form of the product, their product, while permitting the illusion of total input by the users.

This is where the user as expert really comes into play and the extension of the tactical efforts of the users in their struggle for power over the virtual environment in the least obvious way to the outsider (people who are not actually involved in the virtual environment itself). If a user does not get what they want through the forums channel, they then go to the environment itself. In the virtual environment users then exorcise their expertise by manipulating components of the environment in a way that unbalances the experience for consumers with the aim of pushing consumers to petition developers for the changes users were requesting on the forums via a system integrated ‘back channel’ in the form of an illusionary complaint.

The action, generally but not universally, a user makes is a form of system or social manipulation often termed as an ‘exploit’ (yet another term rhetorically deployed not lost to me). An exploit is a manipulation of a system or mechanic so that it no longer “works as intended”. It is the use of a technology beyond the designers’ intent in an unforeseen manner. If the hole or gap in the technology is truly an exploit (it is not unheard of for a developer to create what seems like an exploit intentionally to maintain their strategic position) then the developers must respond by modifying the technology to close that hole or gap. This then usually elicits a dictation by the developers stating that the technology is “working as intended” which then starts the whole process again with a different issue.

Something to keep in mind is that the user community does not work together on one tactical expression. It is not unlike small cells, factions with different agendas, acting separately to achieve an overall control of the virtual environment, a challenge to the dictatorship and the strategic position of the developers. At any given time the number of these tactical operations can be as few as ten positions or issues or as many as one hundred (a number than actually has occurred rarely and usually only in the launch phase of a MMORPG).

Ultimately, there has never been a complete exchange of power in MMORPGs though the strategy of a developer may be significantly altered over time by the tactics of users. Still, largely, the strategic position of the developer is still the same. It is that of the controlling operators of the virtual environment. As an addendum to this relation of the strategy and tactical relationship there have been a handful of cases, no more than ten and no less than six instances, where the strategy of the developers has faltered and then fallen to the tactics of users which universally results in the ending of the product service, the MMORPG is shut down and considered a loss. This is usually due to one cell or faction gaining dominance in influencing the after-launch development of a virtual environment to suite their own desires which is at odds with the desires of a disproportionate number of users and consumers which then results in the canceling of a huge number of service subscribers which in turn reduces the income of the environment below the line of sustainability.