Wisdom of the Gaming Crowd

Best Practices of a Crowdsourced Author

Kristin Gorski interviews McKenzie Wark on May 14th, 2007

When author McKenzie Wark asked himself, what's the best way write a book that unlocks “the curious character of video games as allegories for the world we live in,” the answer was simple: Invite the crowd. The result? The newly released book "Gamer Theory." Before he published the book, Wark posted his draft online and invited readers to offer feedback, which he used to help shape the book. Wark, Associate Professor of Cultural and Media Studies at Eugene Lang College and The New School for Social Research, developed the project with the Institute for the Future of the Book, an organization that seeks to explore, understand and influence the shift of intellectual discourse from printed page to networked screen.

Q: People got very, very involved in reading what you had written online, and there seemed to be quite a high level of discourse as far as, they would comment, and you would comment. How do you feel these conversations influenced the versions?

A: It’s extremely helpful to have a small number of good-quality discussions, where you can have a conversation about it, particularly in terms of writing in relation to people’s expectations. People have expectations from the first sentence what the second sentence is going to be like, from the first paragraph what the second paragraph is going to be like, and it helped to know what a little bit about that was to then reshape the beginning of the book so that you’re addressing where the readers are coming from. Not necessarily to give them what they want but to be able to sort of address their expectations in an effective way.

Q: How did you find people to work with you?

A: Well, the Institute for the Future of the Book found me, and that was how it started. Then we discussed it and decided to do it. Once it was ready for prime time, they wrote about it on their blog, which is widely read, and that seeded other people’s blogs, and blogs worked as a kind of publicity mechanism that brought people to it, to come and at least check it out and see what it was. It helped a lot that we got onto Boing Boing, you know — “top 10 blog in the world,” and that I think that drew an enormous amount of traffic, and from that we sort of were down to a small number of really good collaborators.

Q: How many collaborators were involved with you?

A: I think it was about 300. ...It’s hard to tell because we didn’t necessarily count them, but that’s my estimate, let’s put it that way.

Q: Was there something very specific that made you to work with another group of people, to take Gamer Theory from its first level to its second level?

A: I’ve been experimenting with ways, sort of collaborative, filtering these idea to an online forum [which] might be connected to a more conceited practice of writing books for some time. But parts that really required extra work to build an interface to present a fairly large 40,000 word text in an online environment where people would really want to read it. Because usually online is good for short texts and not so good for longish and fairly involved things.

Q: Were people just allowed to log in with just a user name and email address so people were more anonymous, or did you actually require some geographic and biographic and demographic info from them? How much did you actually want to know about them or need to know about them in order to work with them?

A: People originally didn’t have to sign in at all, but it seemed we started to get spam and we had to tighten it up. So then you had to register for the site. You didn’t have to provide any information at all, just a valid email address which you had to use to sign up. You had to prove you were human.

Q: There seems to be a real issue, even though it’s a very small percentage, of vandals and trolls who have their own agendas, and it sounds you had that early in the day. Did the measures that you put into place clear that up for the rest of the process?

A: There was a problem with spam, meaning “penis enlargement” spam. But no, I don’t think we had any trolls at all. The only person who behaved badly was me, and I apologized for it. I really lost my patience at one point. But I think if you set up an environment of generosity, people generally respond in the same way, and I think we sort of succeeded in doing that by and large. So not everybody liked it. There were comments that were personally a bit hurtful, but I don’t think they were offered maliciously, it was just people’s honest opinion.

Q: Absolutely, I see that now. Did you have a sense of where people as far as different regions or parts of the world, or were they specifically from one type of online community or academic community? Do you have any information on that?

A: No, I haven’t really...we probably have some data we could extract from it, which we sort of deliberately not done, because I don’t really know the ethics of doing that. But from the comments, people seemed to be from many different parts of the world, a wide range in ages. Some people who are gamers, some people who are more interested in design issues, some people who are from a theory world, so it feels like a range of different kinds of competence, which is sort of the idea: is can you connect different parts of competence together, where the idea is that everyone knows something about something, and everybody’s ignorant about a lot things, so how do you get the best out of what people know and put it together, in a way which is generous and tries to acknowledge people’s contribution?

Q: I did read on your FAQ that everybody who contributed was acknowledged in the book. How did you do that?

A: I’d just always attach a name to the individual comment, whatever people chose as their participating name. Anything that they said is always attached to their name.

Q: Were there any tech issues that came up which influenced your process with this?

A: Well, there were certain things that required serious coding to get built, so it was very much a process of finding out what was possible. We built it in Wordpress and I think that the designers pushed it to its limits. We won’t be working in that environment again. But it didn’t fall over. We’re real proud of the fact that it stayed up. It didn’t break.

Q: Did you get a general sense of the work ethic of the crowd that worked with you, or their approach to this?

A: I think that people accepted the idea that this was sort of like an experiment, that we weren’t quite sure what we were doing, that comments were welcome on all or any parts of this, from content through to form. But generally, people got into the spirit of it, and there were some lively discussions along the way. So I think people having possession of it partly, that it belonged to them as well as to us.

Q: Did you get feedback from people afterwards saying that they were happy they’d been involved in the process? Talking about that ownership you mentioned?

A: Yeah, and it also spilled over onto people’s blogs as well. I also tried to track down what people were saying — it’s not that I wasn’t looking — which was also kind of interesting to find this whole other level of discussion about it.

Q: I wanted to ask you about the work itself and the notion of “gamespace.” You mentioned that some people found you because they were video game players. I am not a big video game player, but I’ve read a lot of political science and political theory, and just being interested in media and culture, there’s a big overlap which you make very clear about people in society being in a gamespace now. How would you describe not the virtual gamespace but the real gamespace that we’re living in?

A: In the book I use the term “gamespace” for this sense that many people have that everyday life is becoming more and more gamelike. That your job is a rat race, your pension fund is in a casino, politics is a horse race, and so on. But these games never really seem to be fair, and they don’t have very explicit rules, and so forth. So I thought that what was interesting is that the single-player computer game is potentially a more perfect version of this actual world. It’s trying to get this sort of a reversal of perspective, so that everyday life is the imperfect form, and the game itself is the perfect form.

So usually we see a representation being a let down to the real thing, but with the game, it’s the other way around. The real world is a let down compared to the perfection of games. So I was trying to use that as sort of a bit of critical leverage about the way games and the digital go together and seem to infiltrate every corner of everyday life.

Q: Do you feel that the real gamespace is getting continually more difficult for people, and do you have a sense of a way to make the gamespace more fair?

A: Well, particularly if you’re talking to people who think about themselves at least in part as gamers, then to use this as sort of critical leverage to think, “Well, why isn’t the world as fair as games are? If we could design a game like that, why can’t the world be more like that?” This might be one way to think of games as a critical tool, rather than the opposite.

Q: Do you think you will do something like this again?

A: Oh, yeah, I’m doing it again. The next one is called “Totality for Kids” and it should launch in a few months.

Q: How will people get updates on that if they were interested in finding out more?

A: I guess it will be announced on the Institute for the Future of the Book’s blog, I would hope. Or I think stay tuned to a blog near you, or to Wired News.

Q: What do you get out of this that is propelling you to continue with this?

A: Well, you get to make things collectively, and to me, that’s as close to utopia as you can get.

(Edited by Michelle McLellan)