DESIGNING CO-CREATIVE NETWORKS IN GAMES:
AGENCY, POLICY, AND ECONOMY
by
David L. Jones
BA, May 2001, Morehead State University
MA, May 2003, Morehead State University
A Dissertation Prospectus Submitted to the Faculty of Old Dominion University
in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
PROFESSIONAL WRITING & NEW MEDIA
OLD DOMINION UNIVERSITY
SUBMITTED FEBRUARY 2011
Approved by:
__________________________
Liza Potts, PhD (Director)
__________________________
Kathie Gossett, PhD (Member)
__________________________
Clay Spinuzzi, PhD (Member)
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1. INTRODUCTION
Abstract
This dissertation will use an interdisciplinary approach to explore co-creative
networks in computer and video games. Using methodologies from technical
communicationaugmented with approaches and concepts from experience design,
game design, and cultural studiesI will trace assemblages that link players with
developers, publishers, and other game industry representatives in asymmetrical
relationships in which they negotiate co-creative agency. Within these networks,
participants combine technical and rhetorical skills to define and claim agency for both
themselves and for other network participants. The asymmetry of power in these
relationships, as well as the ways participants claim and define agency, are central
concerns for technical communicators involved in the design of networks that support
participatory cultures. Tracing the assemblage of people and technologies within cocreative networks, my research will examine the tools available for participants to create
and manage content, social interaction, and agency.
Thesis
Central to the research and design of co-creative networks are questions over
the ways agency is enabled, constrained, defined, and negotiated by network
participants including fans, players, game development companies, and game
publishers. How do game developers design experiences to strengthen their own claims
over intellectual property and constrain or enable player-creator activities? How do
players who create in-game content leverage their technical skills, social networks, or
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knowledge of participatory cultures to test the limits of their agency in these networks?
What practices do they pursue in order to claim agency? Most importantly, what do the
answers to these questions suggest about the research and design of networked
experiences situated within participatory cultures?
Current game design methodologies do not account for the co-creative
relationships that emerge between the gaming industry and player-creators who
generate in-game content. However, technical communicators have approached
networked communication experiences in workplaces and social media. Clay Spinuzzi
(2008) provides a robust account of approaches to networked communication. Liza
Potts (2009) traces the use of social media to assemble dispersed network participants
who can respond to the knowledge work needs that arise in the wake of disasters.
Using both Spinuzzi and Potts as bases for my approach, my dissertation will examine
the design of co-creation as network experience in which players must negotiate from
asymmetrical positions of power in order to define their agency as participants. I will use
actor network theory to trace the people and technologies that are assembled into a cocreative network, and to understand the nature of the linkages among those people,
groups, and technologies (Callon, 1986; Latour, 1999 & 2005; Law, 1992 & 1999). I will
leverage activity theory’s differentiation between activities, actions, and operations to
analyze how these linkages support and define agency for participants (Engestrom,
2000; Kaptelinin & Nardi, 2006; Kuutti, 1996). Taken together, these two frameworks
provide a way of understanding how the design of network systems must account for
claims to agency as players are recruited into the design and development processes of
major development studios, forging asymmetrical power relationships that try to both
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foster player creativity while simultaneously regulating co-creative activities. Co-creative
gaming networks seek to empower player-creators while also structuring their activities
in ways that limit their agency.
For technical communicators, such networks provide a rich space in which to
explore the implications of design choices that potentially expand or limit agency,
enable or restrict movement, or otherwise attempt to structure participant activity. Cocreative work in games occurs outside the borders of organizations and institutions,
often beyond the realm of formal work arrangements that help align the practices or
purposes of individual people, groups, and technologies assembled into the network.
Often, members of such networks are working at odds, pushing at the limits set by
others in order to pursue their own interests. Co-creative gaming networks are an
opportunity to examine strategies used by participants—people and groups, playercreators and gaming industry representatives—to leverage their technical and rhetorical
skills to negotiate levels and scope of agency. The case studies in this dissertation point
to the importance of those technical and rhetorical skills in defining and claiming
agency, as well as the importance of design decisions that position technological actors
at important intersections in which the agency of network participants can be both
greatly enabled and constrained.
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2. LITERATURE REVIEW
Participatory cultures often rely on what Johnson-Eilola (2005) describes as
“deconstructed architectures,” or spaces that “prioritize fluid movement of information
and…the ability of users to move around within that information space” (p. 71). Network
participants search for pieces of information and media, carve those pieces into
fragments they find useful, and then push the content they generate out to other
participants. They perform these tasks by assembling various tools and technologies
that better support the mobility of content (Jones & Potts, 2010; Potts & Jones, 2011).
While the social web can and often does support this fluid movement, co-creative
gaming networks (and many other participatory cultures) often link player-creators to
media companies in the generation of player-created content. On one hand, co-creative
gaming networks such as those that support Little Big Planet 2 or City of Heroes
encourage the mobility of content through marketing and rhetorical strategies that
emphasize the power of creativity and the role of the player-creator as an author. On
the other hand, the gaming industry attempts to define agency for player-creators.
Policies and licensing agreements describe what is permitted and prohibited as
legitimate co-creative practices in light of copyrights and intellectual property concerns.
But more importantly, these texts are combined with technologies that serve as barriers
which try to regulate both content and player-creator practice.
Currently, several different scholarly fieldsincluding technical communication,
cultural studies, and game designhave approached various aspects of these issues.
Technical communication has looked at questions of agency and power within the
communication practices and of organizations that distribute labor and knowledge work
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across networks. Cultural studies has explored the impact of power and rhetorical
differentials in participatory cultures in which people, groups, or organizations operate
from asymmetrical positions of social and economic power. Game design largely
defines the play experience as a relationship between the player and the game, or
between groups of players and a game. As of yet, no single method has synthesized
these approaches to examine co-creative activity as a networked experience that
combines distributed work and play into a social activity in which the agency of
participants is always negotiated. Co-creative games enlist players into creator roles,
becoming player-creators with an expanded ability to alter in-game content, yet always
working within a potentially tenuous series of relationships with the gaming industry.
While the ability of player-creators to alter the gaming experience can be greatly
expanded, gaming systems, licensing agreements, and other tools simultaneously work
to regulate those abilities by keeping them within limits game developers find
acceptable. Often, design choices err on the side of control, regulation, and the
protection of intellectual property, rather than on usable systems that also enable fluid
and participatory experiences for player-creators. Technical communicators can bridge
the gap between questions of power, agency, and design strategies so that we can
better design co-creative networks that are more usable, fluid, and participatory. My
dissertation will answer some of the preliminary questions needed to fill this gap.
Participation and Co-creation
Digital networks have become more and more pervasive, extending across
people’s working, family, and leisure lives. Social networking such as Facebook and
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Twitter attract millions of users who often manage connections among coworkers, family
members, fellow hobby enthusiasts, their children’s schoolteachers, or any number of
other people with whom they may have reason to keep in touch. Wikipedia has become
a repository of community-sourced information invested in negotiation over the
construction and maintenance of knowledge (Bruns, 2008; Swarts, 2009). Twitter has
developed into a tool for sustaining “backchannel” communication that develops around
speeches, conference presentations, and classrooms (McNely, 2009). Scholars are now
examining the use of services such as Twitter and Delicious in work environments
(Stolley, 2009; Zhao & Rosson, 2009). And social media participants also use social
networking applications as tools for responding to major disasters, aggregating useful
information, linking disparate bits of data that otherwise would not be connected, and
coordinating responses (Potts, 2009a, 2009b, & 2009c). Social networking tools also
support participatory cultures that are at the center of cultural production, supporting
fans as they engage with books, films, television shows, video games, and many other
cultural artifacts (Deuze, 2007a & 2007b; Jenkins, 2006). The mobility of content is key
to social web experiences (Jones & Potts, 2010; Potts & Jones, 2011, forthcoming).
Many video games are linked to networks in which participants exchange
information, perform creative work, and participate in rich interactive experiences (Roig
et. al., 2009). Games such as Little Big Planet 2 (Media Molecule, 2011) and City of
Heroes (Cryptic Studios, 2004) connect players with corporations and other game
industry representatives. They form communicative networks designed to facilitate the
work of multiple participants in not only playing the game, but also in generating content
that supports or expands the game. As a part of the gaming experience, some players
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take on the task of creating levels, characters, play scenarios, and storylines that
perpetuate and extend the gamespace. In doing so, they extend the game’s cultural and
economic viability by continuously adding value in the form of actual in-game content,
as well as assuming some of the tasks of marketing the game and perpetuating its
brand (Arviddson, 2005). Participants mutually construct the gamespace by drawing on
technical resources and skills that would be impossible to muster without an
infrastructure linking them to content, social media, corporations, individuals, and
interest groups who share both expertise and labora practice known as co-creation
(Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2000 & 2004).
The lines between the producers of culture and the consumers of culture has
blurred as “consumer-created content and processes of user-led innovation,” becoming
“significant cultural and economic phenomena influencing and in part explaining the
production of culture worldwide” (Banks & Deuze, 2009, p. 420; cf. Deuze, 2007a &
2007b). Co-creative activity generates cultural production through the participation of
player-creators. Audiences for television, films, books, computer games, or other media
have leveraged the tools available to them in computer networks to become
contributors. Fans have claimed participatory agency as their right, shedding the simple
moniker of “consumer” (cf. Jenkins, 2006). They have asserted themselves as active
participants not only in the creation of cultural products such as video games, they have
injected their creative and social needs into the economies that surround these
practices, as well. At the same time, their play, social networking, and creative work are
leveraged by media industries to generate profits, “bring[ing the] rich diversity of social
life smack into the middle of our economy and our productive lives” (Benkler, 2006, p.
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53). In video games, companies and player-creators enter into networks for creation
and distribution in which these participants rely on one another. For some scholars, this
raises questions concerning the degree to which fans and consumers become largely
cheap or free “workers for the industry,” a move that also potentially undercuts the job
market for industry professionals (Banks & Deuze, 2009, p. 420; Ip, 2008; Kucklich,
2005; Terranova, 2000 & 2004). The conflation of producers and consumers into
interconnected productive networks and subject identities raises fears of both
exploitation and job outsourcing in the name of expanding profits (Banks & Humphreys,
2008; Postigo, 2007; Sotamaa, 2007a).
However, recognizing the complexities of the relationships between playercreators and the gaming industry, scholars from games studies and cultural studies
have been quick to point out that fans often willingly and knowingly embrace these
relationships (Deuze, 2007a & 2007b; Jenkins, 2004 & 2006; Postigo, 2008), even while
companies may "shamelessly exploit" fans' emotionally charged connections and efforts
(Terranova, 2004, p. 216). From this view, co-creation should be approached not simply
as a system of exploitative labor practices in which the games industry take advantage
of players’ affinities and expertise with media experiences (Kucklich, 2005), but as a
"co-evolution” of "economic and cultural factors” situated in a “dynamic open
relationship” (Banks & Potts, 2010, p. 260).
To put it another way, players who create content for games are not always
looking for financial compensation for their labor. Moreover, they are not simply passive
consumers. Neither are members of the gaming industry always seeking to
“shamelessly exploit” player-creators. As stated earlier, co-creation is a social process
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situated within a rich matrix connected to people and technologies. The returns for
participants’ labor are often social and cultural, a fact that is true for both player-creators
and members of industry. Their needs, purposes, and interests evolve at the same time,
often in response to each other. Banks and Deuze (2009) echo this interpretation,
arguing in favor of a more carefully balanced assessment of co-creation as neither
ideally democratized creative relationships, nor as top-down forms of labor exploitation.
Deuze (2007a) sets the situation by asking how to understand the political and market
economies when it seems that production and consumption have contracted into a
single sphere: “the blurring of real or perceived boundaries between makers and users
in an increasingly participatory media culture challenges consensual notions of what it
means to work in the cultural industries” (p. 244). For fans that produce content that is
then incorporated into the gaming experience in some way, this means negotiating cocreative agency from positions that are asymmetrical to that of gaming industry
representatives. Everyone may be a participant, but different participants have access
to different skills, tools, and types of support to bolster their participatory agency. A
central element of the experience design of co-creative networks revolves around the
ways different participants define and claim agency for both themselves and for others,
as well as the ways in which technologies are leveraged to support or limit those claims.
Distributed Work
Technical communication has developed a body of research aimed at networks
that distribute work across time and space within workplaces and organizations.
Questions of power among network participants are key to the field’s approach to
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networked communication and human-computer interaction. Not only do technical
communicators concern themselves with power dynamics among network participants,
but also among designers and the participants for whom they are supposed to be
advocates (cf. Spinuzzi, 2003). Diehl, Grabill, Hart-Davidson, and Iyer (2008) examine
the rhetoric of mapping technologies that represent and distribute information to
networked participants. They conclude that such networks should make more explicit
the knowledge work of these communities as a way of better contextualizing information
represented in maps. Geisler (2001) and Swarts (2007) both examine the remediation
of texts through multiple devices that are linked to one another within information
networks. These devices must present and reproduce information through very different
user interfaces, requiring the parsing of texts into chunks of content that must be
managed within organizations (Hart-Davidson, Bernhardt, Mcleod, Rife, & Grabill,
2007).
Embedded in all of these approaches are questions about the relationships
among network participants, particularly within organizations that structure such
relationships asymmetrically. In his work tracing the emergence, definition, and use of
genres within such organizations, Spinuzzi (2003) discusses the need to research and
design with an “integrated scope” that looks across multiple levels of power and agency
within organizations and institutions. He highlights a need to understand “worker
agency” and the “local innovations” people develop due to “local exigencies” (p. 19).
Too often, he states, researchers and designers fall into the trap of designing for
knowledge workers as if they are to be saved from faulty tools, systems, or
organizations. Potts (2009b & 2009c) argues a similar course of action with respect to
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the use of systems within the social web to respond to disasters: "Understanding the
complexity of these situations will inform the creation of more flexible systems by which
everyday users can exchange information when it is most important" (2009c, p. 283).
Technical communication research consistently highlights the need to “empower"
knowledge workers as agents with valuable knowledge that is “tacit,” or “what people
know without being able to articulate it" (Spinuzzi, 2005, p. 165). These frameworks
provide a rich basis from which to connect an analysis of the economics of co-creative
agency with the underlying experience design of networks.
The efforts of people who are situated in different places and times occur in
different networks that overlap, even if they do not share the same spatio-temporal
orientations or even political ideologies. Networks are “interpenetrated” so that “anyone
can link up with anyone else inside or outside the organization” (Spinuzzi, 2007, pp.
265-266). These are “dense interconnections,” often working in organizations that “are
not strictly delimited” (Spinuzzi, 2008, p. 137). This means that work is distributed so as
to diffuse labor across multiple sites of practice. In Spinuzzi’s words, distributed work is
“coordinative, polycontextual, crossdisciplinary work that splices together divergent work
activities (separated by time, space, organizations, and objectives)” (Spinuzzi, 2007, p.
266). Distribution requires not only the negotiation of technical infrastructure, but the
negotiation of potentially diverging political or organizational ideologies. The technology
for creating, storing, managing, and distributing information has helped change the
workplace from a highly granular, siloed activity space to one that demands the
flexibility on the part of the worker, both in terms of skillsets and in terms of the social
and political contexts in which they can operate. "[W]ork is [now] performed by
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assemblages of workers and technologies, assemblages that may not be stable from
one incident to the next and in which work may not follow predictable or circumscribed
paths" (p. 268). These assemblages are tactical and contingent, based upon specific
needs for specific tasks or goals. Labor is spread across networks in an effort to take
advantage of the “expertise [of] a variety of individuals who must coordinate their
efforts” (Slattery, 2007, p. 312). The distribution of labor situates economies of
exchange and capital not only squarely within networked communication, but turns the
networks into the source for capital itself (cf. Jameson, 1984/2006). Agency can be
theorized as a form of capital at the center of negotiations among participants.
With respect to games, Sherlock (2008) uses the framework of distributed labor
order to explore information networks that support player activities for massively
multiplayer-online games. The distribution of work across networks requires
conventions that regulate labor and activity, making coordination possible. According to
Sherlock, regulations for contributing to a gaming network, such as terms of service or
licensing agreements, are enforced from a number of positions, most notably by the
game’s developer and by certain players who adopt moderator roles within the larger
participatory culture that surrounds the game. As the audience becomes more and more
active in the production of texts, their collaborations point to issues of power negotiation
not just within the vertical structure of an organizational hierarchy, but horizontally
amongst each other so that working and playing peers begin to, in Spinuzzi’s (2007)
phrase, “monitor each other” (p. 270). Player-imposed regulations make “the rules for
participation in the community” extremely clear as some players assume positions of
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power over others in order to better coordinate and distribute information needed by the
rest of the community (Sherlock, 2008, pp. 275-276).
Distributed labor is one form of what Spinuzzi (2008) would call “net work,” or
labor in which part of the effort of those involved is “the coordinative work that enables
sociotechnical networks” because such networks are spaces “in which work may not
follow predictable or circumscribed paths” (p. 137). One impact of net work is that
“negotiation becomes an essential skill” for those participants involved (p. 145). For cocreative games, the lack of predictability and well-defined paths creates tensions as the
work of designing and implementing in-game content is distributed beyond the borders
of the game development company. Recruiting players and fans into the production of
such content opens the gamespace to expansive creativity that can always generate
new and interesting ideas that benefit both other players and the gaming industry itself.
However, it also means giving up a measure of control of the gamespace that
potentially undermines game developers, publishers, or others within the industry (Kline,
Dyer-Witheford, & de Peuter, 2003). Thus, current co-creative game designs typically
err on the side of limitation and control, attempting to situate player-creators into weaker
positions of agency by limiting how they or their content can interact with gamespace.
Such networks attempt to integrate the open, expansive “net work” described by
Spinuzzi into more heavily regulated interconnections. Game developers and playercreators want to utilize the flexibility of networked interaction, but must constantly
negotiate the level of freedom player-creators have versus the level of control with
which game developers can be trusted
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One reason for this, explored in the next section, is that game design literature
tends to focus on play either as an individual experience in which the game is
experienced by a single player, or as a social practice that links players to one another,
but never to the gaming industry itself. Yet, clearly the networks that support co-creation
(and social play, in general) forge a much broader ecology of participants and
technologies. Game design is only beginning to theorize networked play within the
contexts of co-creation. For technical communicators, the distributed labor I connect
with co-creation has been a central concern in recent research. Co-creative networks
are sociotechnical networks that present challenges to communication design as leisure
and work activities continue to conflate through web-based social interaction (see
Benkler, 2006).
The Trouble With Game Design
Current game design methodologies are heavily influenced by user-centered
design (UCD), which seeks to understand the user within the contexts in which they will
use a piece of software or other product. UCD strategies most often focus on a
participant’s relationship with a specific piece of software or set of interface features.
Such is the case with game design literature. However, the co-creative agency of
players who create content for gamespaces or player experiences has not entered into
the models set forth in key game design texts. The underlying principle in UCD is that
experience designers are user-advocates who help adapt software to a target user’s
needs (Beyer & Holtzblatt, 1998; Cooper & Reiman, 2003; Norman, 1988 & 2004).
Beginning with ethnographic-based methods such as observation, interviews, or
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contextual inquiry, UCD-oriented design methodologies work to uncover the needs and
patterns of use of target audiences by learning directly from them and the environments
in which they typically use software or other tools (Beyer & Holtzblatt, 1998). In some
cases research data from interviews and observation is distilled into working personas,
or models of potential users that provide narrative context for how users might
encounter and use systems on a daily basis (Cooper & Reiman, 2003). Using these
documents as starting points, researchers and designers brainstorm scenarios and usecases that account for the contexts in which software may be used, continuously
designing with the user and their context(s) in mind. Prototypes are developed based on
this research, and lab-based usability testing solicits feedback from potential users
concerning the usefulness of a piece of software, further refining the design team’s work
and the assumptions upon which that work is based. The design and development
process is iterative, often involving potential users along the various stages to further
refine software design and usability.
User-centered design methods focus almost exclusively on the relationship
between what a user wants to do, what a system or software application can do, how
that system represents its capabilities, and how people who use these systems
understand those representations. Cooper and Reiman (2003) argue that what the user
thinks is impacted by the way a software’s programmed behavior is “represented” to
them in the interface. In work-oriented software, this representation needs to be simple
enough to comprehend so that "well-orchestrated interfaces are transparent" (p. 123).
As Morville and Rosenfeld (2006) suggest, the idea is to let users find, process, and
understand information as they need to. The systems they use should help them with
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their tasks, rather than putting unnecessary obstacles in their way. In other words, let
the participant perform the tasks needed to accomplish her goals. She should be
focused on fulfilling her purpose rather being bogged down in the details of completing
small tasks that might otherwise distract her from that purpose, a distinction similar to
activity theory’s distinction between activities, actions, and operations (cf. Kaptelinin &
Nardi, 2006; Spinuzzi, 2008). Cooper and Reiman posit an interaction model for
software in which the programming and code (the implementation) works in the
background and is adequately presented by an interface (the representation) to the
software user so that she can more efficiently learn and use the software (the concept).
Similar principles are the basis for the design of physical objects and services
(Moggridge, 2006; Norman, 1988 & 2004). Working from the perspective of cognitive
psychology, Don Norman (2004) refers to an object’s "system image" (p. 76), or what its
appearance signals to users about its capabilities and limitations. A product designed
with a good system image “maps" its potential uses to its physical design (Norman,
1988).
Tracy Fullerton’s Game Design Workshop (2008) adapts UCD to discuss "playercentric design,” crafting a design process in which game designers are “first and
foremost…advocate[s] for the player” (p. 2). She describes a useful method that
combines player research, iterative design and prototyping, and play-testing into a cycle
very similar to UCD’s general methodology. The player experience is always situated
within the gamespace. Salen and Zimmerman (2004) propose a method of game design
that “requires a focus on games in and of themselves” (p. 1). Their approach depicts the
game as a coherent structure in and of itself, and the design process, much like
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Fullerton’s, is also an iterative player-centered process that configures the player
experience as largely one between the player and the game software. Jesse Schell
(2008) works towards a more holistic methodology, one that sees games not simply as
structures bounded within the rules that define the types of play they support, but as
broader experiences highly contingent upon the contexts that surround the player. Other
work in the design of game subgenres, such as serious games and education games,
generally adapt these processes for specific contexts, such as learning, training, or
exploring socio-political dilemmas (Backlund et al., 2008; Belloti et. al., 2008; Belloti et.
al., 2009; Rankin et. al., 2008). Such approaches have adapted general game design
methodologies to facilitate much narrower design goals.
However, drawing from UCD design methodologies often means overlooking the
very same issues UCD itself ignores. Though co-creative networks and the experiences
they support have always been a major aspect of online gaming and are growing more
and more central to the design of video games, game design texts have yet to take up
either the challenges of creating the technological infrastructures necessary in cocreative networks, or the cultural, social, and political factors that impact the
asymmetrical relationships of participants within those networks. Salen and Zimmerman
(2004) explicitly acknowledge that games have traditionally “been valued as social
experiences" (p. 462), yet they frame social play largely as an experience that "emerges
directly from the relationships between players" (p. 464). Salen and Zimmerman do
discuss an “open culture” in which players are invited to contribute to in-game content.
They go on to say that designers must "carefully foster the kind of player community”
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they find most "appropriate" to their design goals (p. 540).1 However, this does not
account for the broader ecologies of people, institutions, and technologies operating
from asymmetrical positions of agency and powerecologies which frame and support
social play and co-creation within computer games. Sotamaa et. al. (2005) offer a model
that adapts participatory design strategies to game design and development, explicitly
situating the play experience within social contexts that stretch beyond the game’s
formal structure. In his book, Schell (2008) goes so far as to discuss the need to “let
players express themselves" creatively (p. 362), implicitly recognizing some of the social
and cultural needs Green and Jenkins (2009) assign to participatory cultures. Later
chapters in Schell’s book also recognize power dynamics framing relationships between
game designers, developers, and publishing companies (cf. Fullerton, 2008). Yet,
Schell’s discussions never explicitly hint at the interconnected relationships that link
game designers and developers directly to players and the content they create.
Whether focused on the game software as a formal structure or focused on the player
as the audience, game design has yet to address the central role asymmetrical
relationships between player-creators and the gaming industry in co-creative networks,
despite the fact that such relationships have been integral throughout the history of
commercial video games played through computer networks (Kline, Dyer-Witheford, &
de Peuter, 2003).
Spinuzzi (2003) criticizes UCD methodologies for discounting the purposes and
intentions of workers in favor of top-down perspectives that, while simultaneously
portraying themselves as “saving” workers, also attempt to impose design goals that
1
Taylor (2006) argues that game design approaches tend to identify players as, at best, passive
consumers or, at worst, “disruptors” who undermine the gaming experience or the studio’s control over it.
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reflect organizational interests rather than individual worker needs. In Spinuzzi’s words,
“Workers’ operations must be examined in their own right, as interactions – often
centrifugal, subversive actions – that coconstitute (reciprocally make up, shape, sustain)
the cultural activities and goal-directed actions in which workers engage” (p. 27). Potts’
work points to the problems faced by social web participants as they encounter spaces
that attempt to control information, rather than letting people work with that information
in adaptive and contextually-aware ways. She argues for a “participant designer”
framework that augments UCD by situating researchers as “active participants” who can
better understand how everyday people are "empowered to interact and participate with
and within the systems" (2009c, p. 298). Spinuzzi’s and Potts’s criticisms of UCD point
to questions of power agency at work within networked communication among
participants, as well as within the design process itself. In his introduction, Porter (2008)
asks “how do you not only make services personally valuable with easy-to-use
interfaces, but also support people’s social desires for interactivity, authority, reputation,
identity, and control” (p. viii). How designers incorporate questions of power and agency
into their design work is clearly at stake in the ways network participants perceive and
define their roles by claiming agency for themselves. However, such issues so far have
remained at the periphery of the research and design of networks that support
participatory cultures in computer and video games.
Technical communication’s view of networks as sites of negotiated rhetorical and
political power is ideally suited to not only analyzing these problems from a design
perspective, but of using the field’s methodologies to develop solutions that can fill the
void left in current game design methods. Since games are now becoming more and
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more central to the work and leisure lives of both children and adults, technical
communicators need to expand our work as interaction and experience designers to
explore mediated experiences that have so far only sat at the periphery of our research.
Such experiences are now central components within the social web, and provide rich
test cases in which to explore issues of agency and power in contexts beyond
organizations and workplaces. Only by recognizing the implicit and explicit power
differentials, as well as the tools that either support or undermine these differentials, can
communication design more fully understand and create meaningful and usable
networks in which participatory agency is often structured asymmetrically.
UCD’s language of “advocacy” for the “user” certainly places people who will use
a software or system at the center of the design process. However, this methodology
has not adapted to account for networked experiences in which participants are situated
into asymmetrical relationships from which they negotiate participatory agency. There is
a growing need for such workto research and design network experiences through
which participants negotiate the agency they have to participate in the creation of their
culture; attempt to use technologies aimed at channeling interaction in directions that
align with various policies; and define not only their own roles, but those of others, as
well. My dissertation seeks to fill this gap by explicitly linking technical communication’s
approaches to networks with frameworks for understanding co-creation as a
participatory practice that empowers participants as creative agents.
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3. METHODOLOGY
Blending approaches from technical communication, experience design, and
cultural studies allows me to create a methodology that accounts for the negotiation of
participatory agency as a fundamental part of the interactive and communicative
experiences of co-creative networks. In doing so, I can explore tools, systems, and
people that are assembled to distribute co-creative practices, as well as the implications
of such activity on the research and design of networks that support such participatory
cultures. The data I gather will be analyzed within a framework that is “holistic” (Potts,
2009c), or “integrated” (Spinuzzi, 2003)one that enables a deeper understanding of
policies and moral economies as integral components in the experience design of any
network that mediates relationships among fans and players, media corporations,
distributors, and others within the games industry. The methodology outlined here
integrates actor network theory and activity theory to both trace network actors and
analyze the ways actors claim, define, enable, or limit participatory agency within the
network. Technical communication’s interpretations of activity theory and actor network
theory point to a means of understanding agency as both a subject position and as an
outcome of networked interaction.
Because agency arises from the intersection of these two perspectives,
researchers and designers must understand how networks both support and hinder
participants’ claims to agency through the use of technological actors that are made
necessary to the completion of network activities. Such an integrated method uncovers
the ways that agency is constructed by some network actors, as well as how other
technological actors prescribe agency for player-creators. As technical communicators,
Jones 23
we must forge a clearer understanding or networks that support the knowledge work of
participatory cultures which link participants into asymmetrical positions of power. In
doing so, we can fill the gap that is apparent in game design literature concerning cocreative gaming networks, and advocate for more equitable network experiences that
maintain a stronger balance of needs between player-creators and the gaming industry.
For technical communication researchers, this presents an opportunity to expand our
work to network experiences in which the negotiation of agency is always dynamic and
participant roles are not governed by workplace or organizational contexts.
Activity, Actors, and Agency
Technical communication uses two rich methodologies for understanding
networked activities: activity theory and actor network theory. Clay Spinuzzi’s Network
(2008) outlines how and why these two methods are often placed in opposition to each
other. The key divergence identified between activity theory and actor network theory
centers upon the question of agency, how it is understood, and precisely where it is
located. Activity theory situates agency within a subject that possesses purpose and
intentionality (Engeström, 2000; Kaptelinin & Nardi, 2006; Kuuti, 1996), while actor
network theory understand agency as an effect that arises from the intersection of
multiple network actors linked together (Latour, 1999 & 2005; Law, 1992 & 1999).
These different accounts of agency are often taken as the point of departure between
activity theory and actor network theory. Spinuzzi (2008) characterizes the divergence
as one of focus: “Whereas activity theorists are looking for cultural-historical,
developmental explanations for human activity, actor-network theory is interested in
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political and rhetorical explanations for power and its exercise. Activity theory is
interested in how people work; actor-network theory is interested in how power works”
(p. 32; emphasis in original). However, if we reconsider agency as a network effect, we
can link people and power into a co-constructive relationship in which the network’s
distribution of resources intersects with the subject positions claimed by people and
organizations.
Activity Theory
Activity theory (AT) as it applies to human-computer interaction is derived from
Russian formal psychology of the early and mid-20th century. AT “seeks to understand
meaningful, purposeful human activity” within both individual and social contexts
(Stolley, 2009, p. 355) by understanding activity as a “dialectical” process (Holzman,
2006, p. 6). This dialectic is at work on two levels. First is the relationship between the
three-tiered scaffold of activities, actions, and operations:
the unit of analysis is an activity directed at an object which motivates activity,
giving it a specific direction. Activities are composed of goal-directed actions that
must be undertaken to fulfill the object. Actions are conscious, and different
actions may be undertaken to meet the same goal. Actions are implemented
through automatic operations. Operations do not have their own goals; rather
they provide an adjustment of actions to current situations. (Kaptelinin & Nardi,
1997, p. 158, emphasis in original)
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People want to accomplish things (activities). Doing so means intentionally
performing certain tasks (actions) that are mediated by behaviors and tools that a
person can perform and use without consciously thinking about doing so (operations).
The second dialectical level is that between the subject and object of activity.
Subjects are individuals or groups with purpose. They possess agency because they
have intention, and act in pursuit of their goals using the tools and knowledge they
possess. In Fichtner’s (2000) words, “the organism consists in its activity. Activity is the
mode of existence by which organisms establish themselves as subjects of their life
processes” (p. 55). The object of activity is a “material thing” external to the subject
(Kaptelinin & Nardi, 2006, p. 139). But AT imbues the concept with an additional
meaning in which the object is the motive for an activity. Engström (2000) conflates the
term “object” with “outcome” or “objective” (cf. Engström & Blackler, 2005). A richer
conceptualization of the object is that “it is a sense-maker, which gives meaning to and
determines the values of various entities and phenomena” (Kaptelinin & Nardi, 2006, p.
138, emphasis in original). Objects, in turn, serve to mediate the consequences of
activity and affect the subject’s interpretation and understanding of those objects.
Activities arise from the intersection of a person’s or group’s needs (which help
determine the subject’s purposes) with the objects, where the “need is a directedness of
activities toward the world, toward bringing about desirable changes in the environment”
(p. 60). Just like subjectivity, objectivity is the result of a performance within a specific
situation. Whether a physical outcome or an emotional abstraction, the object of an
activity is the motivator that drives the person to actively pursue certain tasks or goals.
Jones 26
Thus, subjectivity is the performance of a person’s or group’s will by directing it at a
particular object or set of objects that fulfill a need.
An AT analysis, then, is aimed at uncovering the ways people perceive their
activities and perform the actions and operations necessary to their enactment
(Kaptelinin & Nardi, 1997 & 2006; Kuuti, 1996; Nardi, 1996). Activity occurs as a series
of negotiated resolutions to contradictions that arise all along the stream of activity,
meaning that the behaviors can slip from one level to another, from activity to action to
operation and vice versa (Kuuti, 1996; Spinuzzi, 2008). AT-driven research involves
tracing how a person or group constructs their social role in relation to the objects of
their activities, and thus claim some form of agency. In this framework, agency is
configured asymmetrically, within a specific point of contactnamely, the subject. The
subject/object dialectic presumes a connection between intentionality and agency.
Since “meaningful, purposeful” intentionality is placed within the camp of the human
subject and his mind, then agency must rest there, as well.
Actor Network Theory
Actor network theory (ANT) focuses on the ways that people, technologies,
events, and places form assemblages2 and organize themselves into functional
networks. Every entity in an assemblage, both human and non-human, is termed an
actor3 (Latour, 1999 & 2005). As the term implies, describing actors is a matter of
2
Assemblages are tactical and contingent gatherings of actors into functional collectives for some
purpose or set of purposes (Spinuzzi, 2008). They can form and disintegrate as needed.
Callon (1999) states that “ANT…assumes the radical indeterminacy of the actor,” leading to “no stable
theory” of it (p. 181, Callon’s emphasis). In Law’s (1999) description, actors are network
componentshuman and nonhumanthat simultaneously maintain individual identities while they also
3
Jones 27
discerning the roles they perform in relation to one another, rather than identifying
essential, subjective qualities of individual actors. Actors collectively work through
translations, which Latour (1999) defines as instances of “displacement, drift, invention,
mediation, the creation of a link that did not exist before and that to some degree
modifies the original [network]” (p. 178; cf. Callon, 1986). Translations are
transformations that occur in both the actors and their linkages in response to dilemmas
faced by the network (Latour, 1999), thereby altering the network as a whole and
reshaping the “local process of patterning, social orchestration, ordering and resistance”
operating within the network (Law, 1992, p. 5). Law states, “the social isn’t simply
human” (p. 2); it is an assemblage of people and things that forge relationships among
one another. The assemblage meets its goals through a "network of heterogenous
materials," or a collective of people and technologies that, once they are aligned, can
accomplish more together than their individual capabilities might suggest (Law, 1992, p.
2). The translations this assemblage pursues within the network drives toward a
"punctualization," or an instance in which the assemblage becomes "greater than the
sum of its parts" (Potts, 2009c, p. 286; cf. Latour, 1999). Actors possess a measure of
agency on their own, but their agency is amplified once they are assembled into a
network and, collectively with other actors, strive to perform some activity (Law, 1999).
ANT discards the subject-object dialectic, arguing that such a
"dichotomy…prevents the understanding of collectives" (Latour, 1999, p. 180). Instead,
ANT favors a “relational and process-oriented sociology” (Law, 1992, p. 7) in which all
actors are “network effects” co-constituted alongside and through their connections
“take the attributes of the entities which they include” (p. 5). The network does not determine the actor,
but the actor does not function autonomously from the network, either.
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(Law, 1999, p. 5). A network is not purely derived from the combination of its actors, and
neither are actors simply defined by the network’s impact upon them (Potts, 2009c). The
term actor then collapses the subject/object dialectic and replaces it with a single
descriptor that designates someone or something that can impact the network’s activity
or purpose(s). Agency no longer rests in a single network node, but is enacted via the
linkage of actors to one another4 (cf. Latour, 1999; Law, 1992). What AT would call a
subject is, to ANT, simply a form that embodies agency as a material sign. The sign
then stands in for the networks that support the subject’s claims of agency (Law, 1992).
In other words, what we call a subject, object, or artifact is really only a black box. As
black boxes, actors become embodied representations that appear as whole, unified,
singular entities because the network that creates them “acts as a single block” and
disappears behind the embodied representation (p. 5). If an actor network reaches
punctualization, then the network appears as a unified whole that masks the network
assemblage behind it. A car that runs perfectly well appears to be a car, not thousands
of parts that perform small mechanical tasks supporting the larger purpose of traveling.
Neither does a car appear as the sophisticated processes that led to its design,
manufacture, testing, delivery, and sale. Individual actors are supported by other actor
networks. ANT sees subject positions as rhetorical constructs through which humans
claim authority, sometimes arbitrarily and to the detriment of understanding the nonhuman actors that contribute to the network (Potts, 2009c & 2010).
4
ANT theorists have proposed the controversial concept of symmetry in agency, which allocates equal
agency to both human and nonhuman actors (cf. Latour, 1999; Law, 1992). Many AT theorists have
criticized the concept of symmetry. They argue that symmetry devalues the role of the human actor as an
agent so that neither her intentions nor her needs have any special place within the network (Nardi,
Whittaker, & Schwarz, 2002). See also Spinuzzi (2008), chapters 2 and 3, for a detailed analysis.
Jones 29
Instead, agency, much like knowledge, is a “network effect” (Law, 1992). Agency
is not located in one actor, but is a performance emerging from the linkages within the
network. The goals of people and the roles of tools, technologies, and systems are coconstituted alongside one another, rather than through a linear causal relationship in
which one purely determines the other. Purpose and intention are “properties of
institutions,” so that “Boeing 747s do not fly, airlines fly” (Latour, 1999, pp. 192-193).
Humans and non-humans, once configured into a network, help realize the potential of
one another. This is to say that each actor can only manifest its full agency, function, or
potential once it is linked to other actors. Since there is no subject/object distinction,
agency is configured via network connections rather than within a single network
nodeit develops from linkages and interactions within the network, rather than resting
as a quality imbued within a specific subject (Latour, 1999 & 2005).
Rethinking Agency
In Network, Spinuzzi is careful not to prioritize one methodology over
anotherAT is not a better account of networks than is ANT, nor vice versa. Instead,
the accounts of agency each approach offers are aimed at different issues within
networks. By starting with the subject and tracing its understanding of the objects it
encounters, activity theory is concerned with analyzing how people use the tools around
them to mediate and learn from their experiences. By discarding the subject/object
distinction, actor network theory is concerned with the ways relationships are enacted
and either maintained or disrupted, and further asking how these moves affect the
network and its purpose.
Jones 30
The end result is two views, one that assigns agency to specific nodes, and the
other that sees agency as an emergent property from networked interactions. Recent
iterations of both ANT and AT have made concessions to each other’s positions
concerning agency, though they have largely retained the language of “symmetry”
versus “asymmetry” when describing agency. ANT’s application, particularly within
technical communication, has modified the stance of “perfect symmetry” that activity
theorists (cf. Kaptelinin & Nardi, 2006; Spinuzzi, 2008) find so cumbersome. For
instance, while tracing the assemblages of actors at work within the social web, Potts
(2008, 2009c, & 2010) has characterized ANT’s insistence on symmetry among actors
as a method for acknowledging the full impact that technologies have on people’s
communicative activities: “Of course human beings are the eminent actors, primarily
owning and controlling their actions and environments more so than the technologies
that surround them” (Potts, 2008, n.p.). Potts and Jones (2011, forthcoming) have
further argued that doing so allows researchers to better conceptualize the mobility of
content as a key feature of the usability of social web technologies. In adapting ANT as
a method for analyzing the reuse of content, Swarts (2010) borrows ANT’s
characterization of networks as functional assemblages and argues “actor networks
stand in as the infrastructure across which work can be both distributed and
coordinated” (p. 132). The network is repurposed to better support activities that people
want to pursue. At the same time, Kaptelinin and Nardi (2006) have acknowledged that
“actor-network theory is right to direct attention to the agency of things” rather than just
that of people (p. 237). As Spinuzzi (2008) suggests, there clearly is some common
ground among these methodologies, though reconciling them is not likely. Such
Jones 31
acknowledgements open new avenues for rethinking agency and utilizing both ANT and
AT in a method for uncovering the numerous details leading to networked activity.
My aim is not to reconcile ANT and AT with each other, but to leverage their
different views to construct a methodology that analyzes co-creative practices within
games as a negotiation of agency through asymmetrically structured network
connections. Agency here is understood as emerging from the intersection of the
intentions of participants—people and groups who may be either player-creators or from
the gaming industry—with the rhetorical and technical tools they use within the network
to represent their goals and enact strategies that enable some participants or hinder
others. Borrowing from Potts’ (2008) assertion that people are the “eminent actors”
within an actor network, my methodology posits that agency in co-creative networks is
initiated through a person’s or group’s intentions, but that those intentions are
persistently “displaced” due to the functions of technological actors. Kaptelinin and
Nardi (2006) are correct in asserting that people “can develop their own intentions on
the basis of their needs” (p. 242), but the nonhuman actors within co-creative networks
in the games explored for this dissertation function to simultaneously facilitate those
intentions while trying to define the goals of those participants. These relationships are
asymmetrical in that gaming industry representatives claim more extensive rights to
control these networks, and often design rhetorical and technological actors that work to
bolster these claims. In other words, co-creative agency arises from the “composition of
actions” (Latour, 1999, p 182) in which black boxes, or systems that operate on behalf
of a collection of actors within the network (Latour, 1999; Spinuzzi, 2008), attempt to
regulate interactions from one vantage point (the gaming industry) while the other
Jones 32
vantage point (player-creators) are working through translations in response to these
claims. Player-creators do so by either creatively enlisting other actors into the network
to support their own intentions and goals. They do so by peeling back layers of the
black box to either better understand how they can pursue their activities, or to
undermine these black boxes entirely. We can analyze participatory agency in cocreative networks by examining the ways participants leverage their rhetorical and
technical skills to pry open these black boxes and enlist other actors (both human and
nonhuman) in their efforts.
Such an account recognizes the intentions of people, their ability to choose, and
the ways the network is mediated to them, but also refuses to relegate non-human
actors to no more than functional roles. With respect to tracing co-creative networks,
this view of agency allows us to see the asymmetrical relationships between playercreators and industry representatives as neither top-down and rigidly deterministic, nor
as purely bottom-up and always open. Agency is negotiated through the network and
the interactions network tools support. The impact of non-human actors is made
apparent by comparing the technological capabilities of the network to the discursive
and embodied performances of people acting within it. The negotiation of agency can
be traced by examining the ways some participants probe the limitations of co-creative
practice set by other participants. This uncovers not only the intentions of people and
groups in the network, but explores the ways technological and rhetorical actors are
structured within the network to support or quash the testing of the network’s
boundaries. Researchers can trace the ways in which the intentions of participants align
with and diverge from one another, as well as when these intentions align with and
Jones 33
diverge from the activities supported by technologies embedded within the network. For
the research and design of co-creative networks, this means developing a much more
holistic, or integrated, method that situates the negotiation of agency from asymmetrical
positions of power at the center of our research and design. Spinuzzi’s (2008) asserts
that black boxes must be flexibly managed through “liaisons” in which “workers or
positions…develop to provide stable connections” among network participants (p. 203).
Co-creative networks illustrate the potential problems of using technological actors as
tools for funneling activity through specific interactions and rules intended to govern
them, such as regulatory agreements and technologies that attempt to define and
constrain co-creative practices within bounds that are acceptable to some participants,
but perhaps not others. This raises the question of how we, as researchers and
designers, should approach the negotiation of agency within our work. Game
developers such as Media Molecule or Paragon Studios want to maintain control over
the work that occurs within co-creative spaces, while player-creators often want more
extensive freedom to stretch their creative and imaginative capabilities. How do we align
these two needs?
An Integrated Method for Analyzing Co-Creative Practice
Potts (2008, 2009c, & 2010) has already described a method developed from
actor network theory that leverages ANT’s relational perspective for tracing the ways
actors form assemblages (see Figure 1). This process involves three stages. First is
mapping the potential actors at work within a media ecosystem by coding them as
noun-types, including people, groups, technologies, systems (multiple technologies
Jones 34
assembled together), events, and so forth. Second, is the need to create a visually
“unique stencil” that makes each actor easily “recognizable” (Potts, 2010, p. 306). The
third and final stage involves an analysis that determines the types of connections
among actors within the network and visualizing their relationships by changing the
weight and types of lines shown in Figure 1. According to Potts, this method visually
maps “shifts in practice” according to the “strength of ties, length of time, history of use,”
or another analytic represented by the lines of connection among actors (p. 307).
Figure 1. Example actor network diagram, based on Potts (2009c & 2010).
Drawing from ANT as formulated by Bruno Latour (1999 & 2005) and John Law
(1992 & 1999), Taylor (2007) uses similar language to describe computer games as
Jones 35
“assemblages” that “are not simply the packaged products that come off the shelf…but
[are] artifacts that traverse multiple communities of practice” (p. 333). These
communities of practice perform tasks that are distributed across a network by
assembling a “range of actors (system, technologies, player, body, community,
company, legal structures, etc.), concepts, practices, and relations that make up the
play moment” (p. 332). Similar to Potts’s (2009c & 2010) approach to communication
within the social web, Taylor views networked gaming experiences as “a circuit of
relations” that enact convergence through the participation of not just people and
organizations, but of technologies, as well (p. 336).
The method proposed in this dissertation augments Potts’s framework by
combining elements of actor network theory with elements of activity theory to trace how
network actors attempt to define and allocate agency across asymmetrical network
relationships. While ANT can uncover the assembled actors in a network, activity theory
provides a method for analyzing how the constraints of the network impact the
experience of co-creation. Combining ANT’s insistence on tracing every active actor in
the network with AT’s distinctions between activities, actions, and operations,
researchers can approach co-creation as a participatory practice that enables playercreators to generate new levels, stories, characters and other in-game content while
simultaneously attempting to channel their co-creative practices through obligatory
passage points. According to Callon, Lascoume, and Barthes (2001), obligatory
passage points are specific actors that promote themselves to other actors as
“indispensible” to the network’s purpose (p. 62). Network actors must route their
inscriptionsthe visual, material objects of discourse (images, text, sound, etc.) that are
Jones 36
the results of their knowledge work or creative efforts (Potts, 2009c)through the
obligatory passage point in order for that work to be integrated into the gamespace. This
means that such passage points can sometimes force network participants through
translations that affect not only the usability of some network tools, but also the nature
and quality of the activities that those participants pursue.
My research analyzes obligatory passage points established by the gaming
industry as technologies that operationalize regulatory policies, such as intellectual
property policies, copyright claims, and licensing agreements. These obligatory passage
points blackbox tools and systems that support regulatory policies in several ways:

limitations in the operating systems of game consoles that restrict the playercreator’s access to some network components;

industry supported network administrators that can enforce the regulation of
player-creator activity;

software updates that can terminate the player-creator’s access to network
components if they do not comply with industry-mandated agreements.
These obligatory passage points become “opaque” actors that are “full of parts” but
appear as a single, unified actor to other network actors (Latour, 1999, pp. 183-185).
While the policies themselves are not hidden from the player-creator’s view, the tools
and systems that enact such policies often are veiled to player-creators so that they
cannot alter software or network limitations that enforce those policies. These tools and
systems are made to appear as simple operations, or “routines processes providing an
adjustment of an action” (Kaptelinin & Nardi, 2006, p. 62).
Jones 37
Tracing the use of such obligatory passage points as black boxeswhether they
are software integrated into the game itself, or hardware components that serve as the
only point of access to online gamespaceswill better highlight how these actors are
designed to limit the co-creative experience and channel player-creator activity in
specific directions. This design strategy has become integral to the experience design of
networks that support participatory cultures in the social web, while also integrating
social networking activities into the business model for entertainment products, such as
video games, that participants purchase. For now, the design of these networks tend to
situate participants in asymmetrical positions of power where player-creators must
accept the somewhat impenetrable claims to control and power of industry participants.
Player-creators are also encouraged to accept the devaluation of their own claims to
agency if they assert an expansion of their creative work beyond those found
acceptable by industry representatives. Uncovering the ways network participants
muster tools, technologies, discourse, and skills in order to support and sustain their
claims to agency is a key element of network research and design moving forward. We
must understand how agency is constructed and supported by network components,
how those components affect the ways participants view and construct their agency,
and how obligatory passage points are used as regulatory tools that mediate the moral
economies that surround co-creative experiences. By doing so, researchers and
designers can explore the ways in which network design supports, enables, constrains,
or hinders participatory agency in co-creative networks. In turn, these insights will help
with the research and design of more usable systems that better support participatory
cultures that work outside easily recognized boundaries of organizations.
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4. RESEARCH QUESTIONS
1. What are the implications of co-creation on the research and design of tools,
systems, and networks that support participatory cultures?
2. How do co-creative networks both support and limit agency for player-creators?
3. How do player-creators define and claim co-creative agency?
4. How do obligatory passage points impact the co-creative activities of playercreators?
5. How are they used to affect the actions and operations of player-creators?
6. How do obligatory passage points impact the negotiation of agency in co-creative
networks?
7. How do some network actors black box other network components?
8. How do co-creative networks distribute labor among player-creators?
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5. RESEARCH DESIGN
My research is premised on Potts’s (2009c) concept of the participant designer,
or a designer actively engaged within the contexts they are researching. Key to my
application of this approach is first-hand participation within co-creative gaming spaces,
using tools available to player-creators and tracing the linkages among network actors.
By situating myself as a participant researcher within the experiences I study, my work
will begin with a preliminary research artifact (three video games) and extend the
research to other connected spaces and practices I discover. Research sites will include
the gamespace itself and the in-game tools that facilitate co-creative practice; the
websites, blogs, forums, and wikis maintained by players and developers; published
interviews with developers and other industry representatives; gaming hardware as a
network actor; and agreements and policies that define the relationships among players,
developers, software, and game-related content. The results of this work will be used to
discuss research and design practices that augment player-centered approaches
emerging from both UCD and game-design. Co-creative practices are an integral piece
of play experiences for many games, and such practices have become a key element in
the game designs and business models for many game development studios and
publishers.
Research Stages
My research design comprises two major stages that are applied to each case study:
Jones 40
1. Tracing the assemblage of actors that form co-creative networks and identifying
obligatory passage points that black box other network actors, or even separate
networks that impact co-creative experiences.
2. Analyzing the interaction design of technological and rhetorical actorssuch as cocreative tools or policy agreementsto uncover the ways such designs define cocreative activity and try to coordinate actions and operations to align with this
definition. These are the network prescriptions that foster co-creation as a play
experience and attempt to structure participant agency.
Initial Data Sources
The data sets described below comprise the initial primary sources I will gather. In
addition, these data sets may be supplemented with others that I uncover in my
research.

In-Game Content: Content generated by players: avatars and characters, game
levels, narratives and storylines, and peer reviews and ratings. This content is a form
of inscription (Akrich & Latour, 1992) that materially represents the agency as it is
constructed through co-creative practice.

Co-Creative Tools: Tools provided by developers that enable players to create
content. Using activity theory’s three-tiered scaffold, I will examine the ways
interactions in these systems are designed, highlighting how these interactions
funnel player-creator activity through obligatory passage points that often serve to
black box (Latour, 1999) other network actors and their impacts on co-creative
practice. In other words, they serve as stand-in actors that mask the presence or
Jones 41
operations of other actors. These tools raise questions concerning the transparency
of network design as it relates to the construction of player-creator agency.

Company-Created Web Spaces: Web spaces maintained by participants from the
gaming industry, and designed to both support and constrain co-creative activity.
From these sites, I will gather data on any web-based tools supplied by companies
to aid co-creative practice, as well as the discourse that emerges between players
and company representatives. The latter will include both official language, such as
the terms of service and end-user licensing agreements, and the discussions in any
forums.

Fan-Created Web Spaces: Fan-created support sites, such as blogs, websites,
wikis, and forums most often operate independently of game companies. For this
reason, they are rich sites to explore the discussions among players concerning their
views of player-creator agency, their views of their relationships with the gaming
industry, and the reasons behind their choices to play some games and not play
others. This data is a point of comparison to examine the official prescriptions
implemented by the game companies into co-creative networks against the
purposes, needs, and practices assigned by players to co-creative experiences.

Published Interviews: Searching popular and industry trade publications focused on
games, such as GamesIndustry.biz and GamaSutra.com, for interviews with game
developers will provide another data set of public discursive maneuvers by company
representatives that operate alongside (and sometimes in contradiction to) the
rhetoric of company-created webspaces. These interviews serve as a comparative
Jones 42
data point for both the policies published in official spaces, as well as the design of
tools and technologies provided to players.
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6. ORGANIZATION OF DISSERTATION
My dissertation will consist of six chapters. The asymmetrical relationships
among participants suggest that participatory agency is a central concern in the design
of co-creative networks. Network actors are often positioned as obligatory passage
points in an effort to establish regulatory systems that can define the level and scope of
agency for participants. Other network actors are enlisted into the assemblage in an
effort to negotiate the impact such passage points have on the co-creative agency of
different participants. This negotiation often takes the form of either taking steps to
reveal or hide other network actors that may be blackboxed by these passage points.
Player creators find ways to effectively tie together two networks: one is within the
gamespace, regulated by software and hardware that limits access to the gamespace
and prescribes what content can be added and how; the other is external to the game
as a series of online wikis, forums, and social networks that help generate content and
organize social and co-creative activities. The usability question at stake is how these
passage points are used to determine the ways these different networks are
interconnected to each other. Three case studies will examine different instances in
which agency is constrained and enabled in co-creative networks, analyzing the player
experiences they foster. From these case studies, I will explore whether or not a more
open design of systems that serve as obligatory passage points must be the goal of
researchers and designers focused on communication networks that support
participatory cultures. To that end, the final chapter will suggest a series of design
principles and strategies that better account for the negotiation of participatory agency.
Jones 44
Chapter 1 Introduction
The introduction will provide an overview of the project, as well as establish both the
research questions and my major claims. The introduction will also provide a brief
discussion of terms central to the project: agency, co-creation, and moral economy. The
central question of the project is how networks are designed to mediate asymmetrical
forms of agency among participants. Thus, I will also establish what I mean by an
“asymmetrical form of agency” as it relates to networks that support participatory
cultures.
Chapter 2 Literature Review & Methodology
Through an exploration of agency as it is theorized in both actor network theory and
activity theory, I will argue that agency is a network effect co-constructed by the
network’s prescriptions and the participant’s claims to purpose and capability. Such
claims are always made from positions within the network, making agency neither the
result of purely a subject position as argued in activity theory (Kaptelinin & Nardi, 1997),
nor purely the result of symmetrically positioned actors posited by actor network theory
(Latour, 1999). Co-creative agency is always anchored within networked interactions.
Such agency is neither purely determined by the network, nor do participants operate
independently of networks. Participants negotiate agency by continually leveraging their
technical and rhetorical skills to modify the network’s prescriptions and inscriptions. With
actor network theory, we can trace both actor networks and the prescriptions designed
within co-creative systems. Activity theory then provides a means of analyzing these
Jones 45
prescriptions to understand which activities are privileged as legitimate co-creative
practice. In doing so, we can examine how the network’s design defines co-creation for
player-creators, forging asymmetrical relationships between player-creators and game
developers.
Chapter 3 Little Big Planet 2
Little Big Planet 2 is a Sony Playstation 3 game in which the play experience focuses on
the invention, distribution, and social interaction that surrounds player-created content. I
will analyze the convergence and divergence of different network tools, both within the
gamespace and external to it (such as blogs, wikis, forums, etc.). The social and
technological relationship between in-game content and networks outside the
gamespace indicate a design that attempts to funnel co-creative practice through the
gaming console. The console can be situated as a technological wall that helps govern
the Playstation Network as a restricted garden. Developers and network administrators
for the PSN leverage the PS3’s position as a gate to the PSN’s online community. The
Playstation 3 becomes an obligatory passage point that only connects to some of the
other network actors enlisted by player-creators, while simultaneously black boxing
other actors from within the gaming industry (such as licensing agreements and informal
whitelists that can regulate co-creative practice).
Chapter 4 City of Heroes
City of Heroes is a PC-based massively multiplayer role-playing game (MMORPG) in
which the player-creation of in-game content is a major component of the social
Jones 46
experience. Much like Little Big Planet, players experience the convergence and
divergence of different network spaces. However, City of Heroes does not run on a
proprietary system that can serve as a barrier to portions of the online network. Instead,
the design of the software itself must serve this role. In this case, the use of a tool called
the Mission Architect serves as a way to regulate how players create and implement
narrative and gameplay experiences within the gamespace. The Mission Architect
system operates in conjunction with policies from NCSoft, the game’s publisher, that
curtail the player-creator’s rights to content they generate, as well as their ability to work
with that content outside of the gamespace. The Mission Architect becomes the
obligatory passage point, supported by policies couched simultaneously in the rhetoric
of creative empowerment and legal prohibition.
Chapter 5 Evoke
Evoke conflates the use of digital online networks with brick-and-mortar embodied
performances so that the gameplay becomes “pervasive,” absorbing everyday lived
experiences into the gamespace itself (McGonigal, 2007; Montola, Stenros, & Waern,
2009). Designers issue weekly challenges to players, who then perform brick-andmortar tasks to solve these challenges, such as tracking how much fuel their cars use or
documenting their efforts to reduce the amount of electricity they use in their everyday
lives. Solutions and their implementations are then inscribed digitally and submitted to
the gamespace maintained by the game’s designers. Player-generated content can take
any form: text-based written accounts, videos documenting activities, photos recording
results, or artwork that explores the results of their solutions in creative ways. Player-
Jones 47
generated content is integrated into gameplay via the use of many networked social
web technologies that can move content from one space to another. This case study
provides a rich example for considering the design of co-creative networks in which
player-generated content is aimed at exploring solutions to real-world problems by
enlisting technological actors that easily move content from one space to another. The
obligatory passage point is the game’s central website (http://www.urgentevoke.com),
used as a hub for social interaction in which players can learn from and rate each
other’s solutions, earning rewards for their activities. While the other two case studies
represent the ways in which co-creative networks restrict activity to centralized spaces,
Evoke presents the challenge of designing networks that integrate social media from all
across the social web into the core gameplay experience.
Chapter 6 Conclusions
The final chapter draws from these case studies to the impact that network designers
may have on the negotiation over agency in networks that support participatory cultures
such as co-creative gaming networks. Technical communication, with its increasing
focus on communication networks, can suggest ways in which designers can approach
networks that forge asymmetrical connections among participants, as well as account
for legal and ethical questions regarding the design of tools, applications, and
participant experiences within participatory cultures. For co-creation in games, technical
communicators can leverage a rich body of scholarship related to distributed knowledge
work in organizations in order to develop new, adaptive design paradigms that support
participatory agency. At the same time, technical communication scholars can use
Jones 48
these networks to explore new forms of networked interaction that distribute work not
across levels of power and privilege in which participant roles and rights are not always
clearly defined. Co-creative networks provide a rich space in which researchers can
observe the negotiation of agency.
Jones 49
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