Portable Play in Everyday Life: The Nintendo DS

The Nintendo DS

Samuel Tobin

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137396594
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

People play mobile games everywhere and at any time. Tobin examines this media practice through the players directly using the lens of the players and practice of the Nintendo DS system. He argues for the primacy of context for understanding how digital play functions in today's society, emphasizing location, "killing-time, " and mobile communities.

1

Introduction

Abstract: The introduction begins by examining why the DS, despite its huge popularity, has not been studied or addressed by game and media scholars. This chapter also explores the tactics and methods that were developed in order to address this understudied subject. These include ethnographic and discourse analysis methods applied to online community discussions as well as four theoretical frame works: game, mobile and play studies as well as the study of everyday life.

Keywords: discourse analysis; ethnography; everyday life; game studies; mobile; play

Tobin, Samuel. Portable Play in Everyday Life: The Nintendo DS. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. DOI: 10.1057/9781137396594.

Good enough

Videogames can be thrilling. They put us on the edge of seats, blister our thumbs, addict us, obsess us, pull us into fantastic worlds, and epic adventures. Except that they also very often don’t. Videogames are frequently not thrilling, or exciting, or fantastic in theme, scope, or execution. More often they are ordinary—not bad, just not enrapturing, amazing, experiences. Very often, videogames are just fine. They are fun, but not that much fun, not too much fun. Often they do not need to be very good, just good enough for what we need them for, for what we want them for, for what we use them for. Some people center their lives on video gaming, becoming expert players, fans, the “hardcore,” or even go pro and become game designers, producers, players, professors, or critics. However most of us who play videogames fall far short of this level of engagement or caring. For the most passionate players, and now and then for the ordinary player, games overwhelm and subsume daily life. However most of the time it is the reverse: we fit games and play into the rest of our lives. And the games that best fit most portions of our lives are not amazing, but just good enough. The demands of our run-of-the mill, everyday lives necessitate a kind of run-of-the mill, everyday game or form of game playing. This is what this book is about: the kind of play that is contingent, play that gets us through the day, rather than makes our day.

For those of us who study games, play, and players, this raises a question: is this play that is merely good enough, good enough to study? For that matter, is it good enough for you to read about? My answer to both of these questions is affirmative: there is much to learn by taking seriously activities that the people engaged in these practices do not.

On subway, buses, and airplanes and in the passenger seats of automobiles, in waiting rooms, in lines, in offices and classrooms, people are playing games on mobile devices. What are they doing? Why this explosion in mobile play? What is at stake politically, socially, and aesthetically in this ubiquitous ludic practice of hand-held play? To answer these questions, we need to investigate two understudied, even seemingly trivial developments: the apotheosis of videogame culture and the saturation of modern urban life by mobile technology. I address both of these phenomena in this book.

To study these topics it is necessary to take on issues that established design or content-focused approaches to the study of digital games are ill equipped to handle. My focus is on videogames neither as discrete texts nor as software, but rather on the contexts of mobile play: the when, where, and why of how these devices are used by people in the world. What is required for this kind of analysis is a sociological approach: one based on empirical data, and one that can address the micro-level practices of players and connect them to large-scale structural changes in our increasingly ludic and mobilized urban milieu.

The understudied DS

To do this, I focus on the players of one mobile device, the Nintendo DS (short for Dual Screen), a dedicated hand-held gaming system. I selected the DS as the organizing object for this study because it is representative of a range of mobile game systems and is currently the most popular and successful of such devices. Over 330 million games were sold in the past year for the Nintendo DS.

By studying the players of the Nintendo DS rather than the device itself or the games played on it, I aim to shift the focus of videogame studies from gamespace, the simulated virtual space within the system, to playspace and what happens outside of the game, and how play fits into the practices and spaces of everyday life. This is crucial in order to analyze these practices at both the micro and macro scale, to connect the minutiae of disparate daily lives to larger structures and transformations, connections sorely lacking in most academic investigations into videogames.

While it is the most successful videogame system ever sold in the USA, there has been no significant scholarly work on the DS in sociology, media studies, anthropology, or game studies. Dean Chan’s article on mobile gaming in Japan, where the DS is also king, only mentions it twice, and Jesper Jull’s book on causal gaming, A Causal Revolution, by-passes the device almost totally, even in sections focused on mobile play or new and novel interfaces. A key reason for this slighting of the DS is that while nearly ubiquitous, mobile gaming flies under the radar of not only scholars, but of even its own players. While it is relatively easy to locate and therefore to study passionate communities of online gamers and home console hobbyists, it is a much more daunting task to locate and study people who don’t think of their practices as important to their identity or their lives.

DS play is an activity that people engage in for the most part casually, rather than as a lifestyle or a subculture. Rather than defining them, DS play instead is located in the interstices of players’ lives, squeezed in when and where it fits and is wanted and needed. This mobile play is noteworthy for its contingent nature. DS play is not an activity that takes over or dominates lives. This is not the all-consuming videogame play we find in descriptions of World of Warcraft or other Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing games (MMORPGS), where players play for hours, even days on end. DS play is the reverse: this is play that is consumed and subsumed into the quotidian practices, requirements, and structures of modern urban life. It is here, in the trivial and beneath notice, in play as-and-in the everyday, that we encounter the vicissitudes of contemporary subjectivities, evolving forms of sociability (and solitude), and social transformations of time, space, work and leisure.

Little work has been done on the Nintendo DS or other mobile game systems because these pastimes are not grand enough, big enough, or powerful enough to attract our attention as critics, social scientists, or even fans. And yet it is vital that we understand mobile play, because this is the primary pathway through which play is seeping into the fabric of contemporary lives, not through immersive ubiquitous virtual reality, or other massive systems, but by slipping into empty moments between activities deemed more important. Mobile play is everywhere but never total; it is opportunistic, nomadic, and dependent on other structures and other practices for its shape and possibilities. Mobile play is miniature; it fits in a purse, a pocket, a train ride, a waiting room, attended to without dominating the attention.

The mobile play of the Nintendo DS is just one expression of this form, but it is a powerful one. The origins of the DS are rooted in the earliest mobile gaming lineages, Gunpei Yokoi’s Nintendo Game & Watch series and the seminal Game boy. The Nintendo DS is the natural heir to these games and also a cul-de-sac, as perhaps the last mobile device dedicated to gaming in this era of apps and multi-purpose hand-held devices. Because all the DS really does is play games, we can trace out contemporary forms of mobile electronic play without becoming distracted by the figure of the always on-call worker tethered to his Blackberry or the constantly entertained, updated, and connected I-Phone user, a player, too, to be sure, but only among many other activities and identities.

Studying the practices of hand-held videogame players

When I got started on this project I tried a number of strategies to research the DS and its users, all of which failed. My initial plan was to interview people who lived in New York and used a DS. This would allow me to do in-person interviews and to focus on questions relating to urban play and spaces. Unsurprisingly, approaching strangers on the L train who were holding DSs and asking if I could ask them some questions did not go well. Next I tried handing out interview cards that in most cases were accepted, but no one contacted me. Next I tried approaching potential interviewees at independent videogame stores. but again I found few people willing to talk with me about their DS play.

In retrospect I would say that some of these problems are common to a research method that involves approaching strangers and others specific to the DS. The DS has a particular status within the world of videogame culture. Setting up shop in videogame stores, especially in independent stores, which tend to serve mostly a lifestyle, hardcore, videogame hobbyist crowd, turned out to be an ineffective way to meet average DS players. I pursued some connections I made with owners and employees at these stores, following their advice to go to game conventions to try and interview people. If videogame stores in New York were filled with self-selecting, hardcore gamers, with little interest in the DS or at least in talking about their play with the DS, then this was even more the case at a videogame convention. Again I discovered that most people attending were not very interested in the DS and not eager to be interviewed. In the end I got only one full-fledged interview out of the several conventions I attended.

However, these frustrating and sometimes humiliating failed attempts introduced some issues that have now become major themes of this study. Rather than giving up on the DS and investigating a more “hardcore” or subcultural aspect of videogame culture, my failures led me to examine how and why the DS and the DS player were so hard to locate and address through traditional ethnographic techniques and site selection strategies. One issue seemed to be that, despite or perhaps because of its popularity, people who play with or own the DS tend not to think of this fact as important or to think of themselves as gamers. It seems that the DS’s ubiquity and casual, even low-key, nature allow it to exist just beneath the notice even of its owners/users. It hides in plain sight even for those who play with it.

The core of my method problem was how to study the usage habits of a group of people who do not think of themselves as a group and who do not define themselves by their DS usage. It is this aspect of the DS, its casual character, that stymied my attempts at research and at the same time now informs my understanding about portable play being more open to contingent pressures; which allows and necessitates a reading of spaces as being more or less open to portable or public play; and which highlights the role of time as the decider of the potential ludic character of these spaces. Indeed the concept of “killing time” that became a major theme in my coding, interpretation and theorizing around the use of the DS is exactly the kind of concept we would not typically hear used by hardcore gamers, console players, or especially by sustained MMORPG users, who might talk of investing or wasting time, but not of killing it.

As the key characteristic of the DS was its portability, I went to sites where I believed the DS is most often used: on trains, boarding areas, queues, and park benches. It was not until I tried using the PA forum to locate DS players’ groups that I suddenly encountered thousands of posts by DS players about using the DS, why they liked it, why they didn’t, where they played, how they played, and why they played. On PA I found a treasure trove of first-person self-reported, spontaneous, and yet often nuanced and detailed writing by and for DS players.

But a research problem persists: Where is the social interaction I am trying to follow or examine in my work on DS players? If, as Weber suggests, a man falling off a bicycle is not a subject for sociology, then how is a man standing still playing with a hand-held videogame social (1978:1375)? Is this activity not an egregious example of an atomized, asocial, media-aided withdrawal from social engagement? If DS play is individualized and disparate and the antithesis of the communal nature of online games such as World Of Warcraft and MMORPGs, why then even try to study it sociologically, with a focus on the sociality of DS play?

My primary answer is that if we were to only study activities for which the sociality is self-conscious and readily apparent, we would come to understand only certain aspects of play in society. We need to look not only at the center, but in the gaps; not only at presence, but also at lack. It is this lack in portable play of explicit social aspects that makes it so worthwhile to study sociologically. Or to put it another way: if portable digital play is, as it seems to be, so fractured, individualized, and driven by a desire to remove the player from social interaction, then it is the fracturing, individualizing, and removal that need to be studied. What such an exploration can contribute is not just or primarily an explanation for the popularity of these games, but more generally a deepened understanding of larger issues of what play is today and how it functions or fails to function in contemporary urban life.

The method problems I encountered at the start of this study had the virtue of forcing me to employ multiple perspectives and registers of inquiry to arrive at an effective multi-modal approach. I draw on many sources, most of all the voices of players and posters at PA, but also on scholars and authors who work in game studies, mobile studies, urban studies, and critical theorists as well as game journalists, both traditional and blogosphere. I interpret these posts in the same manner I would notes and conversations taken from a more traditional field site, through textual analysis. Finally, my own experiences of owning, playing, and using a Nintendo DS have been critical to this study, allowing me to understand what my subjects are talking about as well as to explore firsthand the affordances, limitations, and realties of living and playing with this game system.

Penny arcade

Penny Arcade, (here after PA) is a website, online comic, blog, forum and organization that hosts videogame conventions (PAX and PAX East) and runs a children’s charity (Child’s Play). PA is centered on a daily (weekdays) comic strip in which two characters, Tycho and Gabe (roughly corresponding to the creators of the strip, Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik) discuss videogames as well as other pop culture phenomena. PA also hosts a discussion forum that includes numerous subsections, mostly about different kinds of gaming, from tabletop miniatures to videogames. It is from this forum I drew the discussions, the threads and posts that I use as my main data for this project. I use the PA forums as my sole site in order to delimit my project, findings and scope and to sharpen my interpretation and analysis. I do not include other forums or sites because the technical and social differences found there would necessarily lead to a comparative analysis of sites, be they field or web, and not a close reading of the discourse of these players, on this site. PA is not only valuable in that there is a larger, talkative and user base (though this is crucial to the success of this research) but that conversations at PA tend to be open to digressions, asides and are (relatively) rich. The goal however is not to understand PA but to understand DS players though PA and in that sense this site is as good as any.

As of September 2010, there were over 50,000 members of PA. It is difficult to know how many of these members are active. Because the forum is public (meaning it can be read without registering) we cannot tell how many people read the forum without being members or who, like me, read the forum without signing in each time. Signing in is useful primarily when one wants to use a message board function such as sending messages, posting, or searching. It is not necessary to sign in to simply read the archive of posts. The forum is accessed through a button on the PA homepage. PA uses Vbulletin, a common software package that manages the data and posting for web forums. In this and other ways PA is typical of web forums, whatever their focus or organizing theme might be.

PA has no distinct DS section, nor is there a section of the PA forum dedicated to discussion of hand-held games. DS-oriented threads account for only a small percentage of total threads on PA. The two largest or longest threads at the time I did the research were located in SE or “Social Entropy,” a subsection of the PA forum that is notable for its somewhat lax enforcement of rules, meaning posters can stray off topic without being corralled by a mod (moderator) and a generally looser and crasser style of conversation is acceptable than in other sections of the forum. The two other threads were both located in the “technology” section of the forum, but not within either of the two subsections under technology, “Moe’s Stupid Technology Tavern” and “Massively Multiplayer Online Extravaganza.” The two DS threads in the technology section are similar in tone and style to the SE threads; the biggest difference is their length, as they are both much shorter than their SE counterparts. Bo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction
• 2  The Nintendo DS and Related Devices
• 3  Recommendations and Reviews
• 4  Interface Space
• 5  Id Rather Sit and Play: Mobile Videogames at Home
• 6  Mobile Play In Transit
• 7  Conclusion
• Appendix A, Games Cited
• Bibliography
• Index