In today’s episode we talk to Thomas about what a game is and how a well-designed one balances constraints and unpredictabilities.

We cover what relationships people build in and around games and how it (often) outstrips the designers’ expectations of them; his experience with Linden Lab and how Second Life was designed not as a game but as a platform for game making; player governance as a legitimate component of an online space; the connection between trust, ethics, and governance and why it’s necessary for game companies to participate in digital, public spaces.

We talk about identity and building inclusive avatars and the asymmetry between players and game makers. Lastly we talk about chance, patterns and open ended-ness in games.

Mentioned in Podcast:

• Making Virtual Worlds: Linden Lab and Second Life (2009, Cornell University Press)
  -Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas (2014, Princeton University Press)
• Emile Durkheim
  -The Invention of Tradition (2014, Cambridge University Press)
• CCP Games
• My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World (1999, Henry Holt and Co., Inc. New York, NY, USA) and free download here
• Center for 21st Century Studies
• Serious_Play, Twitch.tv channel
• Coin-Operated Americans, Rebooting boyhood at the video game arcade ( 2015, Minnesota University Press)
• An exploratory model of play

Thomas’s work:

Malaby, T. M. (2012). Digital Gaming, Game Design, and its Precursors. Digital Anthropology, 288-305. Oxford: Berg.
Malaby, T. M. (2011). These Great Urbanist Games: New Babylon and Second Life (reprint). World Making: Media, Art, and the Politics of the Global. Rutgers University Press.
Malaby, T. M. (2009, January (1st Quarter/Winter)). Anthropology and Play: The Contours of Playful Experience. New Literary History, 40(1), 205-218.
Malaby, T. M. (2007). Beyond Play: A New Approach to Games. Games & Culture, 2(2), 95-113.
Malaby, T. M. (2003). Gambling Life: Dealing in Contingency in a Greek City. University of Illinois Press.

Social media or other links:

https://thomasmalaby.com

https://uwm.edu/anthropology/people/malaby-thomas-m/