This quote from Bonnie Nardi in My Life As A Night Elf Priest:
At a workshop on “productive play” sponsored by the National Science Foundation and hosted by Jason Ellis, Celia Pearce, and me in May 2008, virtual worlds pioneers Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer touched on the debate, remarking on what they called the “tyranny of emergence.” They observed that we all hope that online communities will emerge in bottom-up fashion from participatory activity, and we approve as participants take whatever technical affordances they are offered and appropriate them to their own ends. But at the same time these veterans cautioned that we cannot forget the “hand of God” that is the software artifact and the power of designers to shape activity (see Nardi et al. 2009). As Kallinikos said, it is the “right proportions” of the relative contributions of users and software we seek to apprehend.
Pickering’s (1995) notion of the “mangle” is a distinctive formulation of the relative contributions of user practice and technology. Unlike Farmer, Morningstar, and Kallinikos, who urged attention to the primacy of software rules and their directive force, Pickering proposed that a mangle—a mélange of user practices, socioeconomic conditions, and technologies—produces experience. This vivid metaphor suggests the entanglement of diverse elements; taking the metaphor at full face value, the conceptual mangle “mutilates” the varied elements it passes over, pressing them into one another.
…just fascinates me, especially the notion of a mangle of contributions from the user and the technology. Remember Marshall McLuhan and “the medium is the message”? Well, apparently there’s something to that but it’s stated too much in one direction. When you combine Dewey’s activity theory with technological determinism, you get something that looks like a mangle.
I had a discussion that took an odd turn (I say odd because it wasn’t what I wanted to discuss, it just came up) in another class this week as we discussed James Paul Gee’s sixteen learning principles of good games, and students resisted it on the basis that people cheat in games so they can get to the “reward” (in this case, blowing stuff up). A long discussion of online cheat codes and cheating techniques ensured. In such instances, perhaps the mangle is very evident as players try to rip apart the black box of the game’s technology. I can tell you that these students seem to have a lot invested in games being considered “mindless,” which is interesting in itself.
I find myself wanting to go deeper into drawing parallels between technologies and human systems, such as educational systems. Of course, there are problems with doing this because there are serious differences. Gee does this to a degree that is stimulating, without proposing too tight an alliance, in his learning principles, such as the “pleasant frustration” that optimizes game progress for a player, and that he believes should accompany classroom learning, as well.
Bureacracies are similar in that there is often a parallel to the “mangle” discussed here. Nardi discusses how guild leaders help players negotiate some of the difficulties that are hard-wired into a game. But it is also important to remember that play inhabits a magic circle:
- A subjective experience of freedom
- An absence of social obligation and physical necessity
- A subjective experience that is absorbing, compelling, or pleasurable
- Occurrence in a separate realm sometimes referred to as the magic circle (Nardi 102).