I've been thinking recently about the organization of information, and the mapping of culture, and a prime example that sprung to mind is all of the secondary production that goes on around video games, specifically in providing documentation and organizing in-game information.
What are the outlines of this? A person (or more likely a team of people) creates a game. We can debate what games are, and that is a whole separate conversation, but let's just think of it as some sort of interactive media experience. There is a richness of detail. People play it, mostly for fun, although the reasons can be complicated. For various reasons, there is a demand for information about the game to be available outside of the game, with the GameFAQ or wiki being the canonical form of this today. Obviously this is part of a broader phenomena of people writing about and organizing information around culture, and yet video game wikis provide a particularly interesting example for a few reasons.
First, there is something about the nature of games that makes people especially interested in being able to obtain very specific pieces of information. Everything in the game is basically available to the player, as long as they are willing to put in the time and figure it out. But that can at times work against the nature of the enjoyment that people are after. For some people, in some settings, it can be fun to repeatedly fail at something, trying to git gud. Others might love exploring every nook and cranny of a world, mapping out the full space of possibilities. But for most players, they are getting something more like the mainstream of enjoyment that the game designers expected most players would get the most enjoyment out of.
There is a kind of circularity here -- designers are not just designing for a specific type of player, but also explicitly designing lots of edge cases -- but there is still a way in which most games (especially those with highly linear narratives) are welcoming the player into a very particular kind of experience -- one where the "fun" is often the overcoming of small obstacles (which might result in an increase in capabilities, allowing the player to overcome more challenging obstacles), combined with experiencing a traditional narrative. However, it can be quite difficult to calibrate the difficulty of such things, and so there may be moments where the player stops having fun, because they are stuck on something, and would rather get past it quickly so that they can get on to the next, hopefully better-calibrated challenge. This could be defeating a particular boss, or locating a particular item. As such, there may be frequent moments where players want that very specific type of information (how to beat the boss? where is that item?) and wikis are very much set up to provide all of this and more. (A variation on this -- the walkthrough, which provides a step by step guide to beating a game -- might be used in the same way, or it might be used by players that want an even more guided experience, experiencing the pleasure of carrying out each step, and experiencing the narrative, without having to figure things out for themselves).
Perhaps even more than helpful hints and puzzle-related information, wikis devote a lot of space to organizing the information about a game's world -- the names of all the characters and their backstories, all the pieces of lore that can be collected, references to other games or worlds, connections to source material, etc. I often wonder how much the actual role of such informational logistics is to be used as a reference, as opposed to being primarily about the pleasure of organizing the information. How many people sit down and read through a video game wiki to fill in all the pieces of the backstory? How common are such people compared to those who want to catalogue every plant species or map every world?
The latter activities obviously connect us strongly to long-standing traditions in science and administration -- the identifying and cataloging of actual plant species, the mapping of actual spaces, the organizing of information about trade routes and forest yields and everything else involved in trying to run a profitable business or administer a state. Is the amount of time people devote to organizing information about games (and other media such as movies and books) the result of a lack of demand for that sort of work within more traditional entities like business and government, or is there something about organizing information from fictional worlds that is inherently more pleasurable? It's interesting because the vast majority of games are designed so as to be enjoyable to play -- by placing well-calibrated challenges, etc. -- and so it is unsurprising that they are fun to play; but it is far less clear that they are designed to be fun to document and catalogue. It is possible that this is now in some sense a core feature of design -- perhaps seen in an otherwise unnecessary proliferation of in-game plant or animal species -- but it's ambiguous, and most likely is a relatively recent phenomenon. Think of all those in-game collectibles? Are they there because players actually want to collect them, or because others want to document their locations, simplifying the tasks of the players?
As much as these activities are all in some sense games, the lines get blurry, because of course all of this is deeply connected to making money. Most obviously, there is the business of selling the game. Video games are notoriously labor intensive to produce, and big games cost enormous sums of money, meaning that there is the expectation for a certain return on investment. Interestingly, many games are in some sense quite cheap to consume on a dollar per hour basis. Whereas people used to quite willingly pay ten, twelve or more dollars to see a two hour movie, video games which sell for sixty dollars might provide many dozens or even hundreds of hours of entertainment. In-game transactions aside (although this is clearly an important part of the story which cannot be ignored; it's just too big a piece to take on here), this means that video games need to sell a lot of units.
Although I expect that many people find that most games are actually far too long (especially those who have jobs), clearly some aspect of the player base wants a particularly rich, involved, and lengthy experience, with a narrative that cannot be completed in a mere ten or twelve hours. (As an aside, it would be interesting to explore the timeline of the evolving lengths of different media, like books, movies, TV series, and games). However, it is not just the primary market that matters here. Because there is so much demand for video game wikis, they can be enormously popular, and therefore frequently visited, meaning the potential for advertising revenues. As such, we can expect there to be competition for creating these indices of information. Indeed, presumably there is a particularly fierce competition with the release of every major new game, for which site will be able to provide the most popular walkthrough or wiki as soon as possible after the game's release. (Despite the length of modern games, this doesn't stop some players from getting through them extremely quickly in terms of total wall clock time from the first moment of play, which is itself a kind of competition, one taken to an extreme in spaces like speedrunning, again a whole other topic).
I don't mean to imply that all of this is just about business. Clearly people do like participating in a variety of activities related to fictional worlds -- from organizing the information, to writing stories set in those worlds, to enacting live-action versions of related narratives. In total, I would expect that the vast majority of this is undertaken without any expectation of an actual financial reward. And yet the market forces end up shaping so much of the content, because, for example, a wiki cannot succeed unless it gains a user base, and so the de-facto wiki for a popular game will almost certainly be one that has (or could be) commercialized.
Not only do people seemingly not have a problem with participating in spaces that are being commercialized by others, they are actually probably far more likely to do so than to create something from scratch. In other words, not only is much of this organizing of information undertaken on behalf of fictional worlds, it is done within an ecosystem organized by a third party.
There are numerous phenomena to be understood more deeply here -- peer production, internet commercialization, public goods, informational affinities, obsessive tendencies, virtual economies... not to mention the history of earlier manifestations of such cataloguing -- and all of this extends far beyond video games. In a certain way, I have become part of the phenomenon I am describing, by focusing on the secondary production around purely fictional creations, as opposed to secondary production around activities like scientific research. Nevertheless, precisely because the lines get so fully blurred among fun, profit, and obsession in this sphere, it provides something of an exemplary case study. More research required.
