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 Multiplayer
Online Games
Origins, Players, and Social Dynamics
 Multiplayer
Online Games
Origins, Players, and Social Dynamics

Guo Freeman
CRC Press
Taylor & Francis Group
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Boca Raton, FL 33487-2742

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Contents

Preface, ix
Acknowledgments, xi

Chapter 1   ◾   Introduction: Why Online Gaming Studies Now? 1

1.1 ONLINE GAMING AS AN ADVANCED INTERNET
APPLICATION 2
1.2 ONLINE GAMING AS AN INTEGRATION OF
ENTERTAINMENT AND SOCIAL NETWORKING 4
1.3 ONLINE GAMING AS A SOURCE OF POTENTIAL
WEB-BASED COMMUNITY 6
1.4 STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK 6

Chapter 2   ◾   What are MOGs? 11

2.1 TYPES OF ONLINE GAMING 11
2.2 ORIGINS AND EVOLUTION OF MOGs 18
2.3 FEATURES OF MOGs 20
2.4 GLOBALIZATION OF MOGs 22

Chapter 3   ◾   Who Plays MOGs? 25

3.1 TYPES OF MOG PLAYERS 26
3.2 CHARACTERISTICS OF MOG PLAYERS 30
3.2.1 Demographic Characteristics 30
3.2.1.1 Age 30
3.2.1.2 Gender 31

v
vi   ◾    Contents

3.2.1.3 Education/Occupation 35
3.2.1.4 Nationality and Culture 36
3.2.2 Psychosocial Characteristics 37
3.2.2.1 Escapism 38
3.2.2.2 Aggression 39
3.2.2.3 Attachment/Belongingness 41
3.2.3 Experiential Characteristics 43
3.2.3.1 Interactivity 44
3.2.3.2 Involvement 46
3.2.3.3 Immersion 49

Chapter 4   ◾   Social Dynamics of MOGs 53

4.1 PRESENCE 54
4.2 COMMUNICATION 59
4.2.1 Computer-Mediated Communication 59
4.2.2 Avatar-Mediated Communication 64
4.3 COLLABORATION 67
4.4 CONFLICT AND COMPETITION 71
4.5 COMMUNITY 76

Chapter 5   ◾   Methodologies for the Study of MOGs 81

5.1 OBSERVATION/ETHNOGRAPHY 82
5.2 SURVEYS/INTERVIEWS 83
5.3 CONTENT AND DISCOURSE ANALYSIS 92
5.4 EXPERIMENTS 98
5.5 NETWORK ANALYSIS 102
5.6 CASE STUDIES 107

Chapter 6   ◾   Electronic Sports: A Future Direction? 113

6.1 eSPORTS AS COMPUTER-MEDIATED “SPORTS” 114
6.2 eSPORTS AS COMPETITIVE COMPUTER GAMING 115
6.3 eSPORTS AS A SPECTATORSHIP 115
 Contents   ◾   vii

Chapter 7   ◾   Conclusion and Implications 117

7.1 IMPLICATIONS FOR CULTURAL STUDIES 118
7.2 IMPLICATIONS FOR EDUCATION 120
7.3 IMPLICATIONS FOR HUMAN–COMPUTER
INTERACTION (HCI) RESEARCH 121
7.4 IMPLICATIONS FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE 123

GLOSSARY, 129

REFERENCES, 133

INDEX, 159
Preface

M ultiplayer Online Games (MOGs) have become a new genre of

“play culture,” integrating communication and entertainment in a
playful, computer-mediated environment that evolves through user inter-
action. A prime illustration of the social impacts of information and com-
munication technologies (ICTs) within recreational computer-mediated
settings, MOGs are of interest to researchers from various disciplines,
such as computer scientists, information scientists, and human-computer
interaction (HCI) and communication researchers, in terms of their tech-
nological, social, and organizational importance.
With these concerns in mind, this book comprehensively reviews the
origins, players, and social dynamics of MOGs, as well as six major empir-
ical research methods used in previous works to study MOGs (i.e., obser-
vation/ethnography, survey/interviews, content and discourse analysis,
experiments, network analysis, and case studies). It concludes that MOGs
represent a highly sophisticated, networked, multimedia and multimodal
Internet technology, which can construct entertaining, simultaneous,
persistent social virtual worlds for gamers. When playing MOGs, gamers
influence these games as human factors in terms of their demographic,
psychosocial, and experiential characteristics. Thus, when gamers are
playing games, they are also constructing, maintaining, and developing
the game world. In this process, five types of social dynamics are evident:
“presence” is the basis for all the other dynamics, because in order to con-
duct sophisticated social activities, players have to be present together in
the same virtual world; “communication” provides the channel of interac-
tion; “collaboration” and “competition/conflict” are intertwined practices;
and “community” is the ultimate outcome of the balance and optimiza-
tion of the first four dynamics. In addition, MOGs cannot be understood
without empirical evidence based on actual data. Although the six major
empirical research methods used to study MOGs have their strengths

ix
x   ◾    Preface

and limitations, these methods are not mutually exclusive or conflictive.

In fact, whether a research method is appropriate will depend on one’s
research question(s) and one’s data, and it may be appropriate and neces-
sary for researchers to use two or more methods in one study to conduct a
more valid and multidimensional investigation.
Theoretically, this book fills gaps in the study of the sociocultural
aspects of online gaming. Practically, it has many implications for future
studies, shedding light on research opportunities from different perspec-
tives such as cultural studies, education, human-computer interaction,
and information science; for understanding social activities and informa-
tion behaviors that occur in online games, which might provide insights
for game design that supports better human-computer interaction; and
for the formation of communities. It also identifies research gaps in the
existing literature and suggests that further research is required to arrive
at a more comprehensive understanding of MOG features across different
game genres (e.g., violent vs. non-violent, fantasy vs. non-fantasy), poten-
tial player groups (e.g., male vs. female), and game behaviors (e.g., institu-
tional vs. intimate). Overall, the book shows that what we can learn from
MOGs is how games and gaming, as ubiquitous activities, fit into ordinary
life in today’s information society, in the moments where the increased
use of media as entertainment, the widespread application of networked
information technologies, and participation in new social experiences
intersect.
Acknowledgments

I t was a wonderful journey writing this book. I would like to thank

Susan C. Herring, who supported, helped, and encouraged me in every
aspect of this long journey. As my mentor and friend, she is truly one of
a kind.
I also want to extend my sincere gratitude to Elin K. Jacob, who was
there to talk with and gave great suggestions; and Jeffrey Bardzell and
Shaowen Bardzell, who taught me many wonderful things about HCI
design and research. Special thanks go to my family and friends: my par-
ents, who always love me and support my decisions; my husband Bob,
daughter Riley, and in-laws, who love me and make me happy; and all my
great friends who brightened my life during this journey.

xi
 Chapter 1

Introduction
Why Online Gaming Studies Now?

A s information and communication technology (ICT) plays an

increasingly significant role in today’s networked society, the virtual
world has attracted attention from more and more researchers across dif-
ferent disciplines. For example, information scientists are interested in
knowledge production, sharing, and consumption in web-based complex
social systems, considering online community satisfaction to be a crucial
measure of the success of an information system—although most studies
have focused on scholarly and professional contexts (Talja, Tuominen, &
Savolainen, 2005). Similarly, computer-mediated communication (CMC)
researchers have conducted many studies of the instrumental uses of
ICTs, especially in organizational and work contexts (e.g., Hinds &
Kiesler, 2002), including the effects of CMC on work quality and produc-
tivity (e.g., Johri, 2011; Mark, Voida, & Cardello, 2012). In fact, the evo-
lution of web-based information and communication technologies offers
new and exciting ways to gather, organize, disseminate, and communicate
information for all types of user groups in various contexts throughout
the world. Thus, a number of researchers have highlighted the need to
extend the research scope to examine the social impacts of ICTs in recre-
ational computer-mediated settings (e.g., Blythe et al., 2003; Curtis, 1997;
Turkle, 1997a) in order to investigate the multimodal nature of the com-
munication and how communication co-occurs with other (e.g., gaming)
activities.

1
2   ◾    Multiplayer Online Games

With these concerns, multiplayer online games (MOGs), as an emerg-

ing Internet application, should be of particular interest to researchers,
practitioners, and members of the general public who are interested in
gaming and society. These large-scale online games capture the notion
of the Internet as a location for virtual communities (Rheingold, 1993)
and integrate communication and entertainment in a playful, computer-
mediated environment that evolves through user interaction. MOG play-
ers, who come from every corner of the planet, gather and play together in
these digital environments, either temporarily or consistently. This gives
rise to many questions about the social dynamics of MOGs, such as: What
social activities and formations occur in the online informational and rec-
reational environments of MOGs? Does playing MOGs facilitate or under-
mine gamers’ sociability in their offline lives? Therefore, it is important to
take the technological origins, human factors, and social aspects of this
new technology into account, to investigate the unique features of game
players, and to thoroughly examine the dynamics evident in such games.
The sections that follow address the fundamental question of why
online gaming research is important, including its technological impor-
tance (1.1 Online gaming as an advanced Internet application), its social
importance (1.2 Online gaming as an integration of entertainment and
social networking), and its organizational importance (1.3. Online gam-
ing as a source of potential web-based community). The chapter concludes
by introducing the structure of this book.

1.1 ONLINE GAMING AS AN ADVANCED

INTERNET APPLICATION
McLuhan (1964) proposes that games are “extensions of the popular
response to the workaday stress” and “become faithful models of a cul-
ture” (p. 235). He also posits that “[g]ames are situations contrived to per-
mit simultaneous participation of many people in some significant pattern
of their own corporate lives” (p. 245). Thus, games are tied to broader
social phenomena in people’s lives and human societies. In the digital age,
online gaming has emerged as a popular recreational activity, not only
for the younger generation but also for older people in different countries.
For example, Microsoft has reported that gaming is the third most com-
mon activity on its platforms, just after browsing the Internet and reading
email (Hoglund & McGraw, 2007).
Although online games are a type of computer software and remain
rooted in personal computer (PC) technology, they are very different from
 Introduction   ◾   3

FIGURE 1.1 Screenshot of OXO. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:OXO_­

emulated_screenshot.png)

traditional computer games. In 1952, A. S. Douglas created the first com-

puter game (Figure 1.1), OXO (or Noughts and Crosses), a version of Tic-
Tac-Toe, when he was writing his doctoral dissertation at the University of
Cambridge on human–computer interaction. This game was programmed
on an EDSAC* vacuum-tube computer, which had a cathode ray tube
display.
Technically, Chen et al. (2005) define online gaming or online games as
games that are played online via a local area network (LAN), the Internet,
or other telecommunication medium. They are distinct from video or com-
puter games in terms of their client-server architecture (Figure 1.2), which
focuses on “network”—the major technological feature of all online gam-
ing, including both single player games and multiplayer games. “Client”
refers to the software programs (including web browsers) that run on a
gamer’s PC (usually Internet-connected), while “server” refers to the cen-
tral bank (or many central banks) where communication among gamers
(for multiplayer games, e.g., chat, fight), or between a gamer and the central
game program (for single player games, e.g., update software/maps, fight
with nonplayer characters [NPCs]) can be conducted in real-time through
the Internet. During a game session, the client software takes input from
the player, communicates with the central servers, and typically displays

* Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator, an early British computer (Wilkes & Renwick,
1950).
4   ◾    Multiplayer Online Games

State-changing
move Central server

Regional servers

Players

FIGURE 1.2 Client-server architecture. (Adapted from Jardine, J. & Zappala, D.

2008. Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Network and System
Support for Games (pp. 60–65). October 21–22, Worcester, MA. New York: ACM.)

a view of the virtual world in which the gamer is involved (Hoglund &
McGraw, 2007).
Because of its characteristic of being “networked,” online gaming rep-
resents a revolutionary change from traditional, disconnected computer
games, and it is a much more complex technological product. The digital
environment provided by such products represents the expansion of com-
puter networks from isolated personal computers to the Internet and the
growth of Internet access itself, and can place constraints on how people
use these technologies and what they can be used for.

1.2 ONLINE GAMING AS AN INTEGRATION OF

ENTERTAINMENT AND SOCIAL NETWORKING
Social media are defined as “a group of Internet-based applications that
build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and
that allow the creation and exchange of User Generated Content” (Kaplan &
Haenlein, 2010, p. 61). According to Pew Research (2015a), two-thirds of
online adults (65%) use social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter,
Instagram, and Pinterest, and they consider socializing with friends, fam-
ily members, colleagues, and acquaintances in their offline lives a primary
motivation for their adoption of social media tools. Especially, social
media use and social networking have become so pervasive in the lives of
American teens that having a presence on a social networking site is almost
synonymous with being online. Ninety-two percent of all teenagers aged
12–17 are going online daily, and 71% use more than one social network-
ing site (Pew Research, 2015b). As of 2015, even 35% of all those 65 and
older report using social media (Pew Research, 2015a).
 Introduction   ◾   5

As a consequence of the global spread of the Internet and people’s

enthusiasm for expanding their interpersonal connections both online
and offline via social networking, online gaming has become an enter-
taining interactive form of CMC and networked activities (Taylor, 2002)
that appeals to both the general public and researchers. On the one hand,
this novel application combines multimedia, 3D, artificial intelligence,
broadband networks, sound effects, and computer interaction, and it has
evolved into a highly popular form of entertainment (Chen et al., 2005)
both physically and emotionally. On the other hand, most sophisticated
online games can provide gamers with a virtual but highly engaging world
where they can live, play, entertain, fight, collaborate, and interact with
others. “The associated openness and interactivity provide people with
unique and multidimensional experiences that are not available in real-
world settings” (Park & Lee, 2012, p. 855). For example, typical social net-
working sites, such as Facebook, have provided rapidly growing gaming
portals that offer games across a broad range of genres (e.g., FarmVille,
Texas HoldEm Poker, Bubble Safari, Dragon City, Words with Friends,
Angry Birds Friends, The Sims Social).* Recent news (Steele, 2013) shows
that Facebook gamers account for about 25% of the site’s monthly active
users, a significant number considering that site membership is at 1 billion.
Such gaming applications (apps) engage gamers through customization,
the ability to play and interact with real friends, and constant develop-
ment of accessories, add-ons, patches, etc. Online gaming platforms for
mobile phones (through 3G, 4G, or Wi-Fi Internet access) also offer friend
lists, social profiles, leader boards, discovery lobbies, cross promotion, etc.
in order to provide real-time status updates of game play as well as the
ability to play, share, and discover games with existing social networking
friends. In addition, the wide range of communication modes available in
social media enable players to control how far they want to take relation-
ships out of a MOG, for example, via public and private chat channels, offi-
cial forums, MSN, Skype, Facebook, email, and real-life meetings (Pace,
Bardzell, & Bardzell, 2010).
Thus, it has been claimed that online gaming is a new form of social
media, in that it allows the incorporation of appealing game entertain-
ment and simultaneous interaction (Kline & Arlidge, 2003).

* Source from “Most Popular Facebook Games: From FarmVille to King.com’s Sagas” at http://
gamasutra.com/view/news/180569/Most_Popular_Facebook_Games_From_FarmVille_to_
Kingcoms_Sagas.php#.UTy-cdF4adl
6   ◾    Multiplayer Online Games

1.3 ONLINE GAMING AS A SOURCE OF POTENTIAL

WEB-BASED COMMUNITY
In today’s era of new digital media (NDM) or simply new media—“the
actual technologies that people use to connect with one another—­including
mobile phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), game consoles, and
computers connected to the Internet” (James et al., 2009, p. 6)—people
are increasingly exposed to and participating in various online activities
both individually and collectively, including social networking, relaxing,
studying, collaborating, and innovating. Online gaming in particular
functions as a source of potential web-based community via boundary
crossing (Lin, Sun, & Bannister, 2006). Regardless of their physical loca-
tion, individuals who share common interests can play simultaneously in
the same designed artificial environment by creating new bodies and even
new identities. This type of boundary crossing establishes the basis for
potential web-based community and encourages long-term membership:
Online gamers are released from traditional physical/geographical limits
and the need to see each other frequently or to gather as a full group in
order to develop a sense of community (Lin et al., 2006).
In their analysis of 50 online communities, Hummel and Lechner
(2002) identified online gaming as one of the five major genres of virtual
communities based on four dimensions, namely, a defined group of actors,
interaction, sense of place, and bonding. In this sense, online gaming can
be considered a source to establish web-based communities mediated by
CMC tools, involving gamers “who congregate in their virtual space and
form communities around them to support each other” (Ang, Zaphiris,
& Mahmood, 2007, p. 167) and providing “a fictional setting where a
large group of players voluntarily immerse themselves in a graphical vir-
tual environment and interact with each other by forming a community
of players” (Ang et al., 2007, p. 167). As Apperley (2006, p. 18) claims,
“[the] development of the Internet has led to a proliferation of official, and
unofficial, game-based or game-centered communities, which eventually
included all genres of video games.”

1.4 STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK

The rise of online gaming comes at a particular historical moment for
social as well as technological reasons and prompts a wide variety of ques-
tions (Williams, 2006b). Thus, we should study online games now, because
these networked social games are developing much faster than scholars
 Introduction   ◾   7

have been able to analyze them, theorize about them, or collect data on
them, as Williams points out. The current book focuses on the most typical
and popular type of online gaming: MOGs. It reviews the origins, develop-
ment, and main features of MOGs, as well as exploring the types, activities,
and characteristics of MOG players. In addition, this work investigates pre-
vious studies of the social dynamics of MOGs, summarizes major method-
ologies used in those studies, and identifies future research opportunities.
Theoretically, the book aims to fill gaps in the study of the sociocultural
aspects of online gaming. Practically, it has implications for understand-
ing social activities and information behaviors that occur in online games
that might provide insights for game design that supports better human–­
computer interaction and the formation of communities. It also suggests
that information scientists can learn from MOGs how games and gaming
fit into ordinary life in today’s information society, in the moments where
the increased use of media as entertainment, the widespread application
of networked information technologies, and participation in new social
experiences intersect.
It should be noted that, in a broader sense, MOGs are games, and
games are often associated with theories of “play” (e.g., Csikszentmihalyi &
Csikszentmihalyi, 1975; Malaby, 2007a,b; Piaget, 1962). As Malaby (2007a)
states, games have a long-running, deep, and habitual association with
the concept of “play,” which is used in both game scholarship and “more
widely, [to signify] a form of activity” (p. 96) with intrinsic features. These
features include play as separable from everyday life (especially as opposed
to non-playful activities such as work or sleep; Rauterberg, 2004); play
as safe (“consequence-free” or nonproductive); and play as pleasurable
or “fun” (normatively positive). These features also echo Piaget’s (1962)
five main criteria for defining play: disinterestedness, spontaneity, plea-
sure, relative lack of organization, and freedom from conflict. In addition,
Csikszentmihalyi and Csikszentmihalyi (1975) define play as “behav-
ior which is noninstrumental but rewarding in some way” (p. 214). For
Csikszentmihalyi (1990), play is the basis of his famous concept of flow,
which is considered to be intrinsic to the gaming experience.
Based on these understandings, researchers have tied play theory con-
cepts to MOG studies. For example, by integrating ideas about invis-
ible playgrounds from play theory into online educational digital games,
Charles and McAlister (2004) have argued that educational games con-
structed on this sort of multimodal, distributed framework can be
extremely effective at engaging and immersing students in the educational
8   ◾    Multiplayer Online Games

process. They further suggest that the playing of a modern digital game
is inherently educational because of the active and critical learning pro-
cesses involved, as well as the building of an appreciation for design and
semiotic principles through the interpretation of, and response to, game-
play challenges. Pearce (2009) called the emergent cultures in multiplayer
games and virtual worlds “communities of play and the global play-
ground,” which are closely tied to “imagination, fantasy, and the creation
of a fictional identity” (p. 1). Researchers typically regard play as “a highly
positive experience capable of delivering intrinsic value in the form of
escapism and enjoyment” (Mathwick & Rigdon, 2004, p. 324). Thus there
are obvious commitments on the part of researchers to games as play, and
play as fundamentally about pleasure, fun, or entertainment (Malaby,
2007a,b).
However, theories of play, albeit important, are not discussed further
in this book. There are two reasons for this. First, many researchers have
expressed concerns about the ambiguity of play. Although researchers
from various domains have studied “play” systematically or scientifically,
they have discovered that they have “immense problems in conceptualiz-
ing it” (Sutton-Smith, 2001, p. 6). As Sutton-Smith (2001) proposed in his
book The Ambiguity of Play, play is an ambiguous concept: “We all play
occasionally, and we all know what playing feels like. But when it comes
to making theoretical statements about what play is, we fall into silliness.
There is little agreement among us, and much ambiguity” (p. 1). Similarly,
Bateson (1955) suggested that play is a paradox because it both is and is
not what it appears to be. According to Sutton-Smith, the ambiguity of
play lies in the great diversity of play forms: Play could be states of mind,
activities, or events. In this sense, play in MOGs could be mental or sub-
jective play (e.g., dreams, fantasy, imagination, Dungeons and Dragons),
playful behaviors (e.g., playing tricks, playing up to someone, playing a
part), informal social play (e.g., joking, parties, intimacy, speech play such
as riddles, stories, gossip, nonsense), vicarious audience play (e.g., fantasy
lands, virtual reality), performance play (e.g., playing the game for the
game’s sake, being a play actor), contests (e.g., games, sports), and so forth.
Thus, the ambiguity of play itself can lead to ambiguity in the discussion
of play in MOGs.
Second, MOGs are about more than play. As discussed above, there is a
tendency to regard play as fundamentally about positive experience and as
separated from everyday life (e.g., the dichotomy between play and work).
However, as Malaby (2007a) argued, games “are domains of contrived
 Introduction   ◾   9

contingency, capable of generating emergent practices and interpreta-

tions, and are intimately connected with everyday life to a degree hereto-
fore poorly understood” (p. 95). Such a separation of MOGs from everyday
life, and the a priori normative assumption that MOGs are about “fun”
or “entertainment,” is a “false dichotomy” (Stevens, 1980, p. 316). Thus,
rather than considering playing MOGs as a subset of play, and therefore
as an activity that is inherently separable, safe, and pleasurable, it is more
appropriate to theorize that MOGs are “social artifacts in their own right
that are always in the process of becoming” (Malaby, 2007a, p. 95). In addi-
tion, since the concept of “play” itself is a “shallowly examined term, his-
torically and culturally specific to Western modernity” (Malaby, 2007a,
p. 96), it would be more appropriate to connect MOGs to compelling or
engaging, instead of “playful,” experiences, and to situate player experi-
ence within the wide range of particular cultural and historical settings
for games around the world.
The remaining chapters of this book are organized as follows: Chapter 2
describes the nature of MOGs, including their origins, features, and glo-
balization. Chapter 3 focuses on MOG players, including their types and
characteristics (demographic, psychosocial, and experiential). Based on
discussions in Chapters 2 and 3, Chapter 4 examines five social dynam-
ics exhibited in MOGs: presence, communication, collaboration, conflict
and competition, and community. Chapter 5 reviews major empirical
methodologies used in MOG studies. And Chapter 6 explores electronic
sports as a potential future direction for MOGs. The book concludes with
a discussion in Chapter 7 of the implications of MOG studies, including
implications for scholars in cultural studies, education, human–computer
interaction, and information science, research gaps in the existing litera-
ture, and research opportunities in the future.
 Chapter 2

What are MOGs?

T his chapter describes the nature of MOGs, including their foun-

dation as online games, their unique technical infrastructure, and
their global development and popularity.

2.1 TYPES OF ONLINE GAMING

Online gaming has become an increasingly popular genre of new media
activity that is consumed by gamers all over the world. It is broad in scope,
involves various Internet-access technologies such as mobile phones, game
consoles, tablets, and personal computers, and can be divided into differ-
ent categories using various criteria.
Basically, three principles can be identified in the classification of online
games:
1. The principle of technology classifies online games according to their tech-
nological platform and design (e.g., Apperley, 2006; Chen et al., 2005;
Griffiths, Davies, & Chappell, 2003). Examples include classifica-
tion into single player vs. multiplayer games, that is, games operated
on a stand-alone personal computer vs. on networked computers;
locality-based games vs. Internet games, that is, games operated on
a local area network (LAN, e.g., internal campus network) vs. on a
public/global network; and browser-based games vs. client-server
games, that is, games operated on a web page vs. those that require
the players to have certain software (download, installation, and
subscription required). Instead of emphasizing the features of the
games themselves, the technological approach focuses on the techni-
cal requirements and design for online games (including views and
11
12   ◾    Multiplayer Online Games

perspectives)—including whether a gamer is able to seek a human

opponent, and to what extent she/he can do so. Proponents of this
approach claim that such technological platforms directly determine
the playing experience. For example, in an online single player game
played on a personal computer, gamers usually compete with online
updated computer programs, are restricted in the views and/or plot
structures offered, and do not engage in grouping behavior. Although
inter-gamer communication is possible, the depth of social immersion
in such games is constrained by the single player setting. By contrast,
LAN and Internet-based games involve multiple players and provide
multiple levels of character development and, typically, large, sophis-
ticated, and evolving virtual worlds with different narrative environ-
ments. “In these games the nonplayer characters (NPCs) are designed
with advanced artificial intelligence (AI) that offers a rich and unpre-
dictable mileu [sic] for players to experience a virtual world through
their own ‘player character’” (Griffiths et al., 2003, p. 82).

2. The principle of genre classifies online games according to their con-

tent, theme, or style (e.g., AllGameGuide, 2012; Apperley, 2006;
MobyGames, 2012a,b; Myers, 1990; Sellers, 2006; Smith, 2006). This
principle is widely followed, especially by commercial game sites, but
it is also problematic and much debated. Apperley (2006) argues that
the current market-based classification of online games ignores the
new medium’s crucial unique features, instead merely dividing them
into loosely organized and fragmented categories according to their
explicit or implicit similarities to prior media forms (e.g., action mov-
ies, science fiction movies, horror movies). He proposes that the genre
system of online games, which represent a unified new media form,
should be defined according to visual aesthetics or narrative struc-
ture. Similarly, Arsenault (2009) summarizes two types of intersect-
ing criteria for determining video game genres—those pertaining to
game play and those that have themes or narratives—and claims that
“the very notion of genre is controversial and, quite bluntly, a mess”
(p. 149). Klevjer (2006) acknowledges the same problem in genre stud-
ies of online games: There are no consistent criteria used to classify
games, and researchers tend to describe the gaming situation in either
the most general or the most specific terms. Therefore, even as early as
1984, in his famous work The Art of Computer Game Design, Crawford
highlighted that he does not claim that the classification taxonomy for
 What are MOGs?   ◾   13

computer game genres he proposes is the correct one, nor will he accept
that any correct taxonomy can be formulated, since taxonomy is only
one of the many ways to organize a large number of related terms.
3. The principle of the user classifies online games according to their gam-
ers’ experiences (e.g., Elverdam & Aarseth, 2007; Myers, 1990; Stetina,
2011). While the principle of genre, which originates in ideas of iconog-
raphy and theme from movie analysis, is widely used to classify differ-
ent types of online games, some researchers (e.g., Apperley, 2006; Wolf,
2002) propose that interactivity should be considered an essential part
of every game’s structure and a more appropriate way of classification,
since online games differ greatly from literary or film genres due to “the
direct and active participation of the audience” (Wolf, 2002, p. 114).
Thus, researchers suggest shifting the focus of visual and narrative ter-
minology to a specific focus on interactivity, which requires constant
attention to the gamers’ experiences and highlights the uniqueness
of online games as a participatory form of new media. For example,
Stetina et al. (2011) classify mainstream online games based on the lev-
els of interactive experience they provide for gamers: (a) At a low level,
real-time strategy (RTS)* games focus on the interaction of game events,
not on inter-gamer communication, friendship construction, or play-
ing together over a longer period of time; (b) at a medium level, first-
person-shooters (FPS)† provide the option for player interaction within
the game, but this interaction is related more to a defined system of
acknowledgments and gratifications than to social communication; and
(c) at a high level, MOGs are embedded in a nearly never-ending story
with unlimited possibilities to interact with others (both social commu-
nication and game-event communication) in-game and out-game.
In sum, researchers have proposed different classifications of online
games based on various principles. At present, there is a strong tendency
to combine multi­ple principles; Apperley (2006) incorporates all three to
classify online games by genre, platform, mode, and milieu, and Elverdam
and Aarseth (2007) provide an open-ended and multidimensional classifi-
cation involving both technical and human factors. Overall, the previous

* RTS games are usually designed with the theme of war. Players have to use strategies to secure
areas of the map under their control and/or destroy their opponents’ assets, including building
bases and managing resources. See glossary.
† A type of three-dimensional game centered on gun and weapon-based combat from a first-person

point of view; that is, the player sees the action through the eyes of his or her avatar. See glossary.
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
economy of hard-boiled movies, the vindication of Spade's sexual
prowess requires that all other sexual possibilities be impeached.
Hence the private eye's manliness must constantly be confirmed
through conflicts with asexual or bisexual characters - or, far more
often, with female or gay male characters - whom the film leaves
demystified, disempowered, defeated, and dehumanized.^
 Chinatown and the Private-Eye Film 43. Devil in a Blue
Dress: This shot is just about all that remains of the novel's
interracial romance. (Denzel Washington, Jennifer Beals) This
defense of mcisculinity places debates about sex and power at the
heart of all but a handful of hard-boiled films. It is true, of course,
that The Thin Man (1934) combines a hard-boiled mystery with an
intermittently lightsome celebration of the cockeyed domestic life of
private eye Nick Charles (William Powell) and his wife, Nora (Myrna
Loy). More recently. Devil in a Blue Dress (1995), shorn of the
interracial romance that had capped Walter Mosley's 1990 novel [Fig.
43], uses race to displace sex cis the matrix of the film's conflicts,
focusing almost exclusively on the survival of Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins
(Denzel Washington), the unemployed aircraft worker who serves as
the film's reluctant hero. In the white man's world he finds himself
investigating, cops and crooks cilike can beat him hcilf to death
without a reason, and cisserting his identity requires a perilous
tightrope dance between the Uncle Tom subservience white men
demand and the reflexive brutality of his old friend Mouse (Don
Cheadle), whose propensity for violence becomes disturbingly
necessary to Ecisy's success [Fig. 44]. But
 Crime Films most private-eye films, like films noirs and
erotic thrillers, are anatomies of masculinity. Since the hero's
meisculinity is always reaffirmed at the cost of marginalizing or
annulling other sexual possibilities, the private eye's investigation
typically focuses on discrediting seductive femmes fatales like Brigid
O'Shaughnessy, Velma Valento (in Murder, My Sweet), or the
Sternwood sisters (in The Big Sleep). Sometimes the hero's love-
hate relationship with women is dramatized by the presence of both
good and bad heroines, like the double heroines of Murder, My
Sweet and Out of the Past; more often, his ambivalence is simply
projected onto a single heroine, whose ambiguity expresses both his
desire to possess her and his fear of the power her sexuality gives
her. The price of resolving the hero's ambivalence is the heroine's
demystification, and often her destruction as well. Not even death
can protect cm enigmatic female from the private eye's continued
unsparing exposure, as Philip Marlowe shows in Lady in the Lake
(1947) in his continuing inquiries about the drowned Muriel Chess,
and Mike Hammer shows in Kiss Me Deadly in his determination to
follow the murdered Christina Bailey's injunction to "remember me,"
even to violating her corpse after death by retrieving a key she had
swallowed. Although the private eye's aggressive masculinity, shored
up by his discrediting of alternative sexualities, becomes his most
distinctive trait in later hard-boiled films - turning into a running joke
as early as the endless parade of willing women in The Big Sleep - it
also becomes, especially in the wave of revisionist hard-boiled films
that follow the women's-liberation movement of the early 1970s, the
subject of a searching critique. In these ironic reconsiderations of
masculine heroism, the male habits that allow a private eye to
succeed at his work - professionalism and abstract idealism; the kind
of dualistic moral thinking that categorizes suspects, solves cases,
and confirms the hero's embattled masculinity through zero-sum
contrasts; the violent skills that cillow the hard-boiled hero to hold
his own in a hostile world; and the freedom to follow a case
wherever it leads - turn out to make him unfit for anything else. Kiss
Me Deadly, appearing fifteen years before the flood of revisionist
hard-boiled films, begins its prophetic critique in the opening scene,
as Christina (Cloris Leachman), the fleeing hitchhiker who Mike
Hammer (Ralph Meeker) has picked up, recovers from her terror
long enough to dismiss him as just one more example of "Man,
wonderful Man," incapable of loving anything but himself and his
sports car. The film goes on to suggest that Ham 
 Chinatown and the Private-Eye Film 201 44. Devil in a Blue
Dress: Easy (Denzel Washington, right) is forced to depend on his
volatile friend Mouse (Don Cheadle). mer's expertise as "a bedroom
dick" and his sadistic propensity for violence both stem from his
neurotic contempt for the feminized culture represented by the film's
constant references to ballet, opera, classical music, and modern
art.^ Harper makes the inability of Lew Harper (Paul Newman) to
commit himself to his wife (a chciracter absent from The Moving
Target, the 1949 Ross Macdonald novel on which the film was
based) into one of its most important themes. By the time of Night
Moves, it seems inevitable that no film would burden a private eye
like Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman) with a wife if it did not plan to
make an issue of his ruined marriage. It was at the height of this
highly critical reconsideration of the private eye's authority and
potency that Roman Polanski's Chinatown was released in 1974. The
film's Oscar-winning screenplay, credited to legendary script doctor
Robert Towne, looks back nostalgically, as John Cawelti noted not
long after it appeared,^ to the glory days of the private eye in 1937,
the year in which its story is set, at the same time it presents a
penetrating critique of the hard-boiled hero and the values he
represents. The vehicle for this ambivalent critique is pastiche: The
film is a catalog of both private-eye and historical-period cliches
 Crime Films whose meanings are renewed and often
inverted by their ironic handling. Both Chinatown's bumptious hero,
J. J. ("call me Jake") Gittes (Jack Nicholson), and the Ccise he gets
swept up in are defined by their echoes of the past. As even its title
ends up indicating, however, Chinatown, for all its nostalgic
invocation of a double past - the formative years of the City of Los
Angeles and the celluloid heritage of the California shamus - is an
exceptionally bleak film, a record of unrelieved failure. Despite his
pertinacity, his detective skills, and his unexpected idealism, Gittes
does not realize the monstrous nature of the crime he is
investigating until it is too late to stop its corruption from spreading
still further. He can neither persuade the police to arrest the killer he
unmasks nor save the life of the heroine he has come to love.
Chinatown is much more than an ironic valentine to the hard-boiled
detective of the thirties; though it is patterned by a series of
reversals, deceptions, and betrayals, its deeper structure of
revelations, the variety of roles in which it Ccists the hero and
heroine, and its intricate mixture of tones make it the most complete
detective film of all. Yet the most urgent question the film poses
about Gittes is why this hard-boiled dick, who seems to wear so
lightly the mantle of so many Hollywood private eyes before him, is
doomed to fciilure. The film's balance of celebration and critique of
the private eye begins in its opening scene, after its black-and-white
art-deco credits, backed by Jerry Goldsmith's haunting trumpet
melody. The teasing possibility that the whole film will be shot in
black-and-white continues in its opening shot, a riffle through a
series of black-and-white still photographs of something Bogart
never would have been shown looking at: a man and a woman
having sex. Gittes is presenting them to Curly (Burt Young), his
latest client, a weeping skipjack who suspected all too accurately
that his wife had been cheating on him. Gittes's next client,
identifying herself as Evelyn Mulwray (Diane Ladd), wants to hire
Gittes to follow her husband, who she says is involved with another
woman. After token protest Gittes agrees and follows Hollis Mulwray
(Darrell Zwerling), the Chief Engineer of the Los Angeles Department
of Water and Power, through a dazzlingly pictorial array of locations,
from the hot, spacious interior of the county courthouse, where
Mulwray insists that a dam that drought-stricken local farmers claim
is necessary to their livelihood is doomed to collapse; to a dry
riverbed where Mulwray waits for hours until the night brings a
torrent of water through the spillway; to Echo Park, where
 Chinatown and the Private-Eye Film 203 Gittes photographs
Mulwray rowing with a mysterious young woman; to the Almacondo
Apartments, where he meets the young woman again. The one
place Mulwray never leads Gittes is his home, for reasons that will
soon become obvious. Throughout these dreamlike opening
sequences, the range of locations could not be further from the
mean streets of Chandler's Los Angeles. Cinematographer John A.
Alonzo's brilliant outdoor skies and low horizon lines create
dazzlingly picturesque vistas virtually unique in hard-boiled films.
The handsome, airless interiors designed by Richard Sylbert seem to
recede forever into deep space in widescreen framings that undercut
the customary visual dialectic between exterior and interior space, or
more generally between nature and culture, so vital in different ways
to Fury (1936), The Godfather (1972), Double Indemnity (1944),
Basic Instinct (1992), and Blue Velvet (1986). The absence of the
ubiquitous sepia/gold lighting increasingly used to shoot historical
dramas gives the film's vistas a fresh, contemporary look despite the
careful period costumes Gittes wears and the automobiles he passes
on the street; and the pacing of these early scenes, in which Gittes
intently watches Mulwray sitting oblivious and equally still in the
distance, is so deliberate that they become hypnotic. The
picturepostcard mise-en-scene presents southern California at its
most seductive, with only a few reminders that Chinatown is a
private-eye film: the class struggles portended by the farmers'
outrage at Mulwray's refusal to build a dam that would ensure
irrigation for their crops, the hints of a politiccil establishment
polluted by big money, Gittes 's creissly astringent urban sensibility.
At the same time, the slow pace of these scenes and their lack of
action serve a& a reminder that what Gittes is doing is nothing but
watching, harking back to the prehistory of the private eye, when
detectives were expected to be skilled observers rather than men of
violence [Fig. 45]. These early sequences, in which Mulwray seems
to be doing nothing but being watched, seem to fit Laura Mulvey's
proposition that cinema is organized around male voyeurism and
fetishism as neatly as the corresponding sequences in Hitchcock's
Vertigo (1958) in which Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart) watches
Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak). ^ Both men, bewildered by the
apparent lack of purpose behind their quarry's activities, become
fascinated with the possibility of discovering or constructing such a
purpose, and the obsessive quality of this fciscination is conveyed in
both films by the surreal beauty of the widescreen California
landscapes to which the watchers seem indiffer 
 Crime Films 45. Chinatown: A hero (Jack Nicholson) who
does nothing but watch. ent. If Gittes is following a man rather than
a woman, it is a man whose lack of masculinity, already
foreshadowed by his effeminate bowties, his self-effacing manner,
and his mildly ineffectual arguments agciinst the new dam, will
become steadily more apparent as the film proceeds, apparently
confirming Gittes 's own manliness through the private eye's
formulaic algebra of contrcist. What is most out of place amid the
ethereal beauty of the California locations in these opening
sequences is the earthy sensibility of Gittes, who seems more
realistically drawn than Chandler's twentiethcentury knights because
he cracks dirty jokes, acknowledges without shame that the
mainstay of his business is sordid divorce work, and seems, despite
the oleaginous assurance of his glad-handing professional manner
and the bravado of his flashy dress outfits, a parvenu little removed
from his dim "associates" Duffy (Bruce Glover) and Lawrence Walsh
(Joe Mantell), or even proletarian clients like Curly. Gittes, the film
seems to suggest, is no chivalric anachronism like Philip Marlowe; he
is the reed thing, a working stiff whose work happens to take him to
hotel bedrooms.
 Chinatown and the Private-Eye Film 205 46. Chinatown:
The glacial Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) as the hero first sees
her. No sooner, hiowever, iias tiie film replaced the normal visual
duality between nature and culture with a thematic duality between
its dreamlike landscape and its down-to-earth hero than it begins to
complicate it. Rumors about Mulwray's scandalous affair, leaked to
the newspapers, bring Gittes an icily menacing visit from the real
Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) [Fig. 46], which forces him to
acknowledge that he has not only, in clcissic private-eye form, been
decoyed into taking the
 Crime Films wrong case, but has taken it for the wrong
client, since the client on whose behalf he followed Mulwray was
obviously not his wife. Gittes's mistcike not only stcirts his
relationship with Evelyn Mulwray off on the wrong foot but forecasts
his deeper failures to come, after her husband's drowned body is
pulled from the spillway Gittes had watched him visit. Once Gittes
and Mrs. Mulwray tacitly agree to support each other's stories about
her having hired him to follow her husband, the plot seems settled in
a familiar groove: a dead husband, an alluring widow, a hard-boiled
outsider on the make. When Gittes retraces Mulwray's steps by
returning to the spillway that night, the signature scene that follows
adds the one ingredient that has so far been missing from the film's
hard-boiled stew: onscreen violence. After Gittes is nearly drowned
in the unexpectedly torrential runoff, his retreat is interrupted by
crooked ex-Ventura County sheriff Claude Mulvihill (Roy Jenson) and
Mulvihill's little white-suited companion, identified in the film's credits
only as "Man with Knife." As Mulvihill beats and then holds Gittes up,
his sidekick takes out a switchblade knife, accuses Gittes of being
nosy, and then unhesitatingly slits his nose. This scene confirms the
film's hard-boiled credentials, reminding viewers that despite its
leisurely opening it is still a story in which criminal corruption will be
figured as violent action. In addition, it connects Gittes to a
Hollywood tradition of physically suffering private eyes. Philip
Marlowe, who began life in Chandler's The Big Sleep by eyeing a
stciined-glass window over the door of the Sternwood mansion
showing a naked woman tied to a tree and rescued by a knight, has
to be rescued from bondage himself by the hard-bitten dame for
whom he is looking. Other screen Marlowes get shot up with dope
(Murder, My Sweet), slugged and forced off the road (Lady in the
Lake), or run down by cars (The Long Goodbye). Mike Hammer,
widely regarded as the toughest private eye of all, begins Kiss Me
Deadly by being pulled from his Ccir, beaten, and put back in the
Ccir to get sent over a cliff; miraculously surviving the fire that kills
his passenger, he is available to be beaten again, tied to a bed, and
drugged in a later scene before getting shot in the film's incendiary
climax. Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum), one of the few Hollywood
private eyes to avoid serious injury during his film, ends Out of the
Past shot dead by the femme fatale he thought he could outwit. The
ritual torturing of the private eye, of course, hcis the effect of giving
him a personal stake in his case, justifying in advance any extralegal
actions he might take in the name of
 Chinatown and the Private-Eye Film 207 47. Chinatown:
The disfigured nose of Gittes (Jack Nicholson) marks his vulnerability
and rationalizes his suspicions of treacherous women. personal
revenge; but it also confirms his status as a former or potential
victim whose heroic status is hard-won and liable to be revoked,
particularly when he fcills into the clutches of a treacherous woman
[Fig. 47]. In addition, the nose slitting in Chinatown is so sudden,
disproportionate, and graphic that it marks a disturbingly absolute
contreist with the serene California landscape through which Gittes
has been moving. The abrupt outburst of violence is Gittes's first
glimpse of the nightmare world lurking beneath the painterly surface
of Ctiinatown's widescreen visuals. In the most shocking touch of all,
the character who slits the hero's nose is played by the film's
director, Roman Polanski, who brings to it a dark history of his own.
Born in Poland, Polanski was eight years old when his parents were
forced into the concentration camp where his mother soon died.
Escaping from Cracow's Jewish ghetto, he wandered the wartime
countryside seeking refuge with a series of Catholic families.
Although he survived to be reunited with his father when his camp
weis liberated, he never forgot the episode in which German soldiers
pretended to use him for target practice.
 Crime Films Throughout Polanski's early films, a deadpan
sense of absurdity is linked to unbridled terror in the manner of
Jerzy Kosinski's Holocaust novel The Painted Bird. A few yecirs after
Polanski's award-winning surrealistic short Two Men and a Wardrobe
(Divaj ludzie z szafa, 1958) brought him to international notice, his
first feature. Knife in tlie Water (Noz w wodzie, 1962), established a
tone of lowering, often blackly comic menace he broadened in both
Britciin (Repulsion, 1965; Cul-deSac, 1966; Macbeth, 1971) and the
United States (The Fearless Vampire Killers, 1967; Rosemary's Baby,
1968). His acknowledged specialty was brooding tone poems that
seemed to translate Foe's unity of effect into cinematic terms.
Already his literal transcription of Macbeth, which treated
Shakespeare's supernatural horrors as metaphors for the normal
transfer of power, had confirmed his reputation for onscreen
violence. Yet Polanski, cis later films from The Tenant (1976) to The
Ninth Gate (1999) would confirm, was more often a poet of anomie
who preferred to keep violence, as in Rosemary's Baby, largely
offscreen, reserving it for moments in which it expressed and
releeised, for example, the pent-up psychological tension of the
fearfully repressed heroine of Repulsion. It is all the more gruesome
and ironic, therefore, that here, in his first film following the ritual
murder of his actress wife, Sharon Tate (the star of The Fearless
Vampire Killers^, by Charles Manson's deranged crime family, he
casts himself not as the victim of senseless violence but as its
perpetrator, marking a confusion between villains and victims at the
heart of his distinctive contribution to the private-eye genre. The
director's attack on his star, the first extended nighttime sequence in
the film, marks a pivotal point in the film's visual design as well.
Although the events thus far have taken place over at lecist three
days, they have been shot as if over a single extended afternoon
interrupted only by Mulwray and Gittes's nocturnal vigil at the
spillway. Similarly, the two days that remain in the story's time
scheme will be compressed, after Gittes's lunch the following day
with Evelyn's father, Noah Cross (John Huston), into a single endless
night, as exterior skies will gradually darken, horizon lines will rise,
color palettes will shade to oppressive monochromes (especially
during Gittes's visit to an orange grove), and the spectacular interior
depth characteristic of the film's early scenes will shrink as
claustrophobic interior spaces (most memorably in the tightly framed
interiors at the house of Evelyn's late impersonator, Ida Sessions)
close in around the hero.
 Chinatown and the Private-Eye Film 209 Ttiis sense of
creeping enclosure is emphasized in several ways. When Gittes
returns to the Department of Water and Power to accuse Mulwray's
deputy, Russ Yelburton (John Hillerman), of having set up his boss
for the scandal Gittes's investigation unleashed in order to discredit
him and take over his job, he discovers that Mulwray had once
owned the city's water supply in partnership with patriarchal Nocih
Cross. Then, smilingly accepting Gittes's "neisty reputation," Cross
offers nothing to allay the detective's suspicion of having been a
cat's-paw in a conspiracy to destroy Mulwray - only a handsome
amount of cash to "just find the girl" with whom Gittes had
photographed Mulwray, and an ominous view of Evelyn, his
daughter: "You're dealing with a disturbed woman who's just lost
her husband. . . . You may think you know what you're dealing with,
but believe me, you don't." Evelyn's own attempt to hire Gittes to
solve her husband's murder is undermined by the telltale twitches
that more and more often cross her beautiful but no longer placidly
reposeful face.^ Gittes's attempt to track down the reason for
Mulwray's murder takes him from the Hcdl of Records to a sun-
parched fruit grove in the valley - where his car is literally trapped
amid rows of orange trees and to the Mar Vista Inn and Rest Home,
where dozens of fading old men and women sit and doze, pinch the
nurses, or work on a patchwork quilt, unaware that the county
records to which Ida Sessions alerted Gittes identify them as the
proprietors of a fifty-thousand-acre empire that would be fabulously
valuable if current plans to bring water to the vcilley were
completed. Each stop in this stage of Gittes's journey of discovery is
organized around images of complicit mortality. Together they
provide an ironic critique of the opening identification of Los Angeles
with the new Eden, replacing the picture-postcard exteriors and
spacious interiors with landscapes ripe with intimations of death, the
corrupting force of money and culture, and the fragile natural
resources - here figured most powerfully by the ubiquitous images of
water - despoiled by human machinations. Gittes's far-reaching
odyssey over the external landscape, however, only begins a voyage
of self-discovery that intensifies when he takes Evelyn Mulwray to
bed. Everything he has done up to this point in the film has been
eminently consistent with his role as a vintage thirties private eye.
Though he is more brash and coarse, more self-centered and even
stupid than Bogart's heroes, his feral intelligence, his eye for the
mciin chance, and his suspicion of women mark him as the legit 
 Crime Films imate descendant of Marlowe and Spade. But
just as Marlowe's refusal to be bought off by Vivian Rutledge marks
a turning point in The Big Sleep - the moment at which Marlowe
stops acting as the Sternwood family's hired help and begins to act
like an isolated, impersonal instrument of justice - Gittes's new
status as Evelyn Mulwray's lover marks a crucial stage in his
relationship with Evelyn and in his status as a hard-boiled hero.
From now on, Gittes will not simply follow the self-righteous
professional code of the incorruptible private eye; beneath his shop-
soiled cynicism, he will disclose surprisingly quixotic depths of
idealism toward the client he loves but cannot trust. The fragility of
their relationship is indicated by how eeirly their lovemaking comes
in the film: far too soon to give it the terminal, perhaps redemptive
force that it would carry at the conclusion. Instead of being
sanctified by the romantic pairing of the scrappy detective and the
safely domesticated heroine, as it is in Philip Marlowe's first four
screen incarnations {Murder, My Sweet; The Big Sleep; Lady in the
Lake; The Brasher Doubloon, 1947), the ending of Chinatown is
defined by a pair of horrifying revelations: first Evelyn's sobbing
confession that the mysterious young woman with whom Gittes had
photographed Mulwray was not simply "my sister" or "my daughter"
but "my sister and my daughter," the product of Evelyn's incestuous
union with her father; then Cross's guileless confession that he killed
Mulwray to cover up his involvement in a scheme to inflate the value
of outlying land he has secretly purchased by manipulating the Los
Angeles water supply in order to force the expansion of the city's
boundaries. Asked by an incredulous Gittes what more he can
possibly hope to buy with whatever additional money he can amass
from this fraudulent scheme. Cross replies, "The future" - revealing
for the first time the link between his two monstrous crimes: incest
with his daughter and land fraud on an epic scale. Cross, whose first
name invokes the patriarch of the Flood (a role already played by
Huston in his own 1966 film version of The Bible'), has "water on the
brain" - a phrase Gittes used to describe the son-in-law he'd been
tailing. Cross, however, has his daughter on the brain as well. The
link between water and daughter is a fertility run amok under Cross's
monstrously paternal determination to control the future of his
family and his city, whose destiny he wishes to guide with a fond
solicitude ultimately unmasked as incestuous. As a monster who
gives new resonance to the term "city father," Cross reveals the
catastrophic sexual and social power of paternity gone mad in the
climactic street scene in the city's
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