Playing with Data Bases

This paper, presented at the DiGRA 2011 conference, argues that the data base is a central cultural form in modern life and in games, sitting between calculating machinery and the social practices that give it meaning. Its main claim is that data bases do not merely store information but actively structure it: every data base begins with a distinction that sorts things into categories, and those choices reflect technical and ideological decisions that shape what users notice and how they think. The author frames "playing with data bases" as adopting a data-base perspective, a mode of reasoning built on searching, filtering, linking, and ordering.

The analysis draws on two primary examples. The first is the Parship dating platform, whose roughly 80 to 90 question compatibility test turns personal life into categorized, comparable records that are matched by an algorithm and then narrowed through filters. The second is the economic simulation FIFA Fußball Manager 2010, in which the player manages a soccer club through tables of numbers, operating on the data indirectly through actions such as hiring players or adjusting ticket prices. The paper notes that the game's interface is itself a data base aesthetic, and that its numerical tables can be exported to spreadsheet software such as Microsoft Excel with nearly identical structure.

The author concludes that economy-based recreational games embody a rationality of measurability and controllability, in which decisions are presented as things to be quantified and managed rather than left to intuition. Acknowledging that real managerial practice often relies on experience and instinct, the paper argues that such games do not offer an escape from reality but instead function as training in numerical practices, familiarizing players with the logic of a society increasingly organized around data.