Game Design as Cultural Practice Fall 2009

Using our Imaaaaginations

So it turns out that all of those years of me running underneath a giant parachute or eating asphalt in a last attempt to capture that one person in a game a blob weren’t entirely pointless or merely just children’s’ games. Apparently what I had been doing in my free time as a child was exactly the aim of reactionaries years ago who sought to break out of the norms and rules of everyday gameplay in order to create a more dynamic and interesting form of gameplay. Alternative game movements were a reinvention of the way we play. While the normal structure of games  produce a winner and a loser, in most alternative games usually everyone wins, both in the amount of fun they are having and in the actual game itself. It’s also interesting to note that alternative games don’t have an exact set of rules. It’s the same concept of giving Ryan Styles of “Who’s Line is it Anyway?” a goofy looking prop and telling him to make people laugh.  Playing with a parachute would be a great example of this.  There aren’t really rules persay, other than the ones that are made up as you go along. As the play progresses, rules are kept or thrown out depending on how well they fit with the other rule sets. The gameplay may start as one thing and by the end have evolved into something completely different. This phenomenon was explained perfectly by Fron et al in Sustainable Play:

 

                “One of the key revelations that participants came away with was

the importance of subjective engagement in the game experience.

It is as easy to get ensnarled in theoretical intellectualism as it is

to become preoccupied by the technical demands of game making.

This exercise brought us back to the central purpose of creating a

satisfying player experience, and awakened in the participants the

possibility that there might be more to gaming than the marketing

departments of mainstream game companies would have us

believe.” (Fron et al, 4)

 

This phenomenon isn’t just limited to outdoor activities. New media such as massively multiplayer online games have provided a new space for players to explore their creativity. Most of the time alternative play comes purely out of boredom. I remember back when I played Ragnarok Online, after reaching the level cap there was really nothing more to do. My friends and I would constantly be trying things out of the ordinary. We would play hide and seek, hiding in different areas of the world, we would create characters that began with the word “Oob” and invade popular pvp spots, often nagging higher level players by trying to kill them even though we knew it wasn’t possible. I remember those moments much more fondly than I do playing any of the normal parts about the game. Those moments felt very real to me, we had taken a game which everyone played and made it our own. Fron et al also cite this in Sustainable Play describing a same sort of experience that occurred in Lineage. Players decide to use a common item in the game to craft designs and messages for one another. (Fron et al, 4)

 

The ability for people make games within games has become so popular that people have been able to commercialize games out of the modification to games. In “Games as Art” they explain the origin of Counter-Strike. It was a game that originated from a mod in half-life. Ironically today there are now mods of counter-strike which are commercialized games. One example of which is Team Fortress 2. While the art and mood is completely different, the core gameplay mechanics that came from the original mod of counter strike are still there.  This model of making new rules for old games to create a whole new experience has helped to diversify the game industry and make it as interesting as it is today.

Works Cited:

Brand, Stewart. "SPACEWAR: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums," Rolling Stone, Dec. 7, 2001.

Fron, J., Fullerton, T., Morie, J. & Pearce, C. (aka Ludica) (2005). "Sustainable Play: Towards a New Games Movement for the Digital Age." Digital Arts & Culture Conference Proceedings, Copenhagen, Dec. 2005.

Peace, Celia. "Games as Art: The Aesthetics of Interactivity." Visible Language: Special Issue on Fluxus. Jan. 2006.

Alternative Games and the Problem of Audience

A New Gamer, a Basement Geek, and a Game Modder walk into a bar. The bartender asks, "so what are you drinking tonight?". (I would give you an answer to that, but it turns out the joke is really long because they all want a different drink and have well explained needs that validate those drinks) This may go without saying, but the joke isn't very funny.

From the middle of the Vietnam war to the rise of basement digital culture to the popularization of digital media, there have been drastic changes to what is considered the popular concept of games. Where one culture embraces play in its purest sense, that is, play devoid of competition, one will marvel around the modification of rules in competitive circumstances. Other groups will be devoted entirely to new experiences and embrace roles that naturally develop from the expanding sets of tools they offer. The end result is a conflicted and developing history and study of play that radically changes depending on who you are talking to.

So who are we talking to and why are they all seeing play so differently? There is the New Gamer movement (as I call them), an open-minded and peace-oriented gaming culture that academically claims true games are entirely based upon play and require no real rules, but instead require boundaries. These New Gamers reach the height of their influence during strong periods of anti-war sentiment. The two main examples of rising influence from this group are the mid to early 70's, during the peak of dissatisfaction with the Vietnam war, and the mid 2000's, immediately after the initial American Invasion of Iraq. The New Gamer group focuses specifically on games that are play without final goals. They typically engage their users in tasks that allow players to sporadically changes teams and rarely give either team a death or win condition. Proponents of this movement also seem to be the most pleased when these games go on for long periods of time without an end condition being reached. A good example that highlights the underlying intention of the movement's authors would be Bernard Suits reflection on the game, Mother Earth. In Mother Earth, the improvised goal would be for two teams to push a ball past a declared boundary. Suits would then muse that "whenever a team neared a goal, it was noted that players from the winning team would defect to help the [losing] side".(Ludica 2) This would satisfy Suits's intention of creating a "utopian paradox".(Lucidia 2) This spontaneous change in human behavior to uncover altruistic nature tends to be a recurring theme in many of the works that detail this movement, including the Bernie DeKoven book, The Well-Played Game: A Playful Path to Wholeness. The book generally depicts games with loss scenarios as improperly balanced, and glorifies games that have sustained play as "well-played". He suggests that games that have a winner and loser must creation a a partnership, but the "result of such a union is separation".(DeKoven 7)

Another movement that was brought to fame through its creation of the first digital games is the "Basement Geek"(as I call it) movement from the mid 60's and early 70's. This group consists of hobbyists and hackers (though they were not hackers at the time, there was not such a thing!) from well-funded technical universities. These universities would have a proper budget along with technology that had recently been produced from an expanding United States Military. They had computers. These computers would be the bastion of modern computer science by day, but the experimental development hub of graphic based games by night. The glorified narrative behind the origins of competitive play within the computer game Space Wars, Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bum, recounts the opinions and experiences of the original computer gamers. This article written by Stewart Brand highlights dedication to meta-existence and role validation within a computer game.  The lengthy article says nothing at all about play mechanics, but instead recreates the experience and role that players tried to fulfill. The article goes into details about the fact that users are creating and operating a spaceship that is aimed against others and details the role-driven dialog that has one players chastising the other for "killing" him.(Brand) A surprisingly small amount of information is given about the actual game design behind the games of this culture. Instead, most literature describes these groups as role-players that intend to expand their meta-vocabulary.

Though seeming similar to Basement Geek, there is another tier of alternative games, the Modder. This group consists of many talented users of popular software that are able to redesign aspects of a game without altering the engineering of said game's platform. In many ways they are the opposite of the Geek. While a Basement Geek seeks to extend vocabulary by expanding engineering, the Modder seeks to better use existing vocabulary to a different effect. In Celia Pearce's entry into the Fluxus series, a prologue to the paper titled Portrait of the Artist as a Young Gamer, we are introduced into the community that created Counter-Strike. A game that takes the existing vocabulary of Half-life, that is, the ability to shoot others, script events, and smash in-game objects, and produce and entirely unique experience. This experience was the genuine product of competitive gamers, it had been tweaked to balance nirvana and was perfectly dichotomous with its community produced goals. In this game, users were either terrorists or counter-terrorists. The winner, most of the time, was the team that wasn't dead or manages to blow up/disable a bomb somewhere on the map. You were either evil terrorists or noble counter-terrorists. There are no in gray areas of morality and the rulings of the fresh game logic were absolute. This movement was a far removed cry from the goaless New Gamers, a group that embraced games that were devoid of absolutes or hyper-balance. While Pearce goes on to say that this kind of approach is feeding the cliched "status quo narratives of combat" that include "good guy vs terrorist," she does spend a good amount of detail explaining the success and inspiration behind Count-Strike (without argument, an extremely successful mod), which strongly represents the community that has evolved around game modification, for better or for worse.(Pearce 76)

So what is it that these groups have in common? They have all shaped the subject of alternative gaming in one way or another. What is is that many scholars will hesitate to claim about these different groups altogether? They are drastically different audiences that in many ways have created products that reflect their communal nature. Is anyone surprised that pro-peace college students during the Vietnam War are producing laid back games without teams or winners? Is anyone surprised that Super Nerds (and that is a positive label) are producing games in which they are able to role-play as a starship pilot? Even more shocking, is anyone surprised that the hyper-competitive PC gaming community of the early 2000's is making what would go on to be one of the most competitive and overplayed tournament games of all time? My answer is no, no one should be surprised.

While each group is able to make a compelling argument and has a legitimate and positive reason to exist, they are products of their existing constituency. What would Brand's Mother Earth game be like in the hands of counterstrike tournament players? How would the only moderately flexible game rules behind Space War sit with the New Gamers? And how would the Geeks tie their game vocabulary to their roles in Counter-Strike? The answers should be obvious, the tournament players would brawl in the mud until all players are fragged (the surviving team pushes earth after that is done, much like how counter-terrorist teams usually just kill the terrorists and forget about the bomb). The New Gamers would invalidate Space War over the frequent deaths they would experience. And the Basement Geeks would create a machinema version of The Battle of Algiers (which I'm sure exists somewhere).

As for the joke about the different gamers in a bar, the New Gamer gets an espresso, the Basement Geek gets a Tab, and the Modder gets a generic energy drink. The bartender then says, "what the hell are you people doing at a bar?"

Bibliography:

DeKoven, B. (1978) The Well-Played Game: A Player's Philosophy. New York: Anchor Books. (2nd Edition)

Brand, Stewart. "SPACEWAR: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums," Rolling Stone, December 7, 2001. http://www.wheels.org/spacewar/stone/rolling_stone.html

Fron, J., Fullerton, T., Morie, J. & Pearce, C. (aka Ludica) (2005). "Sustainable Play: Towards A New Games Movement for the Digital Age." Digital Arts & Culture Conference Proceedings, Copenhagen, December 2005.

Pearce, Celia. "Games as Art: The Aesthetics of Interactivity." Visible Language: Special Issue on Fluxus. January 2006.

Dvorak

Since it seems relevant to the emergent gameplay that a lot of us have talked about in the latest blog posts, I thought that I'd share this link with everyone:

http://www.dvorakgame.co.uk/index.php/Main_Page

It's a card game called Dvorak in which the point is to make the cards as you play. There are a few rules for how the cards are made, but otherwise it is very free-form and creative. The website also has several ideas for decks that others have already created.

Also, check out the website of Dvorak's creator, Kevan Davis:

http://kevan.org/

It has tons of other interesting game projects that he has worked on.

--Daniel

Alternative Game Movements: Unbound by Tradition

            The creation of new games often seems to become bogged down with the myriad preconceptions of culture. All games require depictions of violence; there must always be a clear winner; the point of the game is to win; games are idle wastes of time and cannot serve any additional, functional purpose—all these arbitrary restrictions lead to a narrow-minded approach to creation that limits innovation. The Fluxus and New Game Movements present alternative ideas in response to these cultural limiters, bringing about the creation of different kinds of games. Drawing from these movements, several games demonstrate the potential of games to break free of traditional molds. Four particularly relevant ones are Spacewar, Earthball, White Chess, and Multicycle.

            First is Spacewar, which is not a part of the Fluxus or the New Game Movements, but it does reflect a similar spirit of innovation. The central gameplay mechanic is simple: two spaceships fly around and try to blow each other up. Unfortunately, Spacewar was unable to break free of the typical gameplay focus on violence. However, as the first computer game, Spacewar, demands a different perspective. While its gameplay sounds similar to myriad games of today, it was quite novel in 1962. The idea of using a computer (previously just a computational tool) as a medium for play transformed cultural perceptions of the device. Stewart Brand, in his essay “Spacewar,” discusses how the game proceeded to develop a culture of its own. Programmers continued to “hack” the game, adding new features and minor changes to improve the gameplay. Several versions of the game appeared, all tweaked according to the tastes of individual programmers. In this way, Spacewar might be considered the first “modding” community game. Also, the game itself served as a test space for practicing or testing code, serving a dual-purpose that ultimately benefited the professional (non-game) productivity of the programmers as well. Thus, while Spacewar lacks innovative gameplay, its very inception was innovative, as well as its ability to cultivate a society of “modders” and provide a useful space for programming practice.

            Next is Earthball, which came about as a part of the New Games Movment, driven by the mantra “Play Hard. Play Fair. Nobody Hurt.” The movement emphasized physicality, interactivity, emergent gameplay, and the importance of players as people. The gameplay of Earthball is simple: two teams attempt to push a giant inflated ball towards opposite goals. The physicality and interactivity are evident in the description. Fron et al., in the essay “Sustainable Play,” made an interesting observation about the emergent aspect of Earthball. In some games, players would defect and switch teams when the ball was about to be pushed past a goal. By their efforts, the ball was pushed back the other direction until the same thing happened again, perpetuating the game as long as possible. At this point, the goal of the game was no longer to win, but to play. Players intentionally broke the rules in order to make the game more fun—an idea that is both acceptable and encouraged by the New Games Movement. Earthball also reflects the ideas of a "well-played game" presented in DeKoven's book The Well-Played Game. It's focus is on fun--on a means, not an end. The game itself is dynamic and changeable into whatever it needs to be to suit the desires of the entire group. In all these ways, Earthball delivers a unique gameplay experience that is fun, active, social, and flexible. It is "well-played." Even though it has an end condition, the point isn’t to achieve victory. By perpetuating its own gameplay, Earthball discovers fun without becoming bogged down by what games are “supposed” to be.

            The last two games are White Chess and Multicycle, which both clearly demonstrate the Fluxus ideal for games and provide good examples of Celia Pearce’s argument for “Games as Art.” If games are art, then they can be more than just play—they can have a message or exist to make a statement. For instance, Yoko Ono’s famous White Chess was conceived as a protest to the violence of the Vietnam War. In the game, all the pieces are white. This results in an inevitably convoluted game that is almost impossible to actually play. Such intentional obfuscation of game mechanics is also present in George Maciunas’s Multicycle: a vehicle of 16 bikes combined into one. The actual game arises from trying to drive the bizarre vehicle, a task that is impossible without cohesive teamwork and communication. Thus, like Yoko Ono’s piece, Multicycle also makes a statement, this one about the value of collaboration.

            From these examples, it is clear that games need not be limited to the narrow restrictions of mainstream game-design conventions. Games can be innovative and useful (such as Brand's observations on Spacewar), "purposeless," emergent, and flexible (according to DeKoven, Fron et al., and the New Games Movement), politically-charged and artistic (according to Pearce), and/or serve any number of functions beyond the basic idea of “play.” These special cases serve as a challenge to game designers to dispose their preconceptions and pursue new and creative ideas.

 

--Daniel

Works Cited:

Brand, Stewart. "SPACEWAR: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums," Rolling Stone, Dec. 7, 2001.

DeKoven, B. (1978) The Well-Played Game: A Player's Philosophy. New York: Anchor Books, 2nd Ed.

Fron, J., Fullerton, T., Morie, J. & Pearce, C. (aka Ludica) (2005). "Sustainable Play: Towards a New Games Movement for the Digital Age." Digital Arts & Culture Conference Proceedings, Copenhagen, Dec. 2005.

Peace, Celia. "Games as Art: The Aesthetics of Interactivity." Visible Language: Special Issue on Fluxus. Jan. 2006.

These are the NEW games

The mechanics of traditional games have been, through years of play, so ingrained in my consciousness that it is difficult for me to think outside of those terms.  Sports (basketball and football), video games (super mario), and traditional board games (monopoly, chess) have taught me that life is governed by rules and that there is an end goal to aspire to.  Additionally, competition extended beyond games into everyday life.  School became analogous to all of the games that I played; it had rules, scores, and a goal.  My peers were simultaneously my teammates and my competition.  It is with this mindset that I examined the New Games described in the readings.  These games were played in ways that challenged my preconceptions of what  a game is.

Brand's Earthball urges players to push a large ball in an open area.  At first glance, this seems to be the opposite of tug-of-war; two teams pitted against each other to score in some end zone.  But this game is played without teams or a pre-defined goal.  Players determine where they would like to push the ball, and can change their position at any time.  There is no scoring and, as such, no way for the players to compete [Ludica 2].  

Rock-Paper-Scissors Tag seems at first to be a traditional game.  Two teams compete in group rock-paper-scissors, and the team that wins tags the losing team.  Any people that are tagged, are moved to the winning team.  The players are constantly switching teams, so the competition cannot flow from throw to throw.  Instead, each conflict is treated as its own game, rather than as a part of a series.    There isn't a definite endgame situation, so the play continues until the players decide to stop.  Everyone wins and loses during the course of the game and there is no way to keep score.  Because of this, there is no way to determine any winners or losers [Ludica 3]. 

Finally, Prui is a game in which there can be no winners or losers.  The game is governed by only a few rules, which require the players to close their eyes and shake hands.  The players cannot talk, unless it is to ask "Prui?"  of the other players.  If they come into contact with the Prui (who does not say anything when prompted) they become a Prui as well.  Initially, it seems that becoming the Prui is undesirable.  But it is not the goal of the player (nor is it possible) to avoid becoming Prui. The game doesn't not have goals or winners.  The game simply is. [Ludica 3]

Bibliography

Brand, Stewart.  1972.  Spacewar:  Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums.  Rolling Stone, December 7.

Fron, J., Fullerton, T., Morie, J. & Pearce, C. (aka Ludica) (2005). "Sustainable Play: Towards A New Games Movement for the Digital Age." Digital Arts & Culture Conference Proceedings, Copenhagen, December 2005.

Pearce, Celia. "Games as Art: The Aesthetics of Interactivity." Visible Language: Special Issue on Fluxus. January 2006.

Analyzing the games of alternative game movements

        The 1960’s and 70’s were an interesting time for games.  Not only was the advent of computational game play just coming to light, but also traditional ways of play were being challenged and reinvented, being presented in interesting ways that sought new goals from the typical ‘win’ scenario.  The alternative gaming movement that took place during this time was able to contradict traditional modes of play while still maintaining familiar game mechanics.  Three games from these movements will be presented and analyzed in order to explore the way alternative games were being used during this time.

“Play hard.  Play fair.  Nobody hurt.”  This was the motto of the New Games movement that took place in the 1970’s, a movement that strove to remove competition and aggression from games (as was, and still is, a very common part of play) in order to motivate a sense of unity, cooperation, and peace.  The games that arose from this movement and similar movements were a reaction to worldwide tension and conflict, most specifically the Vietnam War.  These were meant to be a welcome estival juxtaposition to the damp winter of chaos and warfare going on the world over.  Thus it comes as no surprise that these games had group goals (or no clear goals at all) with no one winner declared at the conclusion of the game.  One such game from this movement Knots had all the players hold hands in any possible formation.  That is, your arm could be going under another’s, over, or perhaps even through someone’s legs.  The idea was to create a complex knot of player connected by held hands.  Then the players were required to untangle themselves without eve letting go hands.  Like many games of the New Games movement, Knots required heavy physicality between players.  Constant physical contact must be maintained in order to complete the game successfully.  While physicality was not a new concept in gaming by any means, the longevity of proximity was novel.  This, combined with group-oriented goals, such as the entire set of players working in synch to un-tie the know, opened up a new set of games for people to explore.  The group mentality approach to the New Games movement has led these games to be very popular in Youth Groups, management retreats, and summer camps today, used to promote trust, team spirit, and non-aggressive competition.

Beginning in the 60’s and gaining momentum into the 1970’s was the Fluxus movement.  This was a movement that promoted games as an art form, as a platform on which people could unleash creative energy and make statements and, most importantly, continually reform a particular concept.  As Pearce discusses, Fluxus objects, like chess were beautiful in and of themselves, but their true beauty lay in their potential energy, in the game play that could and would emerge from them: “It is in the playing that a chessboard comes alive, and the game object becomes a catalyst for play.”  The Fluxus boxes were intended as a kind of do-it-yourself kit to art.  They allowed the play to manipulate the items in the box in free, creative ways, producing their own unique results.  While there were cards with some direction included with the sets, the open-ended nature of the Fluxus boxes broke from the norm of conventional gaming.  There was no win condition or lose condition, no teams or even true players really, in the traditional sense.  Anyone could open up a Fluxus set and create their own piece of art by simply using the tools provided.  This allowed for new types of game play, including heavy modding of either new or old forms of play.  This tendency towards creative iterating and push for modulation expanded the world of gaming and became a precursor for digital gaming, which would, as we will see, introduce a world of constant editing, modulation, and iterative design for game culture.

Hacker culture erupted in the 1960’s and 70’s as young computer scientists converged upon this new and blossoming field.  Most hackers of the day did not come from a computing background for the simple reason that there was not much of a computing background to come from, but this led to highly motivated individuals working to create work that was personally motivated.  One such result was Spacewar, an early space combat game played on single consoles.  Spacewar’s fame does not necessarily come from its game play, although it was extremely fun and highly addictive.  It is a landmark in digital gaming more so for its viral nature.  Created in 1961 at MIT by Steve Russell and colleagues, Spacewar quickly caught on in the computing world and just as quickly was being changed, upgraded, and modded by others in the field.  Spacewar would seem conventional in it’s game play today – control a ship and try to kill opposing ships while not being killed yourself – but it was novel at the time, as it was on a digital produced monitor.  However, even this alone does not quite stand out from conventional gaming mechanics and concepts.  It was the viral mod culture around Spacewar that allowed anyone (assuming you had the computing knowledge) to edit and play the game as he/she saw fit.  It was an entirely new way of gaming.  While any board game or physical could and has been modded in this way, digital gaming provided a sense of definitiveness about the rules you created: while you were playing the game, the rules COULD NOT be broken.  And these rules allowed players to do things they would not be able to do in the real world, like fly ships and blow each other up.  In short, Spacewar provided an ever changing yet authoritative platform for game design in a way the world had never seen. 

While sometimes drastically different from each other, the games of the different alternative game movements of the 1960’s and 70’s all held to a spirit of reinvention, modulation, and group collaboration that has become so fundamental in so many games today.  It allowed for gaming to be seen in a serious light that could have political implications, but also a more communal light, communal in a way that never before seemed possible with the coming of digital gaming.

 

Works Cited

Brand, Stewart.  1972.  Spacewar:  Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums.  Rolling Stone, December 7.

Fron, J., Fullerton, T., Morie, J. & Pearce, C. (aka Ludica) (2005). "Sustainable Play: Towards A New Games Movement for the Digital Age." Digital Arts & Culture Conference Proceedings, Copenhagen, December 2005.

Pearce, Celia. "Games as Art: The Aesthetics of Interactivity." Visible Language: Special Issue on Fluxus. January 2006.

Blogpost 3 (4?): Gender, Race, Scissors

    While I was reading that Sustainable Play, I kept thinking to myself, "Hey, we played that in class;" so, I figured I might as well analyze the games with which I have personal experience.The first was probably my favorite (strangely enough, the students in the paper seemed to like it the best as well), Rock, Paper, Scissors Tag. Since we all played it, I'll skip the description. RPST (that's what all the cool kids are calling it) was fun because there wasn't really much of an endgame. Sure, the idea was to go on a winning streak so that your team absorbed the other, but what made it feel so different was that the face of the enemy kept changing. What was funny was that it was really only a handful of people doing the decision making, but when they lost and were tagged, they'd go over to the other team and still try to be the decision maker...even though they'd just joined the team that essentially outwitted them. What else was new to me was that when your team had a strategy that it was going with, if it ever failed and you managed not to get tagged, you'd know that members of the other team were aware of your strategy.The game took that traditional RPS game mechanic (a bit self-referential, I know) and made it into a game of psychology. It also managed to take a lot of the emotional investment out of it because losing just meant you got to go play for the winning team. It also had a tug-of-war aspect in that the game never seemed to make progress toward and end result since the mode of conflict had a chance of victory that was essentially a coin flip (but where George Washington has a brain and goals).

    Another new game we played that was mentioned in Sustainable Play was Prui. Once again, I'll assume we all know the rules. Prui, I did not like so much, but that might be because I was afraid my hand would wander somewhere unwelcome (it's not like we're all the same height) and drama would ensue. Anyway, that game completely subverts typical gameplay mechanics. You can't really win at Prui. You just play it. There aren't really teams either.The game is more about the process, although, it probably would've fallen into the fun category more if the process hadn't been so dull. If only they could've thought of a more engaging way of interacting and spreading the prui "infection," if you will...

    Sustainable Play also talks about some video games that fall into the New Game category, including Halo 2. Born out of the player community of Halo 2 (and it may have originated in Counter-Strike or elsewhere, I don't know) and later formally included in Halo 3 was the game Infection. Infection actually works a lot like a combination of RPST and Prui. The way it works is that when a round starts, everyone is human except a set population (1 player, 25% of the players, etc) who are the zombies. If a human kills a zombie, the zombie just respawns and tries again. If a zombie kills a human, they're infected and then respawn as a zombie. The round ends when there are no humans left. So, imagine Prui, but fun and with the team aspects of RPST in that losing a team mate typically means trouble for you.

    Halo 3 as a whole is obvously not a New Game, but the reason Infection falls into that category is simply because the goal is to play the game. Sure, you can technically "win," but that's only because they wanted to put the game online and the masses aren't into the whole New Game idea. Anyway, the way my friends and I usually play is that the zombies only get melee weapons and the humans only get a shotgun and a pistol (both standard Infection fare). The zombies have less health and the only items on the map--which can only be used by humans--are mongooses (mongeese?) (ATVs) and a single guass hog (an SUV with a mounted single-shot armor-piercing cannon). The catch is that the zombies run at 300% speed, which makes them as fast as the vehicles. The most popular strategy for the humans is try and be one of the two or three people in the guass hog. The reason this is significant is that if this were a game that people took seriously from a competitive standpoint, no one would ever drive. Whoever gets in the back of the guass hog always gets the most kills, and the zombies who go after the gauss hog always die the most. But, this is a New Game, and the fun is in the playing and not the winning. Chasing down that 'hog is challenging, and if you succeed, you've got yourself a couple new team mates to help you go after the guys who like to sit in the cockpit of the elephant (it's a big vehicle). Infectrion uses the same tools and basic rule sets that every other Halo gametype does (physics, etc) and the basic gameplay idea of killing people, but flips it on its side to make the idea of playing for your team or even for personal glory come second to idea of just playing with your friends...and some random people you recruited online.

REFERENCES:

Ludica (Fron et al.).  2005.  Sustainable Play:  Towards A New Games Movement for the Digital Age.  In Digital Arts & Culture Conference Proceedings, Copenhagen, December 2005.

Games, Art, and War

    Film, from its onset has always been seen as a way for artists to express themselves. Painting, well, that's  just considered to be purely "art". Why then is it harder to associate games with art? Perhaps it is partly because of  certain aspects of games. Bernie DeKoven describes games as something that only exists as long as it is created. Games are suspended from reality and have no bearing on what occurs outside of the game. Using this definition it can be easy to concur that art and games have no place along the same wavelength. However, games have evolved, gone through its own movements, and basically captured the imagination of many, and allowed a medium through which art can be presented. Even DeKoven goes on to say that games ultimately are connected with art and reality through a well-played game. In this way, games have managed to become into its own, subvert the tendencies of its own form, and become what most people would consider "art".

     The New Game Movement originally arose from reactions to the Vietnam War and was based on "Play Hard. Play Fair. Nobody Hurt." It focused on outside, physical play that was concerned with a lot of the well-played game mechanics explained by DeKoven. They allowed the cooperation of all the participants and was much less competitive. An example of a game from this New Game Movement would be Knots which started off with everyone holding hands with someone else. The result of this would be a group of people all tied up as their arms go this way and that. The goal and win condition is to untie these knots by having people move around until the twisted group is a complete circle. Much like DeKoven's well-played game, the end condition is determined by the actions of everyone and requires cooperation, not competition, to win. Like a well-played game, everyone is on equal paring and if one person wins, everyone else wins too. Of course, if the untwisting process is unsuccessful, then everyone loses, but this is the beauty of the game. Everyone is together, affected equally by the same factors. In this way it could be said that Knots quietly subverts the traditional characteristics of games and competition. There is never a winner and loser, one or the other.

    Coming about the same time as the New Game Movement was Yoko Ono's White Chess Set. This was in tune with the political reactions to the war and the Fluxus movement happening around then. Again, like Knots, the chess set requires cooperation because all the pieces of the game are white. Many different play methods and rules can come out of this situation but they are all rules which are agreed upon by the two players. These rules would allow a level playing field and a way for both players to enjoy the game and feel they are playing a "well-played" game. And, while it can contain the typical mechanics of games, Celia Pearce states that this chess set helps to subvert the "implicit narratives of combat and enmity" seen in most computer games.

    In the early video game stages, Spacewar came out as an early frontrunner of the evolution of computers and programming in general. The game was rather simple and had all the mechanics and characteristics of a game, more specifically rules, goals, obstacles, resources, consequences, and information as listed by Pearce. But what was important about Spacewar was its origin with Hackers. The game was in tune with many of the aspects of New Game Movements and the up and coming "mods" and  "patches" fields of video games. Spacewar was designed in such a way that "encouraged  new programming by the user" as Stewart Brand puts it. It was easy to change the way the game could be played and certain obstacles and such could be added such as a hyperspace ability. In that way, it resembles the Digital New Games that Fron ,et al,  mention as ways to convey the New Game Movement through the digital medium like Second Life and There. Fron, et al, also mentions the "new new game" movement that contains aspects such as creating a temporary world that encourages participation between the players rather than through the machine. This could also be compared to Spacewar  as Brand called it a game that "served human interest, not machine". So certainly, Spacewar could be viewed as not just a precursor to video games and computing, but also as an  introduction to the use of subversive art and play in video games.

    Games in general are hard to see as art much on the same level as paintings and even films. But a close study and evaluation of some of the games arising from specific movements such as Knots, White Chess Set, and Spacewar show the inherent subversive nature of these kinds of video games and the use of such a medium to display art. In addition, these games also apply the characteristics of a well-played game to provide a cooperative environment where games can be above reality while still becoming grounded in real-world issues.

Bibliography

DeKoven, B. (1978) The Well-Played Game: A Player's Philosophy. New York: Anchor Books. (2nd Edition)

Brand, Stewart. "SPACEWAR: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums," Rolling Stone, December 7, 2001. http://www.wheels.org/spacewar/stone/rolling_stone.html

Fron, J., Fullerton, T., Morie, J. & Pearce, C. (aka Ludica) (2005). "Sustainable Play: Towards A New Games Movement for the Digital Age." Digital Arts & Culture Conference Proceedings, Copenhagen, December 2005.

Pearce, Celia. "Games as Art: The Aesthetics of Interactivity." Visible Language: Special Issue on Fluxus. January 2006.

Breaking Convetions: Prui, Uru, and Velvet-Strike

            The rise of the New Games Movement and the Fluxus movement are just a few movements that seek to break the traditional conventions of gaming or play.  However, what exactly are the traditional conventions of a game?  According to Pearce, games all share six distinguishable features: parameterized play (rules of the game), a goal, obstacles, resources, consequences (rewards and penalties), and information (Pearce, 69).   By altering or changing these features, movements such as the New Games Movement and Fluxus movement have essentially changed the ways in which players interact or play.  Three games from the aforementioned movements that subvert these common features are Prui, Uru, and Velvet-Strike.

Ludica states that games within the New Games Movement “’take back the rules’ and break free of the oppressive constraints of commercial games” (Ludica, 5).  The New Games Movement is also non competitive and promotes player collaboration, while still making the play enjoyable and fun.  One game of the non-digital context of the New Games Movement is Prui, where players wander around blindly shaking other people’s hands saying the word “prui”.  However, later in the game a leader or the Prui is introduced who cannot say the word “prui”, and players who shake the leader’s hand are converted into leaders as well.  The game is finished once everyone is silent due to everyone turning into leaders.  What is interesting is that once the game unfolds players tend to bend the rules.  This is especially true in the USC case study where self-appointed leaders emerge, which also happened when we played the game.  Clearly this is not meant to happen because it breaks the rules set in place, but as DeKoven said to the USC study group, “These things happen” (Ludica, 3) and it in no way detracts from the game.  The game is more focused on the interaction between the players and not the common convention of having to win or lose, a concept similar to DeKoven's view on games where he says, "victory is not determined by who wins, nor by what game we play, but rather by the quality of playing that we have been able to create together" (DeKoven, 12).

Another game is Uru, which is apart of the digital aspect of the New Games Movement.  Uru is a massive multiplayer online game in which players are tasked to restore the culture of the D’Ni people  (Ludica, 4).  After the game closed, fans created their own servers in which they created new games such as the D’Ni Olympics, manifested games that used the properties of the game, but are unrelated to the actual game itself.  By subverting the traditional aspects and play of the game Ludica says that Uru “became a playground in which players could inscribe their own rules and game activities” (Ludica, 4).

Finally, Velvet-Strike is one of the games of the Fluxus movement due to the fact that it is a mod of another mod, Counter-Strike.  Counter-Strike is basically an online first person shooter where players compete on two different teams, Terrorists and Counter-Terrorists.  Players compete on different maps where goals and objectives are different such as planting a bomb or saving hostages.  Counter-Strike is mainly a very competitive and violent game involving shooting and killing other players.  However, Velvet-Strike puts a twist on the game in that it “transforms a weapon into an artistic tool that shoots graffiti rather than bullets at a targeted surface” (Pearce, 77).  By doing this, Velvet-Strike completely alters the game mechanics in Counter-Strike where the game is now central on art rather than killing.

 

Bibliography:

Brand, Stewart.  1972.  Spacewar:  Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums.  Rolling Stone, December 7.  Online: http://www.wheels.org/spacewar/stone/rolling_stone.html

DeKoven, Bernie.  2002.  The Well-Played Game, 3rd ed.  Lincoln, NE:  Writers Club Press.

Ludica (Fron et al.).  2005.  Sustainable Play:  Towards A New Games Movement for the Digital Age.  In Digital Arts & Culture Conference Proceedings, Copenhagen, December 2005.

Pearce, Celia.  2006.  Games as Art: The Aesthetics of Interactivity.  Visible Language: Special Issue on Fluxus, January 2006.

Alternative Game Movements: How the rules are made

Video games are unlike all other forms of games “Unlike board games or even sports, the rule structure of most digital games is opaque… they constrain players actions without recourse to alteration.”(Fron, p.4) In other words, the rules of video games often can’t be changed. For instance in Halo I really only have one way of interacting with non player characters, I can’t change the rules to decide that I want to try to be diplomatic about things I can only shoot.

 

MIT’s Spacewar(1962) is an interesting game in that it has flexible rules that can be decided at the beginning of a match or reprogrammed to give the user the experience they want. As shown in the play though of the game, the player is given the prompt “TYPE Y TO GET A STANDARD GAME.”(Brand) Upon selecting “N” the player is given the option of changing all the setting for the game. Controlling the game by letting the user modify a set of rules is the more common method of putting a little flexibility in games though at the time this game was released this was uncommon especially when compared to pong(1972) which didn’t give the user many ways to interact with it at all. This game goes one step further as well, because the code was released it allowed players to reprogram it to create there own rules to play by. Also, the game lets the players decide the out come of the game. While the game keeps score, its up to the players to decide what the score means wither it should be looked at as an individual score or a team score and so on.

 

The games mentioned in Fron’s article are also interesting in their flexibility and how they differ from standard games of there medium.  In the game Prui “one of the participants changed the rules inadvertently…she protested the chosen Prui and became the self-appointed Prui essentially breaking the rules of the game.” (Fron, p.3) This action would normally be considered cheating but in the spirit of the game it is an accepted action and the other players go on playing and having fun. This mentality and way of playing is consistent with DeKoven’s ideas “[the players] might have to change a few rules. [The players] might even have to make up a whole new game…When [the players are] looking for Deep Fun, [they are] not as concerned with the game… as [they are] with having the opportunity to have fun together.”(Dekoven, 18-19) For the sake of play and having fun, the rules of the game begin to become more malleable and allow the players to start changing the rules on the fly in order to try to create a more fun experience.

 

Pierce’s Article mentions many modern games that don’t exactly follow the rules of conventional games. Many of the titles listed gives the user the freedom to either play their own way with in the games rules or it allows to player to alter some aspect of play to make the game more suited to their taste.  For the Baby Boomers surveyed they ranked there favorite activities as exploring and helping newer players (Pierce, 8). These two activities are often unnecessary activates in a game and in some games they aren’t really possible. With games like wow and second life that give an expansive environment that will more or less change at some point in time(wow’s cataclysm and second life depends on the players to change it) as well as having an ever changing player base, activities such as exploring or helping newer players can be a common event. In video games exploring may be though of as a common feature but when compared to a board game where exploration is impossible it adds a strong effect on how space is represented.

 

 

Brand, S. (1972). SPACEWAR: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums. Rolling Stone.

DeKoven, B. (2002). Talking about what we're looking for. The Well-Played Game.

Fron, J., Fullerton, T., Morie, J. & Pearce, C. (2005). Sustainable Play: Towards A New Games Movement for the Digital Age. Digital Arts & Culture Conference Proceedings, Copenhagen. 1-6.

Pierce, C. (2006). Games as Art: The Aesthetics of Interactivity. Visible Language: Special Issue on Fluxus. 66-89.