Spacewar and the
Hacker Movement
Spacewar itself was already an “alternative game” from the
beginning, because it was the first video game, a type of thing that had never
been seen before in terms of representation and mechanics. It was, therefore, not so much a subversion
as it was a complete departure from traditional game concepts:
·
Representation: traditional board games often make use of
images and icon-like game pieces to depict a setting of some kind on the
board. Spacewar replaces the static gameboard with a dynamic,
auto-responsive screen, which attempts to create a more realistic graphic
representation of the action (e.g. what Brand calls an “attractive explosion”… in 1972… sure, right, whatever).
·
Control/interaction: In Spacewar,
gameplay is not directly physical, but is mediated through machines. You manipulate your gamepiece by indicating
your intentions with some buttons, not by physically picking it up and moving
it, like you would in a traditional board game.
The board moves your pieces for you.
By using a machine/vehicle control idiom, Spacewar united the world of board games with that of
remote-controlled toy cars.
·
Mechanics:
o
Hard-coded,
procedural rules: for the first time,
game rules are actually inherent in the tools of play. It’s not a matter of following and enforcing
the rules—it’s simply impossible to do something that, according to the
program, is not defined in the rules of play.
o
Both a
physical and mental contest: “Thought
does help you, and there are some tactical considerations, but just plain fast
reflexes also help” (Brand 1972). Insofar
as it is a game about good developing a good strategy, Spacewar takes after many other board and card games—games as
ubiquitous as chess or poker. But it
also takes after sports and other physical contests.
So far, Spacewar appears to be a mash-up of
other traditional gameplay concepts, a peculiar hybrid of genres that went on
to set the tone for most video games right up to the present day. Although it was alternative in the sense of
being new, on the surface there is nothing terribly subversive or counter-cultural
about the way it appropriates previously existing gaming concepts.
However, Spacewar did come out of a “hacker
movement.” The people who made it,
played it and modded it were all part of this movement. Many of them were computer scientists and
engineers, working for “high rent” (Brand 1972) research firms with corporate
or government funding, but there were also artists and computer hobbyists not
actively employed in the computer industry.
What they all had in common was “low rent” recreational projects like Spacewar, both the development/modding
and the playing of the game. They were
motivated by the desire to make the available technology do new and fun things. In this way, they did subvert the goals of the military/industrial complex by using
research facilities and (in some cases) government funding for these
projects. (Hence, the game being banned
at IBM (Brand 1972)). Of course, gaming
ended up being a serious driving force behind the development of computer
technology, because game hackers were always exploring new technology and
pushing it to the limit. Hacking itself
was also a kind of game (see Pearce 2006: 75).
Spacewar and its
descendants also subverted the game design and publishing paradigm that was
dominant at the time. By the 50s and 60s
[according to our class lectures], board games were static, produced objects,
their rules dictated by the publishing company, their affordances determined by
what was put into the box. They were
also patented. Spacewar was quite a bit more like games of the late 19th and early
20th centuries—a bit more like the Landlords game, with numerous iterations,
each introducing its own set of alterations (mods and hacks). Spacewar
and its ruleset were all shared
resources, and when hackers wanted a new feature in the game, they added it, so
that by 1972, a whole preferences selection system had been worked into the program
(Brand 1972). As video games became
popular, some corporate interests again attempted to turn them into static,
published objects, but their efforts were not completely successful (see the
next section on Counter-Strike).
Spacewar can be
understood not just as a product of the hacker movement, but also as an
artifact of Fluxus and New Games. Pearce
(2006: 70-71) discusses the tension that exists between FluxGames as ready-made
objects and the living game processes that they are meant to activate: “…their object-ness represented a state of
dormant play. Just as a chess board is a
beautiful object, its true value is in its potential energy, which is actuated
when the game is played.” FluxKits and
FluxGames were incompletely successful because they attempted to be in flux, in active play, while at the
same time being inexpensive, mass-producible ready-mades (for easy distribution). As I argue above, Spacewar was a departure from the notion of games as static,
dormant, produced objects. Its
constitution, its very existence was in constant play, and it thus fit in with
the spirit of Fluxus. As for New Games,
the connection is simple: DeKoven (2002:
57) challenges us to “change the game,” or in other words, to hack and mod it,
iterating through countless alternate versions in search of a deeper engagement
with the activity.
Counter-Strike
and Counter-Counter-Strike
A
bunch of Half-Life fans weren’t
afraid to change the game in search of deeper engagement, although I doubt very
much that Counter-Strike fits with
DeKoven’s vision for New Games: it’s
violent, hyper-competitive, played against faceless, anonymous (pseudonymous)
opponents, and has this whole antagonistic hardcore gamer culture around
it. Still, it is part of a modding
culture akin to the hacker culture of Spacewar,
in which players add in custom features (or in the case of CS, entire modes of play) that they would like to see. The movement here can perhaps be described as
a partial democratization of video games.
Players would like some say in what the rules and game mechanics will
be, and developers/publishers are often quite happy to let them make their own
customizations. Pearce (2006: 75) notes
that CS is quite conventional and not
a significant departure from the game it modded: it makes a single-player horror/adventure
shooter into a police-versus-terrorists team game, but it does not modify the
core FPS mechanic and does not significantly change representation. In other words, it’s a game designed to
appeal to people who already like Half-Life,
but who would like to shoot at other people instead of computer-animated
monsters.
Then
there’s Velvet-Strike (Pearce 2006:
77), a patch that attacks CS in the
province of thematic representation. Velvet-Strike subverts the CS military combat theme by allowing
players to vandalize the game with anti-war graffiti. Velvet-Strike
is a bit like White Chess: at a time (the
1960s or 2002, take your pick) when war and violence are foregrounded in the
public consciousness, these game mods challenge the representation and celebration
of military violence in entertainment. The
Velvet-Strike patch also provides a
way for people who are not part of Half-Life’s
core demographic to contest (not just protest) its system of representational
meaning.
This kind of game modding
is also, of course, related to the Fluxus tradition, as it illustrates how the
digital game is a “score” (Pearce 2006: 73) meaningful only in its performance
and execution, acts which in the hands of a savvy modder/hacker community,
rather than belonging to the game publishers alone.
New New
Games and Emergent MMO Minigames
Ludica (2005: 4) identify
digital games as a potential site of rebirth for the New Games movement. In particular, New Games-style activities are
developed through emergent play in which “players manage to find unique and
inventive ways to reinscribe rules, often hijacking features or flaws, or
making a superfluous frill a central part of a game mechanic” (Ludica 2005: 4). I’m going to toss my own example of this into
the list that already includes Digital Junkyard Sports, D’Ni Olympics and
Buggie Polo (Ludica 2005: 4-5), one that is reminiscent of the example of using
useless objects to make designs and decorations in Lineage 1 (Ludica 2005: 4). Myst Online: Uru Live had a feature that
allowed players to place floating holographic “Great Zero markers,” which were
used for a global positioning telemetry system and could also be scattered
about the ruins of D’ni to make a kind of scavenger-hunt game. But players found that they could put markers
to artistic and decorative use. See here
for some beautiful examples of players decorating up the cavern for the
holidays:
http://forums.guildofgreeters.com/index.php?showtopic=14060&st=0&start=0
Marker art and other
emergent minigames are authored by the community of players, rather than by
game publishers, and as such tend to be fluid and sensitive to the needs of the
play community as New Games should be (see DeKoven 2002: 18, 19). In Ludica’s words, they are “a means of
constructing shared contexts for meaningful play in virtual […] spaces” (2005:
1). Of course there is also a Fluxus
connection here. An MMO provides us with
the ultimate FluxKit in which the community can build new games, new art and
new meanings out of the junk or mundane objects that litter the game world,
whether they be candles, construction cones (in Uru avatar bowling), or Great Zero markers.
REFERENCES:
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.
Ludica (Fron et al.). 2005. Sustainable
Play: Towards A New Games Movement for
the Digital Age. In Digital Arts & Culture Conference Proceedings,
Pearce, Celia.
2006. Games as Art: The
Aesthetics of Interactivity. Visible Language: Special Issue on Fluxus,
January 2006.
First of all Nic, this is a GREAT essay...really well developed and written. But of course you really got me with the Uru example. One thing I think we can say about Uru is that the game in many ways embodies the spirit of the New Games movement, beyond simply the examples we use in the Ludica paper but in the sense that it's a cooperative game! I don't think it's entirely an accident that the Baby Boomers of Uru are of the same generation as New Gamers. This is precisely why Ludica called for a "new" New Games movement in our paper. We felt like it was time for another revolutionary stance on gaming. We are long overdue for one!
Posted by: gamegrrrl | 11/15/2009 at 03:44 PM