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.
First of all, Matt, nice lead-in with the joke. Here's another one: A Rabbi, a Priest and a Guru walk into a bar, and the bartender says "What is this? A joke?"
What is really great about this article is something that I've been trying to drill into your brains all semester, and evidently it's working: CULTURAL CONTEXT IS EVERYTHING. Your point here is very well taken...these groups are essentially "playing" in the same space, they are just very different groups with very different frames of reference and intentions. This is one of the reasons I have said: think about WHO is playing your game. Fun is not the same for everyone. Stewart Brand is not going to consider Counter-Strike to be fun. The other thing I think your essay highlights is that for each of these groups, the PROCESS OF MAKING THE GAME is part of the fun; there is a great deal of focus on the creation of the game itself, and that is, in a sense, part of the game. It is interesting to note that Counter-Strike was developed by a distributed team. Whereas the "basement" culture was a bunch of guys co-conspiring together to transform a sci-fi novel into a computer program. Anyway, good work.
Oh by the way, I think in the third paragraph you might be mixing up Brand and Suits...I don't think Suits wrote about the Mother Earth game, but I could be mistaken.
Posted by: gamegrrrl | 10/25/2009 at 09:11 PM