When
discussing games and how they have developed over many years, it really sparks
my thoughts in terms of how we have been molded to see games in certain
ways. The “popular” game is in actuality quite boring in its
mechanic. The basic explanation of
current popular games would spark very little interest in their base form, yet continued
use of similar mechanics have produced some of the most popular games. On
another level, the rules and regulations set forth in games often mold the
player to continue to conform to the restrictions that society has set. I
would ask why in a game such as The Sims you aren’t allowed to
go around and kill people. The objective of the game, in addition to
why it has been so popular, is its mimic of real life, yet many aspects of real
life are missing from the game. These sorts of restrictions, which have become
conventions, define what a game is today.
One
game that came out of the “Fluxus” movement that I find breaks this mold that
we set for ourselves is White Chess. This movement promoted games as
an art form in addition to a form of entertainment. In this game all
the pieces were white and the players had to cooperate in order to reach a sort
of end state. Pearce discusses that the idea is not to out-smart
your opponent or to have a “battle” on the board, but to acknowledge the beauty
in the pieces and board itself and the potential they have. “It is
in the playing that a chessboard comes alive, and the game object becomes a
catalyst for play.” In this way the only way to understand the game
is to play it and discover the beauty in the art form.
A
second game that I think is interesting and breaks the mold of traditional
games of today is Prui. This game developed out of the New Games
movement which held the motto “Play Hard, Play Fair, Nobody Hurt”. There
isn’t much of a win or lose state to the game, and there absolutely isn’t any
resemblance of a versus style gameplay. This is a perfect example of
DeKoven's ideas when he talks about "games are suspended from reality
and have no bearing on what occurs outside of the game". People just walk around asking “Prui” and if they get no response
then they stop asking or responding; in addition everyone has their eyes
closed. In order for the game to end there must be a sense of
cooperation within the entire group. Ludica was talking about
another new game when he said the game “became a playground in which players
could inscribe their own rules and game activities”, but I feel that this
applies here too. You as a player can choose if you want to become
part of the masses, or people not responding, or listen intently and attempt to
stay towards the people who are talking still, thereby causing the game to
continue. Fron talks of “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”. Either way can be fun
and provides different difficulties to achieving your personal goal, or trying
to work as a whole to grab up the players trying to elongate the game.
Earthball
is another New Games movement game that is interesting. This game
involved two teams trying to push a giant ball to one side of a field. This
at first would seem like something that mimics the “work on teams to defeat the
opponent” mentality, but what came out of this game is truly interesting. Rather
than trying to make the ball get to one end or the other, players would swap
teams when it looked like their team was going to win. Players did
not want to win the game, but play the game. DeKoven speaks about a
post-game moral possibly having impact on the world after the game, but this
isnt completly applicable in this game.
Because people enjoy playing the game more than winning, everyone should
walk away from the game with a smile on their face. This
brings up interesting paths when developing games for today’s world. If
we could create games that were more fun to play than to win would they sell?
And more importantly would people enjoy it as much as Earthball, or is it the
group effort and the outdoors that sold this game?
At
the end of the day I think that the games that break the mold of today’s
popular games is where society as a whole is heading towards. Games
like Portal or Spore are capturing audiences without any killing or wars, but
with complex thought processes, and innovative thinking.
Cited:
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.
Comments