Imagine
“a game that is created by and for the players within a safe digital
environment built not to wield authority over them, but to provide an even playing
ground in which they themselves are empowered to play; a temporary world that
encourages a new, participatory relationship with each other, rather than to a
machine.” [Fron] Physical and board games have always had the advantage over digital
games in the sense of allowing their users to alter the game rules and regulations
as they please. Even though DeKoven states that “games are suspended from reality and have no bearing on what occurs
outside of the game” [DeKoven], he retracts his position to state the fact that
games that have a winning condition for only a portion of the players, than
that must create a some hard feelings amongst them and those that lost. Where
as if ending the game is based on the cumulative effort of the all the players
to work together, instead of compete and create something, instead of destroy,
than that would most likely result in a positive post-game mentality and
feelings between the players. Yet in order to have a game that could possible
satisfy the constraints of cooperative positive play than games have to evolve
to capture the imagination of their players and allow them to express them
through genuine artistic open mediums.
Digital
games have been projected to us in an image with regulations and conventions
that restrict the user form broadening the sense of games to engulf him/her personal
characteristics and express his/her self directly. “Unlike board games or even
sports, the rule structure of most digital games is opaque—like the ubiquitous
“man behind the curtain” they constrain players’ actions without recourse to
alteration.”[Fron] Yet, players have always been capable to stumble upon astonishing,
genuine techniques to bend the system, and create a new unintended experience. Even
though such conventions have provided us with various phenomenal games, still I
personally find hard to believe that the Spacewar researchers intended for
their medium to turn into something so narrow. Brand Stewart depicts that idea
when he says “Those magnificent men with their
flying machines, scouting a leading edge of technology which has an odd
softness to it; outlaw country, where rules are not decree or routine so much
as the starker demands of what's possible.”[Brand] Conversely it seems to me
like he is trying to say the total opposite, those researchers tried to find
ways, and loop wholes, to control their environment and enable the user to take
the medium out of the norm. Regardless, “We do not need curators to decide
which art will be seen and which will not.”[Pearce]
An
approach that we have been discovering lately is something that Bernie DeKoven
was able to perceive way ahead of the crowd is digital games in a medium as
flexible as board games and sports, where the climax of the game is not
supposed to be determined by winning conditions, but by how the players generally
collaborate and socially interact. Players ought to acclimatize the game as
they play in order to generate an enhanced environment for socialization
and interaction. I guess the question that we are trying to answer is provided
by Fron in ‘Sustainable Play’, “Can we imagine new forms of digital culture
that put the player front and center, in command of their own play experience?
Can we play by our own rules?”
References:
o
DeKoven, B. (1978) The Well-Played
Game: A Player's Philosophy. New York: Anchor Books. (2nd Edition)
o
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
o
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.
o
Pearce, Celia. "Games as Art:
The Aesthetics of Interactivity." Visible Language: Special Issue on
Fluxus. January 2006.
Comments