Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Intermezzo: ON GAMES AND CUPCAKES

My lack of posting during the last two weeks was due to being busy finishing an article on media change for my Prague university. Thinking about what it is that transforms a technology into a medium, I discarded the idea of having a clear-cut categorial definition of any medium and media in general, because each medium gets to the point of being treated as medium following a different trajectory. Is there any abstraction abstract enough to cover all kinds of media we know, including videogames, theme parks and culinary media*?

Then I remembered that, at a party I'd gone to a couple of weeks ago, I had jokingly proposed studying cupcake as a medium. Surely, we could do that, if we projected the particular cupcake against the general cupcake-ness and found a meaning in the way it differs from other cupcakes - if we consumed it for or took from it more than just nutrition. It might be an "I-love-you" cupcake or an "I-love-strawberries" cupcake. It is a thought deeply rooted in the good old structuralism, but hey, I come from the university of Jakobson (pre-MIT) and Trubetzkoy, a place where de Saussure is the primer.
Is it then not the social acknowledgment of meaningfulness of difference, that establishes the medium? It works like that with language, which is a medium, too.
And that is what annoys many gamers about the "content-blind" criticism of videogames - the inability of treating games as individual works rather than the lump of medium as a whole. This en-masse criticism of "suspicious" media crippled the development of comics in the 1950's and is indicative of all power-based media criticism. It might be ridiculous to look for meanings in cupcakes, but in order to criticize them, I must get to the point where the nuances of taste and cupcake design are more than random patterns hitting the interface**.

I know this is far from gaming discourse. Next time I will be focusing on the dead (or hibernating?) genre of point and click adventures and the communities that keep it alive. Or at the reasons why interactive fiction failed to remain a major force. Or the origins of the discourse on game "addictiveness".

*Sadly, this term probably does not exist.
**Here, I am without any doubt influenced by Matt Weise's thesis on meaningfulness in videogames.

Monday, November 5, 2007

MATTHEW SMITH: THE MANIC GAME DESIGNER

Last time, I discussed how we see a game designer in the context of the studio system. I set out to examine whether the perception of game designers was different at a time when they made their games alone, locked away in isolation, staring at prehistoric radiation-heavy monitors or TV screens and programming the legendary classics in machine code, thus intimately familiar with the machine's circuitry.
Next day, by convenient coincidence, I got a message from a friend with a link to an English-language blog run by a Czech game-designer-turned-film-critic, further linking to a YouTube video featuring the inscrutable and long-lost mythical hero of the British game industry, Matthew Smith.



Before launching into tabloid sensationalism and biographical detail, let us look at the very beginning of the film clip. The modern-day British journalist acknowledges the supremacy of the U.S. and Japan in the videogame industry of that day. It is important to bear in mind that the modest, largely home-brew and profoundly nerdy early eighties British games industry was a slightly isolated world with its own weird platform (ZX Spectrum) and a community feel expressed by the gaming magazines such as Your Sinclair or the aptly-named Crash. Thanks to the wide availability of the computer and the fact it was NOT a console, anybody could join the programming ranks and gain fame and respect. The magazines featured game designer inteviews almost every month, and at a very personal level (they described Dave Perry, later of Earthworm Jim fame, as "endowed with all the native charm that one would expect of a man with pure Celtic blood flowing through his veins").

And what about Matthew Smith? He was a prodigy, a 17-year-old kid neatly fitting all the programmer-guy stereotypes: geeky, strange, and with a bad haircut. The old footage shows him as the author of the acclaimed Manic Miner, a wonderfully balanced and surreal game that defined what the ZX Spectrum platform would be capable of. After making a hugely succesful sequel, Jet Set Willy, the young programmer vanished into thin air (watch the clip for details).
But even before his disappearance, he was considered alien. He was too good to be true. The May 1984 issue of Crash magazine brings up uncanny hints at the guy's non-existence: "There were rumours that Matthew Smith was a figment of the Liverpool computing mass psyche [...] There were rumours that Matthew Smith didn’t really exist." The review of Jet Set Willy ends with another eerie statement: "Jet Set Willy is a high point in the development of the Spectrum game. I hope there will be others, maybe ones of a different kind, but I’m sure nothing will top this game for addictivity, fluent graphics, responsiveness and sheer imagination. The nightmare quality of the events suggests its author should be receiving therapy. Instead, he’s probably getting rich. Good luck to him..."
The sheer imagination led Matthew to, of all places, a Dutch hippie commune and druggy oblivion. Manic Miner fans set up a website reporting his sightings. Isn't that familiar? Remember Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd, an artist damaged by LSD, trapped in youth, naivete and craziness? His fans did the same thing. As "brhodes0" puts it in the YouTube comments section: "If you look at the stuff he came out with age 17, the psychedelic images... then combine it with the drugs. Well it's good he's kind of recovered, a top bloke." Barrett never recovered, though.
Smith became a legend for one more reason. By fleeing the programming world and doing crazy things, he completely shook off the programmer stereotype and became elusively fascinating. The fact that he was instrumental in establishing the British gaming industry made the contrast between his exploits and his post-fame life even more striking. And, well, he does not seem to remember much of his post-fame life.
Looking back at his old games, Smith says: "Ten years after I was a history, twenty years after, I am a legend." That is especially true in the British ZX Spectrum fan community, which is one of the most active retro-gaming groups, remaking old classics and taking them onto the web - you can even play Jet Set Willy online. And when there is community, there is myth.

Thursday, November 1, 2007

FAERIE NINJA FAN BOY

It is so cool to start your blog entry with a reference to what you have just heard Henry Jenkins say in his class at MIT. (As if he did not touch on the topic of his academic celebrity status and the fact that his name is being attached to everything CMS, for better or worse; now I'm attaching it to my puny blog.) We mainly discussed authorship, the way it shapes our interpretation of the text, and, briefly, the way authorship is assigned to texts. And Henry Jenkins pointed out that in the field of videogames, we constructed a figure of the game designer but the matter is still not sorted out. By that time, I had been already thinking about it. About who's the author, who we adore, what is considered a personal achievement in videogames...

A faerie ninja made me think about it.

On Monday, I checked the schedule of Alice Robison's excellent all-MIT class on videogame theory and found out that Linda Currie (née Sirotek) was coming to give a talk.
Wow!, thought I - for the following reasons: a) she co-designed and produced one of my all-time favorite games, Wizardry 8, the sequel to the Crusaders game mentioned in the last blog entry; b) for me, she became the symbol of the whole Wizardry series, through which she had worked her way, first (1981!) as an involuntary help-line operator, subsequently as a producer and designer. She simply was THERE and, as a fan, I wish I had seen what she saw - "the making of" the legend. And even if Wizardry is now largely and sadly forgotten, it had a unique twist, a distinct, quirky and unpredictable personality, that elevated it high above your average sword'n'sorcery hack'n'slash. One of the funniest things was the fact that fans intentionally played the game with weakest possible characters "to get more fun out of it", often opting for Faerie Ninjas, an absurd and legendary race-class combination; c) she carried the tradition as long as she could, making the beautiful swan song which is Wizardry 8, a testament of (I would say) her own fandom of the series; d) she's half-Czech!
After an entertaining discussion with her and her colleague Scott MacMillan, I asked her a few fan questions and was on my way home. But making my way through a half-lit MIT corridor, I realized that I cannot just leave. I am a fan. Fans do certain kinds of things. Music fans get their records signed (I do!). Star fans get their... whatever signed. But what should I do? I found myself in utter lack of games-specific cultural knowledge I could utilize. I didn't bring a copy of the game. I knew this was a special and great moment of my fan life and that I had to do something about it. But still I felt strange asking Alice to take a picture of me and Linda. I just din't know whether this is the way it is done.
In the tradition of aca-fandom (though I'm probably more fan than aca), I started to explore, why it felt new; what constitutes my fandom and its relationship to authorship, art and the medium. First of all, I had a hard time thinking about with whom else I would like to have a picture taken. John Carmack? That's an engineer, great, but I guess not exciting in the fan way. Chris Avellone of the Planescape: Torment fame? As much as I loved his game (very much!), I didn't really know anything about this guy until I've read a recent interview. To be honest, I'm quite surprised I could still remember his name. Sorry, but that's how the gaming discourse goes. Ron Gilbert? Maybe. Maybe I would be disappointed should I find out he's not as funny as Monkey Island is.
Although I am a fan of games, I cannot usually see myself as a fan of their authors. Are there Peter Molyneux fans in the way there are David Lynch fans? Are there Richard Garriot fans, or just Ultima fans? I can imagine people respect the game designers. In Smartbomb, Heather Chaplin and Aaron Ruby describe the cautiously respectful way young designers act towards Will Wright and Shigeru Myamoto. They are celebrities, but in their own circle, more like say famous architects than pop musicians or Hollywood directors, although their work is a part of the popular culture. They don't tour, they just make their scarce appearances at gaming expos and conferences. Chaplin and Ruby do give examples of gaming industry people like Cliff Bleszinski, who try to play the role of gaming-world rock stars. Yet an ordinary player won't connect the games he plays with CliffyB's name and face. But maybe I am wrong and you can correct me.
Game is also a collective work, making it harder to think of it as an authored work, but so is film. Even film pushes the credits to a place where people can choose whether to skip them or not, and credits in games are usually made to be skipped and are not a part of the game as such. Maybe the reason for the disconnedtion stems from our perception of games as software, as industrial, technical products, blueprinted, designed, refined, tested, burnt onto CDs, packaged and published, just like spreadsheets. We are probably still at the beginning of the process of establishing our relationship to games as an expressive medium (or to reference Henry Jenkins again, a "lively art"). Unlike films, each game is a technology of its own, not only a manifestation of technology, and game designers stay virtually anonymous, being "technicians" whose power is to know, not to be known. The author is dead and we don't feel any urge to resurrect him, maybe because imagining him tinkering with world design might break our illusion of the virtual world's existence*.
This saves us some trouble with the interpretation, however, because, as we also heard in the class, our knowledge of the author always shapes the way we read her or his work. Most of my gaming experience is untinted by any thought of game designers. But hey, I am going to try out Wizardry 8 once more now, to see whether my interpretation has changed knowing that Linda Currie was a teenage hard-core RPG girl picking up phones and telling people what the gold key is for.

*It's also rather hard to create a whole world in one person (unless you are a god), which makes the intricate webs of texts like Lost the TV show a more team-based and also anonymous work (a collective god-ship?). It might be interesting to look at the way game authorship was treated at the time one or two people usually made the whole game. Hey, I could do that.