THE TORONTO TROUBLE. Complaining about copyright issues

I've been very bad lately, not updating the blog at all. That doesn't mean I wasn't doing anything games-related. I've been playing, researching and enjoying them (especially the weird ones, as usually), and also started writing a piece of IF. There was a lot of interesting stuff to say, and I will now try to sum it up in a series of blog posts, which will, hopefully, mark my renewed commitment to Different Gaming.
Looking back, the thing that comes to my mind and is entirely blog-related, is my trip to the FuturePlay conference in Toronto in early November. The paper I presented there is actually a reworking of What You Can't See Is What You Don't Get, and even has the same title! The full paper will be soon available through ACM (who are behind the conference), let's just say the ideas are the same as in the blog post, but they are expressed in a much subtler, more academic way, and the smarted-up version even includes a T.S.Eliot quote!














What I'm finding blogworthy, though, are the copyright issues I've had with it. In the paper, I'm talking about The Secret of Monkey Island, and obviously, it makes sense to actually include screenshots of the game.
Now, when you publish stuff yourself on a blog or you write for a magazine, they usually don't care. But respectable publishers such as ACM prefer to stay on the safe side, or to "err on the side of caution", so they won't publish anything without a permission. However, whoever has dealt with Lucas Arts from the position of a puny human knows that it is impossible to get in touch with them and get the permission to reprint the screenshots (and yes, they also love to sue people). I attempted to claim fair use, following the guidelines that you can see for example on Wikipedia. However, using your screenshot for obviously non-commercial, academic purposes, with citation, and actually praising the game for what it does well, is not enough to make the lawyers happy.
There are a few discussions of the matter on-line, but they quite inconclusive in whether a screenshot constitutes a derivative work. Alarmingly enough, some argue that publishing a photograph of a building may infringe the architect's copyright. I would like to read experts' view on the matter, but it's actually not that easy to find.
Interestingly enough, by publishing a screenshot in an analog form (such as a conference proceedings or a journal), you fundamentally change the way it's coded, so that it's not possible to re-use as it was before. The original digital form cannot be arrived at from such a copy. So it's more like paraphrasing than actually citing. However, it's usually the print publications that will never allow you to reprint screenshots without permissions.
The outcome of this situation is quite simple: academic papers just do not tend to have screenshots in them, because it's too much of a hassle to get the necessary permissions. A similar situation is present in film scholarship, although I'm not sure how hard it is for them to reach the copyright owners. Literary scholars, however, have their backs covered. Citing a literary work is perfectly OK. You don't need any permission, just state which book you're citing from (of course you cannot reprint the whole book, but did I want to include every single sprite from Monkey Island, so that people can reconstruct the game on their home computers?).
In the end, I gave up and simply removed the screenshots, although it weakens my arguments. Am I the only one who thinks that the current legal measures and the virtual inaccessibility of the game companies' legal departments cripple games scholarship?

READING IS COOL. Reading about video games is cooler.

The other day, me and my friend went for a day trip to Walden Pond, one of the most charming and tranquil (once you get away from the noisy mayhem of a kindergarten which is the Main Beach) places in Massachusetts. We sat on the stone steps, shutting off whatever technology that could connect us to the world outside of this temporary paradise, and started to read. Then a mother - her art noveau earrings gave away certain elegant back-to-nature hipness - came along with two sons somewhere between five and eight years of age and looked at us with a smile.
"Look!" she turned to the moderately scruffy kids. "That's a way to spend your free time. Sitting in the woods and reading books. Instead of, for example" - then came the (mock-)serious face - "playing video games."
I didn't want to spoil the educational moment, but couldn't resist the temptation of a punch line.
"Actually, I'm reading a book about video games."
The illusion of two wise men studying collected works of Thoreau fell apart.

The book, This Gaming Life by the Quake III veteran and games journalist Jim Rossignol, is actually one of the first books exclusively dedicated to the gamer experience, an account of how obsessive gaming can change one's life for the better. Giving accounts of gaming cultures of London, Seoul and Reykjavik, it's an insightful (however journalistic and scattershot) comparative study of gaming cultures, very much in line with what I try to investigate and write about.
And its old-fashioned hardcover design barely suggests it's about something as non-Walden as video games.

WHAT YOU CAN'T SEE IS WHAT YOU DON'T GET: Life and death of the third-person narrative in the current visual paradigm

I have been playing The Witcher lately. This Polish RPG has got positive reviews in both Old and New World, even with its minor but obvious flaws, inconsistencies and glitches (but CRPG fans cannot be picky these days...).
One of the inconsistencies ruined my suspension of disbelief big time. As usual with Baldur's Gate-inspired RPGs, most of the narrative is revealed in conversation with NPCs. But, given the limited animation they have, the NPCs sometimes speak as if they were doing something else that they're doing in their visual representation. The chemist in the chemistry workshop welcomes you while mixing substances to make an explosive, and asks you (or, the player character) to hold your breath, so that you don't interfere with the experiment. What struck me as strange was the fact that while he was describing the delicate operation he was performing, his "avatar" was justing standing around with bare hands, seemingly engaged in casual conversation. This raised two uncomfortable questions: 1) Why is he describing his actions, if ("in the reality of the game world") I should be able to watch them for myself? 2) Why can't I see it if it obviously is happening "in the reality of the game world"? This is not an uncommon incosistency, especially with RPGs.














The very investigation of why this is so strange made me investigate the modes of visualization of game worlds. I do not want to take any shortcuts, but I immediately thought the discrepancy could be handled by switching to less iconic representation, in which the character's action could be described by third-person narration. It would make so much sense, given that The Witcher is a novel adaptation - and what an awesome novel it is! But written language is pretty much banned from contemporary AAA games (portable consoles being the exception). Could its use enhance the storytelling and gameplay experience? And what is its relationship to the current visual paradigm?

First, let us take a look at the history of the rhetorical relationship between the fictional worlds and their visual representation in digital games. I would like to distinguish between two approaches, that make more sense once they're opposed to each other. First of them, we might call illusionism. In games using this approach, there are no signals that the actual game world should look otherwise that its representation or that there could be more to it than you can see. The world of Mario Bros., for example, is exactly what it looks like in the game. The same holds for Doom. Of course, each of us can make his own mental image of this world, but the graphics of the actual game will be the primary source. Graphics come first.
The second one, we might dub illustrationism. In this approach, the graphics are obviously just a part or a version of what the actual world looks like. They are mere illustrations. The game admits that it does not show you everything. One of the best examples of this approach is that of early illustrated text adventure games. In those, graphics served to the same purpose as illustrations in printed books do. They were hints for imagination and most of the world description was presented as written text. This approach was, at the time, arguably better for conveing images of more complex worlds and more complex actions, because not all of them had to be seen, much of it could be just verbally described. In other words, the world comes first and the graphics try to catch up. ASCII roguelike games are even beyond illustrationism: in these, the ASCII characters are not "representations" of the game world characters in an iconic way of visual resemblance - they are simply indices, placeholders. They just show the spatial whereabouts of the character in relation to others.
The illusionist graphics maintain the illusion that you can see all there is to be seen. And within the current trend in rendering and display technologies and the ability to look at any game object from any angle, it is the prevalent paradigm - because it would be humiliating to admit that there are limits to things that the graphics engine can represent visually. The graphics engine is the device of the objective truth of the game world. Markku Eskelinen, everyone's favorite extreme ludologist, describes this (in one of his most inspired moments) as some kind of military ideology: everything can be consistently seen (in a constant level of detail) and mapped with the world divided into several "zones". It is indeed militaristic given that it is the ideal form of expression for first person shooters - in which you need to SEE in order to survive. There's no time for fuzziness or fancy.

Some video game genres, however, tend to contain complex storylines enacted within the game, and those are for most part adventure games and RPGs. The complexity of the worlds makes it incredibly hard for the developers to elaborate the game world visually in a constant level of detail. And there are basically two ways of dealing with this.
One of them is editing. It works really well in adventure games. In Secret Of The Monkey Island, for example, it would be unsustainable to draw the graphics of the whole game world on the same level of detail as the main locations have. That's where the bird-eye-view maps come in, on which the main character is represented by nothing more than a microscopic dot. When the "moving around" part is foregrounded and the "interaction with close surroundings" part is backgrounded in the gameplay, the change of perspective follows. The game thus presents the player with two or more cohesive, but distinct views of the world.
Another way of editing is the synecdoche effect many adventure games players are familiar with: representing a certain setting in a fictional game world by just a part of it. To give a fairly recent example, in the Abe Lincoln Must Die part of the new Sam & Max series, you are able to enter the White House - but the only room you can get to is the Oval Office. The Oval Office stands for the whole White House and it is the place where the action is. There is no explicit explanation of that, it's just a convention. As you enter the White House, you go directly to the Oval Office. This space inconsistency is enabled by the fact the gameplay is localized to certain spots in the game world and there have to be no "common laws of physics" valid across the boundaries of the game locales.
In the more space-conscious games of the yester-year, the space is preserved at the expense of visual detail. The lack of visual information is then compensated by hybridized code, or in other words, by augmentation by written language. It's no big news that language is an incredibly powerful medium, capable of not only compensating for missing visuals, but bringing in new information as well. Let's take a look at Wizardry VII: Crusaders Of The Dark Savant, a 1992 psychedelic RPG that uses a lot of written language by the virtue of being a "fantasy role-playing simulation". Pretty much all of the graphics in this game is just a basic rendering of the game map made out of floor and wall tiles (plus monsters and NPCs). There are four sets of these, which is enough to distinguish an "underground" locale, "town", "forest" and "cave", but not enough to distinguish between the "throne room" and the "storage room". The visual representation is more a representation of "the map" of the world in the indexical sense: it helps you locate yourself, gives you to structural backbone of the environment. The fictional gameworld is distinguished and described in further detail in the third-person "dungeon master" narrative:























This way, you can build a huge game without enslaving whole nations to draw graphics for you. And when the writing is good, you can actually smell the places you go to. This it not to say this illustrationist approach was common to all CRPGs of that time - Lands Of Lore, for example, went on to visualize as much as it could.
In the next generation of Western CRPGs, there seemed to be a tendency to concentrate the writing into the dialogs. The late 90's Infinity Engine games such as Baldur's Gate and Planescape: Torment offered a pre-rendered environment in a fixed-angle top-down view. This gave a good overview of the general situation, but left a lot of space for the player's fancy in terms of the looks and gestures of the characters, and could not really capture minute details. Planescape: Torment, widely considered to be the pinnacle of digital game storytelling and a game of deep philosophical insight, is an incredibly text-heavy RPG. In fact, you don't get to SEE the most interesting stuff in the game. You just READ about it. The game designers simply abused the Infinity Engine dialog box to include not only dialogs, but also memories, thoughts, object interaction and environment description. The story is bursting out of the engine, because it is too strong and complex to be captured by it. In the illustrationist manner, the game world itself existed (in a way) prior to the game, as it is a licensed product, and it is simply too weird for any graphics engine to do justice to it.













Now, I know that the much of the gaming industry operates based on a projected target audience with short to no attention spans, but by giving up on written text, many contemporary games just lose a lot of their expressive potential. It is strange that the narrative non-diegetic voice has been abolished, while other non-diegetic elements (HUDs, gameplay information) have been retained. Because of this, the assumption that videogames remediate the visual politics of film (which is largely illusionist, but does not usually contain any extradiegetic visual information) is not so clear and obvious.
Good storytelling in the illusionist visual paradigm CAN be done, and Bioshock could be an example - but in Bioshock, the world is insular, there are no NPCs and not much variety in the player character's actions (which is not to say it is not an excellent game).
But to fit a sizable world to this paradigm takes a lot of effort - and still it cannot be done in a consistent way. The Witcher, on one hand, tries to maintain the illusionist view, never resorting to non-diegetic narrative and being spatially consistent. But when it comes to dialogues, the fictional world's story is, again, stronger than the engine. This time, the contents of the dialogue are directly contradicting the visual representation (in the previous examples the verbal information rather added up to build a complete picture). I cannot see the chemist performing the mixing, because this character animation is not in the graphics assets of the game. But why do I see him doing something different? Instead of seeing a detailed, realistic representation of something ELSE, wouldn't it be better to just see his portrait and a read/hear a verbal description of what he is doing? I think it would, paradoxically, contribute to the suspension of disbelief.
I still think that The Witcher is an awesome game (there is drug dealing, vampire prostitutes and ex-lycanthropic girlfriends, mind you!), but it strikes me as a game that would benefit from a third-person narrative. That is not to say I am an interactive fiction advocate - I find pure text adventures just too hard to find my bearings in - but I believe that language can express so many things in one sentence that would take hundreds of artist-hours to visualize. Take T. S. Eliot's "streets that follow like a tedious argument / of insidious intent", for example. Do we shut ourself off settings like this by insisting on the fact everything in the game must be seen in 3D?

THE ORIGINAL WORKING CLASS HEROES: Miners, plumbers, trashmen in early 80's games

There has been a lot of articles on gender and race in video games, but has anyone investigated the representation of class? As far as I know, the answer is no. You might say: "What class system do Green Elves have, anyway?" Or, in a more scholarly fashion: "Class is a shaky concept anyway, different from one country to another." You would be right, and yes, I am going to be comfortably vague about the definition of what is working class.
Nevertheless, browsing through my library of early 80's British games, I have found out that there is a substantial share of video game characters that have mundane, hard, exhausting, and generally unenviable jobs. I am not going to say that the proto-game industry was more nice, fair and caring. I see it as an opportunity to explore the relationship between hard-core and casual games, and between technology, game design and content, of which character design is an essential part. It's also an excuse to rant about miner Willy and that I cannot miss.
But let me start with a 1983 British hit, Trashman, featuring you (you can name the character yourself) as a trashman going down the street, collecting trash and getting fired ruthlessly if you are not fast enough. By the way, the advert that's displayed on screen before the gameplay starts reads:

"SITUATION VACANT
Trashman required: must be alert, nimble footed and able to hold his drink."

When you're not fast enough, the following announcement shows up:















The subordination and the class distinctions between the main character and the people who live on the street is further emphasized by the fact that stepping on the grass, and therefore violating their property, makes you run out of time more rapidly. However, if you don't step on the grass, the benevolent house-owners invite you in for a funny chat and give you bonus time. Ian Bogost would probably call this a procedural argument about subservience. Overall, this game offers a good deal of social realism. In retrospect, the people on retro gaming forums are aware of its uniqueness and also Britishness:

"Only the British could make a game about collecting trash, but with the correct humour it pulls it off superbly. Very original and playable, I recommend a blast of this, don't forget to pop in to get the tips! " - Fizza on the C64 Lemon Forum

But the trashman wasn't the only one. Released in 1983 for Sinclair ZX Spectrum, the pioneering platformer game Manic Miner saw the debut of the extraordinary Willy. (Meanwhile, in the mushroom kingdom, Mario changed his profession from carpenter to plumber.) 1984 marked the debut of another English working-class hero, mechanic Wally Week, in the action-adventure game Pyjamarama. In one of the sequels, he was joined by a troupe of other struggling characters, including Tom the punk rocker and Harry the hippie. Another hero, an antropomorphic mole named Monty, appeared in a series of adventure platformers, including Monty On The Run from 1985, in which he tries to escape the police who are chasing him after he took part in a miners' strike (!). This was quite topical, given that 1984 was the year of the ill-fated miners' strikes all over Britain. Today, it sounds like an inspiration for a socially aware serious game. Back then, it was fun, and a relative blockbuster.
These games were huge hits, and although they originated on the Spectrum, the premier UK platform, conversions for other major home computers appeared in no time.

The limited graphic capabilities of early consoles and computers made everything look like a jerky bunch of pixels, which was alright for starship science-fiction (the future is made out of pixels, anyway) or abstract games. But if tiny characters appeared, they could hardly be taken seriously - even the cover art was usually cartoony.
Of all the games mentioned aboved, only Trashman, the scruffy forerunner of the Diner Dashes of today, uses the actual procedure of the job as game design foundation. In the other three games, the game mechanics could pretty much accomodate any character. Jumping around as Mario or Miner Willy could be the same as jumping around with a train conductor or an orchestra conductor. None of their profession-specific skills are used in the game. The choice of characters and monsters was rather arbitrary, although the introduction of the miners and assorted mole people had one game design motivation. That was the fact that the game world was divided into a series of "caverns", closed-off one-screen levels, that were a perfect fit for the underground dwellers.
In Jet Set Willy, a sequel to Manic Miner, Willy is suddenly elevated to high society, because he got rich after finding all the treasures guarded by evil telephones and vicious toilets of the first game. This time, he is wandering through his huge mansion, cleaning up the mess after his "new-found friends" who came to his party. Needless to say, the gameplay hasn't changed much. What changed is Willy's attire: instead of hard hat he has a top-hat.
An interesting class-related narrative element appears, though: the objective of the game is to (once again!) collect all the trash so that Willy's housekeeper Maria lets him to his bedroom. Here, a working-class character makes the miner-gone-socialite perform the same actions as in the original game. It is no surprise that the voluptuous Maria was interpreted by many gamers who did not read the story that came with the original copy of the game as Willy's wife - and that after collecting all the mess, he will be rewarded by some adult fun.
The crazy surrealism of the Willy and Monty Mole games only highlight the down-to-earth, gritty look of the Wally Week games. In the action-adventure game1 Everyone's A Wally, the background art is detailed enough to resemble a small and rather poor British town. In this game, the "gang" of five characters (including a toddler) have to crack safe and get the money. They are not criminals, though - they are a family. And although the game is supposed to be funny (there was even a cheesy comedy song on the flip side of the cassette tape - call it "multi-media"2), the very fact that you're assisting an impoverished family in their criminal pursuits is disturbing, in an exhilirating way.


















As the time went on, working-class characters started to disappear from games for both Spectrum and other platforms. Mario seems to be the only surviving blue-collar gaming icon, worth billions and franchised into infinity. He is an incredibly distinct and well-designed character, no doubt about it, but right now, he is probably the only video game icon who has had a real job. Real-life activities moved into the casual games category with predecessors like the 80's hits Trashman, Burgertime, Cookie, Tapper or Paperboy and recent hits like Diner Dash or Cooking Mama.
Thinking about the reasons, we come across an interesting thing: all the Willys, Wallys and Montys (and Trashman, too) cannot attack, let alone destroy, the monsters (or bloodthirsty household appliances) that threaten them. They are basically powerless. Can you see the Marxist implications?
It would be foolish to design a character with a weapon that cannot be used. If a game is designed with no weapons in mind, harmless Mario (let's forget the jumping part for now) can do the job. But as the requirements on interactivity with environment went up, the characters that just avoid the danger were replaced with those can actively fight against it. Eventually, hard-core games went on to be associated with guys with guns, and orcs, war or both. Serious business.
That was the case with the British 8-bit industry, too. Although it retained some of its domestic, modest and humorous appeal, around 1986, working-class heroes gave way to fantasy, science-fiction and military heroes almost completely3. The follow-up to Trashman bombed, Wally Week went for a jungle adventure out of the ordinary in Three Weeks In Paradise, which marked the end of the series. Monty Mole was dropped and later, his publisher, Gremlin Graphics, gave birth to the offshoot company Core Design, creators of the aristocratic wonder woman Lara Croft4. Good bye, working-class heroes. Or maybe, see you in a casual game. And bring your tools with you.

1)The action-adventure genre was basically a multi-screen platformer with the possibility to carry objects and use them at the right spots. It is often omitted from the adventure game histories, although it shares the essential puzzle-solving element.
2)The affordance of cassette tape as a data medium was the fact that it could include audio without any fancy digitization.
3)Of course, there were also animal heroes and various kinds of blob and jelly.
4)In this little article, I do not intend to criticize representation of class in contemporary games.

YOU BURNOUTS ROTTING IN FRONT OF YOUR COMPUTERS!: Cult of the Superhardcore Gamer in Czech Gaming Culture

It's not unusual to see gamers discuss how many frags they have scored, to which level they have advanced and what mysteries they have unravelled. The feeling of achievement makes a many gamer's life worthwhile. But there are gamers for whom gaming is a serious commitment, a calling, an obsession. They hunger. They hunger for more and more games to finish, preferrably on an Iron Man difficulty setting.
Now, they seem to be relegated to forums of particular games, although, yes, there hasn't been much research on this phenomenon. But there was a time and place, probably one of many, where the superhardcore gameslayer was a shared and articulated fantasy of a larger gaming community. I say fantasy, because it was hard (as if somebody tried) to distinguish between real achievements and tall tales, between a gamer's life and a hallucination induced by too many hours of staring into the screen. There were gamers entering the realm of legend because of their "contribution" to gaming, there were fictional narratives of gaming ecstasies and gaming addiction, of people who took their calling too far. And most interestingly, there was a word describing a superhardcore gamer, a seriously dedicated gamer, in contexts of both fantasy and real life. The word, "pařan", was derived from the verb meaning "to steam". Welcome to the Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic of the early 90's.












The cult of the pařan originated in the discourse sparked by the early Czech gaming magazine Excalibur. Its suggestions of a very specific, emotional relationship to the gamer's computer (more than a particular game), hinted at a Gibsonian cyborg-like coupling of man and machine(1). Gamers' Atari ST's, Amigas and PC's were called "darlings" or "precious ones", promptly invoking the Gollum metaphor.
In a hilarious article called "How To Die In Front Of Your Computer", an Excalibur writer countered a mainstream critique of computer games with a jokingly meant article on how to be a "real pařan". He writes:

"Do not let anybody disturb you. As soon as you come from school or work, immedialtely turn on your computer (or, better, do not turn it off at all) and load your favorite game. Do not answer phone or doorbell. Do not go to the bathroom at all – you could have done that at work! Newbies should play at least until midnight, advanced gamers need not sleep at all. On weekends, pařans must stay at their monitors non-stop.

While playing, sit in the most uncomfortable position possible. This way, you can better identify with the game's main hero – he does not feel comfortable, either!

Never air your room! If you can, put your computer into a windowless room. It should be warm, hard to air and smell dank and stale. That's how you make for a real pařan atmosphere."

There indeed were and are gamers who, to a certain extent, follow these rules. No wonder that, in Score, the early 90's Czech gaming magazine (and likewise in the 80's British press), the ultimate quality of a game was its power to make a gamer sacrifice family life, social life and health. That's total immersion, that's leaving your body behind.
"You'll forget about your pink teddy bear, about your grandma and the urge to go to the bathroom. There will be only you and System Shock," said the review of System Shock in late 1994. Another "life-altering" game, the Sierra adventure Quest for Glory, is described as so addictive that once you start playing, "it goes fast: an hour or two, a sandwich or two, a divorce or two, a grave – just one..." (The same review addressed the readers as "you burnouts rotting in front of your computers", ironically reappropriating the language of their parents.)

In one of the letters to the magazine, a reader confesses:

"They call me Coffeebean and I am the wife of the great pařan that goes by the name of Broken Stick. [...] My husband has been immersed in playing games, Doom specifically, for several months now. [...] In his greatest pařan ecstasies, he jumps out of the window, just in his slippers, and beats our dog Azor with a broom. [...] Recently, he's been telling me my head has 4 feet in diameter. [...] Is there a way of suing id Software for ruining my life? Yours truly, Coffeebean.”

Of course it is all exaggeration, but still, it is now the rhetoric I'm after, not reality.
This is too Monty Python to be true, but note the word "ecstasy". Hardcore gaming is far beyond entertainment.
Although the stories mentioned above all happened in the realm of fantasy, there were real pařan legends, too. If they'd lived in Czechoslovakia, the heroes of King of Kong might have been among them. But Eastern Europe has always been a home computer rather than console or arcade gaming region, so the gaming legends claim that they "turned the score over in Jet Pac(2)" or that they "can walk through first levels of Doom, blindfolded" instead. This discourse of achievement made for a community that, although unrestricting and decidedly unserious, offered an accomplishment-based hierarchy.
Given it was a computer gaming subculture, there was always a huge emphasis on the technical skills and the mastery of many platforms. The advancement through the evolving computer environment and the experience of "beating the medium" (oh, games are the probably the only medium you can beat) in the very process of its making were an essential part of the more real-life pařan figures. The early adopters and the technologically priviliged, those who knew how turn a new technology into pleasure, were a step closer to the pařan-dom.
When the Score magazine, the best-selling gaming magazine and premier pařan outlet, decided to stop using the word pařan and the whole pařan rhetoric in its 13th issue, the editor-in-chief (himself a bigger pařan than anybody else) intended it as a step away from the fantasy of total dedication, towards a more "mature" attitude. He also wanted to reach out to the non-hardcore audience. Upon this decision, the editorial staff even divided their real selves from their gaming selves by discarding their gaming nicknames (used as authors' names) in favor of real names. But the myth was so deeply grounded in the gaming community that people were afraid of losing their status and the value of their accomplishments along with the signifier. A reader complained:

“Today, a child says 'I want' and gets a computer, finishes a game with a walkthrough and cheats and calls himself a pařan. He is not one, but what about those who worked themselves up step by step on programmable calculators, ZX Spectrum, Amiga and PC to be first-class gamers, aren't they pařans? They mastered mouse and joystick, crosshair and two-handed axe, magic and strategy, dialects of English and Norton Utilities? Aren't they pařans?!”

This was back in the day when many, mainly computer, games apparently weren't meant to be finished and their mindless difficulty renders them unplayable for a contemporary gamer - whereas now you quite often "sit through" a game rather than struggle with it. That might be the reason why pařandom was so precious to this reader.
It also explains why the "real-life", hierarchical, achievement-based element of hard core gaming was so central to the community, whereas the fantasy element probably originated as opposition through pleasure, as an immersion in a brand new meta-gaming world that included not only the games themselves, but the game of gaming, the whole digital space that was suddenly available and ready to be explored. And beaten.

1 While talking about computers with affection, do we use the mundane word computer anymore? Or do we switch to something more primal and powerful, something that doesn't remind us of the anemic office space?

2 I. e. running out of digits used to keep the score, and thereby reverting it back to zero. Not easy in Jet Pac, one of the most famous Sinclair ZX Spectrum games.

The screenshot comes from Bloodnet.