tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28187895786458186012024-03-14T03:29:02.555-07:00Different GamingJaroslav Švelch a.k.a.
<A HREF="http://myspace.com/restinhaste"
>Ragů Klemensó</A>
a.k.a. <A HREF="http://leznoplak.blogspot.com"
>Lezno Plak</A> explores different kinds of gaming and gaming cultures. Retro, European, extinct platforms, independent & hard core.Jaroslav Švelchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09202593085090003738noreply@blogger.comBlogger17125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2818789578645818601.post-3502656884554916362011-07-17T05:04:00.000-07:002011-07-17T05:04:50.069-07:00INDIANA JONES FIGHTS THE COMMUNIST POLICE: Czechoslovak Text Adventures as a Transitional Media Form<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgycZmKp9THJHcyZ-Bpk8ZPfGdSplEkbanHzAtZSXgsg7rQ_DgpqPJaSyhBSaPK7FEwwUDsumymusoYJZv4AA-CQl5oNY0vdiO9riew_CrEAIIm_jdJIu7vtcBKVoPQ4shxyp8xRbsTjrIP/s1600/indy1loading.gif" imageanchor="1" style="clear:left; float:left;margin-right:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="192" width="256" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgycZmKp9THJHcyZ-Bpk8ZPfGdSplEkbanHzAtZSXgsg7rQ_DgpqPJaSyhBSaPK7FEwwUDsumymusoYJZv4AA-CQl5oNY0vdiO9riew_CrEAIIm_jdJIu7vtcBKVoPQ4shxyp8xRbsTjrIP/s320/indy1loading.gif" /></a></div><br />
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In May, I had a chance to come back to Cambridge, MA, and MIT's Comparative Media Studies department and present a piece of dissertation project at the <a href="http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit7/subs/abstracts.html">MiT7 conference</a>. The conference embodied my personal relationship with new media and media change: critical fascination. I especially enjoyed my fellow ex-CMSers Colleen Kaman and Kevin Driscoll's presentations and Marina Levina's provocative piece on citizen bioscience. Of course, there was also a track on games, with Clara Fernandez's insightful paper on emulation, Ian Peters' on archiving MMOs and others.<br />
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You can easily read my paper <a href="http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit7/papers/Svelch_MiT7.pdf">here</a>.<br />
The Prezi for it is <a href="http://prezi.com/_vd79c8d5tod/czechoslovak-text-adventures/">here</a>.<br />
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What I wanted to share is the background of this paper. I had been researching old Czechoslovak gaming magazines and games for my dissertation, but the inspiration for a piece on text adventures as such was a call for chapters for a book on Central European digital narratives and electronic literature. I set out to write a paper about the history of digital textuality (including word processors, so ubiquitous and yet so underresearched), but ended up writing mostly about text adventures. <br />
I was especially curious about the two big projects connected to nationwide contests - the 1989's Město robotů (City of Robots) and 1990's ...a to snad ne?! (...what the heck?!), so I interviewed some of their authors. Interestingly enough, one of the authors of the latter game is now a renowned economist and a member of the <a href="http://http://www.vlada.cz/en/ppov/ekonomicka-rada/national-economic-council-51372/">National Economic Council</a>. It was amazing meeting him in his office and listening to him tell the story of a group of students from Pilsen who moved into the countryside to one of their parents' farm and set out to write a hypertext game and actually SELL it (remember, it was just after the Velvet Revolution and there was not yet any functional software market).<br />
In many ways, the history of digital games in Czechoslovakia is a history of the downfall of central planning, the disintegration of totalitarian regime's authority over culture and technology, and the transformation of the society into a free-market democracy (as we wish to think of it).Jaroslav Švelchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09202593085090003738noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2818789578645818601.post-27635932149241378222010-02-15T07:58:00.000-08:002010-02-15T14:55:30.021-08:00PASSING THE WORLD THROUGH MY BODY: My thoughts about The Void<a href="http://www.ice-pick.com/index_eng.htm">Icepick Lodge</a>'s <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Void_%28video_game%29">The Void</a> is a strange game. It is deliberately confusing, contradictory, obscure and opaque. I must admit that I enjoy playing strange games and that is why I bought it in the first place. But The Void actually manages to be more than a curio. It made me think. Not only about its own story and world, but also about games and gameplay experience as such.<br />
The following paragraphs are by no means a full-fledged interpretation, it is more of a collection of ruminations and a work in progress. I might come up with some interpretation and a critique later.<br />
For those of you who haven't played, here is a short description. By its publishers, The Void is described as a "survival horror". Although it has nothing to do with Resident Evil, the words ring true. You will certainly be afraid of dying. As a nameless and transparent soul, you enter the Void, the strange place between Life and Death. First of all, you have no clue as what to do. But your purpose becomes clearer after some time, thanks to the information given to you by Sisters and Brothers, the only sentient beings alive here. The Void is a system of interconnected chambers, with each part of the void being a dominion of a certain Sister and the Brother who guards her. Once you enter a chambers, you move in 3D and collect the rare "Color" and kill monsters that try to annoy you in the process. Color comes in seven... colors. Having certain colors in your hearts enhances your "stats": red makes you stronger, blue makes you faster and so on. You can also mine and plant Color - when you give Color to trees, they bear more Color in the next cycle. Cycles introduce a turn-based mechanic. In the chambers, the game clock is still, but while you are in the pathways of the Void ("on the map"), the time is running. You have 100 units of time to get wherever you need and then the new cycle begins, spawning monsters, making trees and mines yield Color. From time to time, you are assigned quests by the Sisters and Brothers. While on the map, your body transforms the Color you collected in your hearts into the Color you can paint with, and thus interact with the world - this is done by drawing glyphs, like in the acclaimed RPG hit <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okami">Okami</a>. But once you have no more Color in your hearts, you die. And you will die a lot. One of the goals of the game is to open hearts of the sisters by filling them with the colors of their preference. By doing so, you are granted passage through their dominions.<br />
The game fits into no particular genre. It looks like an RPG, sometimes morphs into a shooter, but esentially plays like a strategy game, because planning your progress and managing resources is absolutely essential. In fact, it is a game frustratingly difficult to describe - reminding us how much we rely on established genre conventions while writing about games. As I mentioned before, the game made me think. I also immensely enjoyed it. I will try to outline three main reasons why I think this game captured me.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqsZdomfZNd1JCdytCBZfptMS2qakiPzo6gogKRdqGO-CBlt4ItGo8ekmAJ_cA11OWr_rPbXUh8x0BOVDvZTgquwRn6nj8-3xM0ke7FnBtuOy9A7Hc3sNPZt0pLFjbTlYRaJlS41zL2C_5/s1600-h/thevoid1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqsZdomfZNd1JCdytCBZfptMS2qakiPzo6gogKRdqGO-CBlt4ItGo8ekmAJ_cA11OWr_rPbXUh8x0BOVDvZTgquwRn6nj8-3xM0ke7FnBtuOy9A7Hc3sNPZt0pLFjbTlYRaJlS41zL2C_5/s320/thevoid1.png" /></a></div><br />
<i>1. Experience through world building</i><br />
The Void takes a very minimalistic, yet bold approach to world building. It boils fiction down to minimum. The world has no elaborate history or mythology. Many contemporary games take place in a huge fictional world, while letting gameplay happen only in small sections of it. But the Void is shown in its entirety. It is a closed-off, temporary world, barren and dangerous, "a desert on the threshold of death". In the monologues, it is repeatedly referred to as a "dream" of a "sleeper". It is thus also a decidedly and openly made-up world. I think this is very important for the way The Void works with immersion: the whole world exists only for the player, there is no part of it that cannot be explored. The laws of the Void equal the rules of the game. There is nothing less and nothing more.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLVbSSvP6jroj26m2fswnhEHux7qrFgEwcamDqVxsFjr0J7OvHnvh0EnsgJ6_OMTAIAjg_UA9gPC8O9xu8olAXxILsuzHF-isCAZ20Z4HlMkaDTMq9CJawmNPyes7-3yw8unKd0LQGBbFF/s1600-h/scr0018.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLVbSSvP6jroj26m2fswnhEHux7qrFgEwcamDqVxsFjr0J7OvHnvh0EnsgJ6_OMTAIAjg_UA9gPC8O9xu8olAXxILsuzHF-isCAZ20Z4HlMkaDTMq9CJawmNPyes7-3yw8unKd0LQGBbFF/s320/scr0018.png" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>A partial map of The Void</i> </div><br />
The fact that the game admits its world is a made-up one also allows artists and designers to let their imagination run wild. And let me say, the art in this game is beautiful and utterly original. You might have seen the almost-naked sisters (by the way, this game, which features lots of nudity, is 12+ according to PEGI) and the Tetsuo-like meat-machine hybrids that call themselves Brothers, but this game walks down so many avenues of weird that you will hardly find a match. Each chamber is a foreboding pocket universe.<br />
To contrast with the rare and vivid Color, most of the environment is grey. It makes the experience of lighting it up quite striking. My friend and colleague <a href="http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1401861">Doris Rusch</a> has written repeatedly about games as emotional experiences - arguing that the mechanics and the fiction do not account for the game's meaning by themselves, but that it is meaningful experiences that matter. Experiences are a very good way of looking at The Void. Lighting up trees with Color is one of them. Sucking Color out of the trees is another one. While harvesting a tree, the camera, always in the first person view except on the map, starts to lift and pan away from the tree, letting you view the tree's boughs as they are dimming down. It is a strange, out-of-body experience, which made me think of drug-induced states. Although it might be a minor detail in presentation (it is not even a game mechanic), it makes you "feel" that Color is great - that it gets you high.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiH94a9U0nVmuA-gfqTv1kFCI9I1Dnf48BCq5Ik3WZJXqIFDwIbqcoSLwbcUXSDxs_KY5uBXMKLqErbbpG-yGDBxBmOfwYlcamPRX0KMREq71xYeGeSk3qOgIr0QbV5bZUSrXPwJV0Qkxfq/s1600-h/scr0019.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiH94a9U0nVmuA-gfqTv1kFCI9I1Dnf48BCq5Ik3WZJXqIFDwIbqcoSLwbcUXSDxs_KY5uBXMKLqErbbpG-yGDBxBmOfwYlcamPRX0KMREq71xYeGeSk3qOgIr0QbV5bZUSrXPwJV0Qkxfq/s320/scr0019.png" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>A tree glowing with Color</i></div><br />
You will often wander into the same chambers repeatedly, checking for new Color. (In terms of raw gameplay time, most of it is spent walking in the chambers - that is why the game has been criticized as "slow".) You will learn about the sisters and brothers. You will get familiar with them. But the logic of the world design is unforgiving: It is a world made for you, the player, and so will it with you perish. At one point in the game, the first Sister gives up on life and descends into darkness. At the same time, more and more monsters start to roam the chambers. You feel like the Void is fading, going away. This Void is claustrophobic and you might want out, but it is the only thing you have. But you will have to leave it behind or die with it - quite literally, because the Void is destroyed at the end of the game. There is a lot of melancholy involved in the visual and sonic design of the game, but knowing that this world you have become so intimate with, the world whose rules you have mastered, will cease to exist has its sad, cold-blooded logic. Well, the game is Russian after all.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtLEcCyXJS0S6mIiLotqKcusJG3xwf3iGJgsGE7l5C0b7tfoXcdr1cDrH1Oc9-cxr2n0nD99wneJEzIU6_Hl85WqMoLsx3yiIGJF73vNytMXbl1QSZm2zVvokagaoCbJPEo4SWHTOof0TD/s1600-h/scr0024.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtLEcCyXJS0S6mIiLotqKcusJG3xwf3iGJgsGE7l5C0b7tfoXcdr1cDrH1Oc9-cxr2n0nD99wneJEzIU6_Hl85WqMoLsx3yiIGJF73vNytMXbl1QSZm2zVvokagaoCbJPEo4SWHTOof0TD/s320/scr0024.png" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"> <i>Brother Pit</i></div><br />
<i>2. Being lost</i><br />
The Void is an ambitious game. I resist calling it an art game, because the term brings in connotations I wish to avoid. I'd rather call it an "artistic" game. At the same time, it is decidedly hard core. Not that experience with other games would give you a significant advantage, but it does require perseverance and a great deal of patience. Is it a bad decision on the side of the developers, because the overlap between the hard core audience and the artistic game audience is likely to be quite small? <br />
Partly, yes. The Void is hard in many unfair ways. It uses the damnable mechanics of time limits and random spawning. Its controls are rather shoddy. It reminded me of the early 90's computer games - from before controls were standardized and genres as well. Do you remember the original Dune game, Bloodnet or Cybermage? Messes of games which could never decide what they wanted to be? At the same time, those games were often quite adventurous, as is the Void. As <a href="http://www.ludomancy.com/blog/2006/12/26/definition-of-experimental-gameplay/">Daniel Benmergui</a> put it, experimental gameplay is "gameplay still not proven to work".<br />
At the same time, The Void is hard in more subtle ways. Mainly, it never explains itself. The tutorial is misleading. The game provides you with information vital for your survival after you have figured it out yourself. Many game mechanics are totally obscure. Let me give you one example. Once you paint a tree with Color, it yields more of the same color in the next cycle. It bears twice as less Color in the following cycle, and so on, until it becomes "depleted". When you want to harvest a depleted tree, a message will pop up, "It can be revived in a few cycles". But what is a few cycles? Two, or five - or ten? This piece of information might be absolutely crucial to the planning of your future progress. In fact, different kinds of trees are revived after a different number of cycles. Of course, you can find this information on the game's forums, but that doesn't change the fact that the game is secretive. <br />
Most of the information about both the game's fictional world and the game mechanics come from NPCs, especially the Sisters. But the information is invariably cryptic and vague, and frankly, some NPCs just plain lie to you. Aya, one of the Sisters, tells you "Oh, guest... You really do not comprehend...", which sums up the situation quite nicely. In another great stroke of minimalist design, the main character is mute, so he cannot really ask any questions. He has to rely on a dissonant fugue of other characters' voices who may or may not be honest with him.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieiI1qFQFZs0eHUzrFBhjshgUkm67U5NUuPQgGe-StfgMWz7kv27h2j0p052G7Zb2hmuqGFal3ww5EjDQJUrHwurtkB4fjxmmYFgarmVYUCrbucitN8QjWz_LeRZ4i8xplouv4teSpOCOF/s1600-h/scr0017.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieiI1qFQFZs0eHUzrFBhjshgUkm67U5NUuPQgGe-StfgMWz7kv27h2j0p052G7Zb2hmuqGFal3ww5EjDQJUrHwurtkB4fjxmmYFgarmVYUCrbucitN8QjWz_LeRZ4i8xplouv4teSpOCOF/s320/scr0017.png" /></a></div><br />
Basically, you are left to explore the mechanics yourself. This brings about an unsettling feeling of uncertainty. Yes, you actually do feel lost and stranded in a strange and dangerous world whose laws you do not understand. I said before that I liked strange games. I also like games with worlds which I can get lost in. I think that being lost is one of the most intense ways of experiencing a world, including the world we live in. I also think that the sensation of being lost is slowly being eradicated from game design in favor of making sure that the player knows what to do at all times. The question is, can this sensation be communicated without the prohibitive difficulty? I'm not offering an easy answer. Actually, my question leads to another, more controversial one: Is difficulty a means of expression in games, or just a mere matter of fine-tuning of the mechanics? Is difficulty meaningful?<br />
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<i>3.Give and take</i><br />
I mentioned that the fiction of the game is very tightly coupled with the game mechanics. Even the "conversations" with NPCs hardly ever refer to anything not intimately connected to the rules of the game. There is a master narrative - that of the ascension to the world above, a world that you get glimpses of as the game progresses, but I will not attempt to interpret the game as a whole. Instead I will focus on the core mechanics of "metabolism".<br />
As you gather Color, you collect it in the form of <i>lympha</i>. You have only limited storage for lympha. To survive in the pathways of the Void (on the map), you have to fill your hearts (you will have up to 21 of them) with Color. You do so manually. Once you have no Color in your hearts, you die. On the map, with each tick of the game clock the Color from your hearts is being transformed into <i>nerva</i> and stored in your palette - that is the Color you can paint with. The storage space for nerva is also limited.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEie3kOFgLrqitk4wsfoQ7qC-2gCkK3HIA0rVzkJ4UAcTFhshoRG-0DGO2EQyxL3z-6wNHgRgPxrpHn4y4EYMqu3th6tpDuXUVq09OlEPM4huxU1StrF471JM1d4g9TsF6KjAedQW8qHMgMw/s1600-h/scr0020.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEie3kOFgLrqitk4wsfoQ7qC-2gCkK3HIA0rVzkJ4UAcTFhshoRG-0DGO2EQyxL3z-6wNHgRgPxrpHn4y4EYMqu3th6tpDuXUVq09OlEPM4huxU1StrF471JM1d4g9TsF6KjAedQW8qHMgMw/s320/scr0020.png" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>The body screen: Lympha on the right, body with hearts in the middle, palette with nerva on the left</i></div><br />
This mechanic implies very interesting dynamics: First of all, the process that gives you power is also killing you. That in itself requires careful balancing of your actions. Secondly, there is no possibility of long-term accumulation of resources. The Color flows through your hearts constantly and you must be always hunting for new color. Thirdly, you can hold only so much nerva in your palette, which makes you use it or give it to the Sisters. Sister Ima says it herself:<br />
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<i>"You're only a vessel. A still, converting the old into the new. You grow nerva, yes, but there's nothing great about that. A heroic deed would be giving away all thay you have grown. (...) Only you can grow Color, kind Guest. It's your nature to try to pass our entire world through your body."</i><br />
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You are caught in an endless cycle of hunting, planting and giving away. You must check your hearts all the time; you are always on the move. There is no moment in which you can just sit back and look back at what you have accomplished. Only within the chambers can you take your time and reflect - although the chambers get more and more dangerous in the course of the game.<br />
In terms of gameplay experience, this is part survival horror, part life - pure biological life without capital and without property. All that you own is in your hearts. You might have have a garden of trees, yes, but there is no guarantee a Brother will not come and ravage it. You let the Color flow through your body and pass it on. This makes both taking and giving of color enjoyable. There are other incentives for giving, too. When you fill a tree with color, it will ultimately yield more color than you painted it with. And of course, the best known fact about the game is that by filling up the Sisters' hearts, you unshackle and undress them and that they do these little dances for you. It is more tasteful than it sounds. Even when you realize that the purpose of a Sister is to "give new life" and come to the conlusion that filling their hearts from your palette is in fact a mystical sexual communion.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNbqsxRqvMc6GUitqcCVnxhJgOnUZF7GsXDE59oHWs57yFC99-OnwYFgYOf_Ja1gvX-fNCB8j9IP6_rwd_uugDpdPZirSEWktHVVI0LxlSuhLZZ_aKJfGqTfFhaFko6LogaSKCyVjvUZ2g/s1600-h/scr0023.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNbqsxRqvMc6GUitqcCVnxhJgOnUZF7GsXDE59oHWs57yFC99-OnwYFgYOf_Ja1gvX-fNCB8j9IP6_rwd_uugDpdPZirSEWktHVVI0LxlSuhLZZ_aKJfGqTfFhaFko6LogaSKCyVjvUZ2g/s320/scr0023.png" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Drawing the glyph of giving on Sister Eli</i></div><br />
But again it all comes down to life. The unique experience of living in the Void is that you feel your hearts beating and converting lympha to nerva, that you are in hyper-awareness of your bodily functions and your mortality. For the main character, the Void is a proving ground for life in the world above, where he wants to ascend.<br />
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I made three points about the things I found fascinating about the game. How does it relate to its use of the video game medium?<br />
1. The laws of the game's world correspond very closely with the rules of the game, therefore the player enters a very intimate relationship with it. Dream worlds give designers freedom. Also, a dream world does not mean a world without rules. It can be a world abstract enough to fit the rules. Dream and nightmare worlds are often used in smaller abstract games (<a href="http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/511754">Time Fcuk</a> comes to mind), but even a bigger 3D project like The Void can sustain it.<br />
2. The player never gets full briefing on the rules of the game. Discovering them is a painstaking, but rewarding process. Having no clue is also a meaningful experience.<br />
3. The game mechanics abstract and adjust the very basic procedures of our life, while giving them an interesting ethical spin. You consume and generate energy, which is to be passed on, not wasted on one's self.Jaroslav Švelchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09202593085090003738noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2818789578645818601.post-73612142203745871242009-12-28T06:11:00.000-08:002009-12-28T06:11:48.750-08:00ALL THE BEST IN 2010. Nicked and re-mixed from Jet Set Willy.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDgkYF-yy7ARPMtFV33v31ewedQ3e4hqU7bXozoU-Pq0GAEQRburegA-8OYOOLd94aTSrvZseJuIrxbUZOQtlCJogPeHFhAOC6GF3qNKC0wf575jD9vTbINM0LkErMaYozkHnjuaIkhqb1/s1600-h/PF2010byRAGU.gif" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDgkYF-yy7ARPMtFV33v31ewedQ3e4hqU7bXozoU-Pq0GAEQRburegA-8OYOOLd94aTSrvZseJuIrxbUZOQtlCJogPeHFhAOC6GF3qNKC0wf575jD9vTbINM0LkErMaYozkHnjuaIkhqb1/s400/PF2010byRAGU.gif" /></a><br />
</div>Jaroslav Švelchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09202593085090003738noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2818789578645818601.post-47094542948247632852009-09-29T12:29:00.000-07:002009-09-30T08:59:48.391-07:00DEUS EX VIENNA. 16-color lifetime achievementI am back from Vienna, from the amazingly friendly <a href="http://bupp.at/frog">Future and Reality of Gaming</a> conference. I will try to sum up my impressions of the conference later, now I'd like to share the topic of my talk.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiB2xGXr6TezldYDrRQIGh8LI-6uEk9uV3JQWKvRjbtZXXK_tJCw1qnSzg55l54xsF22Yet0so5T7M4Oeq9VaFuguOunNwXTDBXEEUD-ajBxF5dYEsYieABs-KRFyr1KlkEENfc4YBLctvt/s1600-h/Deusblog.gif"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 269px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiB2xGXr6TezldYDrRQIGh8LI-6uEk9uV3JQWKvRjbtZXXK_tJCw1qnSzg55l54xsF22Yet0so5T7M4Oeq9VaFuguOunNwXTDBXEEUD-ajBxF5dYEsYieABs-KRFyr1KlkEENfc4YBLctvt/s320/Deusblog.gif" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5387022285002312802" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />First, some personal history. Last fall, while living in Willow Street in Cambridge, MA, I rediscovered the weirdest game of the 1980's - Automata UK's Deus Ex Machina. I thought it would be a nice fun event to do a real-time playthrough of the game in the Gambit Game Lab, where I was a visiting researcher at the time. Each playthrough of the game takes exactly 45 minutes, as it is to be synchronized with the audio soundtrack. The invitation for the event read:<br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">DEUS EX MACHINA<br />A Bizarre Multimedia Experience straight from 1984<br />50 minutes of awe!<br />Projected on a moderately big screen!<br /><br />Somewhere between Shakespeare and The Wall, between Breakout and the Holodeck, there is Deus Ex Machina.<br /><br />Designed by the repeatedly failed visionary Mel Croucher, who not only wrote the game, but also played banjo, Korg Vocoder and a zillion of other instruments on the game's soundtrack, this is probably the first commercial art house game. It came on two cassette tapes, one with the game, the other with the soundtrack, which was to be synced with the computer program. <br />In many ways, it was a total failure, which brought its publisher Automata UK Ltd. to bankruptcy; in many ways it's an amazingly non-conformist take on computer entertainment, which left the reviewers baffled, disoriented and strangely pleased.<br /><br />The game, whose treads the thin line between artsy and campy, takes the player through the Seven stages of man, each one a different minigame, hinting at comparisons with both Will Wright's Spore and Jason Roher's Passage. The soundtrack features compositions such as "I'm the Fertilizing Agent" and "War Crimes Are Easy" and bears eerie resemblance to trip hop, which was to arrive many years later. Also, it features John Pertwee of the Doctor Who fame and some other British actors who used to be famous in 1984.<br /><br />A playthrough of Deus Ex Machina takes exactly the duration of the soundtrack to finish, which is why it is such a great game to play and screen with curious friends and colleagues. The Sinclair ZX Spectrum version of the game running on a emulator will be synced with an MP3 of the audio track, the keyboard will be passed around (you cannot win or lose the game, anyways) to anybody who wants to play and the rest will get carried away by the immersive 256x192 attribute-clashing visuals and insane soundtrack.<br /></span><br />For the talk, I did an interview with the author/auteur Mr. Mel Croucher (he's still a witty, sarcastic and eccentric guy) and did a detailed analysis of the game. I will post the whole paper when it's done, but for now, you should at least try Deus Ex Machina yourselves (if you haven't seen it yet). Download a ZX Spectrum emulator for your system, <a href="http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0001373">the game and the audio</a>. I'm always surprised by how positive people's reactions to the game are and how much they love the music. Initial distrust and condescending smile always gives way to involvement, immersion and singing along.Jaroslav Švelchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09202593085090003738noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2818789578645818601.post-16624371430112131462009-06-23T13:14:00.000-07:002009-09-29T12:15:46.907-07:00GAMERS' BAD CONSCIENCE: Moral emotions in games & other newsThe semester is over and I am reading through my students' essays and assignments. I realize that it is very hard, almost impossible, for some of them to write anything else than a game review. The question is: to buy, or not to buy. Or rather: to download illegally, or not? This confirms what José Zagal wrote about in <a href="http://facsrv.cs.depaul.edu/~jzagal/Papers/Zagal_Bruckman-NovicesUnderstandingGames.pdf">his paper</a> on teaching about digital games.<br />Apart from that, my paper about "moral" decisions in single-player games just made it into a book called <i><a href="http://www.columbia.edu/~kls2108/callforchapters.htm">Ethics and Game Design</a></i>. It basically explores the feelings of guilt and bad conscience we get while playing scoundrels in video games. Kicking innocents, teaming up with vampires, abusing doctors sans frontiers, such things. I tried to come up with a model (oh yes, a model!) of what has to be considered while thinking about our moral emotions in gameplay. Of course, much of what I'm talking about came up in the discussions in the <a href="http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/games/">Valuable Games</a> Harvard-MIT sessions, which I dearly miss. Another source of inspiration was John Walker's incessantly entertaining and disturbing <a href="http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/bastard-of-the-old-republic-article">account </a>of playing evil in <i>Knights Of The Old Republic</i>.<br />It was one of those papers that make you read stuff, read more stuff, turn your brain into jelly and read some more. I read many an investigation on moral decision-making and moral identities. Most of them were even completely useless for my purposes. In the end, I found that <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Emotional-Construction-Morals-Jesse-Prinz/dp/019928301X">Prinz's</a> and Greene's neo-Humean (and relativistic) take on moral emotions were most inspiring. Especially Greene's <a href="http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~jgreene/GreeneWJH/Greene-Dissertation.pdf">dissertation </a>is great read, although I did not find it as shocking as the author seems to think it is. I guess I had already been a moral relativist. See you in hell.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEismLz9EaspneLrj7ASy1Xk4ewvZETFk11qPHWQV71RTVNb_xWShb6AFbF_qML1Y8kTYcvg8n79ZfxOzf3UqTcvDe6xpL5B9i3SezjIRy1tXnnNGzLtyBV0-VGiW1gnhw0JihsQ05vWNkm4/s1600-h/1093543587-00.png"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEismLz9EaspneLrj7ASy1Xk4ewvZETFk11qPHWQV71RTVNb_xWShb6AFbF_qML1Y8kTYcvg8n79ZfxOzf3UqTcvDe6xpL5B9i3SezjIRy1tXnnNGzLtyBV0-VGiW1gnhw0JihsQ05vWNkm4/s320/1093543587-00.png" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5350627026480968450" /></a>Jaroslav Švelchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09202593085090003738noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2818789578645818601.post-91948836251593173472009-03-08T10:33:00.000-07:002009-03-09T14:40:49.982-07:00BOBBIN ATTACKS BRNO: Loom paper, teaching game studies (updated)The editor of eLudamos, the journal I submitted my close reading of Loom to, turned out to be a big fan of the game as well. The result is that the Loom paper, my labor of love (and given it's not that long, it was actually a lot of labor), was published and it is now your turn to read it, comment, agree, or disagree. It's <a href="http://eludamos.org/index.php/eludamos/issue/view/7/showToc">here</a>.<br />In other news, I started teaching game studies at the <a href="http://www.phil.muni.cz/">Faculty of Arts of Masaryk University</a> in Brno. It's a full-on assault, seven 3-hour lectures total, with attendance of over 70 people, many of whom have very interesting gaming histories (there's even a fan of <i>I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream</i>). It is a part of their <a href="http://www.phil.muni.cz/music/staticpages/index.php?page=teorie_interaktivnich_medii">Interactive Media Theory</a> programme whose existence is fitting given that Brno is the Czech capital of game industry with 2K Czech and others having their offices there.<br /><br />Update: My friend Clara Fernandez has just sent me images from the last FuturePlay conference in Toronto. To have this post visually stimulating, I'm going to put one of them right here... Or, is it stimulating?<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVjllPDDRr5VDsR6757mMn837nHszpU5WUAM2jatmSLMuPllbBPALVtDbfhI-iISx5rsLYBnUwe4wUorXpDy4q1bNwAXsxL7GEqF3dpQCYT0JKRmznu9saXhTAS2zmFUKue6Sat2-PQaFO/s1600-h/FuturePlay_Jarda.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 240px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVjllPDDRr5VDsR6757mMn837nHszpU5WUAM2jatmSLMuPllbBPALVtDbfhI-iISx5rsLYBnUwe4wUorXpDy4q1bNwAXsxL7GEqF3dpQCYT0JKRmznu9saXhTAS2zmFUKue6Sat2-PQaFO/s320/FuturePlay_Jarda.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5311305886622934114" /></a>Jaroslav Švelchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09202593085090003738noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2818789578645818601.post-14436414080718994092009-01-22T09:54:00.000-08:002009-01-22T10:22:10.960-08:00THE PLEASURABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING: Writing about LoomI've always loved Loom and had this feeling that even though The Secret of Monkey Island is <i>the</i> classic graphic adventure game, Loom is more... special. It has got a unique interface, in which you play melodies at things instead of using objects on objects - thus eliminating the inventory. It has a very deep and mysterious, however sparsely sketched, story. And it also attracted me by being a black sheep of the Lucasfilm's oeuvre.<br />Inspired by detailed analyses of games my <a href="http://gambit.mit.edu">Gambit</a> colleagues Doris Rusch, Matt Weise and Clara Fernandéz-Vara wrote for the forthcoming <a href="http://www.etc.cmu.edu/etcpress/?q=node/232">Well Played</a> book, I revisited Loom again to try to find out what's so special about it. I also read some online reviews that called Loom "the buddhist of videogames", for example, and tried to capture the elusive magic of the game in words. The recurring theme of fan reviews is the notion of <i>lightness</i> and intangibility.<br />I totally agree with them. But what intrigued me is how these feelings are brought about by the game's narrative and interface (especially given that adventure games are by many considered clumsy and not gamey enough). So I decided to write an "academic review" of the game.<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIfpsKWjX9xBYPCjB1tTVCWkHHMrVG3ifrwZlnHhdCLLesSJuG7tFRF3RIf0SvXoRYbyIiJ9TnqTCZqGTsfERzn0RCnHwnw4BuxBMgvlffUEOM3JSoOBPRob1mXUCcuVzWwaMtqw_Zut0i/s1600-h/LoomPic.png"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIfpsKWjX9xBYPCjB1tTVCWkHHMrVG3ifrwZlnHhdCLLesSJuG7tFRF3RIf0SvXoRYbyIiJ9TnqTCZqGTsfERzn0RCnHwnw4BuxBMgvlffUEOM3JSoOBPRob1mXUCcuVzWwaMtqw_Zut0i/s320/LoomPic.png" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5294184948344787106" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />I submitted the whole paper to the game studies journal <a href="http://www.eludamos.org">Eludamos</a>, so I cannot repeat the whole thing here. But in principle, Loom is a damn smart game. Instead of sucking the player in by the standard immersion techniques, it rather takes Bobbin, the main protagonist, out of the game world. He is a weaver, a member of a tribe that can alter the fabric universe with their magic of music, just like the player can control the game. He cannot bring any objects with himself on his journey, just as the player cannot bring any real-world objects into games. These parallels run very deep on all possible levels. Moreover, the identification of the player with Bobbin is made easier by him not having a face.<br />I spent so much time dissecting Loom that it bordered on obsession. Hopefully the paper will be published - and maybe it will even inspire people to look for smartness in games or to make smart games. If it is, I will instantly link it from here. Of course, there will be no screenshots, for reasons explained in the previous post.Jaroslav Švelchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09202593085090003738noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2818789578645818601.post-47670529461327114742008-12-28T08:55:00.000-08:002008-12-28T13:45:23.547-08:00THE TORONTO TROUBLE. Complaining about copyright issuesI'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 <a href="http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/%7Ejg27paw4/yr10/yr10_52.htm">weird ones</a>, 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.<br />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 <a href="http://differentgaming.blogspot.com/2008/03/what-you-cant-see-is-what-you-dont-get.html">What You Can't See Is What You Don't Get</a>, 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 <a href="http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html">T.S.Eliot quote</a>!<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDF7uINUJY2j-DOiwHg-B5_gf7aGnxYTE1L2KlWF9ShsUF1SfH1xTXCafUCT2En5fAVpacGG336-gDMta1kJOkCvskajBIW2Myi2K3ncJp_ECpBm4Vl7Vlmy5TvuPYz9LWAoiL-FTGDQqJ/s1600-h/JardaFuturepLAY.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDF7uINUJY2j-DOiwHg-B5_gf7aGnxYTE1L2KlWF9ShsUF1SfH1xTXCafUCT2En5fAVpacGG336-gDMta1kJOkCvskajBIW2Myi2K3ncJp_ECpBm4Vl7Vlmy5TvuPYz9LWAoiL-FTGDQqJ/s320/JardaFuturepLAY.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5284899599031115154" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />What I'm finding blogworthy, though, are the copyright issues I've had with it. In the paper, I'm talking about <a href="http://www.mobygames.com/game/macintosh/secret-of-monkey-island/screenshots/gameShotId,203357/">The Secret of Monkey Island</a>, and obviously, it makes sense to actually include screenshots of the game.<br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">impossible</span> 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 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Doom_gibs.png">Wikipedia</a>. 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.<br />There are a few <a href="http://ask.metafilter.com/55616/Copyright-in-screenshots-Who-owns-it">discussions</a> of the matter on-line, but they quite inconclusive in whether a screenshot constitutes a <span style="font-style: italic;">derivative work</span>. 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.<br /><span style="font-size:85%;">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.</span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;">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?).<br />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?</span>Jaroslav Švelchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09202593085090003738noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2818789578645818601.post-10158410306313580632008-09-06T23:35:00.000-07:002008-09-07T21:13:11.229-07:00READING IS COOL. Reading about video games is cooler.<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEja9nC5eJf5gr78j-75CNd5LxW0wU9-rzueGZcXNFbikFvzNd26F6Ui_15vl7mXVRgtsYv-9d_fXXaM52FDvO0hySnOKez3dZtXx4fi9YEwPuuCIKqmE5vD4C89CTTvrjo9QDiBU3S3V9sn/s1600-h/Walden.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEja9nC5eJf5gr78j-75CNd5LxW0wU9-rzueGZcXNFbikFvzNd26F6Ui_15vl7mXVRgtsYv-9d_fXXaM52FDvO0hySnOKez3dZtXx4fi9YEwPuuCIKqmE5vD4C89CTTvrjo9QDiBU3S3V9sn/s320/Walden.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5243166915706121602" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />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.<br />"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."<br />I didn't want to spoil the educational moment, but couldn't resist the temptation of a punch line.<br />"Actually, I'm reading a book about video games."<br />The illusion of two wise men studying collected works of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoreau">Thoreau </a>fell apart.<br /><br />The book, <span style="font-style:italic;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/This-Gaming-Life-Travels-Cities/dp/0472116355">This Gaming Life</a></span> 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.<br />And its old-fashioned hardcover design barely suggests it's about something as non-Walden as video games.Jaroslav Švelchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09202593085090003738noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2818789578645818601.post-6442472622499974542008-03-03T20:39:00.000-08:002008-03-04T18:57:06.778-08:00WHAT YOU CAN'T SEE IS WHAT YOU DON'T GET: Life and death of the third-person narrative in the current visual paradigmI have been playing <span style="font-style: italic;">The Witcher</span> 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...).<br />One of the inconsistencies ruined my suspension of disbelief big time. As usual with <span style="font-style: italic;">Baldur's Gate</span>-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.<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiW7aVnuoy9-Sj40-uZo8OvyyocHEk5T0i4c-WP6J9SsyrjCfQQmkMMd7SFgdzfq5lJL7o4hbVSPqpz44YAkVnrkCPG3oE0I1jzCkkXb-8EHpTJtc8Lhcg8iB9yWWwK7zXmU3cby1haRuXj/s1600-h/TheWitcher.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiW7aVnuoy9-Sj40-uZo8OvyyocHEk5T0i4c-WP6J9SsyrjCfQQmkMMd7SFgdzfq5lJL7o4hbVSPqpz44YAkVnrkCPG3oE0I1jzCkkXb-8EHpTJtc8Lhcg8iB9yWWwK7zXmU3cby1haRuXj/s320/TheWitcher.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5173743100105960498" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />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?<br /><br />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 <span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">illusionism</span>. 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.<br />The second one, we might dub <span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">illustrationism</span>. 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.<br />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.<br /><br />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.<br />One of them is <span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">editing</span>. 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.<br />Another way of editing is the <span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">synecdoche effect </span>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.<br />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 <span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">hybridized code</span>, 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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Wizardry VII: Crusaders Of The Dark Savant</span>, 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:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaXMqkoCFZynG9KdlF7TDH_eMn02StZoFJw4cP5Nw6ccZ0qHchYQurp6y6A0LrWKoqEhyphenhyphena9re5Q1LC7d8x_mE-F3ahMvN5We4gGLrfEb4fZNNqxAcYq0fTT9Kz8IcdUAHyt-WI3WJFZOK_/s1600-h/ds_003.png"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaXMqkoCFZynG9KdlF7TDH_eMn02StZoFJw4cP5Nw6ccZ0qHchYQurp6y6A0LrWKoqEhyphenhyphena9re5Q1LC7d8x_mE-F3ahMvN5We4gGLrfEb4fZNNqxAcYq0fTT9Kz8IcdUAHyt-WI3WJFZOK_/s320/ds_003.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5173743065746222098" border="0" /></a><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiN0KqZNfhd_qODCe2cx1gqdvsq0wJ-KjQzQVkByx2yf4CS6EKAZKg3o0zkrmKESiyT5U_xpb51vRGEqWebCiexZ_d5dvhH4QFOaBlDDhcKlLfHNNeKWe_ozKuvaQBarck9bfXnJQ_3EwD/s1600-h/ds_004.png"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiN0KqZNfhd_qODCe2cx1gqdvsq0wJ-KjQzQVkByx2yf4CS6EKAZKg3o0zkrmKESiyT5U_xpb51vRGEqWebCiexZ_d5dvhH4QFOaBlDDhcKlLfHNNeKWe_ozKuvaQBarck9bfXnJQ_3EwD/s320/ds_004.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5173743091516025890" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">smell</span> the places you go to. This it not to say this <span style="font-style: italic;">illustrationist</span> approach was common to all CRPGs of that time - Lands Of Lore, for example, went on to visualize as much as it could.<br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Baldur's Gate</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">Planescape: Torment </span>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. <span style="font-style: italic;">Planescape: Torment</span>, 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 <span style="font-style: italic;">illustrationist </span>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 <span style="font-style: italic;">any</span> graphics engine to do justice to it.<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZZPsNSRxqpC3CYvMSqX8XS3V1nWTL3KkULRbOiCojv66RBdJU6LrrYI9dcXGCdPahrpZQn4Ru4p-WVqc4ThXQJGFqLF52yek8AGboYOKhFcE5RFBPF1NfMZrEE7kvAcjqnu6z22jkpRUT/s1600-h/Torment.jpeg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZZPsNSRxqpC3CYvMSqX8XS3V1nWTL3KkULRbOiCojv66RBdJU6LrrYI9dcXGCdPahrpZQn4Ru4p-WVqc4ThXQJGFqLF52yek8AGboYOKhFcE5RFBPF1NfMZrEE7kvAcjqnu6z22jkpRUT/s320/Torment.jpeg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5173743104400927810" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />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.<br />Good storytelling in the <span style="font-style: italic;">illusionist </span>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).<br />But to fit a sizable world to this paradigm takes a lot of effort - and still it cannot be done in a consistent way. <span style="font-style: italic;">The Witcher</span>, 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.<br />I still think that <span style="font-style: italic;">The Witcher</span> 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?Jaroslav Švelchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09202593085090003738noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2818789578645818601.post-85279018686590018762008-02-26T16:58:00.000-08:002008-02-27T20:48:05.959-08:00THE ORIGINAL WORKING CLASS HEROES: Miners, plumbers, trashmen in early 80's gamesThere 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.<br />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.<br />But let me start with a 1983 British hit, <a href="http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0005391"><span style="font-style: italic;">Trashman</span></a>, 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:<br /><br />"SITUATION VACANT<br />Trashman required: must be alert, nimble footed and able to hold his drink."<br /><br />When you're not fast enough, the following announcement shows up:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHn9ZvwCFmilcwGf6CuVunGDdXGwddZD-9p-drRL1LKVhf7vXzSog0szIS1y6qtgyAgXWVIltH9AupVhKuNb-KVh8MHFbWP5iS0RMEVXPEXYuxm_evOw-fOlZtCxSrR7v0SdcpDNNomRAK/s1600-h/TrashmanMarx.gif"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHn9ZvwCFmilcwGf6CuVunGDdXGwddZD-9p-drRL1LKVhf7vXzSog0szIS1y6qtgyAgXWVIltH9AupVhKuNb-KVh8MHFbWP5iS0RMEVXPEXYuxm_evOw-fOlZtCxSrR7v0SdcpDNNomRAK/s320/TrashmanMarx.gif" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5171459912887478610" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />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:<br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">"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! " - <span style="font-style: italic;">Fizza on the C64 Lemon Forum</span></span><br /><br />But the trashman wasn't the only one. Released in 1983 for Sinclair ZX Spectrum, the pioneering platformer game <a href="http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0003012"><span style="font-style: italic;">Manic Miner</span></a> 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 <a href="http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0003949"><span style="font-style: italic;">Pyjamarama</span></a>. 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 <a href="http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0003258"><span style="font-style: italic;">Monty On The Run</span></a> 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.<br />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.<br /><br />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.<br />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.<br />In <a href="http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseek.cgi?regexp=%5EJet+Set+Willy$&pub=%5ESoftware+Projects+Ltd$&loadpics=1"><span style="font-style: italic;">Jet Set Willy</span></a>, a sequel to <span style="font-style: italic;">Manic Miner</span>, 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.<br />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.<br />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 game<span style=";font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:78%;" >1</span> <a href="http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0001677"><span style="font-style: italic;">Everyone's A Wally</span></a>, 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"<span style=";font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:78%;" >2</span>), the very fact that you're assisting an impoverished family in their criminal pursuits is disturbing, in an exhilirating way.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhICU9Aha3_H_ap1zvxw9PjdoJ3G9hnjRvUwfVoRcisrXeGl944i9rRI0QAJ0SIM63UFIUESIoXs14arM2F6cxOD2ZDCoW6BbanG5jSJFk5Btv0E90Z1Bx5TbfZkszy2rs550doohtI22Qv/s1600-h/EveryonesAWally.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhICU9Aha3_H_ap1zvxw9PjdoJ3G9hnjRvUwfVoRcisrXeGl944i9rRI0QAJ0SIM63UFIUESIoXs14arM2F6cxOD2ZDCoW6BbanG5jSJFk5Btv0E90Z1Bx5TbfZkszy2rs550doohtI22Qv/s320/EveryonesAWally.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5171460419693619586" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Trashman</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">Burgertime</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">Cookie</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">Tapper </span>or <span style="font-style: italic;">Paperboy </span>and recent hits like <span style="font-style: italic;">Diner Dash</span> or <span style="font-style: italic;">Cooking Mama</span>.<br />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?<br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">avoid</span> 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.<br />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 completely<span style=";font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:78%;" >3</span>. The follow-up to Trashman bombed, Wally Week went for a jungle adventure out of the ordinary in <a href="http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseek.cgi?regexp=%5EThree+Weeks+in+Paradise$&pub=%5EMikro%2dGen+Ltd$&loadpics=1"><span style="font-style: italic;">Three Weeks In Paradise</span></a>, 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 Croft<span style=";font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:78%;" >4</span>. Good bye, working-class heroes. Or maybe, see you in a casual game. And bring your tools with you.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">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.<br /></span><span style="font-size:85%;">2)The affordance of cassette tape as a data medium was the fact that it could include audio without any fancy digitization.<br /></span><span style="font-size:85%;">3)Of course, there were also animal heroes and various kinds of blob and jelly.<br /></span><span style="font-size:85%;">4)In this little article, I do not intend to criticize representation of class in contemporary games.</span>Jaroslav Švelchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09202593085090003738noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2818789578645818601.post-12191788474321305382008-01-21T23:35:00.000-08:002008-02-06T12:23:25.450-08:00YOU BURNOUTS ROTTING IN FRONT OF YOUR COMPUTERS!: Cult of the Superhardcore Gamer in Czech Gaming CultureIt'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.<br />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.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeNN3ROQQzzeWudxJpKYY80TyJK2iksMTG3QJlkRRY7opvIr1rAXb068KrrRXR-rfCUac9ixIIkcDphlmfzWWNHfi1r8cul7G0gcGGfOZoE_C-sQyhdAgUi52lPmHOzD7f9PatVHEVr8d3/s1600-h/Gun.png"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeNN3ROQQzzeWudxJpKYY80TyJK2iksMTG3QJlkRRY7opvIr1rAXb068KrrRXR-rfCUac9ixIIkcDphlmfzWWNHfi1r8cul7G0gcGGfOZoE_C-sQyhdAgUi52lPmHOzD7f9PatVHEVr8d3/s320/Gun.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5158202211723390082" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />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<span style="font-size:78%;">(1)</span>. Gamers' Atari ST's, Amigas and PC's were called "darlings" or "precious ones", promptly invoking the Gollum metaphor.<br />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:<br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">"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, <span style="font-style: italic;">pařans </span>must stay at their monitors non-stop.<br /><br />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!<br /><br />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."</span><br /><br />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.<br />"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 <a href="http://www.mobygames.com/game/system-shock">System Shock </a>in late 1994. Another "life-altering" game, the Sierra adventure <a href="http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/quest-for-glory-i-so-you-want-to-be-a-hero">Quest for Glory</a>, 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.)<br /><br />In one of the letters to the magazine, a reader confesses:<br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">"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.”</span><br /><br />Of course it is all exaggeration, but still, it is now the rhetoric I'm after, not reality.<br />This is too Monty Python to be true, but note the word "ecstasy". Hardcore gaming is far beyond entertainment.<br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://imdb.com/title/tt0923752/">King of Kong</a> </span>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<span style="font-size:78%;">(2)</span>" 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.<br />Given it was a <span style="font-style: italic;">computer </span>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.<br />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:<br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">“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?!”<br /></span><br />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.<br />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.<br /><br />1<span style="font-size:85%;"> While talking about computers with affection, do we use the mundane word <span style="font-style: italic;">computer </span>anymore? Or do we switch to something more primal and powerful, something that doesn't remind us of the anemic office space?<br /><br />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.<br /><br />The screenshot comes from <a href="http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/bloodnet">Bloodnet</a>.<br /></span>Jaroslav Švelchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09202593085090003738noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2818789578645818601.post-78663479664550821912007-12-04T12:32:00.000-08:002007-12-04T14:06:47.774-08:00PURGATORY BLUES: I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream As A Game Of Moral Decision-Making<span style="font-size:85%;">I have recently joined an interesting bunch of people from the <a href="http://gambit.mit.edu">Gambit MIT Game Lab</a> and <a href="http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/home/">The Berkman Center For Internet & Society at Harvard Law School</a>, who meet at informal sessions and try to find ways in which games can portray complex issues, such as empathy or moral and ethical decisions. Most of the games that are often brought up as succesful in pulling this off are mentioned below. But to show that ideas like this have been out there for a long time, I set out to do a little presentation on one of my favorite adventure games. The following article/whatever is based on the presentation, the follow-up discussion and it addresses some questions raised at previous meetings. Once the yet unnamed group starts its own blog (soon!), I will edit it and move it there and link to it from here.<br /></span><br />Thinking about games that portray the complexity of human emotion and ethical and moral choices, we often find out that these issues come as little surprises hidden beneath the surface. No matter if they are included to enhance the narrative, immersion, the player's experience or because the creators just felt like doing it, the games usually do not wear it on their sleeve. This was the case with <span style="font-style:italic;">Ultima IV</span> and is the case with <span style="font-style:italic;">Bioshock</span>. And even though <span style="font-style:italic;">Planescape: Torment</span> offered a wonderfully crafted personal narrative of exploration of one's soul, it was still marketed as a D&D fantasy adventure. This might also be the best way to introduce these topics, as the players do not feel like the matters of “great importance” are forced upon them. But there has been a commercial game that had moral and ethical choices as its very driving concept. It was the 1995 PC CD-ROM graphic adventure I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, based on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlan_Ellison">Harlan Ellison</a>'s story of the same (brilliant) name, produced as a joint venture between the production companies Cyberdreams and Dreamer's Guild. Since its release, the medium of videogame has come a long way, and this is a good moment to reassess Ellison's ambitions.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEBE3H9jhXnplHRV_IipsC98PwYvV7QZgTQCUW4qupF4x207h06tcsRFfX_ipWgUqYdqR1P6SEObXxWSEGc9fNGpr1Tz0RXnE1XybfvDG6ff26vYpMLIHpDUPFnJDoWtfEc_CUmwFi2C2K/s1600-h/ellen1.png"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEBE3H9jhXnplHRV_IipsC98PwYvV7QZgTQCUW4qupF4x207h06tcsRFfX_ipWgUqYdqR1P6SEObXxWSEGc9fNGpr1Tz0RXnE1XybfvDG6ff26vYpMLIHpDUPFnJDoWtfEc_CUmwFi2C2K/s320/ellen1.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5140232454689750002" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Prior to the release, Harlan Ellison, who took active part in creating the game, even voice acting the main villain, explicitly stated that he wanted to create a game in which the player had to make ethical and moral choices. Judging from the fact that both of these companies were not heard from since shortly after the release of the game, one might suggest that it was a failed experiment. It was, in some respects, but in revealed a whole range of expressive possibilities of the videogame medium, although it wasn't really able to utilize them. <br />The story is built around five characters tormented post-apocalypse by a military supercomputer named AM, who hates all humanity. These five people are the last bastion of humanity. Or are they? All of them have to revisit their fears and guilt-stricken memories. Originally conceived by AM as another form of torture, these journeys can be used against him in an attempt to defeat him by restoring the characters' humanity and thus finding weaknesses in AM's program.<br />Using a traditional SCUMM-styled point-and-click interface, the player navigates the characters in environments supposedly generated by AM. Most of the content is delivered via voice-acted dialogues. After going through the story of each of the five characters, the player might use the temporary loss of stability in AM's systems to overpower him. But Harlan Ellison is fast to warn that the game cannot be <span style="font-style:italic;">won</span>. To cite the sadly unreferenced Wikipedia article on the game, “to preserve the story's nightmarish mood, Ellison wanted to create a game that players could not possibly win. Instead, there would be a variety of ethical ways in which way they could lose. There are ways to lose heroically, gloriously and at the peak of one's humanity -- if players do well. Otherwise, there are ways to lose ignominiously, in a selfish, cowardly, frightened manner. Dying alone, and in terror. Or being tortured eternally.” <br />At our "morality in games" sessions, we have often discussed the difficulty of making moral choices in games matter and the assertion was made that the relationship between the “moral” choice in the fictional world of the game is often tied to the desire to win the game, which usually leads to making the obviously “right” choices without really thinking about them. No winning option is an interesting design concept, altough its implementation in this game didn't make it justice.<br />The game features a soldier led to regret the harsh treatment of his subordinates, a strong woman who nevertheless cannot overcome the terrible experience of being raped, a man who sent his wife to a mental hospital instead of taking care of her, a fake and selfish hypocrite, and a former Nazi doctor, a disciple of Mengele, the angel of death.<br />The micro-narratives bring up two metaphors used to convey morality issues – that of <span style="font-style:italic;">purgatory </span>(reliving one's sins in isolation from the rest of the world) and <span style="font-style:italic;">moral rediscovery</span>. The rediscovery concept was used to great effect in Planescape: Torment. In both games, player characters are bound to face their forgotten past after a state of amnesia, often making a horrible discovery. This is potentially a very powerful ludic device of conveying the feelings of guilt or misery.<br />Although most of the game is subtler, I will try to demonstrate the game's pros and cons on the story of Nimdok, the Nazi doctor. He revisits the site of his crimes against humanity, having lost most of his memories and only slowly realizing what he did in the past. These screenshots show him puzzled after his arrival at the concentration camp:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDJIlwzihves4nddpCw503jcyBL4xvnmtUG14GZs3crLpEGIXM83Y_fVImKE3FMEYHtcGJILBelRcSrviyS6n_TSm2oz-ioE3VJLI9i94PxHhe1xrG4JoFlKbojL6vVPiVrXDuvZlIvzZF/s1600-h/Nimdok1.png"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDJIlwzihves4nddpCw503jcyBL4xvnmtUG14GZs3crLpEGIXM83Y_fVImKE3FMEYHtcGJILBelRcSrviyS6n_TSm2oz-ioE3VJLI9i94PxHhe1xrG4JoFlKbojL6vVPiVrXDuvZlIvzZF/s320/Nimdok1.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5140232446099815378" border="0" /></a><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjY3HyM_l2E3uwK34iWrh7Rlc6KF_SmOJyQUQuWkn1YU3L_DtsPIsN9CWoZKUXWdEFe4Nhubv3zwSaYoWSCss6q1GphyiXGFx5LKvHjE4gBD2kdakSYFw5FgGpNjsdPoNUKc9Zw0sb82Xpp/s1600-h/Nimdok2.png"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjY3HyM_l2E3uwK34iWrh7Rlc6KF_SmOJyQUQuWkn1YU3L_DtsPIsN9CWoZKUXWdEFe4Nhubv3zwSaYoWSCss6q1GphyiXGFx5LKvHjE4gBD2kdakSYFw5FgGpNjsdPoNUKc9Zw0sb82Xpp/s320/Nimdok2.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5140232450394782690" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />He is bound to confront his former self and the player chooses whether he will stay on the track of a cruel and brutal scientist or whether he will take a different path and save the “Lost tribe”, which is obviously a metaphor of Jews. The choices the player makes in Nimdok's case are rather obvious. He or she can have him perform a useless and ruthless operation on a young kid, or not (the interesting thing is that if he choses not to, doctor Mengele will do it instead, which emphasizes the hopelesness even more). Once he activates the Golem, he can either have him destroy the Lost Tribe or turn him over to the Tribe. All in all, every micro-narrative can be finished in several ways and all paths to lead to some kind of overall conclusion. The way the characters have dealt with their respective stories has an effect on the final stage, in which they confront AM.<br />The game's greatest achievement is that it meant (or could have meant) a major breakthrough in terms of what content may be tackled in a commercial videogame. A game explicitly addressing ethical issues is extremely rare, and this one even offered to play as both a criminal and a victim, in case of Ellen, the only female character. No matter whether the game mechanics actually capture – or induce – the mental processes of empathy, morality and guilt, it at least makes you see the points in one's life where these choices can be made and make you think about them. The game's surreal visuals, abstraction-heavy dialogues, deeply disturbing topics (cannibalism, rape, total war and more) and all-around weirdness nevertheless turned out to become a rare exception rather than a new standard.<br />There were at least two clever design choices: The fact that stories were set in a fantastic enviroment enabled metaphorical puzzles and events, such as one of the characters literally taking his heart and feeding it to a jackal. The inability to reach a “real” winning situation might have brought in some moral ambiguity which is a prerequisite of moral reasoning.<br />And this is where the shortcomings begin: The players are pretty much bound to Harlan Ellison's take on morality, as the game interface signals whether you have made a “good” or a “bad” choice (in a later attempt at a morality game, Bullfrog's Fable, the main character's avatar changed accordingly). This “spiritual barometer” more or less leads to the reduction of a moral choice to a gameplay choice. And although you cannot win, there is still a most desirable outcome that might not be winning in terms of the narrative, but still is in terms of the rule system and “getting the most out of the game”. Another difficulty stems from the fact that the players don't have any opportunity to emphatize with the characters before they find out about their past. This bogs down the immersion factor. While playing Nimdok's story, I often found myself stuck between two choices: either role-playing him and staying true to his former self, or betraying his character and making him “good”. The narrative of the game doesn't do a good job portraying his change from a brutal monster to a potentially repenting man.<br />Other drawbacks include technical issues (laggy, unresponsive interface), aesthetic choices (out-of-place cartoony animation) and gameplay elements (puzzles bordering between unconventional and silly). The graphics are, of course, outdated, and the third-person perspective is probably not the best choice for a soul-searching narrative. The whole idea of building a highly original and meditative game on an engine used to play story- and inventory-based adventures is questionable, although adventure games seem to be (or rather have been, as they are extinct as a commercially viable genre) most open to left-field content. But even though flawed, it is still an enjoyable game that screams “These ideas shouldn't go unnoticed” on every corner. Too bad it did not have a proper mouth.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">In terms of Different Gaming, this game is interesting in two respects. In German and French versions, the Nimdok part of the narrative was very crudely taken out not to upset the censors, without eliminating all the references to him. As contributors to the <a href="http://www.scummvm.org">ScummVM project</a> (which runs this and some other adventure games' binaries on various platforms, making it amazingly portable) have noticed, these two versions cannot be finished up to the “desired” ending. This naturally sucks, but can be interpreted as an unintended meta-commentary: Without bringing all the characters together, even if it is the most sinful one that is missing, humanity cannot be redeemed.<br />In addition to that, in the Czech Republic, the game was lifted from obscurity by a budget reissue translated into Czech by Andrej Anastasov, a prominent games journalist, gaming legend and a proponent of “adult” (read: complex) themes in computer entertainment. In the U.S., the game can be <a href="http://harlanellison.com/herc.htm#ihnm">purchased directly</a> from Harlan Ellison for $32. That's an unusual price for 12-year-old software, but then again, this game <span style="font-style:italic;">is</span> kind of unique.</span>Jaroslav Švelchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09202593085090003738noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2818789578645818601.post-514319676967490202007-11-20T13:32:00.000-08:002007-11-20T16:48:02.293-08:00Intermezzo: ON GAMES AND CUPCAKES<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.notempire.com/images/uploads/DSC_5646.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 214px; height: 214px;" src="http://www.notempire.com/images/uploads/DSC_5646.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>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*?<br /><br />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.<br />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.<br />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**.<br /><br />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".<br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">*Sadly, this term probably does not exist.<br />**Here, I am without any doubt influenced by Matt Weise's thesis on meaningfulness in videogames.<br /></span>Jaroslav Švelchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09202593085090003738noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2818789578645818601.post-10063832920007792762007-11-05T20:28:00.000-08:002007-11-07T15:19:32.443-08:00MATTHEW SMITH: THE MANIC GAME DESIGNERLast 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.<br />Next day, by convenient coincidence, I got a message from a friend with a link to an English-language <a href="http://blog.fuxoft.cz/">blog run by a Czech game-designer-turned-film-critic</a>, further linking to a YouTube video featuring the inscrutable and long-lost mythical hero of the British game industry, Matthew Smith.<br /><br /><object width="425" height="355"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/FWmmMZlhcqU&color1=0x006699&color2=0x54abd6&border=0"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/FWmmMZlhcqU&color1=0x006699&color2=0x54abd6&border=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="355"></embed></object><br /><br />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 (<a href="http://worldofspectrum.org">ZX Spectrum</a>) 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 <a href="http://rocketworm.com/">Earthworm Jim</a> fame, as "endowed with all the native charm that one would expect of a man with pure Celtic blood flowing through his veins").<br /><br />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 <a href="http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0003012">Manic Miner</a>, a wonderfully balanced and surreal game that defined what the ZX Spectrum platform would be capable of. After making a hugely succesful sequel, <a href="http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseek.cgi?regexp=^Jet+Set+Willy$&pub=^Software+Projects+Ltd$&loadpics=on">Jet Set Willy</a>, the young programmer vanished into thin air (watch the clip for details).<br />But even before his disappearance, he was considered alien. He was too good to be true. The May 1984 issue of <a href="http://www.crashonline.org.uk/04/jetset.htm">Crash magazine</a> 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..."<br />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 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syd_Barrett">Syd Barrett</a> 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.<br />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.<br />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 <a href="http://www.jsw.ovine.net/">Jet Set Willy online</a>. And when there is community, there is myth.Jaroslav Švelchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09202593085090003738noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2818789578645818601.post-83201550826293206492007-11-01T21:19:00.000-07:002007-11-02T13:35:09.333-07:00FAERIE NINJA FAN BOYIt is so cool to start your blog entry with a reference to what you have just heard <a href="http://www.henryjenkins.org/">Henry Jenkins</a> 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...<br /><br />A faerie ninja made me think about it.<br /><br />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.<br />Wow!, thought I - for the following reasons: a) she co-designed and produced one of my all-time favorite games, <a href="http://www.mobygames.com/game/wizardry-8">Wizardry 8</a>, 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!<br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">just leave</span>. 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 <span style="font-style: italic;">I</span> 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 <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigxfq-f9y_2VkyyWRV6_4mpPPJh8_re_M3NoHgDRDDHyRQKDAQA9mlbWnwf-wqBeI7NO_Fzk49txumFTPGs3KbxivECkv9dYhB31GctBAywLkbp_YFLLB-FYBjy5N0wApN5NpCViZduhM/s1600-h/JaroslavAndLinda.jpg">picture of me and Linda</a>. I just din't know whether this is the way it is done.<br />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. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_D._Carmack">John Carmack</a>? That's an engineer, great, but I guess not exciting in the fan way. Chris Avellone of the <a href="http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/planescape-torment">Planescape: Torment</a> 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. <a href="http://grumpygamer.com/">Ron Gilbert</a>? Maybe. Maybe I would be disappointed should I find out he's not as funny as Monkey Island is.<br />Although I am a fan of <span style="font-style: italic;">games</span>, I cannot usually see myself as a fan of their <span style="font-style: italic;">authors</span>. 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 <span style="font-style: italic;">respect</span> the game designers. In <a href="http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/planescape-torment">Smartbomb</a>, Heather Chaplin and Aaron Ruby describe the cautiously respectful way young designers act towards Will Wright and Shigeru Myamoto. They <span style="font-style: italic;">are</span> 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 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliff_Bleszinski">Cliff Bleszinski</a>, 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.<br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">know</span>, not to <span style="font-style: italic;">be known</span>. 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*.<br />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.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:78%;">*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 <span style="font-style:italic;">Lost</span> 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.</span>Jaroslav Švelchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09202593085090003738noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2818789578645818601.post-90720618138249019722007-10-22T00:20:00.001-07:002007-10-31T17:04:37.176-07:00MISSION STATEMENT FAILED!I started this blog to share my thoughts on games, knowing that I come from a different gaming culture than most <a href="http://gambit.mit.edu/">folks</a> I know who do research on videogames. Hey, I only played Mario Kart once in my life (after coming to the US) while having played weird eighties English games with blue furry monsters squashing eyeballs for dinner. <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">This will be an outlet for me to write things related or unrelated to the topic of my Ph.D. thesis-in-the-making (actually in-the-planning-of-making), which is roughly gaming discourse, gamer subculture and videogame as an emerging medium. I would usually discuss these things over a beer, but I'd always instantly forget everything I had said. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I must admit that in certain respects, I am an obnoxious <a href="http://www.remakes.org/">retro gamer</a>. Not only do I adore clean and elegant game design. I used to romanticize computer technology as something that is intricate and clumsy and unreliable and requires a certain amount of arcane power to operate. Maybe it was the special knowledge, the wisdom, the ability of making sense of things others would take for a random bunch of pixels, the specific discursive strategies, that separated gamers from the crowd. The gaming discourse at the time and in the place I joined the digital playground seemed to be concerned more with being able to <i>run </i><span style="font-style: normal;">a game then actually </span><i>playing </i><span style="font-style: normal;">it. And, because most of the games were pirate copies which had to be copied and catalogued, the life of a gamer was a damn lot focused </span><i>storing it </i><span style="font-style: normal;">and </span><i>passing it around. </i><span style="font-style: normal;">(How much fun of the early gaming was/is given simply by the fact that it is </span><i>on a computer</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, which is still new to us? Were we or are we amazed by the technology or by our capability of mastering that technology?).</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;">I also experienced gaming as subculture, as something that was so cool to be part of, because it was just emerging and we didn't know what it would be capable of (We still don't know, but I feel gaming as such has become mainstream, though particular niches might have subcultural features). And the views of videogame as an emerging medium is one of the things I definitely want to find out more about.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;">I love to talk about old games and I bring up forgotten stuff; and I love to play (or watch) state-of-the-art games and marvel at new hardware. I <i>am </i>a gamer, but a picky one.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;">Right now I have got three topics lined out: first, I always wanted to write an article on British early eighties Thatcher-era videogames dominated by working class heroes; <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manic_Miner">miners</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trashman">trashmen</a>. This might lead into a discussion of culture-specific content and identity in videogames, which has been mostly relegated into Japan, hasn't it?<br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;">I would like to write a piece that would look at the conflict of the design and the use of a technology and the discursive process of redesigning that takes place in the specialist discourse, focusing on the <a href="http://worldofspectrum.org/">ZX Spectrum</a> platform (a computer amazingly unsuitable for videogames that became a predominantly gaming machine) as viewed by the platform-specific magazines. Might it help to find the moment when a <span style="font-style: italic;">technology </span>becomes a <span style="font-style: italic;">medium</span>?</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;">The third topic, what are our fan relations to games? And game <span style="font-style: italic;">designers</span>?<br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I have more things in mind, some of them as deep as the Stygian abyss. Stay tuned. Oh, and the musket-firing-Umpani-soldier picture comes from the game I spent the most time with. The vast, incomprehensible, insane(ly difficult), over-the-top psychedelic <a href="http://www.abandonia.com/games/247/WizardryVII-CrusadersoftheDarkSavant">Crusaders Of The Dark Savant</a>, one of the weirdest Western RPGs. Play it if you miss getting lost.</p>Jaroslav Švelchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09202593085090003738noreply@blogger.com0