Monday, December 28, 2009
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
DEUS EX VIENNA. 16-color lifetime achievement
I am back from Vienna, from the amazingly friendly Future and Reality of Gaming conference. I will try to sum up my impressions of the conference later, now I'd like to share the topic of my talk.
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:
DEUS EX MACHINA
A Bizarre Multimedia Experience straight from 1984
50 minutes of awe!
Projected on a moderately big screen!
Somewhere between Shakespeare and The Wall, between Breakout and the Holodeck, there is Deus Ex Machina.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, the game and the audio. 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.
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:
DEUS EX MACHINA
A Bizarre Multimedia Experience straight from 1984
50 minutes of awe!
Projected on a moderately big screen!
Somewhere between Shakespeare and The Wall, between Breakout and the Holodeck, there is Deus Ex Machina.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, the game and the audio. 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.
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
GAMERS' BAD CONSCIENCE: Moral emotions in games & other news
The 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 his paper on teaching about digital games.
Apart from that, my paper about "moral" decisions in single-player games just made it into a book called Ethics and Game Design. 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 Valuable Games Harvard-MIT sessions, which I dearly miss. Another source of inspiration was John Walker's incessantly entertaining and disturbing account of playing evil in Knights Of The Old Republic.
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 Prinz's and Greene's neo-Humean (and relativistic) take on moral emotions were most inspiring. Especially Greene's dissertation 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.
Apart from that, my paper about "moral" decisions in single-player games just made it into a book called Ethics and Game Design. 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 Valuable Games Harvard-MIT sessions, which I dearly miss. Another source of inspiration was John Walker's incessantly entertaining and disturbing account of playing evil in Knights Of The Old Republic.
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 Prinz's and Greene's neo-Humean (and relativistic) take on moral emotions were most inspiring. Especially Greene's dissertation 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.
Sunday, March 8, 2009
BOBBIN 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 here.
In other news, I started teaching game studies at the Faculty of Arts of Masaryk University 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 Have No Mouth And I Must Scream). It is a part of their Interactive Media Theory programme whose existence is fitting given that Brno is the Czech capital of game industry with 2K Czech and others having their offices there.
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?
In other news, I started teaching game studies at the Faculty of Arts of Masaryk University 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 Have No Mouth And I Must Scream). It is a part of their Interactive Media Theory programme whose existence is fitting given that Brno is the Czech capital of game industry with 2K Czech and others having their offices there.
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?
Thursday, January 22, 2009
THE PLEASURABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING: Writing about Loom
I've always loved Loom and had this feeling that even though The Secret of Monkey Island is the 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.
Inspired by detailed analyses of games my Gambit colleagues Doris Rusch, Matt Weise and Clara Fernandéz-Vara wrote for the forthcoming Well Played 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 lightness and intangibility.
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.
I submitted the whole paper to the game studies journal Eludamos, 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.
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.
Inspired by detailed analyses of games my Gambit colleagues Doris Rusch, Matt Weise and Clara Fernandéz-Vara wrote for the forthcoming Well Played 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 lightness and intangibility.
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.
I submitted the whole paper to the game studies journal Eludamos, 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.
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.
Sunday, December 28, 2008
THE TORONTO TROUBLE. Complaining about copyright issues
I've been very bad lately, not updating the blog at all. That doesn't mean I wasn't doing anything games-related. I've been playing, researching and enjoying them (especially the weird ones, as usually), and also started writing a piece of IF. There was a lot of interesting stuff to say, and I will now try to sum it up in a series of blog posts, which will, hopefully, mark my renewed commitment to Different Gaming.
Looking back, the thing that comes to my mind and is entirely blog-related, is my trip to the FuturePlay conference in Toronto in early November. The paper I presented there is actually a reworking of What You Can't See Is What You Don't Get, and even has the same title! The full paper will be soon available through ACM (who are behind the conference), let's just say the ideas are the same as in the blog post, but they are expressed in a much subtler, more academic way, and the smarted-up version even includes a T.S.Eliot quote!
What I'm finding blogworthy, though, are the copyright issues I've had with it. In the paper, I'm talking about The Secret of Monkey Island, and obviously, it makes sense to actually include screenshots of the game.
Now, when you publish stuff yourself on a blog or you write for a magazine, they usually don't care. But respectable publishers such as ACM prefer to stay on the safe side, or to "err on the side of caution", so they won't publish anything without a permission. However, whoever has dealt with Lucas Arts from the position of a puny human knows that it is impossible to get in touch with them and get the permission to reprint the screenshots (and yes, they also love to sue people). I attempted to claim fair use, following the guidelines that you can see for example on Wikipedia. However, using your screenshot for obviously non-commercial, academic purposes, with citation, and actually praising the game for what it does well, is not enough to make the lawyers happy.
There are a few discussions of the matter on-line, but they quite inconclusive in whether a screenshot constitutes a derivative work. Alarmingly enough, some argue that publishing a photograph of a building may infringe the architect's copyright. I would like to read experts' view on the matter, but it's actually not that easy to find.
Interestingly enough, by publishing a screenshot in an analog form (such as a conference proceedings or a journal), you fundamentally change the way it's coded, so that it's not possible to re-use as it was before. The original digital form cannot be arrived at from such a copy. So it's more like paraphrasing than actually citing. However, it's usually the print publications that will never allow you to reprint screenshots without permissions.
The outcome of this situation is quite simple: academic papers just do not tend to have screenshots in them, because it's too much of a hassle to get the necessary permissions. A similar situation is present in film scholarship, although I'm not sure how hard it is for them to reach the copyright owners. Literary scholars, however, have their backs covered. Citing a literary work is perfectly OK. You don't need any permission, just state which book you're citing from (of course you cannot reprint the whole book, but did I want to include every single sprite from Monkey Island, so that people can reconstruct the game on their home computers?).
In the end, I gave up and simply removed the screenshots, although it weakens my arguments. Am I the only one who thinks that the current legal measures and the virtual inaccessibility of the game companies' legal departments cripple games scholarship?
Looking back, the thing that comes to my mind and is entirely blog-related, is my trip to the FuturePlay conference in Toronto in early November. The paper I presented there is actually a reworking of What You Can't See Is What You Don't Get, and even has the same title! The full paper will be soon available through ACM (who are behind the conference), let's just say the ideas are the same as in the blog post, but they are expressed in a much subtler, more academic way, and the smarted-up version even includes a T.S.Eliot quote!
What I'm finding blogworthy, though, are the copyright issues I've had with it. In the paper, I'm talking about The Secret of Monkey Island, and obviously, it makes sense to actually include screenshots of the game.
Now, when you publish stuff yourself on a blog or you write for a magazine, they usually don't care. But respectable publishers such as ACM prefer to stay on the safe side, or to "err on the side of caution", so they won't publish anything without a permission. However, whoever has dealt with Lucas Arts from the position of a puny human knows that it is impossible to get in touch with them and get the permission to reprint the screenshots (and yes, they also love to sue people). I attempted to claim fair use, following the guidelines that you can see for example on Wikipedia. However, using your screenshot for obviously non-commercial, academic purposes, with citation, and actually praising the game for what it does well, is not enough to make the lawyers happy.
There are a few discussions of the matter on-line, but they quite inconclusive in whether a screenshot constitutes a derivative work. Alarmingly enough, some argue that publishing a photograph of a building may infringe the architect's copyright. I would like to read experts' view on the matter, but it's actually not that easy to find.
Interestingly enough, by publishing a screenshot in an analog form (such as a conference proceedings or a journal), you fundamentally change the way it's coded, so that it's not possible to re-use as it was before. The original digital form cannot be arrived at from such a copy. So it's more like paraphrasing than actually citing. However, it's usually the print publications that will never allow you to reprint screenshots without permissions.
The outcome of this situation is quite simple: academic papers just do not tend to have screenshots in them, because it's too much of a hassle to get the necessary permissions. A similar situation is present in film scholarship, although I'm not sure how hard it is for them to reach the copyright owners. Literary scholars, however, have their backs covered. Citing a literary work is perfectly OK. You don't need any permission, just state which book you're citing from (of course you cannot reprint the whole book, but did I want to include every single sprite from Monkey Island, so that people can reconstruct the game on their home computers?).
In the end, I gave up and simply removed the screenshots, although it weakens my arguments. Am I the only one who thinks that the current legal measures and the virtual inaccessibility of the game companies' legal departments cripple games scholarship?
Saturday, September 6, 2008
READING IS COOL. Reading about video games is cooler.
The other day, me and my friend went for a day trip to Walden Pond, one of the most charming and tranquil (once you get away from the noisy mayhem of a kindergarten which is the Main Beach) places in Massachusetts. We sat on the stone steps, shutting off whatever technology that could connect us to the world outside of this temporary paradise, and started to read. Then a mother - her art noveau earrings gave away certain elegant back-to-nature hipness - came along with two sons somewhere between five and eight years of age and looked at us with a smile.
"Look!" she turned to the moderately scruffy kids. "That's a way to spend your free time. Sitting in the woods and reading books. Instead of, for example" - then came the (mock-)serious face - "playing video games."
I didn't want to spoil the educational moment, but couldn't resist the temptation of a punch line.
"Actually, I'm reading a book about video games."
The illusion of two wise men studying collected works of Thoreau fell apart.
The book, This Gaming Life by the Quake III veteran and games journalist Jim Rossignol, is actually one of the first books exclusively dedicated to the gamer experience, an account of how obsessive gaming can change one's life for the better. Giving accounts of gaming cultures of London, Seoul and Reykjavik, it's an insightful (however journalistic and scattershot) comparative study of gaming cultures, very much in line with what I try to investigate and write about.
And its old-fashioned hardcover design barely suggests it's about something as non-Walden as video games.
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