Two pieces –Jane Pinkcard’s Salon piece on her sense of dissatisfaction with games as she matures, and the GrandTextAuto bit on the old Voyager CD-ROM If Monks Had Macs – implicitly converge on something that could be overdue: the rehabilitation of interactive media as working expressive forms. Perhaps a lot of people have been trying to avoid the memory of the economic debacle that the multimedia hype of the early 90’s created, but I have fond memories of such titles as Morton Subotnick’s All My Hummingbirds Have Alibis, the Beat experience, Laurie Anderson’s Puppet Motel, and the like. There was someting novel and compelling about them when they came out – a freshness of vision, an energetic re-presentation and framing of cultural practice. The web has superceded a lot of the didactic fantasies of the original works, but I think there’s something left over that hasn’t been taken up much since, a kind of primarily aesthetic, discreet interactive experience. Many of us who work in the game-space have been avoiding the “I” word for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that substantially more money exists, and always will exist, in the mainstream game markets (and thus, for their study). But we need to be willing to consider going outside the game-paradigm – while happily taking elements from it – if we’re really going to make its technologies do what we really know it can.

It’s an interesting day today: Ian Bogost and Gonzalo Frasca of Water Cooler Games have just released an official sanctioned political (after a fashion) game: the Dean for America Game. In a sense, it’s more about politics as a system than about any political stance per se: while it does convey Dean’s populist sensibilities, it doesn’t (by design, I assume) actually address any platform issues whatsover. However, it does, in a friendly way, portray the grassroots political process as a system. I’ve said before that the emerging game-media’s construction of human subjectivity is fundamentally distinct from that of other media in that it portrays as systems what were previously framed as stories. Usually, when we encounter human systems as systems, there’s a kind of alienating effect – we identify systems as machines, and by that as impersonal, intractable forces not amenable to human agency. We feel more comfortable with the kind of agency we get as characters in stories than as agents in systems. But as we become a population of game-players, that alienation diminishes – perhaps we will see the relentless march towards death in a tragedy as more alienating than interacting with a simulation of a related dilemna. Maybe the most political element of the Dean for America game is the depiction of political agency as an element in a complex system with emergent behaviours.

At the Level Up conference’s dinner, Lisbeth Klastrup taught a number of us a very simple game that I think was either called the river game or the bridge game. It’s a guessing game, with extremely simple rules. One person thinks of… something. The other players ask questions in the form of “Can I cross the river if…” and if the question refers to something which fulfills the requirements of the answer, the player is told “yes.” For example, if I’m thinking of a rotisserie chicken, and a player asked “Can I cross the river if I speak Pali?” I’d answer no. There are a number of border-line cases, of course – if they player asked “Can I cross the river if I’m from Delaware?” – well, there are (in theory) chickens in Delaware, and probably rotisserie chickens even in that benighted realm, so a “yes” or “maybe” answer would be acceptable. The game is a child’s game like 20 questions or I-spy. Among the first games that any child would play – and probably almost impossible to implement in a computer game today. It’s analogous to the chastened observation made by many AI/robotics researchers: chess, from an AI perspective, is a very easy problem. Walking is a very hard problem (although, as I’ve noted earlier, at least they’ve got sumo down.) What would it take to get a computer to be able to play this game, both as guesser and answerer? A very rich ontology and a well-functioning inferential engine, for starters.

Belatedly, and since I am more or less cowed by Andrew Stern’s coverage of the Level Up conference, I am going to first jump in on the conversation that he, David Thomas and Mark Bernstein have been having about what games could teach us about the human condition. I want to invert the question somewhat, because the problem of the human condition may well be framed by the media in which it is asked. (That rumbling over in Canada is Marshall McLuhan’s body turning cartwheels, but pay it no mind.)

Perhaps the question of human subjectivity posited by and embodied in the game as a cultural artifact is distinct from the beginning, much in the way that the novel and the film each produced compelling constructions of the nature of human subjectivity. The vernacular novel, in its career from an incidental form of literature through its “relegation” to a women’s media in the time of Jane Ayre and the Bronte sisters, posits an idea of human subjectivity in which interiority is equal to or ascendent over exteriority; in which the workings of inner life and inner voice (and I’ll dodge the question of the modern in this) are often priviledged over the self as a body among others. The subject of the novel is the subject of Freud and Nietzsche: the self who thinks itself into its position, for whom the objects of thought are as determinant as the objects of the world. As film ascended as a definitive cultural form, it carried a distinct kind of filmic subjectivity with it, one in which the self was known by surface effects, by exteriority and signs and the possibilities of mistaken and decieving impressions of the self. I think the capitulation of exteriority to the regime of signs is most obvious in the films of Godard, but I think it’s latent in film all the way back to Eisenstein and D.W. Griffiths.

So, with the videogame, there’s another framing of the question of the human that occurs: that of humans as systems of state and value, of implicit and explicit rules, of the disintegration of the boundaries between body and mind (which is, after all, what “twitch” really is: the neuron as a muscle.) Asking videogames to address the problems of the human condition framed by novels or films is to do it a disservice: it reframes those problems completely. Could a novel or film really find the expressive power to reveal what The Sims suggests about the structures of daily life? I don’t think so, or only in limited ways (a film could offer an explanation of one possible configuration, and one or two theories for those configurations). I’m not ready to suggest a unified theory of videogame subjectivity, but there are a number of elements and characteristics I think it would have: combinational power, the estrangement between implementation and phenomenon, the tension between the explicit model and the implicit structure; emotions as systems (Facade, the Sims, Japanese dating sims); relationships as emerging from the collisions between and interactions of interior systems; the tension between the cell and the body; the ambiguity of the body’s self and the symbolic self. Videogames will become more fluent at expressing the human condition when it becomes more aware of how it has reframed the question, and how it has participated in the reframing of this question in parallel with other social/historical forces.

I’ve just come back from DiGRA’s 2003 Conference, where I presented my article (which, once I figure out the Byzantine copyright requirements, I’ll post it here. It was a remarkable event, and I’ll give a full report, including notes on the incredible constitution of late-night Scandinavians (and Finns), but this is about travel. Actually, it’s about sliding glass doors. We are already understood to be data by the institutions which dominate our lives. Our credit records, our birth, marriage and death records, our licenses and passports, our representation in uncountable marketing databases and mailing lists all represent us as tuples of strings, values, and ID numbers. For the most powerful institutions, that is what we are. But that’s not how we usually experience ourselves, until we travel. Once we start moving, however, we are like packets on a network. Glass doors slide, we are shuttled as information from one city to another. Airports, hubs: routers moving us from the home system to the Munich system to the Helsinki system (which are, of course, the home systems of other packets, just like the San Francisco system is a target for others.) Doors slide again: turnstyles revolve, and we feel a pleasant, dynamic synchrony between our data homonculi and ourselves. We feel ourselves in the systems of motion, at the same time that we experience degrees of freedom from them. Passing through customs is like shaking off one frame for another, of making ourselves a new system’s problem for a bit. Jet lag feels like the sliding off of that synchrony, settling underneath the numbers and strings instead of riding on top of them, until they become invisible (or rather, untouchable – it’s more about touch than sight); like data written to storage, or tape, until the glass doors can slide open again and we can ride the network to a new system.

The response to the newsgaming site’s first piece is as interesting as the site itself. I think that Greg Costikyan’s response deserves an answer, and a strong one. I’m disappointed in Greg’s reaction. Not so much on the question of the selectivity (and consequent bias) of the simulation: it’s true, the simulation is polemically selective by omitting the actions of the terrorists. Rather, what disappoints me is the he’s missing a number of points, the selectiveness of all simulation – and the political ideology implicit in those omissions – being only one of them. That’s the point: all simulations are selective, but the political nature of the selectiveness is invisible to those who produce and consume the bulk of them. Just as a Sept. 11 simulation from the perspective of a New Yorker would begin with nameless terrorists steering airplanes into buildings filled with innocent civilians, a simulation from the perspective of someone in the Middle East may well begin with rockets falling on their homes. (As far as the melodramatic tone that Greg takes when speaking of “targetted America,” it should be mentioned that the collatoral damage figures alone for the Iraq attack, both in relative and absolute terms, exceed the casualties of September 11.) And “sims” such as Counter-Strike – and virtually all representations of terrorism in gaming – are so invested in a dehistoricized, context-free portrayal of terrorists as some kind of elemental evil, that they lose the ability to really speak at all to the political situations in which they are supposedly set. Take a game such as Civilization III, the sort of game Greg would hold up as an example for great pedagogical game design (and in its way, deservedly so.) The simulation brazenly unites religious, language, ethnic, racial, economic and national identities in a way that strongly serves specific national interests, generating fictions of national unity that have serious consequences in history. His vaunted Europa Universalis omits a great deal more from renaissasnce and enlightenment-era European history (not, as Greg says, medieval history) than he realizes: even one of Braudel’s books will give you a more rounded history of the era, not the semester in a history class. The fluidity of populations, the cultures that faced the onslaught of European expansion, the nuances of alliance, all get lost in the sophisticated but ultimately constraining logics of turn-based strategy with uncomplicated lines of interest and completely detached executive authority. The most serious “simulation” error in both Civilization and Europa Universalis, that makes them function as a kind of propaganda of their own, is the way they re-purpose the knowledge of history as an operational problem. White Man’s Burden, indeed. Greg went completely beyond the pale with his glaring ignorance of the realities of Uruguayan history. I’m sure that Gonzalo would be able to elaborate at length about this better than I, but to describe Uruguay as “-a small, inoffensive, neutral nation in South America remote from any possibility of assault by the murderous enemies of liberal democracy (well, other than the possibility of a home-grown dictator or two)” is an indication that Greg’s knowledge of Latin American history is limited to his games of Tropico. In fact, as far as Uruguayans (and many other Latin Americans) are concerned, the murderous enemies of liberal democracy have been backed and financed and armed by the United States, who supported a military dictatorship for 12 years there, from 1973 to 1985, in which thousands of citizens were killed, tortured, jailed and disappeared.

So I’ve been thinking about genre – some of this is going to be in a paper I’ll be presenting, but I think it deserves being spun out and talked about on its own.

I’m taking as a starting point Rick Altman’s paper on a semantic/syntactic theory of genre, and also Mark Wolf’s The Medium of the Video Game. Wolf promotes an interactive theory of genre, by which genre is determined by the interactive structure of the game. His actual catalog of genres involves a combination of interactive strategies, simulation targets (by which artificial life games are distinct from resource management sims), and diagetic structure (adventure games are partially defined by the existence of different world-areas.) Wolf does not claim that iconographic genre is irrelevant, he notes that interactivity is a universal aspect of all videogames.

To some extent the practice of the videogame industry and its market/reception community supports his categories (reasonably, since he drew those categories from existing genres, not formally). On the other hand, there’s a great deal that it doesn’t account for. Games with gangster themes resemble each other in a way that has little to do with interactivity. Grand Theft Auto is interactively more an adventure game like Onimusha, but thematically more like Mafia. Elements of visual aesthetics make Mario Kart more different than alike Gran Turismo. DOA Beach Volleyball is as much a cheesecake game as it is a sports simulation, and in that sense is more closely related to BMX XXX. Of course, no one is expecting set-theoretical, heirarchical models of genre to map the universe of game production and consumption. I just want to note how much is left out by failing to account for thematic (what Altman and film theorists would describe as semantic) content in genre rationale.

Altman posits a mutual relationship between syntax and semantics in genre formation: loosely speaking, that a “stable set of semantic givens” will evolve and change its syntactical expression over the course of time to create new genres (from Stagecoach to The Unforgiven; from Night of the Living Dead to Army of Darkness), or an establish, well-understood syntax will be applied to new semantic material (Blade Runner: film-noir syntax with science-fiction semantics, creating a cyberpunk genre in film which has thrived better than its counterpart in literature.)

It occurred to me that interactive genre in videogames is considerable less stable than film syntax on some levels, although not in others, and that thinking about genre in videogames needs to deal with this. The market expectation for innovation in the interactive elements of game-play is stronger than the analogous expectation for film; while a film audience may be disappointed about the triviality of a film narrative, for the most part they are unlikely to protest that the sequential structure of events in the film has been “done before.”

Game audiences, I suspect, expect innovation at either the syntactic or semantic (thematic, simulation-target, or narrative) level, or the visual aesthetic level, and are less likely to be disappointed by failures of innovation at the narrative level than film audiences are. The stronger pressures to innovate mean that interactive genres are likely to be made ambiguous, to conflate, or to become simply obsolete over time. I have reasons for believing that semantic genre will be somewhat more stable – partially because they are more intertextual and cross-media, meaning that they will participate in the genre-formations of film, literature, television, pen and paper games, etc.

On a finer level of analysis, though, games are more stable than film in terms of their syntax, particularly on a cognitive level. Most strikingly, considerably more ambiguity about sequence of events and causality is tolerated in film than it is in games. The fact of player agency makes it difficult to imagine muddying the contract between game and player which maps cursor/avatar motion with cursor motion, that maps the fall of an opponent with the firing of a shot, that maps the death of the player with zeroing-out on a health bar. It is conceivable to play with this conventions to a limited extent: several games have. However, such play is unlikely to form genre in the way that new conventions of editing, filming, and storytelling created the French new wave, or German expressionism. It is at the next level of analysis, about interactive demands on the player rather than the codes that are used to communicate the specific structure of those demands, that the development of interactivity forms genres, and does so at a destabilizing pace.

There may be more about this later …

GamePro.com / Domestic / Feature / Pro Vs. Pro: Vietnam – The popular gaming press starts to look at the issues that Gonzalo was addressing in Ludology.org.

One of the things that’s noticeable is how the Vietnam war is seens as uniquely troublesome, because it remains a morally ambiguous and contested memory in the American psyche, unlike any other conflict since the Civil War. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that war games are more popular in America than elsewhere. War isn’t experienced in America (except by combat troops) – it is mediated.

I was just reading Friedrich Kittler’s Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, in which he talks about war and simulation (drawing from a comment in Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. He writes:

It is widely known that war — from the sandbox models of the Prussian General Staff to the computer games of the Americans –has become increasingly simulable. “But there, too,” as these same general staffs wisely recognized, “the last question remains unanswered, because death and the enemy “cannot be factored in realistically.” … for death in battle to coincide with cinema would be its own death.

I find it telling that he, a German writer, associated the computerized war game with America. Not surprising, by any means, in light of the way the first Persian Gulf war was depicted as the first videogame war.

I was thinking about the weakness of simulation: that it turns the world into operants, that it is part of the end of interiority as a concern of humanity, that it shares the ontology of nihilism as Heidegger tracked it. If the novel is a form is inextricable from the psychological, modern subject, and film from the subject as a pattern of surface effects and as a body, the game posits the subject as an array of values, of goals and means which subsume history into operations. Of course, it’s easy to accept that sort of operational distance when there isn’t the memory of pain associated with the object of the model: games and models are as much about what didn’t happen or what could have happened or what would happen if… as they are about what did happened.

Coincidentally, I’ve been playing Advance Wars 2 on the GBA. It does have a different, cartoonish stance towards modern war in it. It’s a Japanese game – it’s interesting that war in Japanese games (and anime and manga) is usually fantastic, except as tragedy (Grave of the Fireflies). Even for pre-modern conflict in the 16th century, the best simulation is Total War: Shogun – a British production. Only in (non-animated) cinema do we see any depictions of war, as in Shohei Imamura’s Dr. Akagi or Masaki Kobayashi’s The Human Condition. Perhaps there’s a sort of respect for the fragility of memory that makes simulation, rather than depiction, unappealing.

Following up from the monkey cyborgs, things just get better and better.

I’ll admit that I was drawn to this article about monkeys and cybernetic control just because I think that the sooner we develop robot-wielding super-intelligent monkeys, the better off we’ll all be. But the way that brain’s plasticity that assimilates interfaces into the body’s self-perception (the mapping of the driver’s body onto the car, for example) is, I think, one of the two core elements of videogames (the database+algorithm materiality of them being the other) that I want to get a handle on. Somewhere in there is the key that links their existence as games, and their shared characteristics with sports and other technologies of skillful play, with their media-textuality.