It’s been a busy couple of weeks. Last week was the GDC. My “report” is a simple one: I met a lot of intelligent, funny, and wonderful people. I spent some time helping demo Facade, and managed to see a couple talks. This week, I’m going to visit UCSD to, well, check things out. My longer posts on specifically game-related issues are going to be at Ludonauts.com, and I’ll link to them as appropriate from here. I’ve just put up a piece about Facade and social cognition.

Game sequels, chess, and how videogames are not exactly games. Gonzalo was recently interviewed by a Brazilian magazine¹ on violence in games and film, and asked him about GTA3: San Andreas, the upcoming West Coast-locale version of the GTA3 series.

In his comments about the interview², Gonzalo makes some criticisms of the phenomena of sequels in games.

This is not the first time that concerns about sequelitis have been raised. Edge Magazine once ran a cover story on the problem of sequels, and others have remarked on this before. Gonzalo compares the sequels of GTA to the game of chess, which did evolve over the years, but remained essentially without “sequels” even as variants were introduced.³

What this says to me, ultimately, is that in a very important way, videogames are not like other games – they are also visual media artifacts, subject to phenonema of branding and franchising. In this sense, there are precursors in non-videogames: Dungeons and Dragons spun off a considerable secondary market in pulp novels, children’s cartoons, and ultimately a film.

The case of the GTA franchise, however, is more than simple branding. There is a persistant character, there’s a distinctive millieu, there’s continuity and diagesis; there are unities in visual aesthetics, and there’s also consistency in gameplay.

This is, of course, all within the GTA3 “set” of games. The ‘3’ refers to, I would guess, the same core engine and characters, and gameplay mechanics; GTA1 (and the London 1969 pack) had a top-down interface, and didn’t represent the player-character directly (the use of cut-scenes with comic-art character animations, and the sort of pulp characterizations, was already present in GTA1).

So, in a mini-replay of the question of genre, the “thing” that is sequelized in a videogame is somewhat ambiguous. Final Fantasy sequels have little – but not nothing – in common with each other: it isn’t quite the episodic feeling that you get with, say noir-games like Hitman and Max Payne, but there are recurrent features (moogles, chocobos), some continuity of game-play (map-exploration, turn-based combats, skill systems, etc.) The first true sequel in the FF series was FFX-2, which featured distinct gameplay, but narrative continuity.

In all this, we have channels of content and features for which chess has no real analog, nor do most board games. “Sequelitis” relies on these channels or axes (an improvised list: diagetic, narrative, structural, interactive, franchise) – and like Rick Altman observed with genre, stability in one axis coupled with dynamism in another makes genre-evolution possible. Much of the sequel-logic in videogaming is a consequence of this multiform nature.

1. that link for the benefit of my vast Portuguese-literate readership. Reharl, are you reading this?
2. in English, despite the thick Uruguayan accent.
3. what is now the standard move for the queen, for example, was at one time a variant game-rule called “mad queen.”

Doing theory and cultural studies post-Sokal… The work of cultural studies, critical theory et. al. isn’t science. It’s not subject to the same success-criteria that scientific work is concerned. But Sokal happened, and anyone attempting to do work that shares epistemic terrain with scientific domains must either realize that or risk irrelevance or worse. So, I give myself a few ground rules. Any claim I make must make sense – and contradict – it’s opposite. One needs to be able to prepend an “It is not the case that…” to any declarative statement, to generate a statement that on some level they would be arguing against. It is worrisome how many pre-Sokalian texts – often cited, often respected – failed of this basic falsifiability. Given such a constraint, one can still do this sort of work and avail oneself of introspection and intuition, of allegory and pure speculation, as part of one’s method. This doesn’t absolve anyone from the need to justify or support a stance, nor does it excuse anti-empiricism, but it indicate a freedom from some evidentiary constraints of the traditional sciences.

J2O’s flash game is an excellent example of smart game rhetoric. The drink is marketed as a “pacer,” a non-alcoholic chaser to support an evening of debauch. The game makes the benefits of the product it is advertising as clear as, erm, pee. And I’m sure that any resemblence to the work of the diligent researchers of MIT is strictly coincidental.

Postscript: please, no remarks on peer-to-peer software.

Post-postscript: also, no comments about European (you’re a-peein’) game design. We have standards here. In theory.

Found on Rhizome.org, this piece by Giselle Beiguelman is both technically and creatively excellent: a flash-powered tableu for remixing a catalog of images, sounds, clips, and texts, allfrom the social, political, environmental, and creative landscape of northeastern Brazil. In taking these almost atomic elements of a local millieu into a database, she creates a post-narrative epic of place. The tension between the futurity of the media and the ambiguity of the modernisms of the south is recast by each participant.

Long time coming now, this is the article that I presented at the DiGRA conference last year. There’s a few things I’d probably change or expand upon at this point, I think: fleshing out what a new-historicist approach to game texts might look like elsewhere, maybe, and expanding a bit more on current shomin geki tropes in film and television.

There are some good things about the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts exhibit, Bang the Machine: Computer Gaming Art and Artifacts. Among them are an impressive implementation of Waco Resurrection, with a David Koresh mask holding headphones and microphones, the Kingdom of Piracy exhibit, including a reappropriation/skinning of the Civilization III engine into an allegory about multinational capitalism and corporate power, and the delightful Sims Gallery. But the problems are damning, and they are telling. Hopefully, this will serve as an object lesson to others who plan to curate exhibits about videogames and art.

First, the entire back wall of the main gallery is dominated by an exhibit of/about America’s Army. Built into a rather chintzy faux-Middle Eastern fort structure (looking more appropriate for a county fair than for a museum exhibit) were small alcoves featuring screens showing game-play in action, amid little dioramas of desert warfare bric-a-brac. Posters described the technology of the game and graphic engines, and dutifully described the development team’s heroic efforts to create the game. As far as I could tell, the game exhibit is not playable, and the viewer does not get to access the game’s greatest irony: that no one can play” as the terrorists, but in multiplayer mode, each side appears as terrorists to the other.

The piece – in fact, the entire area devoted to the game – was not only completely uncritical and unironic, it had almost nothing to do with art and videogames, and featured a fawning “story of the creation of the game” that wasn’t part of any of the other exhibits. There was nothing to relate America’s Army to other games (at least not within the piece itself: on the far side of the room, on a table across from the sprawling, costly, and tasteless faux-tress, were a couple defunct computer monitors that featured such works as Gonzalo’s September 12 and other more satirical/problematizing games, but there’s absolutely no sense of continuity between the two.)

Perhaps the exhibit is the result of a generous, yet conditional, gift on the part of the group behind America’s Army, the Navy’s MOVES Institute. That would be perhaps a bit more understandable if either the rhetoric of the game were problematized more, or if the work, as an uncritical, complimentary description of game-technology in action, were at least placed in a less dominating position. But that’s not the case: the America’s Army exhibit towers over the more nuanced and inventive works of the exhibit, and disrupts the effectiveness of the room. That the content of an exhibit, and the stance towards it, be so strongly overdetermined by the wishes of a donor, would never extend this far in a typical art exhibit. Imagine if Campbell Soup was able to place a self-serving display about soup, nutrition, and the food industry in the middle of an exhibit of the work of Andy Warhol. Yes, it’s that bad.

Then there are the difficulties that dog the curating of any new-media exhibits: the challenges of maintaining equipment, of creating a good interactive environment (I’ll mention this in my next section.) Some exhibits were off-line, due to technical difficulties. As more new media works are exhibited in museums, this should be unacceptable. A skilled media technical staff should be part of every museum’s team, along with preparators and guards. In the case of Bang the Machine, on my second visit to the exhibit, about a fourth of the interactive exhibits were offline or not functioning. This is simply not acceptable. In comparison, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s 2001 Art in Technological Times exhibit did an excellent job of keeping some very complex and interactive works on-line and working.

I visited another exhibit recently: an overview of installation art from 1969 to 2002 at the Museum of Contemporary Art at the Geffen Center in Los Angeles. The overall exhibit was fine, with a good selection and effective use of the Geffen Center’s space. I did notice that Gabriel Orozco’s piece, Ping Pond Table (a four-ended ping-pong table with a pond in the middle, with 4 paddles and a number of balls) didn’t enjoy the same reception here that it had when I saw it at the Tate Modern in London: while at the Tate, it turned anonymous gallery-goers into a friendly group of people interacting playfully with each other, the MOCA’s installation was treated as an entirely scopic object (yes, I did pick up a paddle and encourage a couple other visitors to play with the piece a bit, but they quickly retreated back to the typical stance of pure spectatorship.)

This resistance to immersion or participation with an artwork was more pronounced in the exhibit of Julie Becker’s Researchers, Residents, a Place to Rest. The piece invites exploration and consideration, but the curators decided on a high-security, preservation-focused stance towards the work. Viewers were not allowed to flip through notebooks, and given little chance to unravel the subtleties of the work. Instead, they were rushed through by museum guards. It was a disservice to the work, and also went to demonstrate the problem of any interactive work: the risks to the physical element, and the (reasonable) failure of trust between the audience and the curators. The question is, if the aura of the intact material work is so important that it merits intervening in the direct relationship between viewer and work, just why bother with site-specificity at all? Would the best interactive work be a DVD-rom you pick up in the museum store on the way out?

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.