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.

This report about Nintendo’s strategy for its next generation platform ties in nicely with a thought I had today. Namely, that the real conflict for the direction that videogames as an interactive media should take isn’t really that between narrative and ludos: it’s about different drives for participating in the media themselves based on the demographics, and in effect is a conflict between videogaming as agon (from Caillois’ typology of games and play) and videogaming under all other possible auspices.

This year’s E3 supposedly was about “the death of the hardcore gamer.” Summed up as the GWD segment (“guys without dates,”) the hardcore gamer is the canonical audience/market for the game industry to date: a dedicated fan who spends hundreds, even thousands of hours a year playing challenging videogames, developing skills, besting opponents real and virtual, etc.

The idea that games must challenge, must inherently be at least initially difficult, that the meta-narrative for the game interaction involve developing a kind of mastery over the game-artifact, is an assumption that underlies the more defensive posture of the gaming community in the US.

I think there’s a relationship between the function that videogames have in the lives, particularly, of young males, and what seems to me to be the socio-biological foundation for play in general. Play is a mechanism by which the young can develop the skills required for survival and mastery in relative safety, and once those skills are recruited to the needs of survival, the attraction of “playing” at them dissipates.

What I think this means is that the appeal of agon lasts until the instincts for competition, mastery and such are cathected into one’s social and/or professional life. If that cathexis never occurs, one could conceivably continue to find games of agon inherently appealing; otherwise, the joy of play migrates from being a realm of mastery to a realm of conviviality, or aesthetic experience.

The “tyranny of agon” seems stronger in the US than in Japan. Perhaps one might attribute this to a more competitive, individualistic culture in the US, but I sort of doubt it. Japanese society has intense competitive pressures of its own and traditions of competition as strong as any culture’s. Rather, I think this has more to do with the details of the market in Japan: my casual observation was that there was considerably more intergenerational participation in videogame purchase and play. Most game consoles are located in the family room. Virtually every Japanese household I know that reported having a game console indicated that play occurred with the whole family; parents knew exactly what their kids were playing to an extent that one doesn’t see in the US, and often played with them. Rather than this leading to sort of a cleaned-up “family friendly” game culture, it rather seemed to lead to one in which there was a larger market in games that weren’t necessarily motivated by the desire to demonstrate mastery over one’s peers. Not that those games don’t exist (after all, most all of the best fighting games are from Japan); rather, a substantial market for music and dance games, virtual toys, romance sims, and other non-agonistic games co-exists with the games of competition. It’s inconceivable, with the current dominant game culture in America, that Boku no Natsuyasumi could ever enjoy the kind of success that it has in Japan.

I think that’s going to be the upcoming source of discord: the conflict between the GWD and those whose motivations resemble them, who expect games to inherently be difficult and the pleasure of gaming to be about surmounting difficulty and besting obstacles and opponents, and those whose pleasures could lie in vertigo or simulation. At its root, it is a conflict of pleasures.

I’ve done a quick search for the literature for this Picasso piece, and one thing that struck me is that no one seems to have noticed the relationship between the content of the newsclippings in this piece, and the political activities of F.T. Marinetti. During this period of time, Marinetti was manifesting his doctrine of the hygenic value of war by participating in the First Balkan conflict; it was during the artillery assault on Adrianopoli that he wrote his seminal sound-poem Zang TumbTumb While the work wasn’t yet published (it was first published in Milan in 1914) one wonders if the inclusion of the clippings was a dig at the aesthetic nostalgia for war and the violent pretensions of the Italian movement, which were already a known element of the European art scene.

From a paper on games in art by Tiffany Holmes from the Digital Arts and Culture::2003 conference in MelbourneDAC 2003 conference in Melbourne, I found a reference to a flash game called Tropical America which discusses themes of exploitation and violence in Central America, focusing around the El Mozote massacre.

I’ve hoped for a while to see more videogames with Latin American thematics and settings (Malvinas 2032 is an interesting start, although it’s sort of Command and Conquer with a grudge), but I’m afraid that I was disappointed by this offering, and it goes a long way to explaining the limitations of the click-and-tell “interactive” narrative vis-à-vis a simulation model.

For one thing, almost all of this “game” is simply clicking on the one hot-spot on every scene. That’s not playing a game, that’s watching TV with a hand crank. And if you compare the story being told here with the complexities and nuances of the actual historical situation, you see just how much is lost by sticking to an “other narratives” approach towards game design with a social/political goal. There was so much material available in the actual historical event that simply gets left out by the somewhat melodramatic narrative: the sociopathic vendetta against the radical radio station, the interplay between El Mozote’s born-again Christian community (strongly anti-Communist and frankly more aligned with the military government than with the guerrillas) and their Roman Catholic neighbors (under the influence of liberation theology, Catholic villages were more likely than Protestant ones to support the guerrilla movement.) I have nothing against melodrama, and it has its valid, as well as suspect, political functions. Melodrama is a central element of the Final Fantasy games and other games that I think highly of, but in those cases it is at least problematized and often vacated by real game logics.

I’m inclined to be suspicious of a game-designer who makes a politically-inclined game without giving me options. The designers of America’s Army make it impossible to play the “terrorists,” nor to look under the hood of terrorist activity in any way. The opponent is always seen as a terrorist, even though they are required to see themselves in the same uniforms and identities as the Army. The hood of the car is weld shut; pay no attention to the man behind the screen.

Though I share the political concerns of the designers of Tropical America, their reluctance to give the player any freedom – or rather, either their technical inability to do so or, more likely, the habit of the stance of the didactic artist who wishes, consciously or unconsciously, to micromanage to emotional and ideological processes of the audience, disappoints me. It’s unplayful, in more ways than one. That’s an idea that could endure in a radical ludology: playfulness. Playfulness unravels somber rhetorics and, I’d argue makes the horror of real horror – the facts of buried bodies, all the more lucid. The open play aspect of good games can generate a Verfremdungseffekt – a distantiation effect – which Brecht considered central to the mobilization of peoples in their own political interest, and which respected their agency. The “click-and-tell” model of interactive narrative doesn’t exhibit the same faith in the viewer. The melodrama-artist is going to tell you where we are going: they only choice you have is how hard you press the accelerator. I very much like the visual aesthetics of the piece, with its Mesoamerican-inspired figures and woodcut aesthetics. There’s a debt, I think, to Eduardo Galeano’s Las Palabras Andantes illustrated with the woodcuts of J. Borges (and the theme of the corn which occurs in both). I also think that the works of Galeano are a perfect springboard for a videogame, with their dissembled logics, their short scenarios, the implicit yet inaccessible arch-structures of history played out over the bodies and lives of the inhabitants of the land and of the cities. When I see a failure of vision wed to such a visual wealth, the feeling of disappointment is sharper.

I just noticed this paper by Andrew Stern which also gives some voice to this kind of dissatisfaction. I suppose I should read the comments to my own blog more!