Proceedings of the 2nd Annual U of Florida Game Studies Conference
These are the selected proceedings from the 2006 University of Florida Game Studies Conference: Video Games and the Alien Other, which took place on April 6th and 7th, 2006 in Gainesville, FL. The following selections are prepared from the full text of presenters' papers or video where available.
N_A is Nocturne_Alley, a LiveJournal-based Harry Potter RPG that ran for two years. LiveJournal is one of many types of online blogging software, and has become the chosen site for much fandom interaction since its creation. Any definition of fandom would require a number of books to complete, but briefly, fandom refers to a wide-ranging and heterogeneous community of fans who create various forms of art, discussion, analysis, commentary, and collections of data about their sources of pleasure, which can range from boybands, actors, and television shows to novels. Harry Potter fandom is highly complex, ranging from communities based on the certainty that Harry Potter and Hermione Granger are destined to be together, to those dedicated to analyzing the books in detail to understand Rowling’s universe. A specific subcategory of the fandom engages in playing with the idea that many characters are or could be queer, and stories or other works focusing on, for example, the idea that Draco Malfoy and Harry Potter are beloved enemies, are called slash, due to the backslash connecting the two characters paired.
I am consciously avoiding any type of ethnographic analysis of who fans are, or even why they do what they do. Henry Jenkins, Constance Penley, and Camille Bacon-Smith have each produced texts that attempt to address these questions, and their work opened the door for academic study of fans and fandom, as well as began the work of archiving a history of fan communities. That work was widely seen as presumptive within the slash community, and focused so much on the cheap spectacle of slash and the fans who write that it foreclosed the possibility of any meaningful conclusions about what fannish production does. My view is that any future scholarship must now actively work against such readings and their influence on the field; moreover, I would hesitate to ever claim that any universal profile of ‘the fan’ can ever be articulated.
If the term ‘polymorphously perverse’ applies to any fandom, it applies to Harry Potter fandom: though the largest focus is on pairings involving Harry Potter (slash Snape, slash Hermione and Ron, etc.), any kink, pairing, or scenario imaginable has not only been done, but done to excess—Lucius/Giant Squid, Dobby the House Elf/Sorting Hat, and, of course, many permutations of the Weasley family, known collectively as Weasleycest. A driving impulse behind fannish behavior is not only a fascination with engaging these characters on an emotional level as they are, or as we wish them to be, but a desire for more—a perpetual proliferation of Harrys, of scenarios in which Harry is saved from the abuse of the Dursleys by Snape, who then becomes his adopted father and mentor, of sexual encounters with Draco which leave the two boys more and better people due to their ability to love one another, etc. The key here is, of course, the et cetera—no story is ever satisfying enough, as it elides, ignores, or simply cannot contain the true richness fans crave, and no fan production can simultaneously supplement the lack perfectly and attain the legitimacy of being a suitable replacement.
Nocturne_Alley was initially conceived as a Harry Potter roleplaying game, taking place during the sixth and seventh years of Harry’s schooling at Hogwarts, and the moderators have stated that they had always intended the game to end at that time, after the defeat of Voldemort. Normal fans, most with prior experience in roleplay, came together and chose their characters, then requested applications from fandom to play the remaining open parts. They created journals, user icons, user info pages, the community, and began to play, setting plots and characterizations into motion that would build over the next two years until the final conflict. All of the usual suspects are there, from Harry and Draco to Ron and Professor Snape, and the reason given for these characters having journals at all is a project, designed by Dumbledore, to promote house unity through required posting in personal journals and the school community. Over two years, a number of important and interesting things happen: Harry and Draco begin a relationship, Sirius Black and Remus Lupin get married, and pranks, duels, detentions and misunderstandings all serve to tell an exciting story. But my focus is not on the events of the game itself, or even on the performance of a game by its still-anonymous players—without access to the players, any analysis of their perspective or intentions would be seriously flawed, if not impossible. Moreover, the issue of this game’s reception by the fandom is far more interesting.
NrAged is the discussion community created by fans a year into the game, whose title is a play on both Nocturne_Alley and Draco’s mood for almost all of his posts – enraged. This forum for fan engagement provides a clear window into what made this game so satisfying and successful for fans that it can be conceived of as an ideal fandom, and even an ideal fannish product. Most posts announced new contributions to the game, whether updates or comment threads, and analyzed their significance. Motivations, explanations, repercussions, and emotional responses were carefully suggested, explored, and evaluated, allowing fans, in essence, to be fannish about Nocturne_Alley, a fan production itself. The most fascinating and important aspect of Nocturne_Alley, is that what the NrAged watchers are watching is not, in fact, the game itself.
What we see in Nocturne_Alley is only a paratext of the game, which takes place in private chats between players who determine, then roleplay the events that then lead to what is reported afterwards. For example, the events leading up to Harry’s outing are never fully revealed—we merely see Draco’s post renouncing him, and then discover tiny details about Harry’s drunken attempt to kiss him later, in other posts. Instead, what the audience sees is a the wake of the game, rippling outward. The effects of choices, actions, and moments are, however, visible in the journal community, though they aren’t figured as diary entries or transcriptions, and things do happen within the ‘real time’ of a post and its responses. Ron’s reaction to Harry’s outing, to continue the example, happens in the game—his shock, defense, and query, “Is everybody gay?” occur in his post and the comment threads that follow. Yet the organizing framework and action of play happen, for the most part, outside of the community. Posts can set new plots in motion, but the plots, the reactions, even the experiences that will resolve the plot are determined, enacted, and experienced outside of Nocturne_Alley. This is a story written by the game itself, and the reader perspective is of an RPG taking place on LJ, though actually, Nocturne_Alley is a chat, or email RPG, which then is partially recorded in the journals.
To further clarify this issue, consider the experience of LARPing. That experience is often reliant on giving the storytellers ‘downtimes’—individual player narratives of what happens during breaks in the game. These downtimes are obviously part of the game: if you collect and read them, rather than watching or participating in the particular event, you experience events through a byproduct of the game, with enough hints and references to reconstruct the whole.
Though Nocturne_Alley is actually the wake of the game, it may appear on the surface as an experience of reading an epistolary novel, but in fact watchers are watching an experience of play—but only a partial one. Nocturne_Alley could be called an RPG novel, as the structure is being used to tell a story—many at once, as each character has a number of arcs, but the overall story is Harry’s relationship with Draco—even the war with Voldemort takes a back seat. This fact distinguishes the RPG from more goal-oriented games: though Harry is on a quest, that quest is a decided subplot to everything else that occurs, and its outcome is determined by his player’s actions, rather than by anything Harry himself does—the ultimate goal is storytelling, not winning the war. Thus, it is important to read Nocturne_Alley as story oriented, and as focused on the pleasure of playing the characters, playing out the determined plot arcs, and playing with the multiple and overlapping desires of fandom. Moreover, since the player perspective on the game is not actually a relevant part of reading the game’s wake, it is more fruitful to focus on what the NrAged audience knows, perceives, and is led to, through the experience of watching the story unfold.
Unlike more traditional RPGs, the players of Nocturne_Alley embody their characters, rather than perform them, as their 'real' identities are erased by a number of game restrictions: anonymity, communication with the community under the pseudonym 'a_player,' and maintaining the mystery of how the game operates. The effect of this embodiment is the disappearance of the players in the reading, essentially othering the characters from the actual fans involved. Yet a distinction must be made between embodiment and performance, here: though the players are embodying their characters, Nocturne_Alley itself functions as a performance, regardless of player intentionality, by its elevation of a private RPG into a defined, objectified, and displayed engagement of characters now available to an audience. It is structured to be read as a game, therefore it needs to be read as a performance. And because the fans of NrAged are reading the performance of the wake of a game, the game itself becomes ever more inaccessible and alien.
Additionally, rather than being constructed of individual turns, Nocturne_Alley is a layered space both for players and the audience. Posts occur without any regularity, beyond the once-a-week requirement: comment threads are often updated days after the initial post, individual plotlines continue in different places in the community, it is possible to read the posts from a specific day in nearly any order, and individual posts reflect not only different perspectives, but different details about the story, based on the character’s knowledge and experience. Moreover, conversations – especially between Harry and Draco – often occur in comment threads from posts made much earlier, in order to hide their interactions.
Like all RPGs, Nocturne_Alley involves elements of improvisation, but I am more interested in how certain elements of improvisational performance shed light on the interaction between Nocturne_Alley and its fans on NrAged. Not only the game itself, but NrAged thrives on the tension between what is known and what is unknown, and unlike traditional improvs, the drive to resolve any ambiguities is not complete. At the end of the story, we know—from Hermione only—one version of what happened to Voldemort, but a number of other things remain unanswered—who was the Head Boy, what happened with Harry and Draco, what Harry really did to defeat Voldemort, etc.
Though the players arrange anonymous Q&As on NrAged after the game’s end, the only other audience communications, to clarify and deal with the bits and pieces left out of the story, is through awarding gold stars. Given no explanation for particular acts, or insight into events that characters only refer to in passing, after the fact, many NrAged members engage in speculation which is occasionally rewarded by a gold star—no comment, no explanation of which player is validating the claim, no further contact – but the existence of these validations, affirmations that the watchers have gotten it right, implies not only that the audience is not an audience to the game itself, but that part of Nocturne_Alley’s pleasure depends on the speculation about events that are not self-explanatory, that get left out of the frame of the LJ stage.
So, what is important about the reception of this performance, this game played off-stage and partially recounted? To return to the issue of how the online RPG, as a hypertextual performance, implicates the audience and affects reception, I use Giannachi’s definition of hypertextuality to contextualize fannish desire, which emphasizes the performative nature of reading and viewing hypertexts, as well as the ability of the viewer to move beyond the interface and engage a work of art in a more open, connected way, thus multiplying the viewer’s position by allowing her to exist simultaneously in the real and virtual world.
Not only does fannish desire refigure the separation between subject and object, through such methods as coproduction, reproduction, and appropriation, the key issue here is that a complete reading of a hypertext is not only impossible, but antithetical to hypertextuality itself. Finishing the text would result in an end to the desire for more, and fannishness, as a style of desire and a framework for configuring desire, requires a perpetual production, a perpetual pursuit of more configurations, more proliferation, more exploration. That perpetuity is central to what fans do, and NrAged provides fans with an environment for reception and response as well as reproduction, a place to expose and play with the gaps in the narrative, allowing watchers to sustain the pleasure of experiencing the game along with various forms of fan response over an extended period of time. This is somewhat like watching a TV show every week, but production here is much more fluid and variable, requiring a watcher to chain herself to the computer to make sure she doesn’t miss a post. Thus the fannish pleasure of being part of NrAged is simultaneously with the text, and subsequent to the text, in a cycle of production, response, and re-production.
Nocturne_Alley, however, also contributes to this construction of an ideal fandom, in both experience and product, because the players perform ideal fans by creating a product that, because it is simultaneously fannish and textual, is in fact an ideal fannish product. Harry’s player gets to be Harry, but this Harry is not Rowling’s: the Harry of Nocturne_Alley is only a Harry, one of many, but the player’s embodiment and subsequent disappearance from considerations of the character grant that Harry legitimacy. This is not just another story, in which it’s clear that this Harry is fan-made and requires the suspension of disbelief; this is a game, a performance, and NrAged fans use this specific Harry to spur their own creations, thus elevating Nocturne_Alley’s Harry to an original or originary enough creation to treat it almost as they do Rowlings’s. There is, of course, the additional layer of pleasure in knowing that the Nocturne_Alley Harry resembles their own desired versions of Harry, including slash, Draco as the Slytherin Sex God, Sirius’s leather pants, and other tropes that have become canonical to fandom.
So now we need definitions:
A Harry: one of many proliferations, all equal, dependent on preference.
The Harry: that which an A Harry derives from, starting as the original, the Harry in Rowling’s urtext. However, Nocturne_Alley creates an A The Harry.
Complete Harry: Harry who requires no fannish intervention, but who is only complete for a given fan, and can’t possibly be complete in the overall context of fannish production. Complete Harry is ultimately a fantasy, because he both represents and contains fannish desire. That desire arises from a perceived lack in the original, which leads to fannish production: should that lack be filled, there would be no further need for discussion, analysis, art, fiction, or any other creation, and fannish desire is, in the end, a desire not only for creation but for perpetual reconfiguration of texts. The goal of both players and fans is Complete Harry, but that goal is never attainable, as the desire is the lack of Complete Harry, so the result is a proliferation of Harrys, and at most A Complete Harry. The lack of Complete Harry is a motivation for the desire. Satiation is antithetical to the desire itself, and a complete text or character is antithetical to fannish production.
From a fan perspective, Rowling’s original The Harry is not sufficient—he occasions fannish desire, but immediately fails to satisfy the desire for a Harry who has super powers, a father figure, a perfect relationship, a nine-inch dick, etc., and so the initial goal of fan production is twofold: to form a Complete Harry, and to never reach that goal. Nocturne_Alley, because of the transformative embodiment undertaken by the players, which improves upon the original and then erases the productive process of that improvement, creates A The Harry, and this new A The Harry spawns another round of fannish production. Fannish production derives from the The-ness of The Harry.
Finally, then, NrAged and Nocturne_Alley figure an ideal endpoint of fannish production—but only figure it, first because an endpoint of fannish production, like the hypertext, cannot exist, and second because gaps in the narrative, the distance from the game itself, are what allow the story to be an endpoint. The Harry of the game is, in fact, A Complete Harry for the player, but no watcher can ever reach or read the completeness, because full disclosure has been denied. No watcher will ever know what happened with Harry and Draco on that drunken evening, what Sirius and Remus’ wedding vows were, who the Head Boy was, or even how Harry and Draco’s players played. Accordingly, Nocturne_Alley’s particular take on these characters becomes iconic, crystallized into authentic form by the NrAged reception, yet the game/story never supplants either the original, with its copious possibilities for transformation, or any other Harry, even if it’s written by a thirteen-year-old girl who wants him to have wings.
When talking about player identity disappearance, my argument is necessarily evaluative, rather than causal: if we knew who Nocturne_Alley Harry was, that would decrease/ruin the The-ness of Harry. Further, the players have not revealed their online identities, which suggests that the ideal fan player is one who has sutured herself so completely to a beloved character that her own identity not only disappears, but becomes irrelevant to her production. The dualism between the desire for Complete Harry and need for that desire to be unsatiated is continually reinscribed, and thus the ideal fandom needs to never be obtained, for if they reveal their identities, they make a claim to have found/been a Complete Harry. Only when anonymous, do they represent the fantasy without foreclosing it, thereby providing a temporary resting point in the process of perpetual refiguring that is central to fannish production
Player Epsilon: Demoing a New Hermeneutic for Games
Text:
I am interested in a strange and minor paratext to video games – the demo. Although the definition will expand, I will begin with the demo as it first arrested me. In Super Mario Brothers, if the player turns on the game and does nothing, the game eventually shows two short clips of gameplay. In these clips, Mario moves around on the screen seemingly of his own accord, acting as he would if someone were playing the game. My goal is to understand the role of these two short clips in the game – what function they serve, and what their inclusion tells us about how to understand Super Mario Brothers, and, ultimately, how to understand video games in general.
These questions are best approached from the side, however. And so I will, having raised them, set them aside, and begin again with a declaration. Thus: the video game is always performative. On its simplest level, the game is always involved in action – that action being “playing the game.” More specifically, it is a double action, in that there are two bodies acting. The first is the medial body – a term that encompasses many things – a screen on which a particular pattern of light flickers, but also the configuration of machine and wire that feeds that screen, the bodies of objects represented on the screen, and the space through which those bodies move. But these bodies do not act unbidden – the nature of the dynamic of play is a contact between this medial body and human body – the player. The play of the medial body does not take place without a corresponding play of the human body. In fact, I would argue that this dyad – the connected player and game – is the core of the video game.
The point of contact between the two poles of this dyad is the controller. As McLuhan would have it, the controller is our appendage – but it is also an appendage of the game – reaching out from the screen (or its vicinity) and towards us. And just as McLuhan notes that a media is an amputation as well as an extension, the controller also represents an amputation of the game – a necessary incompletion of it. The game reaches out with the controller, inviting the interaction that will complete it. In short, it hails us.
Let us return to the scene of our dyad. Certainly the first scene of almost any game does serve as a hailing – “Press start to play” is a command, and the moment we press start, we have identified ourselves as players, accepting some set of responsibilities. But the game is also hailed when we press start. It becomes a particular object based on the player’s demands of it – a derived product of his actions.
Player and game, then, are only describable as derived products of each other’s actions. The problem is that there are many players and games in existence. For instance, the hinge clearly binds together the player-on-the-sofa and the console-on-the-table. But it also hinges together the two performativities created by the mutual hailing. Furthermore, it hinges together the avatar – the player’s representation on the screen – and the game world – the game’s representation.
This hanging of multiple mutually defined subjects upon a single hinge (namely that of play) evokes the distinctions within narratology and reader-response theory. Taken together, the two fields have given us a substantial litany of readers and authors, generally in matched pairs. The readerly side of these pairs is spelled out by Gerald Prince in his essay “Introduction to the Study of the Narratee.” He offers four – the ideal reader, the real reader, the virtual reader, and the narratee. Each of these can also be considered to have an equivalent author function. In an exceedingly brief format, the narrattee and narrator are characters in the text – the narrator is the person who speaks or writes the text, the narratee is the person to whom that text is fictively addressed. The implied reader and author are constructs of the text – the implied reader is the reader that catches the things that the text alludes to and draws the correct conclusions about it. The implied author is the person who put those things in the text. Actual readers and authors are relatively self-evident. Ideal readers and authors are fantasies – the ideal reader is one who fully understands every single aspect of the text, and the ideal author is one who fully controls every nuance and subtlety of the text. I will not indulge in a lengthy analysis of these concepts and their relation here, and will instead skip straight to some general points about them.
First, the reader and author sides of each step mutually define each other – specifically in the implied reader and author. That is to say that the implied reader is a role that is created through interaction with the implied author, and likewise the implied author is only formulated when the implied reader draws conclusions about him. And so on for each of the other roles. Second, the relationship between the actual reader and the implied reader is performative – that is to say that the implied reader is a role and identity that the actual reader takes on.
Let’s return, then, to video games. I hold that the roles we found in the interaction of player and game mirror those found in narratology To wit:
Reader
Author
Narrat__
Avatar
Game world
Implied
The performative player – the set of goals, desires, and actions taken by the player.
The performative game – the game as the player expects it to work and respond.
Actual
The player sitting on the sofa.
The game as it runs in the system.
Ideal
The perfect player who has complete control over the avatar.
The fully explored and fully manifest game world that can be interacted with in any way.
The hinge of these dyads are the actions of play. These actions do not belong to either side of the dyad – they are rather the actions that constitute the performance of each side. In this context, we can finally ask the question of how we interpret a demo? It would be an easy misreading to suggest that the demo of a game is simply a movie in which the avatar represents a protagonist. A demo of Super Mario Brothers, however, is not a prototypical Super Mario Brothers Super Show. That is to say, our method of reading a demo is not to identify that Mario must be the protagonist because he triumphs over enemies, and then to note that he acquires a mushroom, thus growing in stature, therefore making the whole tale a bildugsroman, and perhaps a fable about the importance of eating mushrooms. How do we make the reading, then?
Let us note the peculiar characteristic of the demo, which is that it takes place within the formal structure of the game. That is to say that all of the non-diagetic material of the game – score, lives counter, health bar, level name, timer, etc – are still in the demo. Thus it is impossible to read the demo as anything other than a game. But if the demo is a game then it must contain the dyad. Some parts of this are easy enough – after all, the demo does appear as the game does when it is played. Thus we can readily take the demo as containing the author/game side of the dyad. Similarly, the fact that the game world is in motion means that the author/game side is performing its duly assigned roles, which means that the hinge of the dyad exists. But the player, rather obviously, does not exist – there is nobody at the other end of the controller.
On the other hand, the player must exist. After all, the organizing of the medial bodies is intelligible only by the distinction of things under the player’s control – Mario, the falling Tetris block, or the chainsaw, to point to several games – and things outside the player’s control – the goomba, the already fallen Tetris block, the cyberdemon. But to interpret the demo in such a way where the game is understood – which we must do – we have to be able to distinguish the game. And so in this act of distinction, we create a player. It is this player that I have named my paper after – Player ε.
The ε is the sign, within computer science, of the empty set – that set containing no members. Thus Player ε is the player without content – the player that is a player, but with none of the actual traits or aspects of the player. There is, in Player ε, only the consequences of the player – game and play – and no actual player. In one sense, then, Player ε represents the pure act of play – play without its attachment to the dyad.
But the pure act of play cannot possibly exist. Play is the point of contact between two mediated entities – game and player – each of which is only defined by its contact with the other. The demo thus introduces a momentary incoherence into the hermeneutic – a point in which the hermeneutic is functioning, but functioning impossibly. This impossibility is best summarized as follows: the game cannot exist without the player, and in the demo the game plays itself. The result is that the demo causes a looking-inward – a self-analysis of the hermeneutic.
In playing itself, the game is showing us the performative act of play – that is, it is showing us what performing the implied player entails. The demo thus occupies the strange role of an illocutionary act about an illocutionary act. It is illocutionary because, as with any text, it creates a dyad of reception between author and reader (In this case game and would-be player). But its content is to show an illocutionary act between the game and Player ε. We are to observe what it is that Player ε does, and then contemplate our own ability to slot into that role in relation to the game that Player ε’s existence has defined.
It is important to note that the demo cannot be essential to the slotting of an actual player into the implied player’s role. Simply put, most games don’t feature demos. In fact, on the NES, almost the only games that did were ports of arcade games which retained the demo mode that would automatically play on arcade machines to get people to insert quarters. Indeed, the act of interpreting the demo – of understanding that you could possibly “be” Mario – really requires that you already have considerable knowledge of how video games work. The demo can’t, in this case, be taken as the origin point for the implied player, or as the way in which the implied player is constituted. That is something that necessarily takes place in the game. Nor is it the case that the demo teaches the interpretive skills necessary to understand the process within the game by which the implied player is constituted.
It is prudent, at this point, to actually look at the demos of Super Mario Brothers. In them, Mario, who is visible on the title screen, runs under the title graphic and enters the game world proper. Each demo lasts eight seconds, and then the game resets to the title screen. If the player again does not press start, the other demo plays.
The first demo to play features Mario behaving illogically. He starts off well enough – he kills the first goomba in the game, and gets a mushroom, growing to Super Mario size. Then he jumps at a question block and misses it, jumping up along the side of it, then does not attempt to hit it again. After this, he behaves in a manner that could be described as confused – he tries to run into pipes for a second before jumping over them, and ends the demo turned around backwards and simply standing there for a second. In the second demo, he displays more skill – he hits the question block, and has no confusion about pipes. He quickly advances beyond where the first demo got to, before hitting a goomba and losing his mushroom. He stomps on the next goomba successfully, but then walks into the goomba after that just as the temporary invincibility from his being hit wears off, and he dies, ending the demo.
The inadequacy of the play displayed in these demos lends further credence to the claim that the demo is not an essential part of learning to play the game. Rather, in this case, Player ε is a reiteration of the lack that is already central to it. The game can create Player ε to finish the dyad and allow it to be played, but this creation is inadequate – degenerate. The game needs an actual player to complete it in a functional and proper way.
This use of Player ε is, like the demo of Super Mario Brothers itself, an artifact of the arcade setting – its sole purpose is to compel people to insert quarters, press start, or otherwise begin playing. And it is fair to say that this can be said of more or less every demo at the start of video games – from Super Mario Brothers on. But the demo event does not have to be used simply for marketing purposes.
One oddity that shows the breadth of the demo as a form is the concept of ghost data. Ghost data is created when a player runs a time trial in a racing game. On subsequent attempts at the time trial, the player races alongside a translucent ghost racer. This ghost does not affect the race physically – the player cannot ram into him, for example – but runs an exact copy of the player’s previous run. The result is that the player is, after their first run, always competing against a demo.
On the one hand, the ghost data is a high water mark – not quite the ideal player, but, as the best that the actual player has ever done, always at the exact point where the line is between the implied player that he can perform and the ideal player that he fantasizes. Since this particular demo is also always received during an act of play (Since one does not just watch ghost data whiz around the track – one attempts to race at the same time), this demo becomes something more nuanced and dynamic than the marketing of the basic demo. When the ghost is in front of the player, it makes the gap between the player’s performance and the player’s desire manifest. But when the ghost is successfully passed, the nature of the racing game is that it disappears from view, since the player only sees just ahead of their car.
Thus in the act of passing the ghost, the player’s performance of the implied player visually erases that gap, removing the difference between the actual player and Player ε. The ghost data makes tangible the sense of surpassing the previous limit of the performance, giving the feeling of breaking through the constraints of a particular and flawed performance of the implied player into a sense, albeit a false one, of perfect harmony with the game. This perfect harmony is then, at the end of the race, literally encoded into the game as the next Player ε when the player’s run becomes the new ghost data.
Although more hermeneutically interesting than the 8-second movie at the start of Super Mario Brothers, ghost data is still concerned with the construction of the dyad of play as it applies to a specific instance of play with a specific game (albeit with a general “actual player” that we have not ascribed any characteristics to). The demo, however, does not have to be so limited in its scope. Its function is to show its audience not just or even primarily how to perform the audience role for a text, but to reveal a truth about that audience role. But truths can extend considerably beyond whatever is actually being demonstrated. Within game studies, we can see this in the example of speedrun videos.
Speedrun videos are videos of gameplay in which a game is completed as fast as possible. Some are done legitimately, and are simply VCR recordings of someone playing the game. Others are done with the assistance of tools like emulators that allow the game to be slowed down or rewound, making it possible to reliably pull off tricks that would be impossible for a human player to do consistently if at all. A well-known example is a movie of Super Mario Brothers 3 recorded by a player going by the name Morimoto. This play-through is around ten minutes long, and features a truly dazzling section in which the player obtains 99 extra lives through a series of perfectly timed jumps.
Although the legitimate plays have a similar aesthetic effect on the average player, it is these tool-assisted speedruns that are most interesting, in that they use Player ε to close the dyad of play off from actual players. In the tool-assisted speedrun, Player ε takes on the role of the ideal player – perfectly manipulating the game. Thus the game stops merely being a world for the avatar to interact in. Its limits and rules change in the face of the perfect control offered by the emulation tools. The dyad that results is inaccessible to the actual player who watches the speedrun movie. He cannot possibly enact the performance of Player ε, and thus cannot cause the game to be the game shown in the movie. The demo is thus not a demonstration of what is possible, or an invitation to a new type of play that the actual player can perform. Rather, it is a marking off of the boundaries of a type of play – a comment on what the limitations are of a particular implied player.
It is important to note that the speedrun movie is only interesting or really understandable if its audience is aware of the implied player they perform when playing the game normally. For an audience with no concept whatsoever of how playing Super Mario Brothers 3 normally goes, Morimoto’s speed run of it does not foreclose any possibility. It is only through the comparison of Player ε’s performance of the ideal player and the actual player’s recalled performance of the implied player that the gulf becomes evident. Despite this, it is also notable that the Morimoto video is a representation of Super Mario Brothers 3, but not a comment on it. Rather, it is primarily a comment about the inadequacy of human actual players in the completion of the act of play, and about the existence of aspects of play that are unreachable from a human subjectivity within that dyad.
We can see, then, that demos are not merely paratexts to individual texts – essentially high-tech versions of what Genette calls the “please-insert.” Speedrun videos show the possibility of demos as a paratext to an entire hermeneutic – a performance of a new mode of interpretive performance. Demo modes are comments on the dyadic nature of interpretation, showing the incompleteness of demonstrated play. In all cases, the demos reveal more about play in general than they do about whatever games are being shown - they provide occasion to enter and explore the construction and negotiation of the interpretive act, and particularly the act of performance that players and readers engage in when they fill their appointed roles in engagement with a text.
AA: Artificial Alterity -- Toward an Ethics of Computer Games
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I stare into the monitor. It is directly across from my face, about two feet distant. If it were a human being, the proximity and the directness of my gaze would have to be interpreted as either erotic or confrontational—quite possibly both. As I engage with the computer, whether for work or play, I tend to characterize, anthropomorphize, personify it. Especially when it fails or, to put it more accurately, refuses, to do what I want, I curse at the damn thing with a vehemence I would hesitate to exert on my worst enemy. The computer is invested with a personality. It has intelligence, even a will. I react to it, or with it, or against it. My typewriter never got treated like this.
Moreover, when I play computer games, as often as not the computer is my opponent. Now, of course, by ‘computer’ in this formula I mean the nexus between hardware and software that enacts the game as I experience it. Insofar as the classic definitions of an agonisitc game focus on the contest between two opponents in a strictly controlled environment, the computer often provides both the environment and the opponent. From the human opponent on the other side of the chessboard, we have come to both the board and the opponent existing in the space of the computer. The opponent is now faceless. To a large extent, this is true even of multiplayer games: when I play Call of Duty on a server, for instance, I do not see the faces of my opponents or teammates. Of their avatars, yes, but not of the human beings behind them. Nevertheless, I’ll have time today only to explore the ethical world of single-player gaming, in which the player is pitted against the AI of the game itself. In a kind of ludic Turing test, the job of the AI is to provide a gaming experience that feels like playing against a competent human opponent. The computer, in other words, must provide not only the board and the pieces, but also the intelligence on the other side of the table.
I’ve mentioned ethics here, and I want to trend carefully. I’m going to be talking about an ethics of computer gaming, but not necessarily a morality of it. I want to talk about ethics in the context of Emmanuel Levinas’s work on the subject. Levinas’s version of ethics centers on the face to face encounter with the other. The other, for Levinas, is any other person: there are no categories in this ultimate alterity and no question of an other being more or less other than some competing version. This is a theoretical other who breaks open my vision of the world (what Levinas calls my totality) with the reality of the other’s being. The other forces me to confront the limitations of my totality and thus introduces me to infinity. The other makes a claim on me, one that I cannot legitimately ignore. This face to face encounter is ethics for Levinas: it is the precondition for ethical behavior or, as he puts it, the ethics of ethics. What we make of the face to face encounter is the result of a specific ethical system and subject to moral judgment. But Levinas’s interest lies in the ethical situation rather than comparisons of different culturally based ethical codes.
One of the most difficult questions for Levinas scholarship has been his relation to humanism. Let’s make this concrete: in the face to face encounter, the other necessarily exceeds my idea of the other. The alterity of the other is infinite. Is it thus a domestication of Levinasian ethics to say that the other is a human? Does this not boil down to “the other is a human, just like I am” and thus violate the other through limitation and sameness? Levinas himself wrote of his philosophy as a “humanism of the other human” and contrasted it with more traditional humanisms of the same. But certainly most discussions of Levinas have assumed that the other is human, or at least sought to problematize Levinasian ethics through questioning the necessary humanness of the other.
The question I’m interested in here, however, is to what extent the computer becomes an other in single-player gaming. Clearly the agonisitc game, as outlined by Huizinga for instance, can function as an ethical encounter in the Levinasian sense. The face to face encounter across the chess board, or perhaps even the jousting field, is almost paradigmatic of the ethical situation for Levinas. The opponents acknowledge and respect each other’s alterity, they limit their relations to those defined as legitimate according to the pre-arranged rules of the game. Cheating under such circumstances would represent a violation of the ethical face to face and thus invalidate the encounter as truly ethical. But in the single player computer game, the opponent is not an other, or at least not an other recognized by Levinasian ethics (the question of the posthuman ethical other is an intriguing one, but not one I can develop now). The opponent is an illusion built out of the intentions of the programmers, the rules of the game, and the limitations of technology. There can be no face to face with the computer opponent because the computer opponent has no face.
It may, however, have a mask. The difference between mask and face is an important one for Levinas. As I mentioned before, ethical alterity is not a matter of cultural difference for Levinas: in this sense, someone from my exact cultural background is no less other than a person from the other side of the globe. One encounters the ethical other without regard to the color of their eyes, to paraphrase Levinas. Cultural difference is a matter of mask: the difference that is constructed on to the face and hides, not essential sameness as we might expect in traditional humanism, but a more radical alterity. The ethical for Levinas is based on difference in spite of rather than because of cultural difference. There are masks, but the point of ethics remains the face behind the mask. This is where true difference lives.
The computer opponent, however, is a mask without a face: I’m reminded of the influential 1973 movie Westworld and its unforgettable image of Yul Brenner’s face removed to display nothing but circuitry beneath. The computer opponent is an illusion of alterity; I attribute strategy, intelligence, perhaps even malevolence and cheating to the opponent (I am especially suspicious of the AI in Civ III). Moreover, at least for games that have multiplayer options, the job of the computer opponent is to simulate a real player. In game terms, there’s often nothing in the games to differentiate the ‘real’ opponent from the AI version. They appear the same on the screen. Thus the mask of the game may hide either a face or the lack of one.
The temptation is thus to conclude that computer games, at least as far as single-player versions are concerned (though I am also tempted to lump in multiplayer games as having as much to do with actual face to face encounters as Friendster has to do with actual face to face friendship) fail to function in an ethical context. But I think that would be too hasty, as well as too luddite, of a decision. As I mentioned above, the role of the AI is to simulate a human opponent. It’s ideal is to make the playing experience indistinguishable form playing the game with another player. In this sense, then, games simulate the ethical situation to the exact extent that they simulate another player. AI offers us AA: Artificial Alterity, a kind of ethical safe space wherein we as players know that we are simulating the other, that we are playing with masks. This does not so much remove gaming from the sphere of ethics as it allows us to see games as simulated ethics. To paraphrase H. G. Wells, digital soldiers leave no digital widows, so a player has room to experiment without hurting people. But I want to maintain that, rather than make computer gaming an ethics-free zone, intellectual work on gaming can remain open to the ethical implications of gaming when seen as a simulation.
Let’s try a concrete example: Tropico 2 is a resource management RTS in which the player simulates the administration of a 17th century Caribbean pirate island. By definition, all production on the island is accomplished by enforced labor. Pirates will rise up against their leader if not provided with sufficient quantity and quality of food, drink, gambling, and sex. All of these needs are met through labor that is maintained through fear and order. Thus the game simulates slavery and prostitution and gives the player no choice in the matter: there is no non-slave labor and if you don’t provide wenches, the pirates will revolt despite their satisfaction in the eating, drinking, and gambling categories. In the simulation, the player must balance several factors, most importantly pirate satisfaction and captive resignation (the latter affected by food, rest, and religion: no liberation theology here). The computer AI controls all the characters who thus, unlike in many other RTS games, do not function merely as extensions of the player’s will. They display an annoying propensity to do what they want. So the player must negotiate with their desires.
These negotiations, I’m suggesting, are simulated ethics. They are simulated ethics in a simulated world that is glaringly immoral by most modern standards. Nonetheless, the decisions the player must make are ethical decisions, or at least decisions about ethics. The Official Strategy Guide to the game, for instance, offers two competing techniques: spoil your pirates by giving them everything they want, or get rid of them as soon as they start to make demands (assassination is an integral part of the game). These are the ethical parameters of the game, and they need to be seen as such. This is very different from the question of whether the game itself is moral or immoral (those it’s interesting to consider why Tropico 2 has aroused no controversy of which I’m aware while Grand Theft Auto generated panic in high places even before the hot coffee got spilled). What I’m trying to define is a space for ethical analysis of games that does not spill over immediately into reactive, knee-jerk moralizing. On the other hand, it also doesn’t allow us the luxury of claiming that games are a world apart and thus have nothing to do with relations to the other.
So, games are simulated ethics: neither the real thing nor a false area where ethics don’t exist. They provide us with a zone in which all faces are masks; so long as no one mistakes a mask for a face, they can function as a useful realm wherein ethical situations are explored more or less without consequences. Yet this conclusion may prove rather too facile. Simulation theory, after all, contends that simulation differs from representation in that simulation involves a feedback loop in which a participant provides feedback that has a more than merely symbolic relationship to the situation being simulated. This is necessary if simulation is to function as useful training for real-world activities. Moving the joystick in a flight simulator must produce effects much like those in a real airplane for the flight simulator to have any use in training an actual pilot. Similarly, hitting the mouse button in the game America’s Army must produce effects like those in actual combat if the game is to function as proto-military training. Moreover, those effects should ideally work both ways in the feedback loop: not only does hitting the mouse button change the environment on the screen, but hitting the mouse button my change the environment in the piece of wetware in front of the monitor. If pulling the trigger in Doom doesn’t make it just a bit easier to pull the trigger in combat, why has the Marine Corps used Doom as a simulation tool?
This doesn’t change my contention that computer games can offer us an artificial version of Levinasian alterity so much as make that contention more complicated. I certainly don’t want to claim that, if I choose to assassinate a pirate in Tropico 2 that I have taken a step down the road toward becoming an irredeemably evil person. Rather, I want only to suggest that simulating alterity may not be as innocent as it seems. Perhaps the main lesson to be taken awa from this is that simulating ethics can give us insight into what it feels like, subjectively, to treat the other as an object. For instance, when I read the line “when my pirates become too picky, it’s time for them to die” in the Tropico 2 strategy guide, I laughed aloud. Why? At least partially, I think it was a reaction to the incongruity of relating the power relations between a person and little colored icons on the screen to the power relations between a despot and the thralls he exploits and disposes with for personal gain. Tropico 2, after all, allows us to transform ourselves from bourgeois drone to pirate dictator in a couple of minutes. It’s all a matter of putting on an electronic mask. And, as we’re reveling in the simulated power of life and death over these others who aren’t really others, we have the opportunity, if we choose to take to, to take off that mask and spend a bit of time contemplating it. This is what it feels like to decide that I can make more money by turning this person from a farmer into a prostitute. This is what it feels like to decide that it would be more cost effective for me to kill these pirates than invest in more expensive entertainment for them. This is what it feels like to treat others as objects and reject their infinity that interrupts my totality. And then to remind ourselves that, though this is only a game, it’s also a simulation, and thus related to what happens in the real world. Playing games ideally, then, can become a form of critique. At least as long as we realize, to hijack Nietzsche, that when you look into the monitor, the monitor also looks into you. But then, that’s what the Other always does.
-- James Campbell, University of Central Florida
Sid Meier’s Colonization
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Sid Meier’s Colonization was released in 1994 and designed mostly not by Sid Meier, but by Brian Reynolds and Jeff Briggs (Coleman). Its subject is Europe’s conquest of the New World. It represents and simulates what is perhaps one of the coldest and most brutal phases in world history and, as Josaphat Kubayanda states, “representation cannot be a neutral undertaking” (9).
Colonization is much like its prequel, the original Civilization. The player looks out on an overhead, two-dimensional view of his territory and controls his people, who procreate incessantly. The map is divided into spaces, each one featuring plains or forests, a river or some hills. In some spaces we will place colonies, in others we will gather armies, in others colonists will go fishing and harvest tobacco. All the while, Indians of various tribes shuffle about, and three other European nations are working nearby, roasting the natives where they live, founding missions, fighting wars with us and amongst each other. Colonization recreates itself anew each time we begin the game. It would be hard to generate two maps that look the same. The randomness and unpredictability make for a game that can be played over and over, quite differently every time.
Despite these many variables, every time we play the game we have to simulate the same events over and over. We have to sail our ships into shallow water, to the shores of the American continent. We must land and found a colony. We have to build churches, forts and newspaper buildings. Growing crops is essential for making money, as boats haul sugar or the rum that it yields to Europe, and return with more guns. The king of whatever nation we choose to hail from (choices are France, England, Spain and the Netherlands) grows gradually too demanding, so we have to boycott certain goods from Europe and, ultimately, fight a revolution and finish the game. Most importantly, we must hunt and murder vast numbers of those who are ethnically different from the colonists we command. Although not in an especially graphic way, this game is soaked with blood.
Postcolonial literary theory traces the implications of literature into the reinforcement of imperialist ideas and frames of mind. As a cultural production concomitant with imperialism, the novel for one is implicated with that practice. Edward Said writes that novels “were immensely important in the formation of imperial attitudes, references, and experiences” (xii). It is not unreasonable to imagine that a computer game like Colonization, which portrays colonial exploitation and subjugation even more intimately for us by placing the player in the role of the colonizer, can be looked at in a similar light. J. A. Mangan studies the way games at England’s public schools fed the fledgling imperial ambitions of young Britons. Certainly a game like Colonization can take on a similar role, making the present-day colonial ambitions and actions of the United States appear to be unremarkable and acceptable, by handing over simulated colonial responsibilities to its players.
In his book Culture and Imperialism, Said gives some deserving attention to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Much of what he writes about the novel can be applied to Colonization. He writes,
[quote]Marlow and Kurtz are […] creatures of their time and cannot take the next step, which would be to recognize that what they saw, disablingly and disparagingly, as a non-European ‘darkness’ was in fact a non-European world resisting imperialism so as one day to regain sovereignty and independence, and not, as Conrad reductively says, to reestablish the darkness. (30)[/quote]
This takes on at least a kind of novel relevance, in the fact that at the game’s outset the entire map of the New World consists of utter blackness; nothing there has yet been explored, and nothing, to us as players, exists there. The computer may not have even invented the coastline yet, just as Conrad’s protagonist sees Africa’s coast as a shady anomaly.
Said remarks as well on elements of Conrad’s work that reflect directly onto the player of Colonization. He writes, “Conrad’s narrators are not average unreflecting witnesses of European imperialism. They do not simply accept what goes on in the name of the imperial idea: they think about it a lot, they worry about it, they are actually quite anxious about whether they can make it seem like a routine thing” (29). The player of Colonization is potentially not unlike Conrad’s protagonist, as Said describes him. Certainly a player can behave within the game as this unreflective conqueror, can play the game without really thinking about it much, but at any moment she may also begin to ponder the dreadful implications of this simulated conquest and annihilation.
The game’s structure does more than place a player in the position of Conrad’s narrator. Said writes, “Being on the inside shuts out the full experience of imperialism, edits it and subordinates it to the dominance of one Eurocentric and totalizing view” (Said 28). The player of Colonization sits not at any heart of darkness, or at the mouth of a river leading to it, but can instead view it in full, with total control over a large proportion of the activity there. When we play Colonization, we are in a position of responsibility over its title endeavor, and thus one of culpability – albeit simulated.
With this in mind, a player might try to play Colonization with a conscience. When someone takes control of these simulated New World colonies, starting in the late fifteenth century, and takes on the great responsibilities that this role entails, including genocide and manipulation of the natives, it can be tempting to resist that.
Sid Meier left slavery completely out of this interpretation of the settlement of the New World. This is objectionable, without a doubt. In the present-day world that would result from the New World as Colonization portrays it, African-Americans would hardly exist. I would not go so far as to assert this as the appeal of the game, or of games like it, but it is worth noting. D. K. Fieldhouse points out that “Metropolitan nationalists twist facts to highlight the achievements of their own country; counter myths are fostered in one-time colonies to provide an ideological basis for nationhood” (84). This conspicuous absence of slaves – the victims of American colonialism who in reality made their success so vast and who perhaps suffered their worst prolonged atrocity – could easily be said to take part in this, if only a small one.
It would cross an important line, however, to ask the player of Colonization to shuffle African slaves by point-and-click across the overhead map and put them to work in fields and silver mines. It would be hard to miss the villainy there. Conquest of the Indians, on the other hand, slips more easily under a player’s ethical radar, because war is a regular computer game element, and a player of one expects it. It is not unreasonable to want to excuse the game’s creators for wanting to keep within the bounds of acceptable computer game atrocity.
Failing to admit the institution of slavery as an element in colonization is certainly a disturbing move, and skews the accuracy of Colonization a portrayal of its subject. However, the fact that there is a place in this game for the purchase and abuse of slaves, from which the slaves themselves can be conspicuously absent, should draw our attention to the disturbing nature of the game as a whole.
Ken Fishkin indicates that a “brou-ha-ha” has gone on – or has done whatever it is a brou-ha-ha does – over this absence of slavery, but he points out that neither is there an acknowledgment of Native American slavery. Instead, Indians convert in the game to Christianity, and join a colony by supposed choice.
To leave slavery out of Colonization is troubling, but this game does admit the extermination of native peoples, and that is the game’s primary concern. The true stars of Colonization are not the European pioneers and soldiers, their little cookie-cutter figures shuffling across the glorified chess board. Nor is it the king, who breezes in once in a while to raise the tax rate. This game primarily concerns the Indians, a player’s prime obstacle to prosperity in the New World.
Various Native American tribes dot the computer-screen landscape. The Tupi and the Sioux are some of the less advanced peoples. The Iroquois and Arawak are of greater significance, and yield more money when we burn down their villages. The Aztec and Inca nations are supreme – they represent the pinnacle of New World fauna, the land’s most rewarding enemies. The greatest challenge for a player of Colonization is to deal with the Indians, and this always involves some extent of murdering them, or watching them be wiped out by another nation.
We can try to be nice to Colonization’s Indians. We ply them with gifts; we share our food with them when they ask for it; we pay them for their land, rather than take it from them forcibly. The cordial approach cannot last, however. At some point, we have built one road too many, we have treasure-hunted on a burial ground. The Indians start attacking. They kill a blacksmith. They burn down the church we spent twenty years putting up. What choice have we but to retaliate, to burn every village to the ground, to exterminate all the brutes? Their blood soaks the fields where we grow tobacco, and with their gold we purchase artillery. As Albert Memmi points out, “humanitarian romanticism is looked upon in the colonies as a serious illness, the worst of all dangers” (21). This is also the case in our simulated colonies. The necessities of imperialism edge out our better intentions.
Sid Meier’s game demands that we abandon this “humanitarian romanticism.” Jean-Paul Sartre states that the colonizer “must assume the opaque rigidity of stone. In short, he must dehumanize himself” (xxviii). Sartre is, of course, referring to the real-life colonizer, not someone playing out a simulation of colonization on a computer. It might be hard to accept that some office temp who wants to kill time during his lunch hour by absently playing a game like Colonization is turning himself to stone, exactly. Since a computer game only takes up a small, diversionary fraction of someone’s daily life, it is hard to accept that it can change an entire person to a cold dominator of subjugated peoples. Still, if someone devotes only one fragment of his attention to Colonization, that fragment of himself has taken on a ruthless purpose, and is subject to whatever his role might do to him.
Sid Meier’s game treats a thing like the eradication of Indians as inevitable. Unless one goes to great lengths, there is no way to play the game without murdering a lot of natives. Even if a player refrained as best he could, the computer who controls the other Europeans would take its opportunity to commit this genocide. Memmi writes, “while refusing the sinister, the benevolent colonizer can never attain the good, for his only choice is not between good and evil, but between evil and uneasiness” (43). The Indians get slaughtered every time we play this game, whether our people participate or not.
If Gandhi and Machiavelli were given total sway over the real-life seventeenth-century New World, each would offer a dramatically different outcome. So we would hope. If each of them played Colonization the computer game, their separate outcomes would hardly differ at all. The game offers a slim range of choices, and can vary only a little each time one plays. There is no room here for Socialist, agrarian experiments or nonviolent cooperation with the Indians. Rather, we must constantly make more money, and the Indians must die. Paul Bove, in remarking on “modernity’s dominant narratives,” points out the “impossibility” within them of “imagining a world without empire” (3). Colonization slumps into this tendency with ease. Certain events in the game, like the revolution that always ends it, are inevitable. This is true in any computer game, of course, especially in an old one.
It is ultimately rather poignant, though, that Colonization offers no complex possibilities, no alternatives to exploitation. The game begins with an assumption, that on the cusp of the 16th century some Europeans might look west and see a lot of people worth crushing underfoot, and resources worth stealing from them. The game puts us in the place of these warmongers, and we must act as they did.
If weplay this game obsessively enough, we begin to think like colonists. Life would be easier for us – within the game – if there were no Indians. We get vengeful and bloodthirsty, and greedy. This is not to suggest that a warmongering player makes for a bloodthirsty person in everyday life. As Kurt Squire points out, “Despite (and perhaps because of) the hundreds of hours I've spent playing war games, I'm pretty much a pacifist. I love Return to Castle Wolfenstein, yet I'd never own a gun” (“Framing”). The player’s vile tendencies are confined to the game, though there are some wider-scale implications.
I would not claim that if enough United States citizens were to play Colonization long and absorbedly enough then our country would turn into one where everyone thinks like a colonist, and our nation would become very suddenly an imperialist one. There is no need to suggest that; a colonizing nation is exactly what we already are. As Said states it:
[quote]The United States is no ordinary large country. The Unites States is the last superpower, an enormously influential, frequently interventionary power nearly everywhere in the world. Citizens and intellectuals of the United States have a particular responsibility for what goes on between the United States and the rest of the world, a responsibility that is in no way discharged or fulfilled by saying that the Soviet Union, France, or China were, or are, worse. (54)[/quote]
Certainly Colonization the game can be implicated in colonization the practice, as it is currently acted out. Just as Said efforts to clarify the implications of the novel in British imperialism, this computer game can easily be seen to reinforce American imperialism, if only on a smaller scale than a canonized, widely read novel like Heart of Darkness. As Said puts it, “cultural forms like the novel or the opera do not cause people to go out and imperialize” (81). They can serve a purpose, alternatively, by making us aware of imperialism in an immediate sense, as long as we are willing to make the proper connections.
The ending to Colonization can be taken in several ways. When the American Revolution succeeds and we are rewarded with a graphic that features hats thrown in the air, and victory fireworks in a night sky, the celebration takes on an ominous tone when one considers what might follow it. The player has learned to colonize, to dominate and to do so independently. R. W. Van Alstyne makes it clear that the real United States has had imperial ambitions since its very inception; he writes, “Even as early as March 1783 the United States was, to [George] Washington, a ‘rising empire’” (1). That is exactly the independent state we have won in the end – one with its guns aimed outward in all directions, ready to begin new conquests.
We should not fault Sid Meier for treating ruin and genocide as inevitabilities. Tunnel vision is necessary in a computer game. It is a simulation, and this one enacts it brilliantly. The game demands that a player take on the impulses of real-life colonization. It can make a gentle, nonviolent player of computer games into an Indian-killer, just as the roles of overseeing the New World purportedly did to their holders several hundred years ago. As Memmi states it, “The economic meaning of a colonial venture, even if it is realized after arrival, thrusts itself upon us no less strongly, and quickly” (4). Sid Meier enacts this by programming a computer’s behaviors and its minute reactions to a player’s actions. There is an accomplishment in that.
A proper sequel to Colonization might devote itself to the American seizure of Mexican territories, or the invasion of Iraq. There are, of course, games that take place at these moments, and this view of Colonization has potential to offer insights into them. Van Alstyne argues that Northern victory in the Civil War solidified American imperialism, as it established a precedent for forcible appropriation of people and territory. It is appropriate, then, that Sid Meier followed Colonization with Gettysburg!, a game simulating the Civil War (Coleman). The New World that the player owns at game’s end is a ravaged one, and the methods used in order to effect this can spell only a similar ruin for the rest of the planet, for the parts that Sid Meier’s map leaves poignantly out.
Time of the Twins: Video Games Presenting the Unrepresentable Through Haunting
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In video games, ghosts can refer to multiple instances: those within the game's machine, the software, those represented in the game narrative, and those that the ghosts represent. This presentation focuses on video games that represent the undocumentable past within game worlds through the act of haunting. Haunting occurs in all digital media through the act of telepresence with the predetermined possibilities set in place by the game designers, and then the traversal and exploration (and possible exploitation) of those possibilities by the player. More traditional notions of haunting occur in games with narrativized ghosts that exist within the game space. These ghosts are sometimes only shadows that cannot be accessed and serve to populate only the visual presentation of the game space. Other times these ghosts are enemies or friends that may affect gameplay.
In addition to more literal examples of haunting, many other games include characters that haunt the game space without ever actually existing in the games. These characters haunt the game world through their remains--their notes, photographs, and other personal affects--but they themselves are never in the game in any corporeal or ethereal manner. Many horror games create haunted spaces by depicting the remains of those who have passed through the game space, yet who are no longer there in any physical sense. The games do so by presenting the remains of the characters who have passed through--their clothing, living quarters, journals, and other personal items. My presentation first traces the types of haunting in games to show how haunting exists and operates on multiple levels and to show how that haunting affects and alters gameplay in a process of othering the player to the game and the technology of the game space.
Ghosts exist in the act of haunting. Haunting expresses a disjunction and a mediation—often between past and present, or between home and the unheimlich. Haunting is bound to the act of mediation and thus to technology. Jeffrey Scone notes the manner in which telegraph lines and radio were viewed as haunted media for their ability to create telepresent states (Haunted Media). Julian Wolfreys conceptualizes of haunting whereby haunting is a process by which disruptions are released into the domestic scene (5). In both cases, haunting operates as a process. As a process, John Lorenz demonstrates how haunting answers social and cultural needs by allowing for the ghosts of the past a form in the present: “Haunted – it is a word that speaks to Raymond Williams’s concept of the ‘residual,’ that which has been effectively formed in the past but is still active in the cultural process” (10). Haunting as a process of disruption allows the ghosts of the past to enter into the present. In doing so, creating “a space in which the past can persist in modified form” in order to confront new social issues” (The Gothic 29).
For digital media, haunting as a process can be most clearly seen through the reducibility of the body to a homogenous text that can be read by a machine. Indeed, digital media scholar Lev Manovich has argued that digital media is defined in part by the ability to be reduced to binary code (The Language of New Media). Reducing the body, or any text, to a machine readable code is an act that haunting seeks to disrupt because this rediction makes life monstrous in the reduction and separation of body and spirit. It is precisely the divide between body and spirit that digital media, and in particular video games, trouble.
Because the mere creation of a ghost figure can begin a process of haunting within the game text, an exploration of the different types of ghosts in games—both those that are troped figures and those that signal the larger process of haunting—is necessary. The ghosts that are represented in video games sometimes take the form of generic enemies that are called ghosts. These opponents—as can be seen in Clock Tower 3 and Echo Night—have a form and a function within the game world. They serve as opponents and do not disrupt the game system merely through their presence. Other games include ghosts that have a presence without a function or affordance within the game world. Titanic, System Shock 2, and Cold Fear all feature ghosts—their voices or images—without those ghosts having a use value within the game. In Cold Fear for instance, when lightning flashes outside of a window, the figure of a creature is illuminated. In the next instance, that creature vanishes completely. The creature-as-ghost in these instances has no use value within the game. The ghost exists, but does not act within the normal structure of the game where all items or objects have direct use values. Like the ghosts in Cold Fear, these ghost represent a small point of rupture because they exist in worlds of function and use, worlds where they represent neither.
While they present a point of rupture, it is often a rip that is immediately closed because the ghosts do not point to the larger process of haunting. For instance in Cold Fear, it is unclear whether the ghosts are the ghosts of dead shipmen, whether the ghosts are generic ghosts of those who have died at sea, or whether they are the ghosts of others. Because these ghosts do not reference another time, place, or person, the ghosts are presented in a localized manner that suggests that particular entities are tied to the game world as ghosts. These ghosts are in some way delimited through their definition as ghost of this particular world instead of as ghosts that exist outside of these worlds. These ghosts thus do not invoke the process of haunting.
However, other ghosts that are structurally the same in that they do not carry a use value and may appear in the same visual and auditory manner, may invoke the process of haunting. For instance, in Silent Hill 2, the main character James receives a letter from his dead wife asking him to return to the town Silent Hill. After he goes to Silent Hill, he finds a knife and it cannot be used to fight the monsters. Instead, the more James—or the player as James—looks at the knife and tries to use it determines James’ mindset. At the end of the game, James can take several paths, including one that looking at the knife leads him to, which is an ending where he kills himself. The knife, while it has no use value in terms of fighting within the game world, comes to symbolize James’ guilt over Mary’s death, and his personal haunting by her ghost.
Likewise, the ghosts in Titanic, for instance, are structurally equivalent to the ghosts in Silent Hill and Cold Fear in that they have no use value and in that they present a point of rupture in the game world. However, the ghosts in Titanic open this point of rupture into a recursive process in which the real past bears witness within the constructed game world because the ghosts in Titanic reference the ghosts of the dead on the real Titanic. In doing so, the ghosts continue to have no use value in the game, but they extend the game space from the immediate world of the game into the real world and the suffering of those who have died in the past of the real world.
Haunting in video games often occurs through game design that summons the past and the dead. The dead can be summoned through their personal belongings and the dead and the past can also be summoned through personal and cultural memories of the past as well as the architecture of the game world. Haunting from personal and cultural objects act through a process of displacement. This displacement occurs when the objects do not have a place within the typical game structure. For gaming, this means not having a direct use value, as with the case of representations of ghosts. The Fatal Frame games present the remnants of the dead which connect more directly to the ghosts of the dead in the game and to an often denied historical past. The first two Fatal Frame games both tell stories of the oppressed and their torture and sacrificial killing by the government. Further, both games focus on the sacrificial killing of women. While the games are not based on completely accurate historical information, they do draw on legal, cultural, and social historical realities. In examining the similar contextualization of the Gothic tradition, Brogan explains that “While contemporary African-American writers often invoke the Gothic tradition, they tend to filter its conventions through African folklore and spirit beliefs” (2). The Fatal Frame games also combine elements of Japanese history within the Gothic frame. In doing so, representations of the dead in the games directly connect to the dead of a specific national and cultural past.
The process of haunting through particular artifacts proves increasingly complex as additional information is involved and invoked throughout the Fatal Frame games. For example in Fatal FrameII: Crimson Butterfly, twin sisters stumble into a cursed village that has been trapped in the past. In the game, players find historical documents that explain that in this village the second born of any twin is considered the older twin. In Japan, villages could decide the birth order for twins until the Meiji period when Japan sought to modernize. In doing so, the Japanese government decreed that the firstborn twin would be eldest in all cases. For an incredibly complicated game world, this may seem like a minor note. However, the Fatal Frame games draw on Japanese history and culture to present their worlds and the Meiji period was a time of great change and great conflict. It was also during the Meiji period when women’s rights were reduced, another change in an attempt at western-style modernization. Players learn of the birth order rules in this village through the collection of multiple notes and journals, including journals from a folklorist, Seijiro Makabe. These journals and notes sometimes provide clues for how to best navigate the game world; likewise, the ghosts in the games sometimes function as enemies that can be fought, meaning that these objects sometimes have use value. On the whole, though, the notes and journals serve no other purpose than to bring the dead into the present of the game world. Because the journals, notes, photographs, and films are strewn throughout the game world, players inevitably find some of these items. The items represent the dead and bring the dead to weigh upon the present. In doing so, the objects act as conjures for the dead that begin and continue the process of haunting. As a process of haunting, the games do not simply invoke the dead of the games, but also the dead of Japanese history.
Many video games were and are developed in Japan and then exported across the globe. Video games, already tied to their own technology, are further tied to the rise of the internet and to globalization. Brogan argues that, “Stories of cultural haunting attempt to remap an often fragmented and inevitably changed memory to its new coordinates by conjuring ghosts who pass from the past into the present, from the old territory into the new” (130). In connection with video games, those changed coordinates are global coordinates in a changed world. Those coordinates are also in relation to a changed location of memory with digital archives and a in changed relation to technology in everyday life.
While haunting is an uncanny return of the past, the dead, or memory within a displacement of the present, it provides a needed passage by which the past and the repressed can enter. This need is exacerbated when the past or memory has been intentionally repressed or removed because: “Like the partially obliterated records that appear in contemporary haunted literature—the family papers mildewed and faded, stories left without endings or explanations, crucial words that resist translation—the ghost's elusiveness conveys a past not easily accessible” (Brogan 29). Like other textual forms, video games also offer texts that can be haunted by the ghosts of the past, and of the ghosts of the present who have lost the channels by which to speak.
Perhaps more important than even the significant memories and histories that haunt specific games are the manner in which they point to all games as mediated and as haunted. As texts, games are haunted by their creators and by that which they represent. As technological artifacts, they are haunted or haunt their technological forms while also being haunted in the act of play and the memory of play, and by the characters and worlds they represent. Addressing haunting in games serves to articulate a manner of game construction and game play as well as to remember—and in some ways—to eulogize the dead in games and the past represented in games.
The New Mediated (Em)Body Is My Others
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Navigating a new gaming environment: Learning as a process of negotiating the alien other
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IndigiMMOn: Indigenous Monsters and Game-Play Imbalances in MMORPGs
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Charnel Houses of Europe: The Limits of Play
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The very existence of a tabletop role-playing game that situates its players as the ghosts of Holocaust victims gave rise to this equally unusual academic project. White Wolf’s Charnel Houses of Europe: The Shoah is a supplement for their (cancelled) Wraith: The Oblivion roleplaying game. Charnel Houses of Europe is a meticulously researched book that tries to do something that may be impossible: deal respectfully with the holocaust while using it as part of a game.
We (Phil Sandifer and Tof Eklund) took this book, wrote a roleplaying scenario using it, and ran the scenario twice, once before and then again at the conference. The players were assigned roles as members of an extended family of victims gathered at the deathbed of their last surviving relative. The game was followed up with a roundtable discussion (see videos) of the experience. Our intention was to probe the limits of what can be considered to be “play” and a “game” as well as explore some of the key issues associated with holocaust literature in the particularly problematic arena of roleplaying. Unlike most RPGs and CRPGs, physical actions were largely unimportant, and emphasis was instead on social and psychological issues. The game revolved around trauma, not only that of the characters’ experiences as Holocaust victims, but also of other traumas and the players’ trauma of roleplaying in this context.
The results were interesting: play consisted of sporadic and often heated discussions between players, with long, uncomfortable silences inbetween. The central trauma, the Holocaust, tended to remain unspoken, something we had not anticipated. Both scenarios ended similarly, but with different affective associations, such that one seemed like “defeat” and the other “victory.” “Play” was at best a cathartic and at worst a miserable experience for players – the scenario defeated most of the usual satisfactions of roleplaying. Paradoxically, players both tended to feel that they had gained an insight into the experiences of Holocaust victims and survivors but that the game has failed to produce an authentic experience relative to the Holocaust.
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Character Bios given to players shortly before play
Melki Stefanska (Sr.) – the grandfather
You had a good life – prosperity and recognition as a lawyer, a devoted wife, children and a place in the community. Your proudest moment was when your firstborn son Yulek named his youngest son after you. When Melki Jr. took sick and died in 1938 was when it all began to fall apart. The Germans came and the first thing you lost was your law practice, followed quickly by your place in the community and then most of your material possessions. You were marked with a yellow star, driven into a squalid ghetto and treated like vermin. At least you still had your family – your son Yulek, his wife Anja and their two living children, Richlieu and pretty Sonja. And your wayward daughter, Marfa.
But even then it wasn’t enough. All of you were hiding in a tiny attic room when they came. Either you failed to cover your tracks or someone tipped them off, because they found you. An SS man and three judenrat police – Jews who were working with the Nazis to “keep order” in the ghetto. It was too much. You confronted them, or stared to. Someone (the SS man?) must have shot you, because your world went white and hot, then slid sideways and chill. When you woke up, your family was gone. It took you a while to realize you’d been robbed again – you were a dybbuk, a ghost – they’d stolen your death from you.
You haunted the one-room apartment and the tiny attic space you’d hidden in emptily for a while, then found the trail of the SS man. You followed him, looking for the chance to do him mischief. You found you could influence the living, just the tiniest bit, make them twitch or shiver or forget something. Your chance came after the war. You were lucky – the SS man toyed with suicide, but wouldn’t have pulled the trigger, wouldn’t have, if you hadn’t made him. Something cold and hungry inside you stirred pleasurably. You panicked and fled.
When the ghosts of your family found you, you thought you might find peace. You were wrong. They had barely returned when Marfa began accusing you of abusing her. This was an old saw – when you were young and trying to make your way in the world, you’d had a bit of a temper and sometime had vented it at your patient wife and, worse, your children – Yulek and Marfa and Lucia, who was only a baby then. But this was somthing new – Marfa was accusing you of touching her... of abusing her sexually. You denied it angrily, of course. But in that moment, something broke inside you. The desperate focus with which you’d hounded the SS man was gone.
Since then, you’ve vascilated unsteadily between foggy confusion and angry outbursts with few moments of apparent clarity. You’re not sure what you are, what you were or what to do. You’ve followed Yulek’s lead docilely as the family has, one at a time, mourned its dead. Inside, one thought hounds you... you couldn’t have done that to Marfa, could you? Could you... you just can’t seem to remember.
Marfa - the aunt
Your entire life, you’ve been bearing the unbearable. Your childhood was hell. Your father, Melki wasn’t good to any of his family, but Lucia was spared the worst of it by being youngest and having two older siblings to watch out for her. Yulek, your older brother, well he was Melki’s firstborn, heir and, above all, male. You got shouted at, cuffed, and though it took you most of a lifetime to remember, touched in ways no father should touch his daughter. Never able to form close attachments to other men, you neither married nor had children, and stayed close to Yulek and his family.
It was only natural that, when you were forcibly moved into the ghetto, you stayed with them, even when Melki pushed his way into the one room apartment you all had to share. When things got worse, you hid with them in the tiny attic space. And who was it they sent out to get food? Who was disposable enough to be risked? You, of course. You got stopped, of course, and didn’t have the right papers, of course. When suddenly it was death facing you in a SS man’s uniform, all you could see of your family was Melki’s leering face. You weren’t going to die for him. Instead, you told the SS man about the hiding place in the attic. He let you go, promised that you’d be protected if you’d told the truth.
The next day, you were home when the building was searched again. You went with the others into the attic, but they knew where to look now. The SS man and some judenrat police found the hiding place, ordered you all out. Melki then did something stupid, even for him. He confronted the SS man, challenged the Jewish collaborators, and got shot dead for it. That was the first time you realized just what you’d done. Melki was dead, and you’d doomed your own brother, his kind wife, and their little children to death. When the SS man herded you into the cattle car along with the rest, you didn’t even complain. You deseved to die.
One you were in the camp and separated from the others, your survival instincts reasserted themselves. You did what you had to in order to survive. A lot of it was unpleasant. You might have survived, but late in the war you were transfered to another camp. Auschwitz. You never had a chance. No sooner had you arrived than you were hustled off to the “showers.” Your final moments were terrible.
A stranger woke you and introduced you to the horror of existence as one of the ghosts of Auschwitz. You fled into the trackless wastes of the world of the dead, dangerous uncertain places where final oblivion is around every corner. They found you there, Yulek and Anja. The love you felt for both of them at that moment was matched only by the crushing guilt that came with it. You gladly joined them in their search for Richlieu and little Sonja. You were against looking for Melki, but couldn’t argue your point convincingly. Now you are stuck under the same roof with him again, and your suffering continues. Sometimes a small voice in your head suggests that Melki should be dead, really, completely dead, at others you hope he will finally admit to what he did. Only respect for your brother and his family allows you to remain here.
Yulek Stefanska – the father
You are tired. So very tired. You remember feeling strong, capable, alert... but even those memories have grown pale and dry. You did everything you could to protect your family – as you had since you were a boy and had to deflect your father’s wrath away from your mother and sisters. You did everything you knew how, but you didn’t know how bad it would get, didn’t know that they would take everything away from you, didn’t know that guns and uniforms and barbed wire would separate you from them, from little Richlieu with his artist’s hands, from brave little Sonja, from Anja, your love. You didn’t know that without them you would collapse, stop caring, let others steal what little you had, and die in an overcrowded barracks that reeked of urine, feces and disease. Your body was tossed into a mass grave, like so many others.
Then Anja found you. She’d always been your beacon, your guide, and suddenly when you found her, it didn’t matter that you were both dead, both ghosts. You and she set off to find your family, to put it back together. For a while, you thought that things were going to be ok. But everything was wrong, like a funhouse mirror version of your life before the war. Sonja’s youthful beauty is now a ghastly image of suffering, Matra and Melki do nothing but fight, and Richlieu. Poor Richlieu. Even they, your own family, his blood, wanted to give him up as lost. But he is still your son, whatever he has become.
This twisted half-existence is unbearable. It was Anja who first suggested that the entire family could pray for the living that they pass on and not become ghosts. There were so many to say Kaddish for at first, in those years after the war. It has been worthwhile – they have all passed on, even those who took their own lives. Not a one has joined the restless dead. It is almost over. There is only Lucia left. Lucia, your baby sister. She never wed and so, with her, the last of your blood will leave the earth. You can rest then. It will be good to rest, to let it end. You wonder what Anja will do without you.
Anja Stefanska – the mother
It’s all coming apart. You’ve been holding it together for a long time, but this is it. Yulek is the hub of the family – he’s the only one that everyone respects. He holds them together, and you hold him together. But Yulek’s become more and more withdrawn. It wasn’t always like this. When you were young, your parents thought Yulek was a good match for you. And he was, giving you a home, attention and three children. It wasn’t even so much boredom that led you to be unfaithful to him, just the ability of a dashing young man to inspire the heat of passion in you – a heat that never seemed to rise above lukewarm with Yulek.
You ended the affair quickly, after only a few days and even fewer trysts, but that was, to be honest, more out of fear than regret. Then everything changed: Melki Jr. died, and Yulek was heartbroken. For the first time, he turned to you, actually needed you; for the first time you saw a crack in his self-sufficient exterior. It was only then that you actually fell in love with him.
Since then, you’ve been caught in a paradox – everything that has happened since the start of the war has chipped and ground away at Yulek, everything has hurt him, threatened to break him. And with every injury he’s suffered, you’ve only loved him more. You loved him when you found him, his ghost wandering aimlessly, loved him as he bore through everything in order in order to reunite his family, loved him when, against all wisdom and sense, he refused to cast out the monster that used to be Richlieu.
You’ve seen Richlieu at his worst – you saw his eyes light up and saw him turn on Sonja. He would have torn her apart, her, his sister. But you stopped him. Yulek wasn’t there. Marfa, who is like a sister to you, wasn’t there. Melki Sr., who at least wouldn’t have put up with this, wasn’t there. Yulek wasn’t there to see you use a voice more powerful than your own to chasten and command Richlieu, wasn’t there when Richlieu’s face took on a monstrous cast that didn’t even look like Richlieu any more, wasn’t there when Richlieu snarled that he knew your secret, and you’d best beware. Maybe some of your son is still in there, but there’s something else, something that could betray a secret that might destroy Yulek, and thereby the entire family.
Richlieu may not need to so anything. Yulek has become frighteningly withdrawn. He started to become this way after reassembling the family, until you suggested the family could pray for the living – a suggestion that became a prayer for the dead, that they not become ghosts. You don’t know what will happen to Yulek when Lucia dies. You have a feeling he’s about to slip through your hands, like rock ground to sand. And, despite yourself, you love Yulek all the more for it.
Sonja Stefanska – the daughter
You are still young enough. You died, at age 12, the day your camp was liberated. Having survived all else, looking almost dead, a feeble and sexless stretch of skin and bone, you looked at one of the GIs who liberated the camp. He saw something human left in your body, bent down and offered you part of a Hershey bar. Somehow you swallowed it, past cracked and broken lips, down a throat almost blocked by a dry, bloated tongue. In your empty and collapsed stomach, it provoked new agony in a body that you had thought past any further suffering. That chocolate bar killed you. That well-meaning GI killed you. But you are still young enough that you feel grateful to him for trying.
There are moments when you feel older than dust itself. If suffering is the measure of a life, then you lived several in your twelve years. There are moments when you feel that you can’t bear being treated as a child any longer, having added thirty-plus years of death to the paltry dozen you were alive. Nonetheless, you are still young enough to accept that your elders are the way they are, that they may be too old to change. You are just old enough to realize that change may be necessary.
You know that you are dead, as are your father, mother, aunt and grandfather. You know that Richlieu is dead as well, as is your baby brother, Melki Jr. You are still young enough to wonder whether Melki Jr. is a ghost like you are, young enough to see Richlieu’s cruelty as part of his being your older brother, young enough to think, hope, believe that your family can be whole. Young enough to know that you can save Richlieu, fix everything and tie a bow on top. Old enough to know that it isn’t that easy. Lucia, your aunt, is dying. You are still young, but growing old fast.
New Cyborg Philosophy: Techno-Religious Hybridization in Marathon and Halo
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Sexuality and Sexual Orientation in Computer and Console Games
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Playing with the Other: Alterity in the Work of Peter Molyneux
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Introduction: computer games, conflict and the hero
In his classic book The Art of Computer Game Design, Chris Crawford elaborates the idea of conflict as being “an intrinsic element of all games” (Crawford, [1982] 1997:14). Conflict would have a central role within games, as players struggle to achieve a goal or victory over other participants. According to Crawford, that could explain the recurrent use of violence in videogames, not because violence itself is crucial for games, but because it is an obvious way to portray conflict. Given the technical constrains of computer games during its early years, it is fair to assume it was also one of the most feasible ways, as physical and bellicose violence could be represented and simulated with an economy of resources that subtler forms of conflict could not. It could be also argued that exacerbated forms of violence permeate the collective imaginary. From narratives originated in ancient times, such as the ones in Greek mythology, to contemporary cultural forms, as seen in movies such as Pulp Fiction and comic books as Frank Miller’s Sin City, violence as extreme forms of conflict have fascinated humankind. Computer games, for being interactive simulations, allow users to play with violence in ways that narratives cannot. However, still according to Crawford, before indulging in such activity, the player has to be presented to a justification to such violent acts. The dehumanization of the player’s opponent is a frequent solution. Crawford writes: “We never, never obliterate human beings; instead, we vaporize ugly space monsters” (1997: 25). Robots, ghosts and other fantastic creatures could be added to the list. However, I beg to disagree with the statement, as some games actually allow (and encourage) the player to attempt against the life of human characters as means to in-game progression. Anthropomorphic enemies or not, a usual justification for the player’s acts is his position as a heroic one. This is often configured through a backstory, cut-scenes or visual cues, reinforcing whatever motives the player’s side has to engage in combat against his enemy.
At this point, we must remember that the heroic condition could be subjective, as argues Joseph Campbell in his book The Power of Myth (Campbell and Moyers, 10988). Campbell sees an intrinsic value to acts considered heroic, which are perceived as such depending on the point of view of the observer. He uses the example of two enemy soldiers, one American and one German, both worthy of a “heroic” condition, in spite of standing in opposite sides (1988: 127).
In fact, the game America’s Army (U.S. Army, 2002), developed for the US Army and played by opponent groups over the internet, is famous for not allowing users to play as terrorists. During game sessions, each group sees itself as the American Army and the opponent group as the terrorists. This could be due to the developer’s awareness of the player’s identification with the characters he controls and its association with a heroic position. In his book Half-Real, game researcher and theorist Jesper Juul points out the interplay between the fictional worlds and real rules videogames are made of (Juul, 2005). One could speculate that this interplay operates between real player and fictional character, and that the ethos of the latter is renegotiated in favour of the progression of the former – and that during play, the player’s personality is never completely divorced from the character and vice-versa. Players, according to Juul, “want to be able to identify with the fictional protagonist and the goal of the game in the fictional world” (2005, 161). This identification was also investigated by Jill Walker, who noted: “In the rhetoric surrounding computer games (…) the difference between playing and being the protagonist is blurred.” (Walker, 2001: 18). Paradoxically, by always depicting the side where the player stands as morally defendable and the other side as not -- to the point that it becomes a convention of the genre, if not video games -- one could adopt a morally questionable self-centred position, and unable to recognise the other beyond those values.
This does not mean that all representations of alterity in games are depicted as malign, but that it frequently happens. This linkage between the ‘other’ and the ‘evil’, as well as the Manichaeism it connotes, is a central point of a series of Peter Molyneux’s works, which I now propose to investigate. Molyneux was specifically chosen for the evolution of his work around the themes of good and evil, as well as for the representation of other instances of otherness in his games.
Populous
Populous (Bullfrog Productions, 1989) originated the genre referred to as ‘god simulation’. The game puts the player in charge of a deity whose power is influenced by the number of followers devoted to him. With a range of environmental powers such as terraforming, flood and volcano activity, the player’s goal is to empower his followers and eliminate the followers of other deities who compete against him for a ‘theological domination’ of the earth. A groundbreaking, innovative title, Populous was the first game credited to Peter Molyneux as a game designer. As the illustration from the DOS-version title screen indicates (Fig. 1), there is an inclination to depict the player’s deity as being a good one (a white-bearded old man who can resemble Zeus or a stereotypical representation of God), and your opponent, who has an also stereotypical demoniac face, as an evil one.
[img_assist|fid=10320|thumb=0|alt=Populous - Title Screen|caption=Fig. 1: Title Screen, by Bullfrog Productions (image contributed by user Multimedia Mike). source (13 March 2006). ]
Thus, the first reference of the good / evil dichotomy in Molyneux’s work operates in the way we first described it in this essay: The player, positioned as the good side, must eliminate the evil, opposite side. It could be argued that the deity’s followers should be regarded as ‘others’ as well. In fact, they reacted to your actions, rather than being directly controlled. However, for the symbiotic relationship between them and their god, who is additionally not represented by a character on screen, they should be considered all instances of the player.
Dungeon Keeper
At the time Dungeon Keeper (Bullfrog Productions, 1997) was released, its gameplay was not as innovative as the one implemented in Populous; Dungeon Keeper is generally described as a RTS (Real Time Strategy) game. However, the most remarkable aspect of this title relied in the representation of the player, now in the role of an evil creature that is in charge of a dungeon constantly attacked by heroic figures. Peter Molyneux himself seems to credit this setting as the most important feature of the game: “Dungeon Keeper’s original concept was, “You play the bad guy”. This was, I though, one of the best ideas I’d ever had. In hindsight, the way the idea was implemented caused it to be not such a compelling game as it should have been.” (Rolling and Morris, 2000: 126). In fact, user’s testimonials usually stress the original concept as part of the fun. An anonymous reviewer from amazon.com declares it “One of the best games on the market, in my opinion. Just love being the bad guy, instead of the regular good versus evil scenerio” (Amazon.com, 2006). This cathartic feeling is shared by other reviewers, such as Claire Fawkes: “Instead of doing bad things on the internet, I was doing bad things in a game. I loved greedily mining for gold-loved the ruby mines-infinate (sic) gold-and I loved killing the good guy” (Amazon.com, 2006). As Brian Sutton-Smith puts in The Ambiguity of Play, “[a game] frees you from one self by binding you to another” (Sutton-Smith, 1997:183)
Dungeon Keeper, it can be said, kept the Manichaeism observed so far in other examples. As in Populous, there is a good side and an evil one, and opposing forces must be eliminated. However, it subverted genre conventions by connecting ‘us’ with ‘evil’ and the ‘other’ with ‘good’, thus demonstrating how arbitrary this classification is. On the technical side, the experience of adopting someone else’s perspective was reinforced by the use of the camera, which the player could change from an isometric mode (Fig.2) to the point of view of a selected creature controlled by him (Fig. 3).
Fig.2: Top View, by user Yemeth. source (13 March 2006).
Fig.3: 1st person View, by user Yemeth. source (13 March 2006).
Black & White
Twelve years after Populous and four years after Dungeon Keeper first came out, Black & White (Lionhead Studios, 2001), was published. Borrowing elements from both previous titles, it was praised by the gaming press as a revolutionary game for its complexity and originality, especially in respect to its open-endness, artificial intelligence and interface. Molyneux himself declared “Black & White is the game I always wanted to make” (Molyneux, 2001:54). Like Populous, Black & White also put the player in the role of a deity who has a symbiotic relationship with its followers. Like Dungeon Keeper, it also allowed the player to perform as ‘the bad guy’.
The game’s title is an analogy to the good / evil behaviours that the player can adopt; a choice between a loved, benign deity and a feared, malign one – each one endorsed by moral advisors resembling, like in Populous opening screen, simplistic representations of god and devil. The choice is not only reflected by the environment elements such as the followers’ village, but also by the development of an animal-looking creature which functions as a pet within the game, learning how to behave from the moral choices of the player and how he punishes or rewards the creature’s actions.
There is a tension on how Black & White is both similar and different to Molyneux’s early games, not only in terms of gameplay, but also the universe it is set on. This tension, indicating both a continuation and a disruption within his discourse, is also noticeable on how the game deals with alterity issues, compared to its predecessors. As opposed to Populous and Dungeon Keeper, Black & White gives the player the right to choose between a good or evil path, also allowing him to transit between the two during game progression. It is important to notice that this mobility, and also the presence of the moral advisors, makes the values of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ no longer exclusive to either the player’s or game-controlled characters, being rather the result of their choices. The villagers / followers have also a greater autonomy compared to the ones in Populous – they now have individual levels of happiness, and their belief must be sustained by the actions of the god-player. This ‘dialogue’ is extended to members of different tribes, who should be co-opted to the player’s theological system (what still can be seen as an imposition, but is not as violent as the extinction proposed by Populous).
Note: Someone asked me, during the Q&A round after the presentation at the Second Annual Univ. of Florida Game Studies Conference, what would represent the fact that, in Black & White, you can play as a benevolent god and still train your creature to be evil. What I suggested then was that it could allow a more ambiguous performance regarding such dichotomy. It is a good question, though, and maybe it should be further investigated.
Fable
Released in 2004, Fable is a RPG that carries forward the dilemma initiated in Black & White. The game’s motto, ‘For every choice a consequence’, indicates that moral issues and the good / evil dichotomy will function in a similar way to the ones in the previously analysed game. However, the nature of Fable and some of its design choices still contribute to the discussion of alterity within the selected framework of this essay – and beyond. From a 3rd-person perspective, the player controls a single character from childhood to manhood. As he progresses in the game, taking a series of quests or wandering in an open-ended fashion, he can improve not only his character’s several skills, visuals and wealth, but also build a reputation as a good or evil person – depending on his deeds. Non-playable characters’ impressions of the main character vary, as he can be feared, loved, admired, etc. Although similar reactions were possible from Black & White villagers, it is important to notice that, in Fable, the player’s character is on a level much more similar to characters’ (i.e. he is not a deity to them), being able to engage into interesting inter-personal interactions, such as getting married. It might be an obvious comment to make, but Fable carries a notion of alterity with a greater sense of humanity than Molyneux’s previous works. Instead of adoration points, there is a reputation system. Plus, the absence of ‘moral advisors’ (as the ones in Black & White) credits moral decisions to the own character / player, not holding any external consciousness responsible for his choices involving other characters.
Other interesting subjects for further research on alterity and otherness in Fable, although too specific for this essay, concern gender issues and sexuality. In the game, the player’s character (which is never female) can get married to male characters and female ones as well, and also wear women clothing, makeup and hairstyles. No profound analysis of this subject can be made here; although I believe it counter-balances the usual dose of machismo encountered in games (see also Graner Ray, 2004). Furthermore, it allows players to impersonate minorities (and, if part of that minority, see themselves represented), and adopt behaviours rarely found in videogames.
The Movies
Disconnected from the fantasy worlds that illustrate the games previously described, The Movies, published in 2005, is often described as two distinct products in one (Kosak, 2005; Davis, 2005). It is not only a management simulation or ‘tycoon game’, a genre already familiar to Molyneux, who designed the game Theme Park (Bullfrog Productions, 1994), but also a moviemaking tool. Actually, it would be more appropriate to call it a machinima-making tool, as this is the term used to designate cinematic productions made using games and their engines.
In terms of game mechanisms, there are similarities (however tenuous as they may sound) between The Movies and Black & White, as tycoon games usually offer a god-like perspective and allow direct manipulation of characters (whether they are ‘followers’ or ‘employees’) by a sovereign hand. Still, some of the game’s features and characteristics express some changes in the way alterity is approached. First, partly because of the universe it is set (a Hollywood-esque film studio), the Manichaeism trait, and the ‘good vs. evil’ debate is practically removed from the management, goal-oriented part of the game. While the competition against other studios can take away some awards from the player, his performance is dictated almost exclusively for his actions, not suffering interventions from an enemy side.
It is also quite interesting to see how the how the game’s free-form portion, the movie-making tool, can be fitted within the discussion. In spite of being open-ended, one of its suggested uses, judging from footage presented by Molyneux himself (Molyneux, 2005), is the subversion of classic Hollywood movie genres. Molyneux’s presentation at the British Film Institute counted with the exhibition of several short films made by Lionhead staff, some of which played with movie conventions, resulting in homoerotic parodies of sitcoms and zombie love stories. This can be seen not only as a criticism to a formulaic discourse from the movie industry (full or archetypal heroes and villains itself – see Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey), but also as an invitation to the appropriation of the discourse and its means from the players.
Conclusion
There were many reasons for choosing Peter Molyneux’s games as this essay’s subject. The originality of his work, pointed out several times in this text, is only one of them. Another one is the longevity of his prolific career, established through decades and extended to several game platforms. However, the most influential aspect was the straightforward depiction of elements such as ‘good’ and ‘evil’ in the games here analysed (with the exception of The Movies). The varied approach to this subject and its relationship to the theme of alterity in his work, at different times reaffirming, subverting and questioned the vision presented in this article’s introduction, reflects the multiplicity of positions that can be formalized using videogames as support. The evolution of Molyneux’s work is punctuated by radical transformations in his discourse (Table 1).
