Listing entries tagged with Games

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if:book review 1: game culture   06.11.2008, 10:35 AM

I've chosen 'game culture' as the theme for this first review post, for all that many of these posts could just as easily be tagged another handful of ways. But games have always hovered at the fringes of debates about the future of the book.

Consideration of serious video games; repurposing of existing games to create machinima, and cultural activities arising out of machinima. Dscussion of more overtly cross-platform activities: pervasive gaming, ARGs and their multiple spawn in terms of commercialization, interactivity, resistance to 'didactic' co-optation and more. There's a lot here; as per my first post on this subject, I'd welcome comments and thoughts.

In February 2005, Sol Gaitan wrote a thoughtful piece about the prevalence of video games in children's lives, and questioned whether such games might be used more for didactic purposes. In April 2005 Ben picked up an excerpt from Stephen Johnson's Everything Bad Is Good For You, which pointed to further reading on video games in education. In August 2005, four British secondary schools experimented with educational games; someone died after playing video games for 50 hours straight without stopping to eat; and Sol pondered whether the future of the book was in fact a video game.

Between February and May 2006 the Institute worked on providing a public space for McKenzie Wark's Gamer Theory - not strictly a game, but a networked meta-discussion of game culture. Discussion of 'serious' games continued in an April analysis of why some games should be publicly funded. In August 2006, Sino-Japanese relations became tense in the MMORPG Fantasy Westward Journey; later the same month, Gamersutra wondered why there weren't any highbrow video games, prompting a thoughtful piece from Ray Cha on whether 'high' and 'low' art definitions have any meaning in that context.

Machinima and its relations have appeared at intervals. In July 2005 Bob Stein was interviewed in Halo, followed later the same month by Peggy Ahwesh in Halo-based talk show This Spartan Life. Ben wrote about the new wave of machinima and its relatives in December 2005, following this up with a Grand Text Auto call for scholarly papers in January 2006, and a vitriolic denunciation of the intersection between machinima, video gaming, and the virtualization of war (May 2006). In September 2006 McKenzie Wark was interviewed about Gamer Theory in Halo. Then, in October 2007, Chris mentioned the first machinima conference to be held in Europe.

Pervasive gaming makes its first appearance in a September 2006 mention of the first Come Out And Play festival (the 2008 one just wrapped up in NY last weekend). It's interesting to note how the field has evolved since 2006: where pervasive gaming felt relatively indie in 2006, this year ARG superstar Jane McGonigal brought The Lost Game, part of The Lost Ring, her McDonalds-sponsored Olympic Games ARG

Earlier, overlap between pervasive gaming, ARGs and hoaxes was foreshadowed by an August 2005 story about a BBC employee writing a Wikipedia obituary for a fictional pop star - and then denying that they were gaming the encyclopedia. I wrote my first post about ARGs and commercialization in January 2007, following this with another about ARGs and player interaction in March. The same month, Ben and I got excited about the launch of McGonigal's World Without Oil, which looked to bring together themes of 'serious' and pervasive gaming - but turned out, as Ben and my conversation (posted May 2006) to be rather pious and lacking in narrative.

Since then, both marketing and educational breeds of ARG have spread, as attested by Penguin's WeTellStories (trailed February, launched March 2008), and the announcement of UK public service broadcaster Channel 4 Education's move of its £6m commissioning budget into cross-platform projects.

I'm not going to attempt a summary of the above, except to say that everything and nothing has changed: cross-platform entertainment has edged towards the mainstream, didactic games continue to plow their furrow at the margins of the vast gaming industry, and commercialization is still a contentious topic. It's not clear whether gaming has come closer to being accepted alongside cinema as a significant art form, but its vocabularies have - as McKenzie Wark's book suggested - increasingly bled into many aspects of contemporary culture, and will no doubt continue to do so.

Posted by sebastian mary at 10:35 AM | Comments (0)
tags: ARG , Games , archive , gaming , review

this is a game. no really, it is   03.26.2008, 2:26 PM

This morning, I received an envelope through the post. It contained two chapters of a pulp murder mystery, along with an invitation to a private gathering with the same title as the booklets: Looking For Headless. The gathering will take place in an anonymous City of London complex of rooms for hire by the hour.

It feels like the rabbit hole for a promising ARG. The accompanying letter describes how Georges Bataille formed a secret society, Acéphale, in 1938. Now, in 2008, two Swedish artists have discovered a Bahamas-based offshore company named Headless, which they have been investigating for the last year. At the meeting, I presume, I and the other invitees (whoever they are) will learn more.

A key characteristic of an ARG is the convention 'This Is Not A Game'. Puppetmasters work to sustain the illusion that the game's elements are part of the 'real' world - that's a real person who emailed you, this is a real corporate website. Though players know the game is a game, there's stil a thrill at the edges: should I phone that company, is it in-game, will I just get some confused receptionist? What's real, who is complicit? But here the program is running backwards. Headless is, in fact, real. Owned by the Sovereign Trust Gibraltar. Little other information is available. Goldin+Senneby, the artist duo behind the project, state that they are interested in business as fiction, and in acts of withdrawal perpetrated through corporate structures.

ARG-like, the edge is ambiguous. The art-world jargon the artists use to discuss the project feels - perhaps deliberately - like yet another act of withdrawal. The two chapters of 'Looking for Headless' I received contain real transcripts of real detective reports, use the real names of real people, are authored by a real person - John Barlow . Though he has never met the people who commissioned him to work on this project, Barlow has scripted himself into the story. But parts of it are pure fiction. Reading the first two chapters of Looking for Headless is unnerving: which parts of this happened, and which did Barlow invent? In a story about the shadowy realm of offshore tax management, it is hard to be certain. Have the meeting's invitees, as - it is implied - the reincarnation of Acéphale - Headless - been incorporated into a game, an art project, a work of fiction, or something altogether more sinister?

Today, Barlow left for Nassau, Bahamas to continue his investigation of Headless. He'll be blogging his experiences here. It is not clear whether he will be blogging factual accounts, or embroidered ones. Or if, caught between pervasive, digitally-mediated self-narration and an emerging sphere of digital storytelling whose core insistence is that a game is not a game, we have lost the ability to tell the difference.

Posted by sebastian mary at 02:26 PM | Comments (2)
tags: ARG , Games , bataille , fiction , headless , not_a_game , unfiction

expressive processing: post-game analysis begins   03.20.2008, 3:27 AM

So Noah's just wrapped up the blog peer review of his manuscript in progress, and is currently debating whether to post the final, unfinished chapter. He's also just received the blind peer reviews from MIT Press and is in the process of comparing them with the online discussion. That'll all be written up soon, we're still discussing format.

Meanwhile, Ian Bogost (the noted game designer, critic and professor) started an interesting thread a couple of weeks back on the troubles of reading Expressive Processing, and by extension, any long-form text or argument, on the Web:

The peer review part of the project seems to be going splendidly. But here's a problem, at least for me: I'm having considerable trouble reading the book online. A book, unlike a blog, is a lengthy, sustained argument with examples and supporting materials. A book is textual, of course, and it can thus be serialized easily into a set of blog posts. But that doesn't make the blog posts legible as a book...

...in their drive to move textual matter online, creators of online books and journals have not thought enough about the materiality of specific print media forms. This includes both the physicality of the artifacts themselves (I violently dogear and mark up my print matter) and the contexts in which people read them (I need to concentrate and avoid distraction when reading scholarship). These factors extend beyond scholarship too: the same could be said of newspapers and magazines, which arguably read much more casually and serendipitously in print form than they do in online form.

I've often considered Bolter and Grusin's term "remediation" to be a derogatory one. Borrowing and refashioning the conventions of one medium in another opens the risk ignoring what unremediated features are lost. The web has still not done much more than move text (or images, or video) into a new distribution channel. Digitizing and uploading analog material is easy and has immediate, significant impact: web, iPod, YouTube. We've prized simple solutions because they are cheap and easy, but they are also insufficient. In the case of books and journal articles, to offer a PDF or print version of the online matter is to equivocate. And the fashionable alternative, a metaverse-like 3D web of the sort to which Second Life points, strikes me as a dismal sidestepping of the question.

Posted by ben vershbow at 03:27 AM | Comments (0)
tags: Blogosphere , Games , design , expressiveprocessing , peer_review , publishing , reading , screenreading , the_networked_book

more compelling than choice   03.12.2008, 6:09 PM

The first two major ARGs to play out, The Beast and ilovebees, surprised their creators: the collective intelligence of thousands of players was taking down in hours puzzles that the puppetmasters had expected the community to wrestle with for days. And in order for the game not to go stale, new challenges – sometimes created on the fly - had to keep coming. If the content fizzled out, or the puzzles were too easy, the players would become restless and lose interest.

I was reminded of this by the recent discussion on this blog about hypertext. 'Boring' is such a loaded word; and yet so much of the Web feels, to me, deeply boring. Even the interesting stuff. Internet addiction is all about clicking across link after link, page after page of content, unable to tear oneself away but still strangely bored. Faced with infinite places to go, all content becomes undifferentiated; lacking in narrative; boring. Much like the paralysis consumers face when confronted with 15 near-identical types of pesto, choice of content made as easy as a click here or there reduces it all to a blur.

I found myself pondering easy choice, supermarket paralysis and internet addiction in the context of the exciting promise and strange underwhelmingness of much hyperfiction. Then, yesterday, interactive game creator and SixToStart ARG writer James Wallis said something that flipped the light on. “Writing for interactive is different to print writing,” he said. But this isn’t in the way someone habituated to storytelling on paper might expect. For such, 'interactive' might suggest an exciting opportunity to cast off the formal shackles of one-page-after-the-next. (Certainly, when I first came across HTTP, that's what it seemed to promise me). “When you think of interactive, you think of the Garden of Forking Paths, non-linear narrative and so on. But if you want people to stay interested, that doesn’t work at all.”

Instead, he says, writing for interactive takes a more or less linear narrative, and makes the reader/user/player work it. In an ARG, a crucial piece of information might be hidden behind a login that needs to be hacked; the story’s progression might depend on a puzzle being solved to reveal a code. The payoff of interactivity, the thing that gives the story a hook that it couldn’t get otherwise, is less about ‘choice’ or a pleasure of diverging from linear narrative, than a sense of active contribution to the progression of that narrative. Of course, because an ARG plays out in real time, players may solve things 'too' quickly or take the story in a new direction - then, to avoid shattering the 'This Is Not A Game' illusion the puppetmasters must create new content to reflect that divergence.

Earlier, in a comment on the hypertext discussion, I found myself pondering emotional involvement – as measured by whether a story can move you to tears – in the context of interactive narrative. Games that eschew development of 'characters' in favor of making you, the central protagonist, the 'character' that develops. Tearjerking moments in 1983 text-based adventure games. How does a character or situation creep up on us so that we care enough to be sad when they’re gone?

Perhaps it’s easier to let this happen when you’re being swept along by a movie, or barely noticing as you turn page after page. I can’t prove this, but it feels as though having to make empty, consequence-free choices about where a narrative goes next pulls me back from imaginative involvement to a more meta-level, strategic, structural kind of thinking, that's inimical to emotional absorption. It's a bit like something pulling me back from an exciting moment in my book and inviting me to contemplate the paper. Forcing me to choose between narrative possibilities, when that choice has (as in the supermarket, faced with the rows of pesto choices) no consequences, and implying too - as the supermarket does - that choice were in itself a positive addition to my experience, in fact undermines my ability to relax into that experience. Compare that to a hidden group of puppetmasters evolving a narrative on the fly to fit around an amorphous, self-organizing group of players, going to extraordinary lengths to avoid rupturing the story's consistency, and you can see that here are radically different kinds of 'interactive'.

Making you work for the next chunk of story, or making you the central protagonist. If these are two narrative tools that demonstrably help make stories work in a digital space, are there more? And are they perceived as markers for quality interactive fiction? Or are game-like narratives still considered somehow a 'lower' art form, nerdy and plebeian, unsuitable for 'serious' writing or consideration as powerful narrative? I would welcome any evidence to the contrary.

Posted by sebastian mary at 06:09 PM | Comments (8)
tags: ARG , Games , choice , gaming , interactive , narrative , story

hypertextopia   03.03.2008, 12:57 PM

We were recently alerted, via Grand Text Auto, to a new hypertext fiction environment on the Web called Hypertextopia:

Hypertextopia is a space where you can read and write stories for the internet. On the surface, it looks like a mind-map, but it embeds a word-processor, and allows you to publish your stories like a blog.

The site is gorgeously done, applying a fresh coat of Web 2.0 paint to the creaky concepts of classical hypertext. I find myself strangely conflicted, though, as I browse through it. Design-wise, it is a triumph, and really gets my wheels spinning w/r/t the possibilities of online writing systems. The authoring tools they've developed are simple and elegant, allowing you to write "axial hypertexts": narratives with a clear beginning and end but with multiple pathways and digressions in between. You read them as a series of textual screens, which can include beautiful fold-out boxes for annotations and illustrations, and various color-coded links (the colors denote different types of internal links, which the author describes). You also have the option of viewing stories as nodal maps, which show the story's underlying structure. This is part of the map of "The Butterfly Boy" by William Vollmann (by all indications, the William Vollmann):

Lovely as it all is though, it doesn't convince me that hypertext is any more viable a literary form now, on the Web, than it was back in the heyday of Eastgate and Storyspace. Outside its inner circle of devotees, hypertext has always been more interesting in concept than in practice. A necessary thought experiment on narrative's deconstruction in a post-book future, but not the sort of thing you'd want to read for pleasure.

It's always felt to me like a too-literal reenactment of Jorge Luis Borges' explosion of narrative in The Garden of Forking Paths. In the story, the central character, a Chinese double agent in WWI being pursued by a British assassin who has learned of his treachery, recalls a lost, unfinished novel written by a distant ancestor. It is an infinte story that encompasses every possible event and outcome for its characters: a labyrinth, not in space but in time. Borges meant the novel not as a prescription for a new literary form but as a metaphor of parallel worlds, yet many have cited this story as among the conceptual forebears of hypertext fiction, and Borges is much revered generally among technophiles for writing fables that eerily prefigure the digital age.

I've always found it odd how people (techies especially) seem to get romantic (perhaps fetishistic is the better word) about Borges. Prophetic he no doubt was, but his tidings are dark ones. Tales like "Forking Paths," Funes the Memorious and The Library of Babel are ideas taken to a frightening extreme, certainly not things we would wish to come true. There are days when the Internet does indeed feel a bit like the Library of Babel, a place where an infinity of information has led to the death of meaning. But those are the days I wish we could put the net back in the box and forget it ever happened. I get a bit of that feeling with literary hypertext — insofar as it reifies the theoretical notion of the death of the author, it is not necessarily doing the reader any favors.

Hypertext's main offense is that it is boring, in the same way that Choose Your Own Adventure stories are fundamentally boring. I know that I'm meant to feel liberated by my increased agency as reader, but instead I feel burdened. What are offered as choices — possible pathways though the maze — soon start to weigh like chores. It feels like a gimmick, a cheap trick, like it doesn't really matter which way you go (that the prose tends to be poor doesn't help). There's a reason hypertext never found an audience.

I can, however, see the appeal of hypertext fictions as puzzles or games. In fact, this may be their true significance in the evolution of storytelling (and perhaps why I don't get them, because I'm not a gamer). Thought of this way, it's more about the experience of navigating a narrative landscape than the narrative itself. The story is a sort of alibi, a pretext, for engaging with a particular kind of form, a form which bears far more resemblance to a game than to any kind of prose fiction predecessor. That, at any rate, is how I've chosen to situate hypertext. To me, it's a napkin sketch of a genuinely new form — video games — that has little directly to do with writing or reading in the traditional sense. Hypertext was not the true garden of forking paths (which we would never truly want anyway), but a small box of finite options. To sift through them dutifully was about as fun as the lab rat's journey through the maze. You need a bigger algorithmic engine and the sensory fascinations of graphics (and probably a larger pool of authors and co-creators too) to generate a topography vast enough to hide, at least for a while, its finiteness — long enough to feel mysterious. That's what games do, and do well.

I'm sure this isn't an original observation, but it's baggage I felt like unloading since classical hypertext is a topic we've largely skirted around here at the Institute. Grumbling aside though, Hypertextopia offers much to ponder. Recontextualizing a pre-Web form in the Web is a worthwhile experiment and is bound to shed some light. I'm thinking about how we might play around in it...

Posted by ben vershbow at 12:57 PM | Comments (38)
tags: Borges , Games , hypertext , narrative , software , storytelling , visualization , writing

books and the man, part III: the new patronage   09.23.2007, 10:00 AM

In the first 'Books and the man' post I took the example of Alexander Pope to argue that the idea of 'high' literature is inseparable from economic conditions that enable a writer to turn himself into a brand and sell copyrighted material to his readership. In this post I want to look at what happens to creative work in a medium whose very nature militates against copyright.

The internet encourages artists to give stuff away for free, and to capitalise (somehow) on abundance and reproducibility. Ben's recent roundup of copyright-related readings quotes Jeff Jarvis to this effect: “It has taken 13 years of internet history for media companies to learn that, to give up the idea that they control something scarce they can charge consumers for.” So the answer, says Jay Rosen, is advertising: “Advertising tied to search means open gates for all users”. But while this works just fine for regularly-updated information-type content, how are works of imagination to be funded? As media professor Tim Jackson pointed out some years ago in Towards A New Media Aesthetic, the infinite reproducibility of content on the web threatens the livelihood of artists and writers to a degree that critics such as Keen believe will bring about the collapse of civilization as we know it.

Keen's wrong. There were artists before there was copyright, and there will be afterwards. Leaving aside my speculations about experiments such as Meta-Markets, cultural forms are starting to emerge online that make use of the internet's mutability, endlessness, unreliability and infinitely-reproducible nature. But they're not 'high art', in the sense that Pope pioneered. Rather, they hark back to an earlier period of literature when aristocratic patronage was the norm, and there was little distinction between 'high' and 'low' art except in the sense of being calibrated to the tastes of the target audience.

I've written here previously about the ways in which alternate reality gaming is the first genuinely net-native storytelling form. I complained that this exciting form was emerging and was already being colonised by the advertising industry, through sponsorship and similar. Where and how, I wondered, would the 'independent' ARGs emerge?

I'd like to eat my words. Calling for 'independent' ARGs invoked the perspective of those cultural assumptions of 'independence' that both created and were created by the scarcity business model of copyright. In doing so, I ignored the fact that the internet doesn't use a scarcity model - and hence that the concept of 'independence' doesn't work in the same way. And internet users don't seem to care that much about it.

I asked Perplex City creator Dan Hon whether he thought there was a bias, or any qualitative difference, between 'independent' and sponsored ARGs. He told me that ARG enthusiasts don't reall care: “It's normally the execution of the game that will have the most impact.”

So for enthusiasts of the internet's first native storytelling form, the issue of whether corporate sponsorship is acceptable (an idea which would beanathema to anyone raised in the modernist tradition of authorship) is completely meaningless. If anything, Dan reckons 'independence' counts against you: “There absolutely isn't any value-laden bias towards indie-ARGs – in fact, if anything there's a negative bias against them. Many players [...] are quite happy to give warnings that the indie args are liable to spontaneously implode just because the people behind them are "too indie". A quick nose around the 'ARGs with Potential' section on the Unfiction boards turns up enough 'This looks like a dodgy indie affair' style remarks to back up this statement.

So while the arts world "was divided between shock and hilarity" when Fay Weldon got jewellers Bulgari to pay an undisclosed amount for frequent mentions in a 2001 novel, there are no anxieties in the ARG community about seeing advertising converge with the arts. Perhaps one could argue that ARGers are typically computer gaming enthusiasts too, and if they can cope with expensive Playstation games they can cope with Playstation-sponsored stories.

But. Take a look at Where Are The Joneses?, a collaboratively-written, professionally-filmed and Creative Commons-licenced online sitcom devised by former Channel 4 new media schemer David Bausola. Not an ARG; but a near-perfect instance of bottom-up culture. Written by its community, quality-checked by the production team, funny, absorbing, released on open licence – and an advert for Ford Motors.

If you catch him in an expansive mood, David will tell you that the marketing industry will survive only if it stops trying to influence culture and just starts making it. The flip side of that is that vested interests will, increasingly, explicitly find their way into creative works produced online. And, in my view, that's not necessarily a bad thing.

A glance at some of the scions of the pre-eighteenth-century canon gives a hint at the role that aristocratic patronage played in the arts. To hear some of the anti-internet rearguard speak, one might think that To Penshurst was written independently of the relation between Sir Robert Sidney and Ben Jonson; one might think that the arts has always been unsullied by power; that the encroachment of the the latter (in the form of commerce) on the former is a sign of our imminent cultural disintegration.

But contrary to Keen's assertion that the mechanisms of copyright are indispensable to cultural dynamism, the English cultural renaissance that gave us Shakespeare, Bacon, Sidney, Donne, Marvell et al was largely driven by aristocratic patronage. Copyright hadn't been invented yet. And if the world of art and culture is to survive in a post-copyright environment, it may be time to look furthe back in the past than the eighteenth century, and re-examine previous models. Which means looking again at patronage, which in turn, today, makes a strong case for embracing the advert. With the distinctions between brand patronage and creative culture already collapsing, it may be time for artists to wake up to the power they could wield by embracing and negotiating with the vested interests of corporate sponsors. If they do, the result may yet be a digital Renaissance.

Posted by sebastian mary at 10:00 AM | Comments (9)
tags: ARG , Games , copyright , publishing , writing

stencil hypertext   09.11.2007, 1:31 PM

Not sure if it's been washed away yet, but folks in the Bay Area should keep an eye out for this charming urban hypertext:

The mission stencil story is an interactive, choose-your-own-adventure story that takes place on the sidewalks of the Mission district in San Francisco. It is told in a new medium of storytelling that uses spraypainted stencils connected to each other by arrows. The streetscape is used as sort of an illustration to accompany each piece of text.

More images and some press links on this Flickr photoset.

(Thanks sMary!)

Posted by ben vershbow at 01:31 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
tags: Games , art , fiction , gaming , graffiti , hypertext , urbancomputing , writing