Opening Up Video Game Production
Turkle’s piece on video games this week was like taking a walk down memory lane. Joust! Hell yeah! Pac-Man, sweet (anybody else remember how horrible the Atari port of Pac-Man was and how it beared little to no resemblance to the arcade version?). I’m really glad I grew up during the dawn of video gaming and have gotten to see the progression. I would never suggest that my appreciation of current games is deeper or more valuable than a younger person who’s always had pretty graphically significant games at their disposal, but I do feel that my personal appreciation of games is certainly wrapped up with the contextual knowledge of having lived and played through each progressive generation. I would recommend that any younger player (or older player who never grew up playing games) go play some original Atari. Many of those games are still great, and it is quite the experience of seeing how far games have come. How do you do this? Google “emulation” but don’t tell anyone I told you 
I appreciate how Turkel mentions the point I brought up in class the other week (from Steve Johnson’s excellent “Everything Bad is Good For You” that the gaming experience is often fraught with frustration, repetition, and general pissed-offed-ness (the original Ghouls and Goblins, anyone?). This is not a mindless zombie-state past time, and the fact that the frustration can be such an integral part of the enjoyment seems integral to the genre. But I also enjoyed how Turkle quoted people who see this frustration and intense focus as a kind of relaxation and meditation (I seem to recall this being a debate on a post earlier in the semester).
Most interesting to me is the question of if game players are going to stop being consumers and move into more productive roles. We see this with a variety of media on the web as more and more people are creating, remixing, appropriating, and continually challenging the tired stereotype of the consumer as mindless, passive absorber. But games are a bit trickier to produce, especially from scratch. Sure, the art of modding has been around for awhile, and there are quite a few clever hacks of games out there. People have used editing tools to create some new levels and maps in games that sometimes rival and best the levels created by the original team. But a game from scratch, or even from templates of choices is still a pretty tricky affair.
Kongregate.com is an excellent website of really well done Flash video games that do show it’s possible. But still, this requires flash skill and is no easy feat to produce. How does game design become more open to the public without years and years of training? Is this something we should even be concerned about? Is it sometimes OK to merely wait for and take what the big media producers give us, and not get caught up in this consumption/production binary?
Comments
Good One
I was wondering if you'd get to Baudrillard. Turkle's admonition of the solo video game experience (in which players are constricted by the rules of the game, which she sees as inferior to freestyle make believe) does suggest that if players were able to change the rules of the game they would be less constricted by the video game's system. Thus, we infer that if people made their own games their constriction would decrease.
But that doesn't seem true. The players are just setting up more rules, so they're trapping themselves. This is where my fun with Turkle stops- the possibility of absolute freedom in a game seems nil. As Homo Ludens pointed out, the rules are part of what makes the game. Otherwise it's absolute free play, which seems fairly instinctual and only randomly satisfying. Plus, she points out how operating within a game's rigors allows for a zenlike experience, which is good.
Some of her concerns are valid, of course, as getting too used to the video game world must have some drawbacks. But the bite of her argument was largely lost on me. Overall, my initial response to her article and Baudrillard's was that a lot of this minute concern is not really worth the effort. But my more composed answer, and the issue I think is really worthy of thought, is that Baudrillard makes it really tough to make progress beyond the current message-response system. This applies to New Media games and talk.
Scope Increase
Just think about how many of the communications technologies that have developed since Baud made his comment use the message-response system so avidly. I'm thinking of two in particular. Instant messaging, ostensibly a new form of communication that makes discussion more "live" than e-mail, really serves to take conversation and make it asynchronous. People can be even more casual than in e-mails, while multi-tasking more than a real conversation allows. The idea of a text message is that you'll get what the other person is saying (read: the essential clarity and importance of the message receipt) enough to respond to it at any time.
I was also thinking about Facebook, Myspace, and the other online community forming sites/software (I'm sure there is an impressive name for the genus that I haven't learned yet). In these sites, communities are formed in a way more demonstrable than in real life, which seems like progress towards Baud's goal, but each person has a headquarters, into which they must log-in, from which is tracked all their moves... the sender as the root of communication is never forgotten.
Erasure of Author Trail
The only online space that really disrupts this message-response would be an anonymous chatroom in which people are essentially practicing invention strategies with one another. If the room could not even allow the smallest difference to be marked between users (no user titles like Anonymous-1, Anonymous 2; no user titles at all, just a stream of text being created) then the sender-sent model would be nowhere to be found- it would essentially be one stream of consciousness from multiple sources.
In terms of video games, I think the most progress that has been made is actually the Wii. Assuming that the Wii is the platform that is playable by the largest segment of the population (which is yet to be proven but seems true, as it's enjoying wide popularity in both retirement homes and bars) the Wii creates a game experience that involves a great many people and thus allows them a hand in crafting how each individual game plays out. Consider Wii tennis: the world is still bound by rules, so Turkle wouldn't be totally satisfied, but how you play (when you hit, how you must hit) is determined by the motions of your teammate and opponents. You are collaboratively experiencing the game, creating an encounter with the Wii and each other. I think that's certainly the closest popular progress that has been made in the Baudrillard vein.