Author: NatalieBarillaro

The biggest theme I was able to pick out of this reading was “What’s the point of making stuff if it doesn’t come from the most authentic you?”

Karla Zimonja’s idea of an agenda (or a fucking agenda, to use language from the text) jives excellently with everything we’ve been talking about in class. Agendas aren’t commonly found in AAA games, or at least decisive and divisive ones aren’t. But it is common for creators to have one. We often talk about what the point of classical literature is, or what a filmmaker was thinking when they directed a certain piece. But it often seems that the agenda of a big-budget game is to sell copies.

One item on Karla’s agenda is to make portrayals of women more realistic. It’s mentioned that fictional women aren’t allowed to be both flawed and strong, like male protagonists are. For this, and many other reasons, Karla was unable to identify with women characters and media as a whole for the longest time. Unfortunately, I can sympathize.

I think this ties along well with Brendon Chung’s philosophy of making games for people games aren’t normally made for. Not everyone can identify with the World War II heroes from Medal of Honor. Not everyone can identify with children with psychic powers, or Italian mustached plumbers who like to step on things. But these characters are tied as much to their gameplay mechanics as they are their stories. Game characters should be diverse, but these experiences should be diverse as well.

I thought this sentiment carried well into Nina Freeman’s chapter, where Freeman explains the rewards of creating a hyper-personal vignette game about her own life. She claims it’s the only stuff worth making, because the more honest and candid you are with your audience, the easier it is for them to connect. But also, there’s a certain joy in creating this type of experience and forcing someone to feel it the way you did. But this type of force isn’t like the type AAA games do when they force me to play as a character who doesn’t look like me (because he is made to look like the everyman, or at least the idealogical fantasy of the everyman who’s playing the game). It is the type of force that takes a true experience and imposes it and begs you to hear it for what it is over the vast expanses of cookie-cutter experiences on the market. Freeman makes these games for herself, but in the process they reach people who can also identify with these sentiments that are not often explored in larger games. These highly-specific, honest, open games manage to reach people in a way games tailored to reach a wide audience through vagueness and non-committal storytelling cannot.

I want to hear more games like this. I want to make games like this.

I love the discussion of Journey in this section of the book. I especially like how Isbister connects Jenova Chen’s intent to make the player feel small to the game’s ability to encourage collaboration. I think it’s an excellent mechanic, and I’d like to explore it a bit more.

When I play a video game, I’m instantly drawn to those scenes and mechanics that have me interacting with others, whether they be NPCs or other characters. I was the kid who couldn’t pull myself away from Hyrule Castle Town when it came time to find a new dungeon, because I’d rather be where all of the action was instead of in some musty dungeon. Games that make me feel alone make me feel empty. So that first time I saw another person inside Journey, I ran to them and chirped over and over as quickly as the controls would let me.

Having the other player be the only other sign of friendly life in the entirety of the game is a powerful enough mechanic on its own, but the vastness of Journey’s landscape, the sheer amount of emptiness that game allows me to feel- all of those things combine to magnify my need to interact with someone else. I can go through the Fire Temple now if it means I can have another chat with Darunia after emerging victorious. But after moving on to another level in Journey, and another, and another, the silence is deafening.

How Games Move Us talks about a certain reliance on each other that Journey imposes on its players. This is more directly shown when player characters can be seen huddling together in the more difficult levels. But I think that reliance is more than just a preprogrammed characteristic of the avatars. Players rely on each other to fill the emptiness, to more or less make that experience for them.

At least for me, I felt like Journey was utilizing introspective-focusing mechanics to drive players together.

This chapter got me thinking about motion controls and my own personal experiences with them. I remember plugging my Wii in for the first time. I thought it was a blast. My parents and friends all thought it was a blast. Cue massive sleepovers with all of my friends, where we popped in Just Dance and didn’t stop until my mom had to bribe us with late-night pizza to settle down and talk about boys like they did at normal sleepovers. I remember boxing against my mother, racing against my father, and showing my grandfather how to move to get the perfect strike in Wii Bowling. These were awesome moments in my life. They were fun, and engaging.

I also remember getting the new Legend of Zelda for the Wii and putting it down even before the first temple because of the motion controls. I had a similar experience with Okami. I remember having to point my Wii Remote at the screen when I wanted to write a letter to a neighbor in my Animal Crossing village; I never sent another letter again. I remember always, always opting for the GameCube controller when I could.

And because I was kind of an introverted gamer, my time with the Wii was dominated by those latter experiences. Gaming was something I mostly did alone. I began to believe the mainstream gaming news outlets when they told me that motion controls were a gimmick. I began to resent motion because of it.

Two things. One: everything’s a gimmick. Just as it is unfair of us to assess a video game with the same criteria as a movie, I think it’s unfair of us to assess a motion-controlled game the same way we would a joystick-driven game. Maybe the Wii didn’t bring me the single-player experience I wanted, but it did bring me other types of experiences.

Two: Moving and interacting with the space around you naturally makes you want to interact with the other people in that space. This is why I think motion controls work so well as multiplayer games. While there are exceptions (Star Wars: The Force Unleashed was actually pretty fun), most of the games I enjoyed with motion controls had social components. The human connections made those experiences. But those connective moments would not have happened without the Wii. They were the result of good design.

Social gaming is more fun for me now, especially since it’s more accessible (thank you, adulthood). At parties I’m the first one to suggest a round of WarioWare or whatever. Motion controls have let me witness my friends doing some pretty stupid stuff, and for that I’m grateful.

The example that most spoke to me when reading the first two chapters of Isbister’s How Games Move Us was that of Cart Life. When developer Richard Hofmeier describes the development process, he said he wanted to make his game as realistic as possible. “I wanted a game like this when I was a kid- I wanted to learn how to live.”

The most mundane parts about video games are the most interesting to me. I enjoy big, grandstanding fantasy as much as the next person, but games that can manage to make big deals out of small, everyday situations are my favorite. As a child I enjoyed them for much of the same reasons Hofmeier enjoyed them. I, too, wanted to learn how to live. A child’s viewpoint of the world is limited, and any game that allows a player agency outside of ‘go to school and come home and walk the dog and get ready for dance practice’ was a welcome addition to my experiences back then. That’s why even in fantasy games, I loved the levels where you had to get a job, or perform some really simple task. My favorite part in the original Paper Mario was always following the recipe to bake a strawberry cake, which forced me to pop the object in the oven for precisely sixty seconds. I was too young to use an oven back then, so that was really all I had.

Now I think I enjoy these games for a different reason. I’ve had jobs. I’ve baked cakes (I’m real bad at it). I’ve driven cars and decorated my own home and created budgets and held management positions. But still I find myself drawn to games with these more “realistic” tasks. And I think the reason for it is not just that these characters are more relatable to me. I think I also really enjoy the implications of these more realistic scenarios being included in games.

Cart Life has the player managing their own food stand. They have a limited amount of money and a limited amount of time, just like in 80 Days. You control a character who has some sort of situation which inhibits their growth- an addiction, a daughter, etc. These feel like real people. The day to day experiences feel worn-out, but they add up to something larger. Games that can show us to find the meaning in the mundane don’t just elicit an important emotional response. They can help us with our own lives.

“There is more to the world to playfully take over now,” writes Sicart in his final chapter   (100). “There’s the world, the machines, and the way the machines make the world exist.” Out of all the passages in the reading for this week, this one was my favorite. At first I took ‘the world’ to be the world in a game. This could be our world, the real, physical world, or it could be a world inside of a video game: Rapture, the Pong Arena, and (soon) Alola Certainly, making these worlds exist can be seen as a form of play. Sicart hints that software development itself can be playful, and designing the worlds, creating stories behind them, and cooking up conflict is a classic playful activity.

But I really enjoyed the second meaning of the passage, which arises when you take ‘the world’ to mean, in all uses, our world. The real world. There is something to be said about the way the machines make our world exist. Or to be more specific, the way our world exists because of machines. We see the world much differently now than we would have twenty, ten, even five years ago. Machines have forever altered our way of life, and they will continue to do so. Sicart mentions that machines have already encouraged us to view the world as a collection of systems and subsystems, because that is how computers view the world. It goes beyond that.

Computers dictate how we view the world around us. They gather information, interpret it, and present it to us. They allow us to communicate with each other. Sometimes, they even communicate with us. We even have languages for interfacing with different types of computers. Text overflow at the bottom of a screen tells us to flow. We can usually tell what items in an application are able to be interacted with and how simply by looking at them.

I love when people play with these expectations. Take Clickhole, for example. It’s The Onion’s sister news site meant to parody the likes of Buzzfeed and other clickbait-fueled web sites. While it does an excellent job of this, it takes the playfulness to the next level with certain segments. A personal favorite was the sleepover, a series of Facebook posts where one clever Clickholer communicated with the site’s entire userbase. Clickhole asked users what they were bringing, what time they were going to bed, and what movies they should watch during the sleepover.

While it was essentially just a massively multiplayer text-based role play scenario, Clickhole employed many of the features of Facebook while simultaneously playing with the expectations of how a company or news source (even a fake one) interacts with the public. This sort of expectation would not have been possible of the context hadn’t already existed, if we hadn’t already witnessed countless news sources ask mundane questions via their social media platforms (“Who are you most looking forward to hearing in this Thursday’s debate?” “What would YOU have named Boaty McBoatface if it were up to you?” “Share and be sure to tell us your favorite moment from today’s show!”).

I just think it’s interesting, how many new expectations we can subvert now that computers exist.

I found myself stuck on the beauty chapter this week. Perhaps it’s because September 15, 2016, is neither the time nor the place to talk about play and memes in politics.

When Sicart first began to describe the notion of beauty, I couldn’t get out of my head the image of my father sitting with me in the living room, watching Derek Jeter deliver play after play. My father would shove a fist full of popcorn in his mouth, clap, and bellow tremendously, “BEAUTIFUL.” I didn’t really understand what about the plays were beautiful, besides perhaps “the beauty of winning,” as Sicart puts it (63). But there is a lot of joy to be found in performing an action inside the constraints of a context, and performing it well. I found this out the first time I wrote my own saxophone solo. I feel it now when I play a particularly good match on Pokemon Showdown.

But I love where Sicart goes next: relational and dialogical aesthetic. There is so much beauty to be found in playing with others. There is so much to love about relating to others inside of a context of play. When I look back on it, many of my favorite gaming moments have happened when I was playing with others.

Actually, I do want to talk about memes. And Pokemon. In February of 2014, one ingenious man set up a Twitch stream. He wrote a script that would take commands from the chat of his channel and convert them to input for an emulator running Pokemon Red Version. If you typed ‘Start’ in the chat, the script would see that, and press ‘Start’ in the emulator. This seems simple, until you realize that the stream reached an average viewership of 80,000 at any given time. Imagine it. 80,000 people all playing the same game of Pokemon. Simultaneously. Together.

We had to play it together. We never would have beaten it otherwise (but we did beat it. It took us a few weeks, but we did it). I learned so much about a game that I thought I’d known everything about. I learned how to dupe the game’s faulty AI. I relearned how terrible the graphics from 1996 were.

But the biggest thing I learned was how ready and willing 80,000+ people were to enter into a community for the sole purpose of achieving this relatively pointless goal. Subreddits popped up. Fanart started surfacing. An entire backstory, complete with religious overtones (and even a church choir) made its way to the forefront, as players quickly began to search for an explanation as to why the player character kept checking in on his Helix fossil (“Some asshole keeps typing “Start+A” just wasn’t interesting enough).

I’ve never seen another phenomenon like it. But the point is, it’s the most beautiful form of play I’ve ever seen in my entire life, satisfying most of the different types of beauty Sicart mentions. We experienced the “beauty of winning,” many times, perhaps the most iconic of which was the capture of Zapdos, a Pokemon that is found only once, and will not reappear if you defeat it in battle. We experienced dialogical aesthetic in the way that old fans began to explain to newer fans how the game worked. Analyses were run on which buttons, statistically, would get us to the end faster if spammed. Plans were drawn up. An entire community was built, and it existed solely in the context of this one instance of this one Pokemon game. Most Pokemon communities nowadays are built on the entire franchise, but not this one.

The game itself subverted the expectations of gaming and streaming, much like Desert Bus did the expectations of what a game should be. Twitch Plays Pokemon pushed the limits of exactly how many players could have their fingers on the controls of a single-player game at once, and how exactly a Twitch channel can be used to foster play and interaction.

Thanks to Sicart I’ve finally found a word to describe the phenomenon that was Twitch Plays Pokemon. It’s ‘beautiful.’

 

When I began Sicart’s Play Matters I immediately started to think of my time as an actor. The idea makes some sense. There is a similarity in terminology. Actors perform plays. Oftentimes actors are referred to as players. A group of improv actors will follow a game while performing their scene. But the similarity does not stop at the language.

A play has context: the theater, the stage, the set. It has rules, for how to both perform and enjoy it. Don’t upstage your scene partners. Don’t turn your back to the audience. Don’t use flash photography. It is autotelic; the purpose of the play for players and playgoers alike is to exist in that narrative. It is appropriative: the lights go up, the actors come out, and what you see is no longer a stage or a theater but another place entirely. It disrupts the lives of its players. If you don’t believe me, ask me how many hours I’ve slept during a tech week.

Over and over again the simplest definition Sicart provides of play is that it is existing in the world. That’s exactly what theater is. Actors (or players) spend countless hours, days, months, years practicing the art of existing in the world. They do sense memory exercises, attempting to show through their body alone that they are on a windy, moonlit beach or a crowded D making its way through Manhattan. Anyone who has done such an exercise knows that you can place yourself in worlds that no movie screen, toy, or VR headset ever could.

We must not leave out the audience. Although they may think they are passively viewing theater, they are not. Whether they view themselves as participants in the game, they are participating just the same. Sicart uses a game of tag as an example of play in the first chapter. In the game, players will use their spouses, friends, and coworkers as pawns to achieve their goal. These pawns may not be players, but they are participating. If you’re headed to a show, however, you are more than just a pawn.

The narrative cannot exist without the audience. They make up the fourth wall. The world cannot exist without them, as they box the players in, turn on the pressure, and provide live feedback. They become guests at the dinner party, wanderers in the Athenian forest, denizens of Pride Rock.

It got me thinking about other types of art and performance: playing the saxophone, writing a novel, painting a portrait. All of these processes open a dialogue between creator and audience. All of these processes have a phase that allows the creator to explore, to create and destroy and learn more about the world as they express it. Sicart may say that all of these tasks are not autotelic, that they can be playful in nature but are not necessarily play. The point of writing is to complete something, not to play with words. The point of playing saxophone is to create music, not to play with notes. This is the main disagreement I have with the first few chapters of Play Matters. All of these things- the saxophone solo, the performance, the portrait- are merely byproducts of our desire as a species to not only exist in our world, but also understand it and communicate that understanding to others. In other words, they are byproducts of play. Play is the mother of all creative pursuits.