Extinction Level Events

A few days ago I posted about the Miami Global Game Jam, before it began. After the jam I wrote up a review of the games produced during 48 hours in Oxford Ohio. You can read the original post at Miami’s blog here. I did not actually attend the jam since I will be at Miami in the Fall. Yet, being an outside observer (or player) was ideal for writing up the review. I have some distance from what was produced… Some of the games are more complete than others, but one can find some amazing ideas at work here. Reviewing the games makes me realize that the innovate creativity of Global Game Jams is certainly important. The model of innovation can produce fascinating ideas; it is beyond doubt. Yet, thinking through this model of innovation and its relation to dominant ideologies of the games industry is still important: indie game production, rapid-prototyping, etc., will still feed into the game industry more than challenge it. The production of innovative “game mechanics without politics” is fodder for the same-old, same-old of the game industry, even though what we witness is the absolute, interesting new. This is not to say that the games created at Miami are not amazing and astonishing in their own right. They are! I suppose I just want to take the criticality further. What would be a political, progressive model of the GGJ based on production models that do not feed dominate industries but subvert them? Brecht said that innovation is only renovation if it is not attached to true political motivations for change. It may be that GGJ are generators of (amazing) renovation, but not (dare I say) innovation. True innovation would require, as Brecht said, the “revolutionizing” a medium’s aesthetic production. But, of course, the methods of Brecht were eventually co-opted, as was the notion of “revolution” itself. So, it remains to be determined, both theoretically and practically, what “true innovation” would be…in the meantime…check out these rad games from Miami U!

From Lindsay Grace’s game Nurture-Extinction

A few days ago the 2011 Global Game Jam ended, and Miami University wrapped upits second successful year of participation. Since then I have had the pleasure of checking out the games created by the 42 participants (many of them Miami students and some AIMS faculty to boot). They produced twelve different games, either individually or as part of teams. Frankly, I am amazed by the breadth of creativity and innovation demonstrated within this vibrant collection of games, and all participants should surely be proud of their endeavors and impressive results. Moreover, all the organizers, volunteers, and sponsors deserve hearty accolades for a job well done.

The games created at the Miami Jam orbited the general theme of this year’s GGJ, extinction, an apt choice for a game jam topic given that the term could mobilize ideas from the environmentally conscious to the violently apocalyptic, from the literal to the literary. One tile-based RPG entitled Herbedca (still in its nascent stages) is based on the wacky premise that ancient, extinct plants have returned to terrorize the world, and it is the player’s goal to save his or her loved ones from this little “gamestop” of horrors. Another game created at Miami envisioned the extinction of the human race carried out by an army of Snookybots (obviously beginning their assault from the Jersey Shore). This humorous shooting-gallery game reminded me a tad of Cory Arcangel‘s mod I Shot Andy Warhol, though updated for MTV‘s Gen-Z. In another shooter entitled Extinction Level Events (E.L.E), the player plays Earth herself as she spins around the Sun, using various mechanics to thwart the destruction of the Earth’s population by hurtling asteroids, solar flares, and alien attack. You will fail. Earth will be destroyed. But, you can try to rack up as many points as possible before the “E.L.E” gets the best of you. At first this spinning, digital orrery made me dizzy with its intense action, but after forty-five minutes (yes, it IS that addictive) I was mastering my force-fields and nukes while trying to tweak my score one notch higher.

Shadow

Meanwhile, such irreverence and wicked fun was matched by more ethereal ideas such the game Shadow, a beautiful adventure style game where you play a shadow trying to find the human host that it has been detached from. Sneaking through the city streets you dodge bright lights which will extinguish your form while sticking to darker nooks and crannies for sustenance. The premise is eerily imaginative, and the artwork convincing through its refined simplicity. Similarly ethereal was the gameNurture-Extinction created by the principle organizer of Miami’s jam, Lindsay Grace. In this exquisite artgame a line of delicate flowers grows toward the sun, each emblazoned with a letter from the world “Extinction” shining from their flowery faces. The player simply attempts to keep the blossoms alive by pressing the letter on the keyboard that matches the letter on a flower that has begun to fade. The goal—almost impossible to achieve when playing alone—is to keep all the budding flowers from fading (which would eventually spell the word “extinction” on the screen, perhaps keeping the demon at bay by naming it). The game’s difficulty reminded me of how challenging it is to prevent the loss of fragile nature in an industrialized world. We cannot nurture nature with our two hands alone. It will require many hands to save the natural world from extinction. I also thought, perhaps, that the game could be appreciated as a slightly subconscious expression of Grace’s roll in the game jam: nurturing the event, tempering it with just the right atmosphere, fertilizing it with energy, and helping to coax the budding games into the light of day—these are no small tasks and certainly laudable, as is the game he created.

Freeword

Here and there, words kept popping up in the games produced. Thus, the intriguing game Freeword slightly resembled the Google Image Labeler game, but instead of mobilizing my fun to do tedious work for a large corporation, it sparked my individual creative juices and challenged me to vitalize my own vocabulary. Presented with bizarre images of unidentified technologies and objects I was asked to describe these images with individual words. A nearby flame was “fueled” by the unique words I typed and “diminished” when I became lazy and tried to use the same word twice. As I played, the strange images of human technology dovetailed with my desire to create clever and unique descriptions, trying to keep the flame of human ingenuity alive. Then there was another game for “wordies”  entitled Growth and Decay: A Head-to-Head Word Game, a two person lexical battle made for the Android. Here, the players scramble (or “scrabble”) to create a word from an array of letters that each is given, then try to take apart or “decay” the word their opponent created by removing letters from it in order to create another word. Phew, a mouthful indeed. Words fail, you just have to play it. It’s devilishly fun. Instead of spending a three hour flight flinging birds at blocks in order to kill pigs, you might find yourself turning to the bloke sitting next to you and asking, “Growth and Decay?” Knowing the rules, hopefully he will respond with a simple, “Go.”

MEchine

Though not a word game, MEchine is 2D-platformer which should satiate the meta-gamer in all of us. Jumping here and jumping there, you soon meet your co-conspirator in play: the game itself. Redefining the “cut-scene,” after you complete a few levels you will come “text-to-text” with the self-conscious entity which is the game. In these ELIZA-esque moments the game’s convincing personality will ask you questions about how things are going. Then the game will change “itself” (its mechanics, its “look,” etc.) based on these conversations. Self-reflexive innovation at its best! Look for this one to appear soon on Armor Games or Newgrounds.

One of the best parts about the GGJ, in my opinion, is its openness to game creation beyond the bounds of the digital. Indeed, Miami’s jam saw the creation of two fascinating multiplayer card games. Okay, the game Vanished is digital through and through since three players work collaboratively (awesome!) with their mobile phones (awesome!), attempting to save the interconnectedness of human knowledge from extinction by linking disparate spheres of information through the jungle of wikipedia (again, awesome!). So, for example, starting with cards that send you to the wikipedia pages for Lady Gaga, James Joyce, and The Kansas City Chiefs, can you and two other players work together, following links from these pages in order to arrive at a common page, say, Grand Theft Auto? Yes, you can! Of course, there are other mechanics at work in this sophisticated game which will derail your efforts. In another card game, Dissolution: A Space ‘Venture, you vie against other players in a resource hungry colonization of a new planet. Earth, after all, is faced with extinction. The Settlers of Catan jumps to mind, but Dissolution is equal to that famous game in terms of the tightness of its game mechanics. It’s truly an amazing feat that a team of individuals can gather for 48 hours and create a fun, challenging, multiple-player game with such a stunning balance of rules (the same goes for Vanished as well). So, if you and some friends are thinking about what to do on snowy evening, print out those .pdfs, scissor them up, and settle in for a social gaming experience where nothing will be extinct except your boredom.

Rubicon

Then there was Rubicon, a captivating and fragile artgame which provides a nice closure to my post. Rubicon is meant to be played by an individual only once, where he or she initially controls a bubble ascending from a body of water. As the journey unfolds the player can merge with other bubbles within the water, thus becoming larger, or instead choose to avoid other bubbles, and thus remain smaller. At a certain point the bubble erupts from the water and becomes airborne; the player now attempts to avoid blowing leaves that will burst the bubble that he or she has evolved. Depending on your choices in the water stage you end up with different movement skills within the air as you float. The game is perhaps a wonderfully distilled version of the first stage of Spore (and, in my opinion, packs a more meaningful punch than an aesthetically similar award-winning game, flOw). When you finally—inevitably—strike a leaf and “die” the game records a phrase that describes how you lived your fleeing, effervescent life (so-and-so was “curious at an early age” or “explored wide and far”). Future players can read these brief descriptions of prior journeys before they begin their one play-through.

A “rubicon” is defined as “a limit that when passed or exceeded permits of no return and typically results in irrevocable commitment.” Is this not a nice description of the Global Game Jam event, a threshold participants cross, irrevocably committing to the production of a game in 48 hours? Each individual or team chooses how to design their game, their innovative bubble of creation, eventually releasing them into the world. Each journey is different, each exploration unique, but all leave a mark that others—like me, an unknown, distant player—can encounter and enjoy.

If you haven’t yet played these excellent games, fortunately they are not threatened with extinction. In fact, they are alive and well, right over here. Go play.

So, I’ve started a little enjoyable labor, blogging, for my job that starts next Fall at Miami University, where one side of my joint appointment will be in The Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies (AIMS). I posted today about Miami’s Global Game Jam event which starts tomorrow. I re-posted my thoughts below. I keep it kind of simple on the Miami site although I wrote more at length about the problem of “innovation” in indie game production in my dissertation. I think Global Game Jams are problematic, as I am sure many others do: forcing creativity and innovation, getting students ready for crunch time when they work in the actual games industry, and generally the valorization of the concept of innovation in general which becomes one paean of contemporary Capitalism (and indie game production). I tend to agree with Stephen Shaviro when he writes about innovation upon critiquing a text from Paolo Virno entitled Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation:

I think that Virno’s reference to Schumpeter is symptomatic, because it offers the clearest example of how he fumbles what seems to me to be one of the great issues of our age: which is, precisely, how to disarticulate notions of creativity and innovation and the New from their current hegemony in the business schools and in the ways that actually-existing capitalism actually functions. [...] I myself don’t claim by any means to have solved this problem — the fact that we can neither give up on innovation, creativity, and the New, nor accept the way that the relentless demand for them is precisely the motor that drives capitalism and blocks any other form of social and economic organization from being even minimally thinkable — but I feel that Virno fails to acknowledge it sufficiently as a problem.

GGJ events are not interested in the disarticulation that Shaviro talks about; they are about innovative production, not even broaching the concept of innovation itself (although it would seem like an ideal chance to invigorate  students, game designers, etc., to ponder the concept of innovation and how it operates with the game industry). Indeed, the GGJ FAQ state that the goal is to “rapidly prototype game designs and hopefully inject new ideas to help grow the game industry.” The growth of the industry, capital accumulation, etc., is the goal. In any event, you can read my post on Miami’s AIMS blog re-posed below, although my dissertation chapter “For Time Flows On: Innovation and Opposition in Video Games” approaches the concept of innovation in more depth…

Beginning tomorrow, Miami University will host its 2nd annual Global Game Jam (GGJ), an unique opportunity for individuals interested in game production and design to gather and work together, producing a video game in just 48 hours. Yep, 48 hours of sleepless design and implementation!
The GGJ is a young, though important, phenomenon. The event fosters collaboration, social networking and sharing. It is a hothouse of budding ideas, where the molecules of individual expression bounce off one another and create a super-heated atmosphere of innovation. It is a constrained space and time which catalyzes creativity and experimentation, a 48 hour “magic circle” where the excitement of game production embraces a beneficial acceleration. It is an event where individuals can pick-up tricks of the trade and potentially learn something new while sharing ideas with a wider community of colleagues. And in a world where so many of our ideas remain unfinished and filed away in sketchbooks of possibility, GGJ is a chance for folks to feel the deep satisfaction of creating a finished product (however small and preliminary) and to take pride through one’s participation in a global enterprise that seeks to cultivate the flowering of the video game medium. Indeed, GGJ is all these things and more…

Yet, like any play experience which creates a powerful “magic circle,” the GGJ will end and participants will be cast back into everyday life (though hopefully with a stellar game under their belts and a wealth of new experiences!). In these after-moments, one achieves a kind of critical distance from the magic of the experience, a distance which allows for further reflection. Hopefully in these moments one can even reflect on the model of innovation that the GGJ embraces and puts into action: an unleashing (and “forcing”) of creative potential that strives toward a model of rapid-prototyping where an idea is implemented quickly to test its potential. Such an accelerated model of development can produce great ideas and games (or, at least, the seed great games). Witness 2D Boy’s the Tower of Goo created for the monthly game “jam” called the Experimental Gameplay Project. Yet, while accelerated moments of innovation can produce excellent ideas, such ideas can also depart quickly and thus allow powerful insights to wither. Just as we know that cramming for an exam might produce successful results, the knowledge gained from the experience is often fleeting and ephemeral. Indeed, the Tower of Goo did not become The World of Goo without sustained innovation and creative thinking long after the initial rapid-prototyping had occurred.

Beloved indie game developers thatgamecompany—creators of the games flOw, Flower and the forthcoming Journey—published a description of their production process for their student developed game Cloud in 2006. The team had this to say:

[A] number of academic programs have also begun to initiate a series of fast-paced, innovation-oriented events called ‘game jams.’ [...] While the rules for each jam have varied, most of have focused on speed and quantity of games produced. The intention seems to be towards discovery of new ideas by brute force and enthusiastic energy. A fun way to innovate, to be sure, but only a few of the games produced during these highly energized events have provided inklings of true innovation, and unfortunately none have seen any application past their initial demonstrations in respective showcases. It could be argued that the game jam format may lend itself to small innovative ‘flashes’ that would need a secondary level of longer-term research to foster and iterate on these flash ideas.

Their intriguing article describes a longer, deeper form of game innovation and design that would act as a nice counterpoint to the method emphasized by the GGJ. Elsewhere one can find similar reflections on notions of sustained innovation such as a recent interview with Jonathan Blow (the developer of the award winning game Braid) or a video from the “Innovation in Indie Games” panel at the 2007 GDC that featured members from thatgamecompany, 2D Boy, Jonathan Blow and others.

I am not certainly not playing the role of the naysayer here, championing a more sustained creative reflection over the intense innovation produced by game jams. They both have their merits, and it is perhaps in combining their merits that a more robust model of innovation and satisfaction will be attained. It can only be hoped that after the jam the excitement and energy can be sustained, that the innovation (of design, game mechanics, collaboration, etc.) produced in 48-hours will unfold into a longer duration of development where such innovation can be deepened. In any event, while participants in the GGJ should be focused on having fun and producing cool stuff, there is no reason why the event should not also be an occasion for contemplating its cultural significance and for critically reflecting on the concept of innovation itself (well, at least after the fun has died down…).

Above I referred to the GGJ as “a hothouse of budding ideas.” A hothouse is a hotbed of activity, a concept often embraced by musicians to describe an environment electrified by improvisation, innovation, and creativity. Indeed, the GGJ is certainly a wonderful space for jamming and experimentation (as Lindsay Grace has pointed out in his description of the GGJ). But a hothouse is also a greenhouse of sorts which sustains a warm environment needed for seeds to grow. It is a delicate space full of fragile lifeforms which depend on the warmth for their continued growth. Indeed, true innovation needs to strike a balance between the accelerated generation of creative ideas and their long-term nourishment. Only then will the knowledge generated by the game jam (or cram) truly blossom.

One thing that has always nagged me was the dichotomy of ideology critique and what he calls informatic critique–the former occurring in a vertical, allegorical fashion based on a depth model of interpretation and the latter being horizontal, a process of scanning the surface of a text, and largely in relation to his previous work on the flexible structures of protocol through which control is asserted.

Of course, the attack on the depth model of interpretation is a primary facet of postmodernist thinking, but in (Marxist) authors such as Jameson, Eagleton, Perry Anderson, and even Linda Hutcheon (to some extent) the abandonment of ideology critique is a frightening symptom of critical thought. Indeed, part of Jameson’s critique of postmodernism is that signs are detached from reference, from “deep” history, where signifiers circulate unattached to anything “below” them such as signifieds, or god forbid, an anchor of reality. Thus, in postmodernism everything is upfront and out in the open; nothing is hidden; interpretation does not excavate deeper meanings let alone the political unconscious.

In terms of video games, this is exactly the approach Galloway takes to games in his chapter of Gaming called “Allegories of Control.” He will say things like, video games present their politics in “relatively unmediated form” (an abandonment of the key Marxist concept of mediation?); or,  games are “politically transparent;” or, a longer example:

“As I have alluded to in Jameson, the depth model in traditional allegorical interpretation is a sublimation of the separation felt by the viewer between his or her experience of consuming the media and the potentially liberating political value of that media. But video games abandon this dissatisfying model of deferral, epitomizing instead the flatness of the control allegory by unifying the act of playing the game with an immediate political experience. In other words, The Sims is a game that delivers its own political critique up front as part of the gameplay. There is no need for the critic to unpack the game later.”

Whereas Civilization for Galloway acts as a transparent surface display of the totality of informatic control – its interlocking algorithms, the flexibility of various paramaters that players can investigate, adjust, and change – The Sims is a direct display “of life lived as an algorithm.” It’s all there right before us in these games which act as indexes to the form of control and societal structures–postmodernist, post-industrial, informatic (call it what you will)–that exists around us. One doesn’t need to unpack how Civilization represents history, because it is right there in the mirror before us–as mathematical, informatic models which ultimately act as the erasure of history itself. One does not need to deeply interpret The Sims because it is right there before us as “an immediate political experience:” the revealing of our contemporary lives as insipid, repetitive, algorithmic tasks as we play the game itself.  I actually have no qualms with these analyses, they point back to the structures of control (stemming from Deleuze) that Galloway has extrapolated in his work on protocol. But this sense of immediacy of the political, a privileging of surface over depth, seems like a unnecessary (postmodern) annihilation of ideology and the work of interpretation needed to think through it, which, in my opinion, still remains an important political task. In fact, perhaps a task I am trying to do right now in seeing through how Galloway’s notion of “informatic critique” is working ideologically itself.

Take an article from 1984 or 85 from Terry Eagleton entitled, “Capitlaism, Modernism, and Postmodernism” where Eagleton dismantles the ideologies within both modernist and postmodernist thinking.  For example, Eagleton attacks Deleuze and Guattari (figures of utmost importance to Galloway):

“In post-1968 Paris, an eyeball-to-eyeball encounter with the real still seemed on the cards, if only the obfuscatory mediations of Marx and Freud could be abandoned. For Deleuze and Guattari, that ‘real’ is desire, which in a full-blown metaphysical positivism ‘can never be deceived’, needs no interpretation and simply is. In this apodicticism of desire, of which the schizophrenic is hero, there can be no place for political discourse proper, for such discourse is exactly the ceaseless labour of interpretation of desire, a labour which does not leave its object untouched.”

Now, reading this quote beside the longer quote from Galloway above, it seems that for Galloway the video game places its politics right up front, without mediation (of visual representation or narrative for example), without the need for ceaseless interpretation, without the construction and hard work of political discourse, leaving its object untouched (because, well, the critic does not need to unpack The Sims because it’s meaning is right there in front of us as we play) . Of course, there is “interpretation” of an informatic kind (maybe “interpretation” in the computer science sense where code is executed or carried out as is) which always leads back to the same structures–protocol, the informatic system, etc..

Or take Galloway’s notion that “the shooter is an allegory of liberation pure and simple” and an allegory “of the purest surrealist act: the desire to burst into the street with a pistol,” wildly attacking the oppressors: here it is, desire that just is, purely and immediately expressed in the gameplay of shooters. Are all shooters like this? How about stealth shooters? Would Metal Gear Solid or Mirrors Edge fit into this analysis? No. But it would seem that following Galloway the politics of these games would need to be right up in front, somewhere, and ultimately and inevitably pointing to the informatic system which underpins them.

But let me get back to the point I want to make about Ideological Critique and Informatic Critique. At the end of his “interpretation” of Civilization Galloway writes, “Thus the logic of informatics and horizontality is privileged over the logic of ideology and verticality in this game [Civilization], as it most likely is in all video games in varying degrees.” Thus, ideological analysis and interpretation should always take a back seat to informatic critique in Galloway’s estimation. Yet–and this is where things get a little more interesting–at the end of the chapter Galloway tells the reader that, “In modernity, ideology was an instrument of power, but in postmodernity ideology is a decoy….” A decoy: something that distracts, a misrepresentation that misleads us, that tricks us into following after it as the truth escapes elsewhere, like ducks drawn to our false brethren just before the hunters unload their guns. Is this not, in truth, the model of ideological analysis? In Galloway’s analysis it is ideological critique itself that is the decoy (false consciousness, the distortion, the trick that leads us astray) while an informatic or “protological” system hides away beneath it. But here we are again in the depth model of ideology, where only now it is ideology itself which is the ruse. But my point is, Galloway’s method of revealing the informatic beneath the so-called decoy of ideology is simply an ideological critique in itself. My point being that the so-called retreat of ideological analysis in games is arrived at only through the reiteration of its own theoretical methodology.

In the end this both pleases and displeases me because the chapter itself does not embody an “informatic critique” but formally uses the (“modern”) model of ideological critique that it purports to destabilize. It displeases me because I think Galloway’s work on protocol and informatic systems of control is intriguing and I would like to understand more how an informatic critique can be more useful as a model of analysis than simply returning to the reiteration that, yes, we do indeed live in a world of protocol/information, etc.. It pleases me because, well, I simply do not accept the death or uselessness of concepts such as representation, false consciousness, depth models of interpretation, etc. upon which ideological analysis rests, and, this includes the medium of video games.

If anything Galloway’s chapter should teach those of us interested in analyzing video games that ideological analysis should not be abandoned in our approach to video games, that the depth model of interpretation continues to be powerful and productive even when it is not recognized (or even explicitly denied!) as such. If there is ideology at work in Galloway’s chapter, it is the ideology that ideology and its critique have been superceded in video game analysis. (I should mention that Galloway has a much more complex analysis of ideology as such elsewhere, though not in relation to video games; thus, I am not claiming that Galloway thinks ideology as such has been superceded, only that a certain form of its critique in relation to video games seemingly has been).

One other point I would make is that representation and narrative–often the scourge of Ludologists and even Galloway at points (for example the last chapter on “Countergaming”)–are mediations of the informatic, of protocol, of game play and game mechanics. It is often through them that we arrive at the game, and they should not be dismissed so easily. The Sims and Civilization might be border cases that privilege informatics over representation/narrative/history, etc. (thus are the most “transparent” when it comes to informatic analysis), but many other video games are still ripe for ideological excavation.  The transparency and immediacy of politics embedded within cultural artifacts such as video games is a ruse we cannot afford (or pretend) to forget.

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