| D O O R S O F P E R C E P T I O N 5 | |
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| toggle your joysticks with pride | |
| PDF link for printable transcription | J.C. Herz |
It¹s amazing to be introduced and have someone make what I do sound so prestigious because I find that there¹s a very heavy prestige-gap in this area in general and a kind of discomfort about games and the way that they¹re categorized. If you find people whose background as designers is not just out of computer games - people have moved into computer games from places like architecture, from places like art, from education - they have this general unease about the fact that they¹re making computer games, and when you ask them what they do, it¹s interesting to see what they call it. Up until very recently they called it multimedia, until it was proven in 1995 that no-one could make money with CD-ROMs. Then they decided that they wanted to call it digital entertainment or interactive entertainment or interactive media but it¹s funny no-one comes right out there and says: I make computer games, and feels completely comfortable about it. At least no-one with an advanced degree. The biggest evidence which we saw of this was in this whole, awful, painful episode of the games industry that happened a couple of years ago, which is called Silliwood – i.e. Silicon Valley and Hollywood were going to get together make beautiful music. But really what it was was game designers deciding that they really wanted to be movie directors - and the technology is moving us to a place where we can do this. We can drive around in convertibles with cellular phones, get laid, because we make computer games. Alas, it was not to happen, because games are not movies. Thank god they¹re their own creatures. And when companies like Rocket Science crashed and burned we all learned this, and computer developers, for the first time in their lives started to get out of the inferiority complex that they had about Hollywood when they realised that when a game designer and a movie producer get into a room, there¹s an IQ differential of at least 30 points. We are the smart guys, what are we doing worshipping these people? So now, finally, I think we¹re getting into a place where people who make games, can hold up their heads, because of things like the industry grew 37 percent last year and will probably grow that much again this year. In terms of critique, how you make this stuff and how you think about it, there¹s also a bit of tension but it comes from a different place - it comes from the fact that we¹re inventing this medium as we go along. It still hasn¹t fully congealed, so in many cases we don¹t know what to call it. Things that would get sold as games, aren¹t games. They¹re interactive, they happen on a computer, you don¹t use them to do work and therefore it must be a game. And it doesn¹t quite fit, we don¹t have a model. The one that I¹ve come up with so far, and this is a working model, is if you take the category of play, as the big circle and the van diagram, and anything you can do with it digitally, or I think non-digitally, there are four things that you can make basically. You have a game which, as Eric said, basically there¹s rules, there¹s a goal, there¹s a winner and a loser. You can make a toy, which is very different from a game. The chief play quality of a toy lies in the qualities of the object, be it virtual or physical. It¹s about the doll, it¹s about the thing, it¹s about the Gak. It¹s about the thingness of the thing the quidity of it, not the rules of it that make it a toy. You can make a story, that¹s the third thing you can make. We all kind of know what a story is. Or you can make a tool, which is the crayon, the digital paint program, the thing which allows you to make something else. So you have a game, a toy, a story and a tool. And as far as I have seen, all the products that have been dumped on my desk, they usually fall into one of those four categories, and the people who know what they¹re doing usually know that they¹re making one of these things. So you have games and the difference that I have found between a computer game, a video game and other kinds of games which we have a thousands and thousands years of history with, is that a computer game is the only kind of game that I¹ve experienced where you go into it, you go into the magic space, not knowing what the rules are. It¹s not open-ended exactly, because there are rules. You just don¹t know what they are. And because every game is slightly different, what you have is not just playing the games but actually discovering the rules, you¹re exploring the environment, you¹re learning the rules. And this makes up a lot of the game play. A lot of the fun of a video game is playing it but also finding out how it works, figuring out the system. And what you¹re doing, what I¹m doing, what a lot of kids are doing, when they play video games is there¹s a certain amount of model making that goes on. What you have in a video game is a system, it¹s a model of some reality, someone Œs reality. And what you have as a player, is a model that you¹re making in your head about how the game works. And when the model in your head matches the model in the computer, then you figured out the rules of the game, you figured out the system. And a lot of people actually don¹t finish playing computer games because to a large extent, the process of figuring out how it works, is the game. and once you¹ve cracked it, once you¹ve hacked it, it¹s like a chess game; checkmate in four. You could play it through the checkmate but essentially the game has been won. So you have this matrix and on top of it of course you have this visual spectacle, but it remains a structural enterprise. And the extent to which the play value of a computer game is extended is the extent to which this knowledge enterprise is extended. The discovery of how the game works, what are the secret area¹s, what are the cool things you can do. And you find these communities of interest, you find this process of hacking the game. On the Internet now, you have people exchanging hints and tips and cheats, not just about how to win the game, Œcause we¹ve gone beyond this now. Okay, you can get to the end of the game, you can win the game, but what the designers have very cleverly figured out is that you can extend the value of the game by hiding things in it. And once you get to the end, your task then becomes to open up the secret doors, which have no functional significance in the game, because that¹s an area of the system that you have not explored. So this is almost like a 19th century scientific enterprise going on with children and games. You explore the new world, you figure out what are the laws, what are the formulas and what are the hidden secrets. And when you get to the end, you get what we would never achieve with the 19th-century idea of progress: you¹ve solved it, you know how the world works, finally, and the angels sing and you¹re the master of it. You also have - because this is a men-made world, not the natural world - you have the ability to create. And this is something new, this is - you know, when I was a kid playing Atari back in the old days, you couldn¹t do this - but now you can actually create games and you have Doom-mods on the Internet, people creating their own levels of Doom. All these games ship with level-editors now so that you can make your own you know death match - your place or mine? This is really amazing because you bring to this area, this zone of game, this playzone, not only the ability to explore but also to construct. And the real game at this point becomes the process of making the game, designing the game, you know? We¹re all designers here but this is not something that 24-year-olds or 28-year-olds out of art school do, this is something that 12- and 13-year-olds do. And it¹s a pretty sophisticated process. So the game becomes the constructive enterprise and it becomes this very real fusion between science and art. You have the technology on one side, you have the aesthetics on the other and you have to somehow find a way to fuse them in a way that gets you status among your peers - and when you¹re fifteen that¹s really tough. So you have the rules; how do you make a game? How do you break the rules? You have the goals to make a great game, and you have the winners and the losers. And there¹s a few winners out there and there¹s tons of losers, but who cares? And it¹s a challenge, it¹s a huge challenge but we¹re only realising now that it¹s also a privilege. So if I can leave you with anything, those of you who make interactive media - sorry those of you who make computer games - it¹s: hold your head up high, and toggle your joysticks with pride. |
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url: DOORS OF PERCEPTION |
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