On Saturday April 28th, I presented at the Intersections conference at Ryerson University hosted by the Joint Program in Communications in Culture, which is Graduate Program co-administered by York U and Ryerson U. The theme of this year’s conference was ‘Occupy; seminars, workshops and an art exhibit (called Cross Sections), all works related to the Occupy movement as well as cultures of resistance at large.
My presentation was titled #occupygamespace: Cultures of Resistance in Video Games. Originally meant to be a paper, but due to time constraints it became more of a presentation of the research of a project in progress.
The research began with several questions. How present are representations of resistance cultures within game culture? If they are present, how effective are they? In what ways do video games convey themes of or portray cultures of resistance?
While that paper is still forthcoming, there was another sub-topic that emerged out of this research (and through discussion after my presentation with several attendees) that I feel directly connects a great volume of video games with the legacy created by the Situationist Internationale, a group of avant-garde thinkers, writers, activists and artists that operated in France from 1957-1972. The SI cast a wide net of influence, having helped influence the May 1968 General Strike in France, as well as influencing such figures as Malcolm Mclaren, former manager for the Sex Pistols and one of the original founders of the punk rock movement (and often credited for its rise to popularity). A key member of the SI was also Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, which has become a foundational text in many a Culture Studies class.
For all of their theories, premises, and publications.. it was in the zero hour of preparing my presentation when I made a small break through that led me to connect Situationist practices to video games from an angle of approach that I had never considered before; that of the concept of the Dérive. A practice that I believe articulates itself through acts of both game design and game play; situated as a key concept in throughout the history of the medium.
If you’ve read the link I provided above, you’ll note that at heart of the dérive is a drive for exploration; for moving off the beaten path (or ‘axis of habit’) and exploring your environment in ways that you had not. For the SI, this was linked to the concept of psychogeography; a term coined by Guy Debord, describing how our geographies (environments) affect us, how we move through them, how they make us feel, etc. When connected, we can see that the dérive gives us agency; it illustrates that we understand the relationships between ourselves and our environments, and gives us the power to alter that relationship by exploring our environments in new ways. This concept is articulated remarkably well in the history of video games.
The first example of the dérive in video games i present to you is Walter Robinett’s Adventure, a landmark game in its time for many reasons, but perhaps for one over all the others; Adventure was the first game to feature what is now commonly referred to in gaming culture as the ‘Easter Egg’.
The story goes something like this: fed up with the lack of credit that he and his fellow programmers at Atari (each of whom where solely responsible for the creation of a game: art, code, everything package design) where not being respected by the company at a time when it was making the lion’s share of the home video game market, Robinett decided to stage a secret protest while working on Adventure. Within the game he created the above ‘room’, but access to this room was exceedingly difficult to gain. The player had to take a single black pixel (key) from near the end of the game, all the way back to the game’s beginning and walk through a section of wall (also only a pixel wide), using the key to gain entrance. When those absurd conditions were met, the player was greeted with this room, a room containing only one thing: Robinett’s claim of authorship over the game.
At the time game designers didn’t experience the respect as creatives that they do today. They were paid mediocre wages and were not given credit anywhere on the game’s packaging as the title’s author. This was Robinett’s protest against these practices. And yet, no one knew about it until a teenage player sent Atari a letter asking about this screen.
While it took a while for the practice of including hidden items and pathways to completely catch on in video games, Robinett’s act of protest is an excellent example of how the dérive articulates itself in a video game; from Robinett’s designing of this secret room, to the young player who clearly had decided to explore the game in ways not set out by his instruction manual. Leaving the final official goal of the game behind for the sake of exploration, this teenaged boy becomes an example of the first (public) practioner of the dérive through his play experience. Little did Robinett and the boy who found his secret know, that they were the first designer/player in a practice that would become a central component of game play design.
There are no games in the history of video game culture more emblematic of the search for secret items and pathways than the Super Mario series of games, by Shigeru Miyamoto. From hidden coins, powerups (mushrooms), 1ups (also mushrooms) to whole rooms called Warp Zones that enable the player to skip ahead by multiple levels in order to reach the games’ end more efficiently, Miyamoto understood the dérive as a design concept like no other designer before him. And the player’s understood it too.
I can’t recall how I came to know where every secret item and warp zone is in the original Super Mario trilogy for the NES, but I do know them. And while some of them were simply secret routes planned out in advance by Miyamoto and his team for players to expand their understanding of the games’ geographies, other routes seemed like we were discovering ‘tricks’ or exploits; bending the ludic constraints of the game to reach our destination. As an example of the former, here is a video outlining how to collect all 3 warp whistles from Super Mario 3.
To get the first warp whistle it to step behind the two-dimensional plane of the game level itself to discover a secret room, hidden behind a black field. In the second example, the player must ‘fly’ Mario up past the level’s ‘ceiling’ until he passes a secret barrier, then must move (unseen to the player) to the right until he enters a secret door. Please keep in mind that these are elements designed into the game to be discovered by the player. This is derive as it articulates itself as a design concept in a video game.
The second example I have for you is of the latter: the player trick or exploit:
In this you can see that at sometime while playing this level, some player somewhere discovered that you can simply ‘swim’ under these ships, and reach the level’s end unscathed. Another example of this in also in Super Mario 3, where if the player possesses the Raccoon Tail power-up, the player can fly over an armada of flying airships in much the same way.
This idea of the exploit or trick in these instances could be argued, as the designers left the space open both above and below the viewable screenspace in order for players to discover these alternate routes. While I haven’t been able to find any writing on these level exploits from a design perspective, the outcome is constant, the player feel empowered by these actions. By feeling like they’ve cheated the game itself, it becomes a small act of protest and victory over the ludic constraints set out by the game’s creators.
I could cite a myriad of games from the 8 bit era that house examples of this exploration practice. Miyamoto’s other famous franchise, the Legend of Zelda, features a vast Overworld full of Dungeons that players must explore in order to find all of the items needed to reach the game’s end. The theme of exploration in Zelda gives the game a decidedly open and non-linear feel to it’s gameplay. Squaresoft’s Final Fantasy also used this technique effectively by having players only able to progress through certain areas they could visit, but not pass through until they found key items located elsewhere in the game world.
The derive as a design practice created richer environments for players to explore, which then enabled the player to continually play games in new exploratory ways in hopes of discovering new secrets, finding new pathways and ultimately gaining new intimate knowledge of the structure of the game. This altered the player’s relationship with the game, giving them agency to move throughout the game in ways that were no pre-described by the game’s ludic constraints. But it also became a premise that many future video games did not just incorporate, but made central to the themes, narratives and further means of navigation within the games.
This post was the first half of my research into the derive as a concept connecting the legacy of the Situationists with video games, dealing with explorations in two-dimensional worlds. In the next week or so, I will post about how this concept finds new articulations in three-dimensional games and how these games connect to the representations of youth neo-tribal cultures in urban video game spaces.
Tiff Nexus: Youth New Media Literacies Jam.
A month has gone by without a post, even though I meant to many times. Mainly because of final projects for classes, but also because of some other non-academic projects that I’ve been involved with. Tomorrow at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto, TIFF NEXUS (a sort of New Media Initiative started by TIFF) is hosting the final conference of it’s first round of Initatives.
Previously TIFF Nexus had hosted a conference on Locative Media, including a Creative Jam called the Peripherals Initiative, which paired game developers with hardware hackers to create new means of game interaction. It was followed up with a conference on Women in Film, Games and New Media, which featured a creative jam called the Difference Engine; a creative incubator designed to jumpstart teams of first time female video game makers.
And now TIFF Nexus is hosting a conference on Youth New Media Literacies, which is tomorrow, April 20th. And, following the trend, Nexus also hosted a Youth New Media Literacies Creative Jam, one which I was fortunate enough to participate in.
The Jam consists of 5 teams, each tasked with creating a project that teaches Youth (aged 10-13) New Media Literacies. We were all pretty much left to our own devices, in that sort of free and autonomous kind of way, to create a project that we felt hit on as many as the NMLs that we could squeeze in.
While the conference is tomorrow I’m sure that no one will mind if I post a bit about our project, called WeBuiltThisCity, which is a collaborative, crowdsourced city building game/ curriculum platform that teaches kids the basics in 3D digital design, Urban Planning, and much more. It’s modular and scenario based, giving educators and kids the opportunity to build and great their own games for the platform.
I have to do a 7 minute presentation on the project tomorrow during the conference, so I’m going to go prep, in the meantime check out the video teaser TIFF Nexus put together.
Virtual Pet Shelter KickStarter Project gets plugged pulled, soldiers on (updated from orig post).
I read this post over at Technabob last week and felt that it was a fun, clever idea that needed to be written about once I got through some other work. puppyrainbow aka Brooklyn based artist / librarian Kacper Jarecki Started a Kickstarter project to give homes to all the wayward virtual pets in the world called the Virtual Pet Shelter.
It’s purpose was to create a program where adopters could essentially become foster parents for a rotating group of discarded virtual pet toys. Tamagotchis, digimon, gigapets etc., and save them from being discarded into landfills. According to the description on the kickstarter page:
“Although they are “digital,” in a way Virtual Pets are alive! And if they are alive, that means that they have a right to be safe! So that’s why I decided to make up the Virtual Pet Shelter — so that I can help these virtual beings become happy!
Virtual Pets eat, play, die, and some of the newer ones even have babies and can start a Virtual Family. Sure, these Virtual Pets must live their whole life inside a device, but yet, this is their life, and their life should be happy!
The goal of the Virtual Pet Shelter is to save Virtual Pets and to find them a happy home. The Virtual Pet Shelter will fix up old Virtual Pets and replace their batteries, or even just take them out of the box so that they may live! I want to acquire many different Virtual Pets from E-bay and other other places so that I can make them alive again!”
Upon finding out about the project, I was eager to help fund it and help get the shelter, and the Foster Parent Program underway. Once I was paid from my research job last week, I went back on the site yesterday to help out all those wayward virtual pets, only to discover that funding had been removed for this project 3 days ago. Now I do not know if this means that Kickstarter itself removed the project from being funded or if is was Kacper himself. Either way it’s a bit sad to see such a poppy/ cheeky and fun project slip away. I suppose that is the reality of crowd funding.
***just an update. i emailed Kacper to ask him what had happened and he said that Kickstarter pulled the plug on the project because they determined he wasn’t doing anything new, just fixing up something that existed already. Clearly they did not understand the project. Also while I do believe that Kickstarter does have a need for some kind of oversight…. i think it’s wrong for them to the pull the plugs on projects. If people choose not to fund something, fine, but this, this ends up being a form of censorship.
***update number 2! Kacper is not letting the lack of crowdfunding get in the way of his project! here’s a webpage he’s got up right now!
This project reminds of something very similar I had done as a child. When I was about 11 or so, my parents bought a new refrigerator. Said fridge came in a very large cardboard box, one which I immediately took and began building into a small building. This tiny architectural model had a door large enough for me to enter/ exit, several windows and a sign set above the door that said ‘Skot’s Animal Shelter”. Why at that time I had decided that all of my stuffed animals were orphans that needed a place to live, I cannot say, but it is illustrative of why I felt a special resonance with the Virtual Pet Shelter as a project.
I was never into the whole virtual pet phenomenon (because I was already 21 when the Tamagotchi was released in North America) but they always fascinated me. When I was younger, I imagined myself feeding my stuffed animals and interacted with them in similar ways, but virtual pets introduced an element of automation and autonomy into children’s interactions with their imaginary pets. Somewhere in here is a paper on the subject (or perhaps it’s already been written, time to look around).
Finally though, I will say that I hope that this project sees a resurgence, though perhaps not in the mail order/ distribution/ trade capacity that Kacper envisioned originally. I could see this as a gallery installation, creating an adoption agency much like Xavier Roberts had when his Cabbage Patch Kids first hit the market in the 1980s. Each virtual pet could easily be hung on gallery walls for patrons to explore and interact with in the same way that people go to the Humane Society to adopt real animals. A show like this would speak to the virtual lives we project onto our objects and devices, and their role as a consumer device in the mass toy / entertainment market. Kacper if you’re reading this, we need to talk! 
Nienke Sybrandy’s Gordijnen (Curtain). An Ascii art project on longing and the digital.
Designer Nienke Sybrandy has created this beautiful curtain, which at first glance appears to be a simple white curtain with the shadow of a tree falling on is as it would were the sun shining through the window, casting this shadow. More than the simple illusion of a tree shadow, this piece is actually an elaborate work of ASCII art.
Here is her description of the project (from her website) :
“A house is rooted underground in a worldwide network of pipes and cables. Everything we communicate through those roots is converted into a language that is the same all over the world: ASCII (American Standard code for Information Interchange). This computer language was invented before we could send our pictures in the form of pixels. It was the first form of communication between people and computers. A language as universal as a longing for the view from your old window. You can take pieces of furniture with you to your new house, but unfortunately you can’t take the tree that grows outside your window. These curtains visualize a tree that has its roots in the same ground as the house..”
I am quite fascinated by her intermingling of the concepts of ‘roots’ in this project, the roots of the tree connected to the earth, the roots of the house connected to other human beings through the vast infrastructure that she speaks of. Then of course in relation to the digital we have the concept of the ‘root’ in terms of the digital file. Root folders, etc.
One particular aspect of her artist statement that struck me was the referral to a sense of longing, both for the old state of things, but also in relation to the digital. For an installation project I am currently working on, being guided and advised by a design/architecture Professor from Ryerson, I’ve been discussing issues related to architecture and its relation to both digital design practices and to the virtual construction of space in video game environments. One of the texts that I read for this was a great book by Architect/ Theorist, Peter Zumthor. In Thinking Architecture, Zumthor discusses the practice of architecture as one of representation that then translates to the construction of structures in real space; both traditional methods of architectural drawing and CADing (Computer Assisted Drawing) techniques are meant to conceptualize an object situated in the real. However, when this representation remains on paper or on the screen:
“the effort of the portrayal often serves to underline the absence of the actual object, and what then emerges is an awareness of the inadequacy of any kind of portrayal, curiosity about the reality it promises, and perhaps — if the promise has the power to move us– a longing for it’s presence. “
I think that this quote sums up quite nicely Sybrandy’s project. No matter where we go with this curtain, we will never again have our old tree back, and this representation serves to highlight the longing of the tree we knew, and in some sense it elicits a longing for a pre-digital world, a world with different roots and structures than the roots and structures we currently experience.
March 23rd. PIXELDANCE 4! mf8b!
Coming up in Toronto in just under 2 weeks is the latest installment of PixelDance, a semi-regular chiptune show thrown by local chipmusic makers. I’ve been invited to come play a chipstep/chipbass DJ set using my modded PSP DJ rig for the show, as well as supplying visuals using my DDR VJ controllers. Great lineup, this city has got tonnes of talent chiptune wise.
Toronto Board Game Jam Roundup – Part 1. the Broad strokes.
What did you do this past weekend? Maybe you went to the mall, or out for some drinks with some friends, or catched whatever bad winter season rom com is in the theatres. While you were doing whatever you were doing, myself, my partner (@allypattern on twitter) and 70+ other people participated in the 2nd annual Toronto Board Game Jam. *please note that this post is more of a everything that happened at the Jam post, a personal post about teh development of our game will come in the next day or two.
You might be asking yourself, what’s a board game jam? Well imagine you get together with a group of other people for a weekend, with the goal of creating a board game over the course of the weekend. So in less than 48 hrs you and your team have to conceptualize, build, and play test a board game. If it sounds like a lot of pressure, well it kind of it, but it’s also designed to have you think about your limited time and resources and put together something playable and fun.
The weekend started out with a talk/ exercise by coordinator Adam Clare, who teaches game design at George Brown College (the Jam itself also took place there).
The exercise that Adam planned for us used tiny wooden play pieces called Meeples. In the exercise we had to concieve of a way to make a very simple game (3 humans must destroy a “robot” before it gets them) that had a set of rules that would make the game fun and give it replay value. It was actually a very interesting exercise. When people think of board games, they generally think of kids games, but there are a vast amount of adult oriented boardgames with sophisticated rulesets and game mechanics to keep people engaged, interested and playing.
After the game rules/ mechanics exercise, all the group split off in search of a space where they could make their games. The game jam provided old board games and other miscellaneous do dads for us to use as game pieces, lunch, coffee (oh the endless coffee) and snacks to keep us fueled up. Day 1 (Sat consisted of getting our games mocked up, worked out and some rudimentary testing of our rules/ mechanics. We had until about 7pm at the College, then parted ways to return home to deprive ourselves of sleep, only to return to the Jam by 10am the next day to polish, print, and play test our games, before having to finish at 6pm.
Above we see the team who created Heavy Metal Combat, a dice/ paper game where you build robots and have them compete. Best part was the sales floor/ auction aspect of the gameplay.
Here we have Andrey and Bo’s game Subways, Subways, Subways. It’s a city council simulator, where one side plays the Ford Nation trying to build subways through intimidation and dirty tricky and the other plays as City Council trying to get LRTs built. I had the opportunity to play this game, and while the rules were (at first) complicated, once I got into it, I have to say it was AMAZING! My favorite game of the Jam.
Here’s Black Hat Tycoon, where you play a Wild West era robber baron, trying to profit in sneaky and underhanded ways…..
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So after we built and playtested, it was off to the Central, a bar in the Annex district in Toronto to showcase our games to the public at a play party!
A packed house full of players and over 20 Board Games made in LESS THAN 48hrs! Truly it’s a remarkable thing, the calibre of the games were incredible! Here’s a few more pics of the games.
RATRACE!
Hungry, Hungry Hipsters, a game about consumer goods, chain stores and pop culture trivia!
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The evening ended with an ad hoc awards ceremony, Where Adam and the rest of the Board Game Jam team held raffles and gave out awards for games.
@Allypattern and I were lucky enough to win a raffle for free participation in the 2013 Board Game Jam! Which was pretty awesome, others won gift certificates to the awesome game cafe in Toronto, Snakes and Lattes.
Then came the award for Crowd favorite, which went to Black Hat Tycoon. Best use of the theme of the Jam (SCIENCE!) went to Frankenfood. And best overall game of the Jam (as David, one of the Jammer organizers put it, the JamSpeil) was WE ARE LEGION! Which was the game that Alison and I made for the Jam, in which you play cooperatively as anonymous attempting to hack corporate servers and win the public relations war!
Needless to say that we were very suprised and very honored to be given top prize at the Jam, particularly since this was the first board game we’ve ever made. We won a gift certificate for The Game Crafter, a site that will print to order your indie made games! So we’ll be producing more copies, after a redesign and rule tweak after some feedback from playtesting. But more on that later.
If you have never participated in an event like this, I highly recommend it. It provides a unique challenge where you need to take something from concept to finished product in a very short period of time, which really brings out the best in problem solving, creative thinking, and collaboration. Kudos to everyone who made games at the Jam, so amazing! And thanks to Adam, David, Charlie and the rest of the team for putting this together. I had the time of my life doing this.
Da Chip 2 (chip music Daft Punk cover album) now available for download.
In 2008, chiptune artists Je deviens dj en 3 jours and Zombectro, began an open competition on 8bitcollective asking artists on the site to create and upload chipmusic covers of Daft Punk tracks. The end result was an album called Da Chip Vol 1, an 11 track cover album available for free download, featuring work by a wide variety of chip artists.
Since the last Da Chip album, Daft Punk did the score to Tron Legacy, and some of their tracks from the film have been rolled into Da Chip Volume 2, which was released online this week. But fear not, there are tons of classic Daft Punk to be found here in 8bit glory as well. Volume 2 features some of the current luminaries of the global chipmusic scene, including SabrePulse, Knife City, cTrix and even Japan’s Cheapshot ( a master of chipbass and chipstep).
While there have been many other chipmusic tribute albums, covering everything from Pink Floyd to Kraftwerk to Miles Davis, Da Chip ranks highly on my list of chipmusic cover albums. But generally I’m always keenly interested to see how chipmusicians translate more traditional forms of music into their craft.
To download both albums for free, go here. Let the lo-fi dance party begin!
Directions in Play/Art/Design… D-Pad-1 Round Up.
On Feb. 3rd, I hosted my first game/art/performance event in Toronto (since moving here for Graduate School last fall) called D-P.A.D. (Directions in Play.Art.Design) at Interaccess Gallery. Interaccess is an artist run Media Art gallery and studio in the Queen West district of Toronto.
I am pleased to report that the night was a smashing success! We opened the doors a little after 8pm, and by shortly after 9pm, we had hit the capacity for the gallery, which was about a 150 people!!!! Then a line up formed outside! Then it thinned out, then filled up again. All told our attendance peaked around 250 people in and out of the space all night. Thank you all who came out and supported this event, I was beaming then and am still elated when I think back on it! Thanks to the gallery staff Alex (program director) and Laura(director) for the opportunity, thanks to the HandEye Society and the Canadian Game Studies Association for the sponsorship and help with the army of volunteers, and thanks to the designers, artists and performers! It went so well, we’re planning the next one already, should be sometime in May/June. Until then, here’s a summary of the works exhibited and some pictures!
The event was programmed to show a wide range of creative practices all centered around gaming culture. It featured games by local Indie Game Developers, media artists, hackers, and musical performers (and a few out of town guest artists). The Night featured games by Damian Sommer (A co-op game called Friendship in 4 colours) Big Pants (a game using 3d red/blue anaglyph glasses, Depths to Which I Sink), Devine Lu Linvega and Renaud Bedard from MTL (bullet hell shooter Rain+bow), Alex Droqen and Jason Kaplan (multiplayer vs. game involving pirates!), A myraid of games by the Group Dames Making Games and their JAMuary incubator, which featured a ton of first time female game makers, and Alex Bethke (Poppycock, a sidescroller runner/platformer.
The night also featured works of art by 3 artists: RotterDam Tower and Gameboy Empire by Clint Enns (The first was a machinima remake of Andy Warhol’s Empire made using GTA IV, the 2nd a remake as a Gameboy ROM), Gauntlet Series ( a series of paintings by King Woobs, based on images and themes from the Gauntlet games), and Cities in Flux by Kenton Sheely (a hack of GTA San Andreas that allowed the user to stretch, modify and otherwise destroy the game’s architecture, thus creating glitches and abstractions of the game world).
And finally there was a round of musical and visual performances, by locals MandelBrut (an a/v noise set using home made noise generators and snyths, and a modified vectrex game console), Oxvylu, (chipmusic), BossFyte (a/v chip madness!) and myself (with a rather Drunken chipbass/chipstep DJ set on PSPs). For Oxvylu’s and my performances, we made use of my DDR VJC mod, which is a mod of two DDR pads which are then used as VJ controllers for live visuals, thus the people on the dance floor, are also the VJs!!!
^Mandelbrut ^
^Oxvylu^
^BossFyte^
^and me! mrghosty^
^and a special thanks to these guys ^
who kept the visuals running and
the dance floor bouncing!
One thing I have to say about Toronto is that it is full of immensely talented people in games/ media / performance, and full of a supportive group of makers and enthusiasts who support each other in ways I’ve never seen before. I’m truly humbled by the quality of work I was fortunate enough to showcase, and by all the amazing people I met at the show.
Right now I’m working on a few other events and project, for the nearish future, and have an upcoming exhibition I’m curating this summer in Winnipeg at Platform as well. Stay Tuned for more info!
**pics in this post by Brendan Bell and Elma Bello!
On Feb 23rd, the NYU Game Center (which recently announced it’s new MFA program in game criticism/ theory/ design) is hosting Ivory Tower Defense, Games in the Academy. The event, other than having one of the best names ever to grace an academic event, is a panel discussion between members of the Game Center’s faculty. Moderated Frank Lantz, the Center’s director, and featuring panel/ faculty members Jesper Juul (perhaps known for his book, A Casual Revolution, which chronicles the rise of the “casual gamer), Katherine Isbister, and Eric Zimmerman, the Panel will be a discussion of video gaming and its “complicated relationship to academics”.
For those of you who are unaware, Video Games as an object of academic study is relatively young, mostly due to the fact that it is still a realitively young medium. The medium is just over 50 years old, which is a short time when you consider it in relation to other objects/ areas of study. As such the medium has been undergoing what could be be described as critical growing pains. While people began to examine the idea that video games are a powerful medium, much of the early work on the subject was done through a more decidedly sociological approach (as in; are games damaging our children?).
As I write this, I have in front of me a paper commissioned by the Toronto School Board titled, Student Participation in Video Arcades: A Sociological Study of Causes and Consequences by Desmond Ellis. This paper, written in 1985, seeks to correlate the connections between Video Arcades and juvenile delinquency. It seems that there was such a moral panic in the mid 80s that studies needed to be commissioned to figure out how games were ruining our children. So much so that there was once a By Law in Toronto that prohibited an Arcade from operating within a certain distance of any school. As a child of the Arcade age, I can safely say that I turned out ok, and so did most of the rest.
Since this time, games have become far more widely accepted and now exist as the most popular entertainment medium on the planet. Then Roger Ebert makes a public gaff by claiming that video games could never achieve the status of art. While I won’t offer my own rebuttal here to his perspective, I will point out that other theorists said the same thing about film when it was still in its infancy, as well as countless other media including photography, and yes even the novel!
Speaking as someone who is now in graduate school studying games, I am happy to see that while many of my generation are embracing the notion of games as objects of academic study beyond the sociological, but I am also glad that the good folks at the NYU Game Center want to maintain the conversation about the study of games. It’s important for any of us who choose to study anything to continually question our area of study, to ask WHY we are studying it, to ask WHY it’s significant. Though not simply to justify it to our detractors, but so we can keep ourselves engaged and inspired to continue to contribute to the discourse. It becomes a question of what is it precisely that inspires us to want to study games.
In the past weeks, having now been in Graduate School for about 6 months, I am constantly meeting new people (many of whom are around my age or younger) who have chosen to study games academically. And in its 50 year life, it amazes me at the breadth of gaming culture, for not a single one of my peers has the same focus in their studies. Gaming Culture and its study is a bit like a new frontier in some ways. Sure, the pathfinders have been out there exploring and mapping it for years now, but there is still so much uncharted territory. I think that’s why it’s so exciting for me.
While many others have chosen to focus on issues such as gender and representation in gaming, or narrative in games, or any other myriad of foci, I’ve decided to look at the technology and how it it situated culturally. What I mean by this is, what are the cultural roles that gaming hardware (and software) inhabit during it’s tenure in the consumer market? How do people re-invent new roles for old consoles once they’re past their market peak? How do we engage with our gaming devices? Are they merely tools for immersive entertainment? Creative Tools for us to tinker with? How do we interact with gaming consoles and how do these interactions shape us as users? Game Theorist/Designer Ian Bogost is someone who started this work in object oriented philosophy related to gaming/digital culture; he calls this focus Platform Studies. The first book in the Platform Studies series was Racing the Beam, a book focusing on the Atari 2600.
My reasoning behind this focus is due to several factors. The first of which is how I’ve witnessed the changes in gaming culture and technology since the Atari, which was my first gaming console when I was a child. As I grew I saw the culture and technology grow, gaming and I matured at a similar rate. This led me to becoming a bit of a gearhead: I mod, hack, tinker, break and fix my consoles, teasing out methods of interaction not intended by the technology’s designers. In short, I play WITH the games as much as I play them. It’s these explorations that I’m deeply interested in; in the play practices of gamers, hackers, modders, and other participatory cultures and communities. The work I’ve seen by others is incredible and inspiring; feats of both aesthetic and technical wizardry, often accomplished in a single project. For those of us of my generation who grew up playing games, these practices are as everyday as playing the games themselves.
So, for what it’s worth, I think it is crucial for us to continually question games as an object of study. Though not question its worth as an object of study, gaming culture is so vast, so ubiquitous, such an entrenched cultural phenomenon that of course it requires study. Any medium/object/ creative work/ period of history/ scientific theory/whatever that holds so much influence over us as a species / society demands that we give it our attentions. What I’m thinking here is that we need to talk about how we study games, what our methodologies are/will be, and maybe ask where is this all going. I can’t say for sure where that is, being new to this and all, but I can tell you this, I’m more excited about that journey than I was when Super Mario 3 was released for the NES!
Japanese Console History, in Tiny Plastic Capsules.
Since the beginning of gaming culture, mass marketing machines have churned out a massive array of licensed products, collectibles, clothing, peripherals etc etc, creating an offshoot merchandising market that gleans profits larger than the GNPs of some Nations (forgive the hyperbole, but it’s probably true). Of the myriad of secondary market goods related to game culture, I’ve often been most interested in Japanese collectible culture, more specifically the miniature toys that come in little plastic capsules, known as Gashapon.
Gashapon is the brand name of capsules by Bandai, and it’s subsidiary companies TakaraTomy/ Yujin. These machines (seen above) are all over in Asia, arcades, shopping malls, small shops etc. There are even whole stores that are nothing but Gacha capsule machines and an attendant there to give you change. My first experience with capsule toys dates back to when I was a kid when you could pop in a quarter and get some cheap ass crappy toy in similar machines placed in malls, grocery and department stores. But Gashapon toys are (usually) of a much higher quality.
I found my first Gacha capsule machines in a small shopping centre in Chinatown in Toronto years ago, and then discovered a Gacha machine store in the Pacific Mall in the North-Eastern part of Toronto. Every brand of Asian pop culture has probably been represented in capsule-toy form; anime characters, game characters, miniature fake foods, mini designer furniture collections, and so much more. Sometimes you can find mini actions figures, keychains, small models and maquettes, even mini capsule machines that spit out even tinier capsules with smaller toys inside of them!. But years ago I found a series that caught my attention far more than the usual secondary market merchandise you would normally find.
While visiting the capsule store at the Pacific Mall with a couple of friends years ago, I found the Sega History Collection. The series was essentially mini versions of the entire history of Sega video game consoles. The master system, the Genesis (MegaDrive), the Sega CD, Saturn, Dreamcast. Now these were not simply tiny static models. The game carts are removable, the controllers can be “unplugged”, CDs could be removed and slid into small cases (The Dreamcast came with tiniest of Space Channel 5 game case and disc). AND even the VMUs on the Dreamcast Controllers could be removed and inserted. This was my first encounter with capsule toys with such a high level of detail. I bought a couple of them (one of the things about capsule machines is that you don’t know what you’re going to get, which is half of the fun, unless you end up with a duplicate). But it also inspired me to see what other game hardware had been recreated in mini-model form. Turns out, pretty much any game console from the history of Japanese Video game culture.
Please keep in mind that I have been a collector of many things in my life, I guess I’ve got just enough of that touch of OCD in me to make me want to collect things. And as my interests have changed in my life, I have seen different collections of themes and objects come and go. So when I say that these tiny model game machines have fascinated me for years, more than any other collectible, that’s pretty significant. I’m not sure exactly why this is the case with these, but I think it’s that they’re more than just toys. These “History Collections” are like micronized game museums.
At this point in time, any collector/ game historian would have to put out a prohibitive amount of money to collect one of each of these pieces of hardware (I have a rather extensive collection of game hardware and software, but nothing like the scope of these collections). Yet the Gacha models present an affordable means of collecting the ENTIRE history of Japanese game consoles and their peripherals for fractions of that cost, nevermind they take up a fraction of the amount of space. With these, the history of Japanese (console) gaming can rest on a single shelf.
While we often see all kinds of toys, and objects related to the characters from game franchises, and I have seen some collections dedicated to the history of game genres (there’s a schmup/ bullet hell history collection that I have found, dedicated to all the vehicles that you pilot in the games), these History collections are unique, it’s the only instance I know (other than the odd papercraft or DIY project) that focuses on the machines we play the games on; focusing on the technology of gaming.
Through these collections, and their accompanying mini flyers (which are the images in this post), we can see how the technology has progressed, and how hardware aesthetics have changed over time (arguably, not that much, surprisingly). While these mini flyers are designed to show you the objects that you did not get, to encourage you to go back and drop more money into the capsule machines, it also gives you the slightest taste of that history, even if it is in a very tiny format. Although pretty much every console from Japanese manufacturers are represented, it would be nice to see a collection like this that encompasses other consoles, perhaps Atari or even Commodore or Apple computer histories.
There are other large-ish Gacha capsules that have even housed mini vintage Sega arcade machines (such as OutRun, After Burner, etc). And recently I even found work by model railroad enthusiasts that are making their own mini arcade machines (more on that another time). But if there’s any question of game culture’s saturation of images, themes and characters, click here to see mugen toys page dedicated to game themed Gacha Capsules. And these are only the ones that are recent, or haven’t sold out yet.
I for one am going to keep searching for pieces from these history collections. Maybe I’ll make a mini-museum diorama to house them in.
