Tag: Computerspil

Article posted on www.game-research.com on April 13, 2004

Much attention has been devoted to the scholarly issue of whether games should be thought of as rule based systems (ludology) or stories (narratology). Real games, however, obviously occupy both camps; some are more linear than others. Thus, two aesthetics compete for the players’ attention. On one side we find simulation-type games in which a limited number of variables create an open unpredictable world and on the other we find narratively oriented games in which the direction of the plot is given overriding importance. These two aesthetics are often seen as favouring different political world views. This article examines the claim that game design ideals can or should be seen as political statements.

A recent article in Reason (a magazine devoted to “Free Minds and Free Markets”) claims that “Video games are evolving into a grand anti-authoritarian laboratory”. The reason for this is the shift from “pre-rendered animation and simple behaviour to physical modelling and advanced artificial intelligence…”, a shift that “takes power from authors” (Parker, 2004 22). The author airs his dislike of storytelling games and goes on to claim that games in fact “as a class… appear to favour civil and economic liberty.” (26).

The author, then, clearly sees a connection between games which provide open worlds, freedom and libertarian ideals. This more than indicates that he considers more rigid, story-based games as somehow connected with anti-liberalist ideals: socialism, in so many words.

In this article I examine the connections between general design ideals and political ideologies.

Games are clearly…

During the last few years a debate has raged (or at least been claimed to rage) within game studies. In this debate the perspective of ludology has been contrasted to that of narratology. The term ludology was introduced into computer game studies by game theorist Gonzalo Frasca who early on suggested that ludology be thought of as simply the “discipline that studies game and play activities” (Frasca, 1999). Expanding on this however, Frasca on his popular webpage has specified that a ludological stance implies that “games cannot be understood through theories derived from narrative” (Frasca, 2001).

Over the years, the ludology label has been associated with notions of a radical anti-narratologist stance. This is hardly justified by Frasca’s mostly non-confrontational formulations (see also Frasca, 2003). Others, however have been more direct. For instance, Jesper Juul, in a 1998 paper stressed how “Computer games and narratives are very different phenomena. Two phenomena that fight each other. Two phenomena that you basically cannot have at the same time.” (Juul, 1998). Juul has later softened his position (Juul, 2003) and any truly radical ludology is now mostly associated with Finnish theorist Markku Eskelinen (e.g. Eskelinen, 2001).

Although examples can be found it is a widespread observation that the alleged opposition, the narratologists who hold that computer games can and/or should be understood as stories only exist in highly limited quantities. However, it may also be the case that the games-as-narratives perspective can be thought of as a sort of folk theory. While not many scholars may have held this belief a large number of non-involved (or only casually involved) people may well have considered this common sense. For instance the Danish Broadcasting Association in 2001 aimed to raise some €12,5 million for a project with the working title Metropol Scandia. Described as a “storytelling game” the product would see real actors interacting based on user decisions in a “virtual landscape” based on “Flash technology”. According to one account the project leader saw this as a promising alternative to computer games, which supposedly are “so simple that you can easily guess that you have to go through a specific door, collect a specific item and so on…” (Thorhauge, 2001) .

In 2004 nothing has yet come of this ambitious project. Arguably, it was a manifestation of a (to some) intuitive idea that for games to be better they must tell better stories. The ideology here is mostly conservatism; a belief that for “new media” to be worthwhile they must mostly mimic the old. More importantly, however, it may be a consequence of a pervasive predilection for ‘narrative’. Briefly, postmodern philosophy (and theorists within cultural studies) in the 1980s tied the concept of narrative to the idea of social constructionism. Most radically, scientific conclusions (or “truths”) were considered mere narratives, and thus everything was political. Such thoughts – of which many, of course, were more tempered – found an odd bedfellow in the idea inspired by various concepts from cognitive science, that people understand their world in a cognitive format which looks much like classical conceptions of narrative (i.e. is temporal, has clear causality). Within film theory such notions were advocated most forcefully by David Bordwell (1985) and Edward Branigan (1992). Branigan was specific that “Making narratives is a strategy for making our world of experiences and desires intelligible. It is a fundamental way of organizing data.” (1992 1).

It is not entirely obvious how to travel from the understanding that people understand in terms of narrative to the normative ideal that media producers (and indeed companies and products) should tell stories. Nevertheless, marketing disciplines working with branding and storytelling have made this leap often claiming that consumers (or perhaps mostly modern consumers) react favourably to “good stories” and are less concerned with facts.

I shall return below to the question of whether ludology can reasonably be tied to a full-scale political ideology. For now, however, we can note that ludologists do actually see themselves as something more than merely “students of games”.

Ludology has been framed in emancipatory terms, claiming to oppose theoretical imperialism or colonialism (humorously commented upon by Jesper Juul’s Game Liberation, a small game in which you as the player have “to defend games (and yourself) from the imperialism of a thousand theories.” – http://www.jesperjuul.dk/gameliberation/).

Game Lib illustration missing

More clearly, ludologists have essentialist tendencies. Espen Aarseth, whose seminal Cybertext (1997) is the explicit foundation of much ludology, held that “To claim that there is no difference between games and narratives is to ignore essential qualities of both categories” (5). This is a nebulous statement. To see why, let us turn to a discipline which has struggled with the idea of similarities and differences for centuries. In biology, various systems have been constructed to tell organisms apart. In some regard, Aarseth’s statement would be comparable to the proclamation that “to claim that there is no difference between human beings and animals is to ignore essential qualities of both categories.” To a biologist, of course, that is not immediately obvious. But more importantly, the “no difference” part is very vague. While no-one would disagree that we can point to various differences between humans and other animals we have no general way of deciding whether the two categories are mostly different or mostly similar. And we certainly have no way of deciding which differences are “essential”. We could stress that humans live in cities but we could just as well stress that dolphins communicate by sonar and display certain behaviour patterns inviting the conclusion that dolphins are essentially different from all other organisms. This is not to say that Aarseth’s statement is not meaningful (surely we can follow his larger argument that games have interesting characteristics not shared by, say, novels) but referring to “essential qualities” is not a strictly academic practise. Academically, categories are arbitrary and to claim that they are not is to engage in politics. The politics here, however, are those which come wholesale with the establishment of research programs. Although this may be done with varying degrees of modesty (and initial modesty is likely to be beneficial at later stages) such programs, if not framed in purely local terms, will always be arguing that one method, perspective or basic set of assumptions is superior to others.

In terms of games, ludologists can easily be seen as advocating a certain aesthetics. Significantly, most ludologists are not arguing against narrative in games. However, by stressing their scepticism towards some kinds of narrative (e.g. games that seem to mindlessly translate storytelling conventions from older media) they can be said to support game designs which take a simulationist approach. This, however, is merely one of several possible approaches to game design. In the following, I will present the two main approaches; the simulationist and the story-telling aesthetics.

Open worlds, closed stories

One way to distinguish between games is to look at their degree of openness. This can be thought of in a number of ways. For instance, we can understand games as being world-centred as opposed to protagonist-centred. In the former case the game is a world with physics in which processes take place without the protagonist necessarily being involved. In protagonist-centred games, however, the entire game system revolves around the protagonist and nothing noteworthy takes place outside the action radius of the protagonist. In her humorous account, game journalist J. C. Herz (1997) referred to the former approach as the “Old Testament approach to game design” stressing that the designer here creates the basic material and the basic rules (analogous to the laws of nature). This, she contrasted with the “‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ syndrome, where you feel like you’re on some kind of monorail through the game.” (154). These two approaches were addressed further in my article ‘The Road not Taken’ (Smith, 2000).

Another, and more precise, distinction was made by Jesper Juul who described games as being on a continuum between two basic game structures: ‘emergence’ and ‘progression’ (Juul, 2002). Emergence, to Juul, is “the primordial game structure, where a game is specified as a small number of rules that combine and yield large numbers of game variations…” (324). An example is chess, in which quite simple rules combine to enable an enormous (if technically finite) number of individual chess matches.

In progression games, on the other hand, “the player has to perform a predefined set of actions to complete the game.” (324). Juul stresses how this game form is practically unique to computer games. Clear-cut specimens include adventure games such as Myst (Cyan, 1994) and Gabriel Knight III (Sierra, 1999).

Myst illustration missing

Looking at the history of computer games it is obvious that the initial preference was for simple emergence games. Games like Spacewar! (Russel et. al., 1962) and Pong (Atari, 1972) were easy to learn but took practice to play well. With Adventure (Crowther, 1976) and Zork (Infocom, 1979) however, the player was given a series of tasks (or puzzles) to solve in order to progress through what was essentially a linear story. Arguably, the introduction of adventure games mark a politically charged time in game history as adventure game designers (or ‘authors’ as they often called themselves) attempted to distance themselves from the simple teenage-friendly arcade action games of the time. Adventure game designers may well have had lofty goals. It is hard, however, not to acknowledge the strategic side of their project. In this light the attempt to lean heavily on storytelling media (in particular the novel and the film) is reminiscent of earl film makers’ attempt to draw on the prestige of classical theatre by placing a camera in front of actors performing classical plays. Alternatively, the project can be compared to the rhetorical work of the French Nouvelle Vague movement, who in the 1960s strived to promote an idea of the film director as an author (Smith, 2000). Thus, in a sense adventure game developers saw themselves as more sophisticated than their emergence-inspired colleagues. But their project of framing games as literature (and thus art) failed since in terms of popularity and creative potential, progression games were not (or did not become) obvious candidates for the label “real games”. Thus, it may be that ludology should be seen as a counter-reaction to this failed attempt. In positioning games as worthy of recognition ludology are employing the exact opposite strategy, namely arguing that games are different. Considering the popularity of emergence games this argument is likely to have more impact.This brings us back to the actual games since recent developments seem to contradict any claim that game designs subscribing to a “pure” emergent aesthetics are – or will soon become – the norm. Now, as an example of a computer game with highly emergent properties we can choose SimCity (Maxis, 1989). Here, we find no storyline but rather a sort of sandbox – a term sometimes used derogatorily, see for instance Klug (2002). The player is given an interface through which he or she can interact with a system of individually speaking simple components. The results are not prescribed and are infinite in range. Interestingly, many modern games in fact seem to merge the two basic aesthetics in ways that not many might have foreseen a decade ago. Notably, Half-Life (Valve, 1998) was praised for its seamless integration of story and player freedom. Rather than forcefully advancing the plot by stripping away the player’s options while displaying a cut-scene, Half-Life succeeded in supplying pertinent narrative information while remaining inside the system of the game engine.

Half-live illustration missing

Later games with similar ambitions have even revitalized the much-derided cut-scene, introducing brief, cinematic animations functioning more as establishing shots or drama enhancers than scenes conveying complex narrative details. In Prince of Persia: Sands of Time (Ubisoft, 2003), for instance, dramatic situations are sometimes introduced by a brief swoop of the “camera” showing the layout of the soon-to-be battle field (the game also uses some classical cut-scenes to advance the story).

Prince of Persia illustration missing

The game makes use of modern cinema aesthetics in brief ‘functionalist’ cut-scenes which serve as establishing shots etc.

But the recent game which may have most forcefully demonstrated the potential of merging the two aesthetics is the top-selling video game in the US in 2002: Grand Theft Auto III: Vice City (Rockstar North, 2002). The original Grand Theft Auto III (2002) is in fact one of the game singled out in Kevin Parker’s Reason article for setting the player free (Parker doesn’t fail to note that the player begins the game in the role of a freed prisoner, and comments “Captive audience no longer”). While Vice City has a narrative in the form of a series of tasks which must be completed to advance the underlying plot, the game has been singled out mostly for its advanced physics leading to a world of opportunity. For instance, since Vice City’s vehicles have logical properties and are not just backdrops, the player may use them in highly varied ways. Where, though, does the game belong on Juul’s emergence-progression continuum? While it is certainly true that the game offers more freedom (in any common sense of the word) than classical adventure games, Vice City is actually not emergent in the strict sense of the word. While game objects may become involved in chain-reactions (i.e. large-scale car crashes) the world itself does not actually evolve much in the absence of the player character. Vice City citizens do not live their daily life according to their basic preferences in the parts of the city where the player is not present. Thus, there is no way that the actions of the player will cause large-scale changes in the game world. In fairness, then, Vice City belongs somewhere in the middle of Juul’s continuum and is perhaps not the obvious choice of game for someone arguing that games have reached new stages of ‘freedom’ (MMORPGs, also mentioned by Parker, are more obvious candidates)

Does game design have politics?

Let us now return to our more general question of whether the two aesthetics are tied to political ideologies.

Parker, in his Reason article, doesn’t take it nearly as far, but let us consider an extreme argument: Narrative games are socialist, simulation games are liberalist. With the term ‘socialist’ we shall refer to the idea that central governance is advantageous. ‘Liberalist’ here is the idea that self-governance is advantageous (and morally superior since individuals are or should be free). First of all, the analogy is of course quite obvious. Adventure games (say) have relatively fixed story lines established by an all-powerful author and the freedom of the player is moderate at best. Simulation games have only basic rules (analogous to laws of nature and perhaps basic human rights) and offer much more freedom. In various forms, this analogy is common. Most specifically, interactivity (and the rise of interactive media) has frequently been described in utopian terms (see examples in Aarseth, 1997). But certain forms of texts within non-interactive media have also been described as inherently more free and some of these descriptions have had obvious political components. For instance Umberto Eco wrote of the “open text” which afforded multiple interpretations (Eco, 1989). In media studies John Fiske (1987) called such texts “writerly” and saw them as empowering the interpreter. In film theory, Andre Bazin is often credited (more or less fairly) with the idea that editing had an un-democratic element since the director was assuming too much control. Turning to painting, the “academic” perspective, common since the renaissance has been described as manifesting certain ideologies. And within theatre, Brecht famously advocated the need for new forms of drama not affirming bourgeois values. In other words, the tradition for linking certain media forms (or genres) to specific ideologies is both old and persistent.

Not only designers and producers face such accusations, of course. An illuminating parallel to the games are political claim, may be the idea that science is political. This idea also comes in many forms, one of the stronger being the claim that theories put forth must be understood as manifestations of certain ideologies. Such an argument has been levelled repeatedly against proponents of the so-called sociobiological perspective (see Segerstråle, 2000). To some critics, when sociobiologists have claimed that animal behaviour should be considered in the light of genetics they were really saying that natural dispositions should be used as guidelines for structuring society etc. While specific sociobiologists may of course have held a broad range of views, in general such an accusation is unfounded (see discussion in Dennett, 1995). The naturalist fallacy is the belief that you can infer from is to ought and these critics were in fact committing an odd naturalist fallacy by proxy as they ascribed the fallacy to their opponents who didn’t (as a rule) commit it themselves. In this indirect fashion the idea of slow gradual evolution highlighted by Richard Dawkins (e.g. Dawkins, 1989) and others has been described as an attempt to naturalize self-organizing, non-revolutionary liberalism. In the other trench Stephen Jay Gould’s declared Marxism has been associated with his predilection for the more revolution-friendly idea of evolution by punctuated equilibrium (Gould, 1995).

The operative noun in all this remains analogy. And analogy, as has been aptly shown by many (e.g. Sokal & Bricmont, 1998), is a highly slippery weapon to wield. Mainly, it does not hold that because a person has a certain position within one domain he or she must necessarily hold it in others. Nor does it hold that if someone displays a certain behaviour in one context he or she will also display it in other contexts. For instance, one may believe that the army should be organized hierarchally while society should be organized democratically. Or one may hold the belief that it’s every man for himself in professional chess while people should display community ethics in political life. As to behaviour, one may attempt to strictly adhere to the scientific method in one’s professional life while enjoying The X-Files or romantic poetry in one’s spare time. More to the point one may play, or design, the most Orwellian nightmare of an adventure game story without endorsing any of its content as a recipe for real world legislation.

As a designer or critic it is possible to subscribe to a certain design aesthetic. Significantly, it is also possible to argue that emergence games most elegantly make use of the capabilities of the digital computer. Indeed one may even point to the statistical connection between certain aesthetics and certain ideologies (i.e. fascist architecture) but one cannot sensibly equate a predilection for a certain aesthetic with a certain world view or political ideology. Doing so means committing a universalistic fallacy, to make the mistake of assuming that all aspects of life can or should be judged using the same measures.

None of this means, of course, that individual games cannot way be said to be politically charged (e.g. Taylor, 2003) or to be expressions of political world-views. We can point to the peculiar rule in SimCity which makes it impossible to have a tax-rate higher than about 20% and we can point to the fact that the game was conceived in a US context (and not, say, a Scandinavian one). But we cannot categorize SimCity as anti-taxation propaganda much as we cannot claim that a novel which describes a certain society is necessarily an homage to the society in question.

Conclusions and other perspectives

The freedom offered by games – the agency brought about by interactivity – is often compared to the concept of freedom in private and political (real) life. This analogy, however, often speaks of a universalistic fallacy; the idea that the same measure may be applied to all aspects of life.

Within game studies the attempts of ludologists to ‘set games free’ (from old paradigms) has been associated with an anti-narratological stance. This association is not entirely justified although at the level of game design some ludologists have expressed scepticism as to the possibilities for reconciling (enjoyable) gameplay and narrative. Thus, the somewhat emancipatory project of ludology lends itself to association with what Jesper Juul has called emergence games. The idea that computer game theory and design should be freed from oppression, if only indirectly, ties into the argument that emergence games are somewhat purer or that games based on strong traditional narratives are somewhat limiting. This is mostly guilt by association, however, as the only true political agenda of (most) ludologists is that of advocating certain perspectives in the ongoing endeavour of constructing a (presently rather non-rigid) research program.

Whereas arguing which game aesthetic is inherently purer is mostly a game of words Parker’s suggestion that multiplayer games be seen as political laboratories is an interesting – and generally under-explored – notion. And there is much to learn. MMORPGs, for instance, are struggling with constructing societies which support such diverse requirements as justice, social order, and fun. In this task, MMORPG designers are experimenting with hosts of non-traditional systems for managing deviance and for ensuring a certain level of equality in worlds easily upset by the concentration of power. It is curious how this topic is intensely discussed while very rarely dealt with in a careful academic fashion. It is rare, at least, that political scientists take a genuine interest, whereas their sociologist and economist colleagues are contributing powerfully to our understanding of topically adjacent multiplayer phenomena. Hopefully, this gap will be filled in the near future. Worlds are being built, and there is much to learn for the curious.

References

Bordwell, D. (1985). Narration in the Fiction Film. London: Routledge.

Branigan, E. (1992). Narrative Comprehension and Film. London: Routledge.

Dawkins, R. (1989). The Selfish Gene (2 ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Dennett, D. C. (1995). Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. London: Penguin Books.

Eco, U. (1989). The Open Work. Boston: Harvard University Press.

Eskelinen, M. (2001). The Gaming Situation. Game Studies, 1(1).

Fiske, J. (1987). Television Culture. London: Routledge.

Frasca, G. (1999). Ludology meets Narratology: Similitude and differences between (video)games and narrative. Retrieved 29th of March, 2004, from http://www.jacaranda.org/frasca/ludology.htm

Frasca, G. (2001). What is ludology? A provisory definition. Retrieved 29th of March, 2003, from http://ludology.org/article.php?story=20010708201200000

Frasca, G. (2003). Ludologists love stories, too: notes from a debate that never took place. Paper presented at the Level Up – Digital Games Research Conference, Utrecht.

Gould, S. J. (1995). The Pattern of Life’s History. Retrieved 6th of April, 2004, from http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge101.html

Herz, J. C. (1997). Joystick nation : how videogames gobbled our money, won our hearts, and rewired our minds. London: Abacus.

Juul, J. (1998). A Clash between Game and Narrative. Paper presented at the Digital Arts and Culture conference, Bergen.

Juul, J. (2002). The Open and the Closed: Games of Emergence and Games of Progression. Paper presented at the Computer Games and Digital Cultures Conference, Tampere.

Juul, J. (2003). Half-Real – Video games between real rules and fictional worlds. PhD dissertation, IT University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen.

Klug, C. (2002, 16th of September). Implementing Stories in Massively Multiplayer Games. Gamasutra.com.

Parker, K. (2004). Free Play – The Politics of the Video Game. Reason, 35, 21-27.

Segerstråle, U. (2000). Defenders of the Truth – The Sociobiology Debate. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Smith, J. H. (2000). The Road not Taken – The How’s and Why’s of Interactive Fiction: www.game-research.com.

Sokal, A., & Bricmont, J. (1998). Intellectual Impostures. London: Profile Books.

Taylor, T. L. (2003). Intentional Bodies: Virtual Environments and the Designers Who Shape Them. International Journal of Engineering Education, 19(1).

Thorhauge, C. (2001). DR satser 100 millioner på interaktivitet [The Danish Broadcasting Association bets 100 millions on interactivity]. Computerworld.dk.

Aarseth, E. (1997). Cybertext : perspectives on ergodic literature. London: Johns Hopkins University Press.

The original Danish-language version of this article appeared in the magazine Samson, April 1999.

The research done on computer games up till now is quickly perused. This in spite of the popularity of the interactive medium and an economic success that surpasses that of the film industry. This article seeks to explain this disproportion and to lay a few modest building blocks to the foundation of a new field of research.

“Let there be no doubt about it: these games are not harmless fun, as some think, but rather digital poison.” exclaimed Senator Joe Liebermann in the American Senate last year. The target for his verbal weaponry was the apparently increasingly more violent computer games of the time – certainly a popular target when the army of worried parents and pedagogues take aim with the loaded bazooka of guilt transference. But if the discussion were to be characterized by one keyword it ought to be exactly that: Doubt. Researchers deliver relativistic statements, but there they are, the boys, hour after hour glued to the screen without showing the least bit of interest in the parental arsenal of character building activities ranging from brisk strolls to books filled with learning. Had it only been the television set that attracted them but no, it is something far more mysterious; an activity where the boys themselves are the active ones and where red slime monsters occur with the regularity of real world train delays.

Surely, this must be dangerous?

In the discussion concerning children and young people’s relation to computer games this question has been the most commonly articulated. It is, however, notoriously difficult to answer and scientific research has all but ignored the subject. The computer games industry may have surpassed the film industry in revenues but still, it isn’t really something one has wished to get involved in. First of all this restraint calls for an explanation. Afterwards this article will present a sketch of the history of the computer game – a necessary foundation for the possible introduction of theory and methods of analysis.

The blind eye of media research

New fields of research are difficult to deal with. Research is the building upon a foundation of experience, the abandonment of earlier hypothesis and the revision of old theories. When such a foundation does not exist there is no discussion, no experts to refer to, let alone place oneself in opposition to. Consequently there is a certain inertia in the broadening of research fields. It is just plain hard to start something new.To this we must add that the computer game exists in an academic no-man’s-land.

On one side the character of the phenomenon as an audiovisual experience places it within the field of film or communication science. But if the interactive texts are studied in their context of use the theorizing seems to belong to pedagogy/psychology or perhaps to broader cultural research such as sociology. Even if a modest theoretical perspective is chosen one encounters problems. In a text analysis it can be hard to capture a phenomenon that leans towards issues of mass communication but at the same time doesn’t seem to make sense without a focus on the interpersonal aspects and questions raised by the interactive multimedia experience.

Finally, the history of the phenomenon plays an important role. Computer games come with strong fast food connotations. The birth of the games into a masculine pubertarian environment has placed them solidly among the lowest low of popular culture – an area that has not traditionally enjoyed great academic interest. With the convergence of media studies and cultural studies and the more general rehabilitation of phenomena of popular culture, however, this is about to change. Hopefully this article may speed up the process however slightly.

The dangerous pictures

The mass cultural connotations of the visual media still bring them into conflict with a more traditional concept of quality and artistic as well as general value. At the same time playing is not traditionally seen as a very productive activity (or at least as an activity pertaining specifically to childhood). In a childhood environment of professional caretakers the children sense an opposition towards the idea of the machine as toy. The reason for this, according to child culture researcher Carsten Jessen, is that the pedagogues “do not perceive the computer as an appropriate activity for small children. The computer is viewed, as is television, as a sort of ‘passive entertainment’, which may make the children antisocial, reduce the scope of their imagination and have destructive effects on playing.”

The hostile attitude may in part be traced to Herbert Krugman who, in the sixties, performed a series of EEG experiments on children to measure their brain activity while they were watching television. The quite controversial experiment showed that the alpha waves of the brain of a television viewer corresponded to those of a sleeping person and were quite different from those of a (book) reader.

These results where popularized by Jerry Mander in an all-out-attack on the television medium (Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, 1978) and were highly compatible with Neil Postman’s description of the dangers of using television for educational purposes other than showing the harmful nature of the medium. These television pessimists picked up on the thoughts of Marshall MacLuhan’s description of how the visual medium brought along a regression to a pre-textual form of thought and therefore was a threat to the dominance of rationality.

MacLuhan saw the visual media as involving the user in a much more unreflexive manner than the distance demanding and rationality-motivating book. But in contrast to MacLuhan who had made serious reservations and primarily had sought to start a debate on the new media his heirs were overwhelmingly critical and unconditionally worried about the harmful effects of television. Their popular scientific work may be considered to bear much of the blame for the educational distrust of visual media.

One may, however, also have to look for the explanation in the classical misgivings about commercial popular culture. Furthermore it is possible that this new unknown sphere of youth culture is perceived negatively by the older generation because it symbolizes something uncontrollable and unknown. In the words of psychologist Eugene Provenzo: “Concern on the part of parents and other members of the adult community may in fact reflect their fear of losing control over youth populations.”

The history of computer games

Carsten Jessen and Lis Fauerholdt probably represent the most serious research done on the subject in Denmark. With a media ethnographic focus on concrete situations – for example the Introduction of Doom II (ID soft, 1994) in a youth club – it has been possible to attack (if not downright falsify) some of the commonly accepted premises of the debate. No, computer games are not used to replace human interaction and no, there is no obvious link between the apparent themes of the games and subsequent behavior patterns of players. The qualitative approach has hereby proven its relevance. What one may specifically miss at this point is the quantitative basis for generalizing the conclusions.

There is also a need for the understanding of the history of the phenomenon. Even Jessen and Fauerholdt display a fumbling insecurity when seeking to describe the experience of playing. The game Doom is describes as having a three dimensional interface and it is claimed that the playing experience may be “compared to walking with a video camera held to the eye and seeing the world through it”.

Now computer games have something in common with film – both are two-dimensional representations of a three-dimensional world. There is therefore nothing particularly three-dimensional about the interface and there is nothing new about the ability to move into the picture. What powers of explanation the video camera hold isn’t obvious either. But the confusion illustrates the need for a common frame of reference.

The very first computer game was Spacewar from 1961. It was an explosive feat of invention but the popularity of the game was limited by the fact that it could only run on mainframes the size of two-room apartments. Spacewar went through innumerable changes but it was basically a dogfight between two spaceships in a sharply defined space. This space, the locked screen, was to limit the activity of the player for many years to come.

Ten years after the birth of Spacewar arcade games started to become common. Most often, however, you had to go to specially established arcades that were built in connection with other leisure activities such as movie theaters and malls. Unique among those compelling game boxes was Space Invaders (Taito, Bally Midway, 1978). The popularity of thiis game broke the confinement of the arcades and brought the machines out of the subcultural semi-darkness and into restaurants and caf´s.

Meanwhile creative programmers started to surpass the traditional limits. It was obvious that the single screen picture was unnecessarily restraining and in an attempt to break the rigid boundaries of game depth the late seventies saw the arrival of the adventure game with the prototype Adventure as founder. The game was available to North American Universities with access to ARPAnet (a precursor of the Internet). Adventure (AKA Advent or Colossal Cave) worked by a completely textual interface describing the action and environment of the protagonist (in response to commands such as ‘go north’ or ‘look at tree’).

This textual interface (parser) was important as it allowed the player to interact with the game in a far more complex fashion than previous multiple-choice-interfaces (where one might for example be asked to choose between three options). Adventure was, however, obviously poorly designed to part the arcade guests from their quarters so the development split into two tracks.

With the development of more exploration oriented games it became obvious that a more mature audience was ready to spend days and nights completing these purely textual and generally inflexible constructs. Apparently these players hungered for interactivity – for the possibility of active participation. Companies such as Atari started to tentatively probe the potential market for home based game machines. And the demand was hard to miss. So the arcades and the home consoles developed in a parallel manner over the years – in commercial competition but especially as mutually supplementing phenomena. Technological innovations have almost always been initiated in the arcades but the personal computer games have bet on the development and complexity of form. Companies such as Atari have wisely sought to spread over both markets.

The 1980′s saw an almost violent development of the adventure genre, which was supplied with graphics and a more accessible interface. The action genre pushed the capacity of machines ahead and reached a peak with Gauntlet (Atari, 1985) which permitted four players to play simultaneously. It’s interesting to note how the possibility of ‘constructive’ teamwork made Gauntlet at least as popular as the traditional kill-or-be-killed multiplayer type.

The strategy genre developed in the late eighties as a more flexible and variable variant of the adventure game. Early triumphs such as Pirates (Microprose, 1987) and SimCity (Maxim, 1989) established the genre as a significant alternative to the adventure genre which now (with certain significant exceptions) has slipped into the background.

The chief reason for the (relative) decline of the adventure game is probably the development in the last five years towards still more open and user-autonomizing game structures. Wolfenstein 3D (ID Soft, 1993) was not only a technically superior action game but also marked the arrival of a completely new concept of the structure of the computer game.

This digital change of paradigms may be described as an expansion of interactivity. Not only is the player the force behind the plot. He, and I do of course mean he, is now also empowered to negotiate the frame of this plot. Modern action and strategy games may of course be played as they are but the creative player can now construct his own levels, his own sound effects, down- and upload add-ons and changes from the Internet.

Not only has this development placed some of the artistic responsibility with the player but the player has also moved himself in search of networks. Modern computers are of course connected and this gives the games a whole new potential. Several thinking beings may now act in the same fictive world at the same time. Omnipresent Internet caf´s testify to the importance of this new quality. Complex worlds may now be explored together, fearful battles may be fought without danger to life or limb.

Chasing the effect

The last sentence is worth noticing because many are not satisfied with life and limb. The debate concerning computer violence circles to no small degree around the children’s souls and the effect of violent images upon said soul

A particularly revealing comment comes from former member of the [Danish] Children’s Council Frode Muldkj´r: “Image violence floods our children through film, video, computer games, Internet, and commercials. Isn’t it a strange society that just says that those things have ‘little or no effect?’”. I, however, would personally like to ask if it isn’t a society at least as strange that just says that we should, on principle, be afraid of that of which we really know nothing.

The question of violence is, as sociologist Henrik Dahl has put it, the Loch Ness Monster of media research. We have searched and searched and only found what corresponds to unfocused photographs of dubious contours. But as I hope to have hinted at the violence question is but one of many possible scientific perspectives. The exceptionally gender-specific appeal is well worth examining just as the skill evolving aspects and social function of games have to this date have only been touched upon sporadically.

The road ahead

All the dangers of text analysis lurk around the corner for the person who tries to analyze the themes of the games. The existing efforts to construct complex structuralist analysis or psychoanalytically inspired readings have resulted in nonsense and largely irrelevant abstractions.

When J. Staalby in a Danish thesis (Computerspil, tekst og tegn. RUC, 1995) hunts the connection between the graphical appearance of Doom and Jaques Lacan’s theories about the perceptions of young children the result is somewhat strained. When media researcher Jens F. Jensen tries to lay bare the structure of Space Invaders using the narrative schemas of Propps developed to understand the structure of Russian fairy tales the explanatory value is rather limited. The players often use the computer as a toy whereupon the theme of their play is projected – rather than the reverse.

It is to a high degree still the child who defines the frames and direction of the playing or in the words of Carsten Jessen: “It is, however, worth noticing that the program does not control the content of the play activity. It is the children themselves who define the space and content that the playing develops and this often happens in contrast to that which the programs explicitly calls for.”

As an equivalent of the ’subversive’ reading of reception analysis it can be noted how the players often find great satisfaction in using the games in ways that are totally unpredictable to the outsider. The intertextual element of games also plays a significant role – a role which is of course completely overlooked when bloody images such as the above one from Doom flood the debate on a tidal wave of moral panic.

The fact that computer games refer ironically to each other is almost as a matter of definition hard to spot for the outsider. And ‘outsider’ is an apt description of the main characters of the debate and the, often educationally oriented, experts appointed to protect children and young people from inappropriate influence.

As I have implied the media ethnographic perspective seems to hold the greatest power of explanation. This method has shown how games are often used socially and it has been suggested that the games must be seen in connection with a focus on the general nature of play. Further along this path is materializing the promising perspective that the reason why human beings play in the first place is the possibility to acquire skills in simulated situations.

It is probable that one when applying this perspective will come to the conclusion that certain computer games may in fact contribute with more contemporarily relevant skills than both brisk strolls and books filled with learning.

Further reading

• Carsten Jessen: http://www.hum.ou.dk/center/kultur/CJ.html
• The arcade game museum Videotopia: http://www.videotopia.com/control.htm
• Thesis on interactive fiction:
• http://nickm.www.media.mit.edu/people/nickm/srthesis/index.html
• Survey of Danish computer game player habits: http://computerspil.cjb.net

With thanks to Rachel Dalton