NOTE: The full version, complete with full-color images, is available here: Visual Communication Seminar Paper
Do You Want To Play a Game?
A Visual Presentation of Adversarial and Non-adversarial Gaming
Sean J. Callot
English 853
Dr. Holmevik
29 April 2008
Introduction
Games are cool. In one form or another, games offer, at the very least, distractive entertainment value to a wide cross-section of the public. Whether the games people play are simple tabletop card games or advanced, futuristic first person shooters, the result is always the same. A person plays a game in order to enjoy a diversion from the normal day to day experience.
Electronic games, especially video games, have thoroughly permeated popular culture. One has only to turn on the television these days to be greeted, at one point or another, with advertisements for video games or video game-generated content. The television programs South Park and CSI: New York each included game content into their 2007-08 seasons. Artists have incorporated video games into their work. Electronic music artists Eiffel 65 and Aphex Twin included references to video games explicitly in several of their albums. Electronic gaming comprises a significant proportion of holiday spending every year. Video games are here to stay.
Even more interestingly, those who play these games, called gamers, have begun banding together to form discourse communities. Often these communities form cooperative gaming organizations, called either clans or guilds depending on the gaming conditions and the discourse community’s disposition toward gaming taxonomy. These organizations will engage each other in competitive tournaments, using multiplayer or even massively multiplayer gaming platforms, playing for prestige, respect, and, on occasion, prize money.
Outside of cooperative gaming communities, there are also significant discourse communities designed around single-player gaming systems. These communities rise to support gamers in completing difficult solo games and serve to enhance the overall game experience. Some of these communities produce user-generated content, including additional gameplay scenarios, expanded arsenals of weapons and special items, and even stand-alone viewable media. These communities are not limited to combat-oriented games, though games whose main premise involves defeating an adversarial enemy with often over-the-top violence seem to provide a significant driving force for such communities.
These communities describe the divide in genres between adversarial and non-adversarial games. Adversarial games focus on a struggle between good and evil (or, in some cases, evil and different magnitudes of evil). These games are often described as climbing a mountain or completing a journey. As a child, I remember enjoying these games and playing them through to completion. Fellow gamers would brag about “beating” these games in much the same way veterans of war brag about beating their opponents. Phrases such as “Man, I owned Super Mario Brothers 3!” were common in the school yards of the late 1980’s. Sentiments such as this continue to describe this competition between gamers and the games they play. Gamers play adversarial games to beat them, and, upon completion, often relegate these games to the “Played ‘em, beat ‘em” pile. Every gamer seems to have one of these piles, just next to the game console. These piles serve as trophy collections for gamers.
On the other side of the coin, however, are games that cannot be beaten because there is nothing to defeat. Non-adversarial games have no enemy to destroy and no overarching game premise except to score points and have fun. These games include Tetris, Bejeweled, and, in the most extreme case,
Adversarial and non-adversarial games provide entertainment to a large percentage of the population. Even my 67-year-old Texan grandmother enjoys pinball and solitaire on her ancient computer. My 69-year-old grandmother delights in beating her husband, children, and grandchildren at a game of dominoes. Adversarial and non-adversarial games permeate popular culture, and, as such, their allure should not be ignored. What should be understood in each of these genres is that, at the root of everything, they are games people play.
To this end, this combined presentation will demonstrate the differences and similarities between adversarial and non-adversarial games. The theme that runs throughout the several projects which combine to produce a coherent argument about the divide between gamers, and how that divide really does not exist, will be remediation of game content. Remediation, as described by Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin, refers to the incorporation of existing media into an entirely new form of media. Gamers have been engaging in acts of remediation for years, often without even realizing they were doing it. Video game characters and concepts appear on t-shirts and in discussion of various themes in school classrooms. Television routinely remediates video game content in order to prove a point.
One example of remediation which comes to mind is an episode of the Adult Swim claymation short Robot Chicken, where stylized versions of Mario and Luigi meet their unfortunate doom in Vice City. This city, the setting of what has arguably been considered one of the most subversive and dangerous games ever created, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, is rife with violence, drugs, prostitution, and even more graphic violence. By incorporating the heroes of one of Nintendo’s most family-friendly action-adventure heroes in this subversive setting, the creators of Robot Chicken were able to extract more than just laughs from the audience. This sequence invited gamers everywhere to consider “mashing up” different game styles and genres to create new experiences.
It is in the spirit of mash ups like this that this project hopes to address the issue of adversarial and non-adversarial gaming. There are four main components this project will produce. The first is creating an avatar in the three-dimensional virtual environment, Second Life. This sub-project will attempt to incorporate both sides of the adversarial and non-adversarial gaming issue into one anthropomorphic character. This may seem to be a difficult and insurmountable task, especially given the limitations inherent in creating an avatar. However, by using only user-generated items, clothing, and a generic animation and skin motif, and combining these components, using the game’s own control interface and a little skillful arrangement of those controls, this project will demonstrate that it is possible for one avatar to encompass two sides of the same coin. The avatar will serve as an example of how gamers themselves have to divide their attention between immersive adversarial games and their more casual non-adversarial counterparts.
The second portion of this presentation will focus on static digital imagery. This proves more limiting that the avatar sub-project, as these images have to be static displays of two disparate ideas of gaming. To address this, components of popular adversarial games will be combined with aspects of non-adversarial games to construct a complete remediation. New concept games, including screenshots of possible gameplay in some cases, will be developed. These images will, again, demonstrate that though adversarial and non-adversarial games may address different issues with different methodology, they are still all united in the fact that they are games.
The next sub-project will be a machinima video production. Machinima videos allow for remediation of gameplay in order to produce new, user-generated video content using the games people play as the animation platform. The video portion will address the issue of escapist gameplay, which threatens both adversarial and non-adversarial gamers. By producing a machinima, this portion will also include aspects of the discourse community, which often engages in remediation of this type in order to prove a point.
Finally, all component parts of this project will be combined in Second Life in the form of a construction project. This portion of the total project will display all subsequent projects in a format best fitting the spirit of gamer community. To that end, the construction project will attempt to represent the gamer community in a building.
It is my intention for all of these components to be taken as a whole in order to fully understand the concept of adversarial and non-adversarial gaming. The next few pages will hopefully demonstrate this concept.
Meet Jacques Morrisey: The Second Life Avatar as an Expository Tool
The avatar in Second Life is a representation of everything a player wants. The avatar can do anything, make anything, and be anything. The avatar can be a vampire, a giant winged daemon, a politician, a mercenary, or a small fuzzy rabbit. Using an avatar to relate to concepts of visual communication, however, provides the user with an interesting challenge. How best to describe the inner workings of a concept in a movable anthropomorphic example?
In this example, the concept at play is adversarial and non-adversarial gaming. The image of the gamer, possibly best described by Brad Paisley in his song “Online,” is of an overweight 30-something loser who still lives with his parents. Those who embrace the gamer culture as an addiction often find themselves faced with this socially unacceptable lifestyle. For a number of gamers, this is the life they have chosen.
However, not all gamers are unsuccessful slobs. In fact, in 2004, video game sales reached $9.9 billion. Sales figures increased to $12.5 billion in 2006. It is obvious that these sales can not be made entirely to parents of children, nor can a population of young adults with small living expenses support this industry. There has to be a class of game enthusiasts who are much more than just casual gamers, who use games as a way to relax after a hard day’s work. It is also possible that these gamers use games in their daytime hours as stress relief in the office, but prefer some meatier, more visceral fare when they’ve returned home at the end of the day. Jacques Morrisey is one of these gamers.
Jacques Morrisey is the name given to an avatar in the online virtual community Second Life (hereafter SL). In this environment, Jacques Morrisey represents a different kind of avatar. Initially, Jacques is unassuming. He wears a dark suit of clothes, sunglasses (but only when it is sunny outside), dark shoes, a light grey shirt, and has his average length hair styled with gel and bangs. His hands are held in a default position, with no major features. He doesn’t really engage in much conversation outside of academic discussion with other serious gamers. It is very easy to imagine Jacques as a middle-level corporate executive, working in an office, sorting through reports, meeting with clients. It is also easy to imagine Jacques playing solitaire on is work desktop, or Tetris on his mobile communication device.
This is not to say that Jacques doesn’t have friends. His saved logs include several intellectual conversations with his associates and colleagues. He spends most of his time in SL shopping for clothes or creating objects at the
Despite his button-down, chic exterior, Jacques has another lifestyle he maintains. At the drop of a hat, Jacques’ form changes from a simple office jockey into a stone-cold combat operator. His clothes shift from dark modern textures into the stark pattern of desert-colored tiger stripe camouflage. His shoes are replaces with jump boots. His hair is covered with a Kevlar helmet. His sunglasses vanish, and body armor, combat belt, and a backpack appear. He even brandishes a mean-looking assault rifle, complete with a sound suppressor and red dot scope. He maintains the same, confident, cold stare that he held in his “day job” look. Jacques Morrisey looks more French Foreign Legion than Banana Republic.
In this example, the duality of the modern gamer is evident. While the understated, clean cut Jacques doesn’t turn many heads, the much more adversarial-appearing Jacques turns heads deliberately in the other direction. While Jacques would not openly brandish his weapon against someone else (the rifle is equipped with non-lethal ammunition that pushes other avatars around, but causes no harm), he does look like he means business. In a world of scantily-clad tiger-girls and giant bat-winged vampire boys, Jacques brings a level of cold lethality to the environment. It is easy to imagine Jacques stepping off a helicopter in
The gaming life of Jacques Morrisey, and his physical representations of that lifestyle, demonstrates the dualism most gamers experience in their daily lives. In a society that places a high premium on hard work, and holds leisure activities in much lower regard, the gamer has to put on their suit of “normal clothes” to go to work and support their lifestyle. Gamers who actually manage social lives, a population which is garnering a much larger percentage of the gaming culture, may even have husbands, wives, and children to provide for. Responsibilities and commitments limit the gamer’s abilities of self-expression and enjoying their favored past time.
When gaming opportunities arise, either in group encounters over a table top role-playing game, or through a video game console, true gamers embrace the opportunity to play. After all, for a gamer who had been turned into an eggplant in Kid Icarus, slain Ganon in The Legend of Zelda, or waited in sub-zero temperatures for Star Fox’s US release, it is difficult to put away the memories of a lifetime. Modern game systems, with price tags reaching $500 or more, and games retailing for $60 a piece, provide amazing graphics and immersive game play experiences. It is easy for an older, serious gamer to seize the opportunities to play these new games and relive some of their old memories in new forms.
The nature of modern games has changed, however. Where before gamers had the opportunity to step away from a game for a can of the “New Coke,” modern game systems require almost complete attention to be successful. Multiplayer games, especially PC-based Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games, passively or even actively punish gamers who do not fully dedicate themselves to the totally immersive nature of the game. While this can be destructive, serious gamers are more adept at maintaining this balance between their working life, their personal life, and their gamer life.
This balance is what Jacques Morrisey represents. He is equally comfortable and confident wearing his “normal clothes” as he is in full combat gear. Games, for him, are a means for releaing his aggression and frustration in a form that is less destructive than actually engaging his real-world adversaries in armed conflict. In the game world, shooting someone is the name of the game most of the time. In the real world, non-adversarial games are the order of the day. Actual physical violence is prohibited, for the most part, in the modern corporate world. The immersive nature of the modern combat game, additionally, is counter-productive to most business’ corporate strategies. For a gamer to have some release, or to help the lunch hour be more enjoyable, or just to waste a few minutes between assignments, non-adversarial games such as Tetris or Sudoku, both available on any computer with an internet connection or any mobile device. These games allow for distraction, but not to the point of categorical exclusion.
Jacques’s clothing and accessories represent this balance between the outside world of the corporate shill and the inner life of a serious gamer. For Jacques Morrisey, a second reality in Second Life may seem like a layer too far. For the conscientious and serious gamer, this interweaving of levels of existence is only too familiar.
Come Get Some… FUN!!! Digital Remixes as Non-Violent Remediation
Broadly speaking, there are two major categories of video games which people play. There are adversarial games, where the player maneuvers a character or group of characters through a conflict with an opposing force. These games can be played as one character against the world, as has been the case virtually since the beginning of modern video games. They may be played by several players at once, either pitted against each other, as the original Pong was meant to be played, or allied against an opposing force, either human-controlled or computer controlled. These kinds of games are the games Jacques Morrisey embodies when he switches his clothes from his usual black suit into desert camouflage. These are the games about which conservative organizations rage – the games parents swear never to give to their children, for fear of creating sociopaths, but always do.
Then there are the non-adversarial games. These games are almost exclusively single player affairs. There is just one human playing a game without an opposing force arranged against him. There are no enemies to shoot or blow up, but only a desk with a pack of cards, or a pinball machine display. The player plays the game not to beat the computer, but simply to play. These are the kinds of games the come pre-loaded in Windows. These games do not have any objective or any end goal aside from just free play.
Games of this type are epitomized by
Be they Solitaire or Soldier of Fortune, games provide a much-needed distraction for some gamers, and a way of life for others. Since the overall focus of this project is to examine the duality of games and what each kind of game, adversarial or otherwise, provides the player, it seems important to note that these two broad categories could be mixed. While this has been done successfully in some cases, it can become the most loathed kind of video game of them all: laughably unplayable.
To provide perspective, take, for example, the case of Metroid Prime Pinball. In my younger years, before I found the joy that can be derived from blowing Nazis away with a submachine gun in Wolfenstein 3D, I played non-adversarial games almost exclusively. Ever since I can remember, I would play educational games in my mother’s classroom while she graded assignments or wrote out lessons plans. On the weekends, however, I would become fascinated by the blinking lights and pinging sounds of the pinball machines at the local pizza parlor. Since those early experiences listening to The Who rock out about the Pinball Wizard and hammering away the ancient pinball machine in the back corner of the waiting area at the Pizza Hut, I’ve been interested in pinball. Dad said that pinball would help with coordination, and Mom liked that I was out of her hair for a little while. I remember hearing a radio report on NPR a long time ago which described pinball as a “pure game.” There is no adversary and no impetus to play aside from the ability to increase your score and hone your reflexes.
It seemed inevitable that pinball would fade from gaming culture, as games began to include more realistic graphics and advanced, real physics engines. Adversarial games took to these advances more readily, as a realistic game experience would draw larger audiences to these games. Non-adversarial games really didn’t demonstrate the kind of advances in gaming technology that could be found in the latest engines coming out of Valve’s studios. However, the pinball game, which used beautiful table art and realistic sounds to draw people into playing for hours, appeared to be a perfect platform for advanced game technology. Metroid Prime Pinball demonstrates this, and introduced a real example of how adversarial games could be relaxed into a more casual gaming experience.
Metroid Prime Pinball places the player in the role of Samus Aran, an intergalactic bounty hunter tasked with hunting down the vilest adversaries in the galaxy: the Space Pirates. Her story is told across several games, ranging from Nintendo’s Metroid to the Nintendo Wii’s Metroid Prime 3. In the environment of dangerous and brutal combat against genetically enhance intergalactic buccaneers, Rare Games decided to produce a game where Samus Aran rolls around the environments from the fourth game, Metroid Prime, in her Marius ball form. The player controls the flippers and bounces Samus around the environment, smashing into bumpers and targets, racking up high scores, and unlocking new environments in which to play. There are the remnants of the story from the original game, but the player is free to ignore the story line and engage in free play. Rare successfully transferred an adversarial game into a non-adversarial distraction.
In light of this basic concept, I decided to modify two equally adversarial first person shooters into non-adversarial games. Microsoft’s Halo places the hero, Master Chief, against the insurmountable forces of the Covenant. I decided to remove Master Chief from the display and place the player in the role of a commander of blocks in Tetris Wars.
The goal of this game is to win points by dropping blocks into formation and clear lines across the play area. Multiple lines at once earn larger scores. However, from time to time, witty Covenant forces will appear on the screen to menace the player. By dropping a block onto the brute, the player can earn bonus points. An example of typical game play, including the disparaging Covenant Brute’s realization that his life is a lie and that the player truly is a supreme commander of eight-bit falling blocks, is displayed here.
Progress in the game will be rewarded with advanced difficulty settings, including Veteran and Brutal, as well as advanced play area skins depicting scenes from the Halo universe. The game would ship with an ESRB rating of T (for Teen) due to language.
The second example of modification of an adversarial game in a non-adversarial fashion involves Duke Nukem. This hyper-violent, misogynistic, foul-mouthed man’s man engaged invading aliens in a line of third and fourth generation games named for the protagonist. However, during this remix of the original game concept, the player takes control of Duke as a dancer, cutting loose after destroying a priceless alien battle station in Earth’s asteroid belt. The game concept crosses the sexuality of Duke’s favorite strippers with the athletics and dexterity of Duke’s combat skills in a round-robin free dance experience.
Players who engage thoroughly in the game, matching the rhythm of the pulsing music with their own fancy footwork, are rewarded with high scores, new songs, and images of Duke’s strippers cheering him on enthusiastically. This game would most likely ship with an ESRB rating of M (for mature) for sexually explicit images, references to alcohol use and sexual situations, and language.
These games transmute the topics and environments gamers have enjoyed for years into less adversarial genres. Players will be able to enjoy their favorite characters and environments while enjoying new, non-adversarial free play game experiences.
Escapist Gaming: The Beatles and World of Warcraft
Like all forms of entertainment, there are members of the gaming community who take their game play too far. These are the unfortunate souls who allow games to replace their work, their education, and their personal lives. These are the people who give playing some kinds of games, such as Massively Multiplayer Role-Playing Games, a bad reputation. These are gamers engage in escapist gaming, supplanting the game world for their own life experience. This kind of gaming places an unfair stigma against gamers, like the aforementioned Jacques Morrisey. However, an analysis of game culture would not be complete without addressing the difficulties gamers face when the game becomes too much.
I felt that the best way to convey this concept of escapist gaming was to use what some members of the gaming community call one of the most addictive and escapist games available, Blizzard Entertainment’s “World of Warcraft” as the platform for a machinima video. Machinima is a technique of video development which uses a pre-generated animation platform, most often a video game, as the video element of a multimedia presentation. A machinima artist stages all of his shots using the video game’s built-in animation engine and captures the screen display of the action using a third-party screen capture program. The video captures are then edited together to tell the artist’s story, often using voice actors to augment or replace the video game’s dialogue with a script written by the artist.
Alternately, as in this project, the artist may opt to replace the soundtrack with a song to create a music video. Since the concept of the video was to examine escapist gameplay, it made sense to use The Beatles’ encore track from Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, “A Day in the Life.” This song depicts the day-to-day life of an unnamed character, and includes such humdrum activities as going to work, catching a bus, drinking coffee, and smoking. However, the main action of the song depicts a character talking to people about things he’s read about in the newspaper or seen at the cinema. The very essence of the song places emphasis on the concept of replacing boring reality with the excitement of events from other people’s lives.
This alternative read of a Beatles classic provided a layout for the development schedule and required scenes for the video capture portion of the project. Using Fraps and Jing, two different screen capture programs, I was able to effectively capture the scenes I arranged in World of Warcraft. The first step was to build a character in WoW which would fit the character concept from the song. Since the character is voiced by John Lennon, it made sense to create a character that looked like John Lennon did in 1967. The character, named Leonen on the WoW server, was built as a human with long brown hair, a brown beard, and a white robe. In order for Leonen to be capable of engaging in the actions the shooting script required, I had to develop Leonen’s character from the most basic, brand new level 1 character into a more developed, more powerful combatant. This demonstrates one important aspect of machinima: when working in a game, the artist needs to understand that the game engine he is using is not designed for multimedia authoring. Especially in adversarial games, the artist needs to plan ahead and develop his characters either in safe areas where they will not be threatened by AI opponents, or integrate those opponents into the action.
Playing with some of the game mechanics and camera tools Blizzard developed for WoW, I then used Leonen to scout shooting locations. Initially, since the majority of the story I developed from the song took place in a city, I took Leonen throughout the human city of
In order to demonstrate the escapist feel, I decided to use still images captured with Jing, a desktop screen capture tool that works best with still images, for all scenes where Leonen is speaking to someone or experiencing something real in his life. I used WoW’s preset animations to give Leonen expressive emotions. For example, when the song’s lyrics have the main character telling someone a story, I commanded Leonen to speak, which would begin a speech animation. In the middle of that animation, I took a still image. This allowed me to use that image for as long a time as I needed in the editing process, rather than the three seconds or so in which Leonen would actually be moving.
The still images, while striking depicting objects or characters in motion, do not actually move. I used this effect to demonstrate how boring and bland Leonen’s real life is. Only when dreaming or when telling a story to someone else does the film use moving video. This places emphasis on the lack of real life excitement Leonen experiences throughout the story. Leonen is boring, but his imagination is vivid. To express this, I changed Leonen’s clothing from his day-to-day clothing (white robes) into a set of armor. Leonen brandishes a warhammer and shield against enemies in Westfall. In the story, Leonen supplants the hero in his stories with himself, pitting himself against incredible odds, slaying vile monsters, and keeping the countryside safe and sound.
For the video sequences, I used a program called Fraps. This program captures at a much higher frame rate than Jing, so the video quality was much better. Also, Fraps captures video as a high-resolution and high-quality .avi format, allowing for much more advanced video editing techniques to be used without loss of image clarity. During gameplay, I would simply press a previously unused key and capture thirty seconds of video. I then imported the video into my editing program.
Using dream sequences of heroic and fanciful events, such as flying a griffin into battle or facing down a horrible flying beast, helps develop Leonen’s insanity into a more tangible state. However, the final sequence, as the orchestra builds from a low mix of sound into a towering, orgasmic crescendo, demonstrates just how far Leonen is willing to take his fantasy. I chose to use a ripple transition instead of a continuous fade out transition in order to demonstrate that, where other action sequences were merely in Leonen’s head, this final scene was actually happening. It’s exciting and in full motion, with Leonen running through the hills of Westfall to engage his opponent. However, he finds himself quickly outmatched, and in the closing notes of the song, the screen goes dark then blinks back, revealing Leonen having fallen as a result of his embracing what he could not do. His imagination wrote a check his body could not cash.
Ultimately, machinima provided the best template for producing an essay on the difficulties gamers face when they internalize their gameplay too deeply. By making a machinima music video with a message, I was able to demonstrate the pitfalls gamers often fall into in an effective format.
So far, as the project has progressed, the concept of adversarial and non-adversarial games have been expressed through the use of a Second Life avatar, several digitally remixed images, and a machinima music video. The emphasis has thus far been placed on the differences between the two broad game genres, focusing on reconciling these differences through various means. However, it is important to note that within the gaming discourse community, there are two prevailing trends. The first, expressed in the video, are the cautionary controls implemented to prevent the kind of escapist gaming that resulted in the unfortunate death of Leonen. The second is expressed in the final portion of the project: the construction of a representation of gamer culture in the form of a church.
Whether they engage in competitive games or cooperative games, gamers play together, enjoy talking about games together, and helping each other get through games. This sense of community has permeated all aspects of gamer culture, and could be considered a belief system. Gamers believe in cooperation and competition. Gamers support each other in much the same way a traditional church community would support itself.
Additionally, certain sects of the Christian and Muslim faiths have demonstrated significant resistance toward video games and those who play them. Gamers are ostracized by large portions of traditional and radical religious organizations. These religious fanatics denounce gamers as worshipping at an altar of a false prophet, and are therefore damned to join the denizens of hell or some other equally horrible place. Gamers, for the most part, do not engage in this kind of finger-pointing except amongst themselves, in much the same way religious sects engage each other in holier-than-thou shouting contests.
Given that gamers engage in many of the same community activities as church organizations do, the design for a gamer church flowed smoothly from concept into actuality. Using the basic construction tools provided by Second Life, building a basic house is relatively simple. However, the design of a gamer church has to be a blend of gamer culture, including adversarial and non-adversarial game genres. To this end, it made sense for Jacques Morrisey, the avatar created in the first portion of the visual construction project, to be the driving creative force for the design and construction of the
The basic design of the church was to be classic and simple, as the earliest Christian churches were. The walls and floor are created using the basic cube templates and given a light blue stone “skin” with a bumpy, concrete-like texture. Blue, as outlined in Kress and Van Leeuwan, is a calming color, and blends nicely into the surrounding landscape of the church grounds on Clemson’s development island. However, it still stands out from the greens and browns of the island just enough for an observer to see it.
The roof is detached from the walls by a couple of meters. This design is to maintain a sense that the church is open to all, since anyone can fly into the church through the door or through the opening between the walls and the ceiling. Gamers are free to join and leave as they please. The church feels truly open. A network of beams holds the fabric roof in place, which provides little more than shade for parishioners. The default pine skin was left on the support beams, which reminds me of the simple outdoor chapels I attended during the war. However, the canvas roof with a diamond-steel texture provides the sense of rigidity and protection most churches attempt to provide.
Entry to the church, as previously stated, is made either through the gap or through the front entrance. There is no door to block people in or out. A stair case leading to the main entrance is partially covered by the rolling hills, whose slight grade allows for wheelchair accessibility. Every aspect of the church has been built for maximum accessibility, within the constraints of the Second Life engine.
Upon approaching the front entrance of the church, visitors are greeted by the bulletin board, which details the latest church services or gaming sessions. The green line emulates the controller cable from an older style game console, and also depicts a link between gamers. After all, in the earliest days of cooperative gaming, a cable was used to connect multiple controllers or game systems together. The details of the service and gaming session are clearly displayed, with the time and date visible as well. Jacques, the pastor, consented to have his image placed on the bulletin board, though his modesty didn’t allow him to look directly at the camera. As a pastor, he decided that having his picture up would help new members identify him, since he does not wear traditional clerical garments.
Inside the church, ten pews are available for gamers to sit and collect their thoughts between services, or to chat and enjoy the company of friends between game sessions. Gamers are also protected from the elements by the simple roof, but are able to hear rain fall or enjoy the beautiful sunshine of the island.
Lining the walls are images of the dreamlike combination of adversarial and non-adversarial games. More information on these image designs is available in the digital remix portion of this paper. However, these games serve as glowing beacons of what gamers should aspire to: combining their competitive nature with their desire for free play. The images themselves were re-imagined to resemble stained glass windows with soft, angelic light flowing through them. This furthers the sense of sitting in a modern church, where beacons of true values are highlighted and illuminated to remind visitors and parishioners of the core tenants of the faith.
At the front of the church is an altar. The altar is little more than a simple table, built using blocks from Tetris. This altar embodies the welcoming, open feel of the church. Anyone is free to approach the altar at any time, and the image of the fallen gaming martyr, Leonen, will greet them. If a visitor wishes to touch the image of Leonen, the image invites the visitor to view the movie of the tragic death of Leonen. At this time, I am still working to link the object to the video’s URL, but interested parties can simply cut and paste the link into their favorite out-world browser. To the right of the altar is the father of modern gaming, Mario himself. I felt that any examination into gaming culture and the fellowship therein wouldn’t be complete without Mario’s presence.
Ultimately, the
Conclusion
To play a game is to join a community. Ancient Greeks and Romans would roll dice made from sheep’s knuckles to play simple gambling games with their friends and comrades. The French and the Germans play cards and dominoes with each other. The Scots play golf. Out in
The gaming community is what this project has centered on. In retrospect, this project could have addressed any of a number of issues the gaming communities address. Focusing on adversarial and non-adversarial gaming proved to be a good device to examine these gaming cultures, but there are many others available. The day before this project was due for submission, I received a book of scholarly articles written in and about World of Warcraft, the same massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) I used to create the machinima video. These articles discuss a number of intellectual issues, from feminism to post-colonialism, from the quest narratives to naming structures. Issues of these kinds are exciting because they are developed from within the WoW communities. These issues are concepts gamers have struggled with and against through the three years the game environment has existed. Any of these many issues could have been addressed visually because WoW is an inherently visual communication medium.
One idea I would have enjoyed examining would have been the structure of so-called raid guilds. These specific communities engage almost exclusively in adversarial combat against AI-controlled enemy non-player characters (NPCs). Raid communities organize group runs against the most difficult dungeons and castles in the game world, focusing on defeating the most difficult enemy NPCs in the game. This kind of combat is interesting and exciting, building communities among the combatants. While players fight enemies, they will discuss things going on in their real lives as well as in the game world. This sense of community helps to keep players playing, but also gives players separated by hundreds or thousands of miles an opportunity to connect with like-minded people.
When I first began to play WoW shortly before the release of the Burning Crusade campaign expansion, I did so because my friends were playing. When they dropped out of the game, I continued to play for a little while. The experience was diminished, however, as I couldn’t talk with my friends in the game world about the things I had accomplished. Internal validation was great, but it just wasn’t the same. So I stopped playing. About a year later, however, at the recommendation of my professors, I rejoined the game. At that moment, I was invited to join their raid guild and participate in their conversations. I was reminded, almost immediately, about how much I enjoyed playing this game with other people.
This community, for me at least, is the driving force behind this and other games. The first of the large-scale role-playing games, Dungeons and Dragons, is entirely built around playing within a community. Gamers meet to play in a user-generated environment, pitting heroic characters against the gamemaster’s diabolical devices and hordes of enemies. A game of D&D can bring together people from different walks of life and allow them to build new communities to share their stories. In my game community, for example, we have a combat veteran, a biologist, two high school teachers, a bio-science engineer, and a mechanical engineer. We each take turns developing challenging gaming scenarios which speak to our specific levels of expertise. We incorporate aspects of our lives into the story, and the community addresses these concepts.
Explaining these kinds of communities, and the issues they address, using visual representations would prove an interesting challenge. After all, how do you explain the anguish and disappointment of a total party kill using visual representations? Remediation would lend interesting opportunities to such a project. Perhaps creating posters warning against a Level 2 party engaging a Death Knight would suit the purpose.
Ultimately, this project allowed the opportunity to build representations of issues gamer communities deal with on a daily basis. I think the sum of the parts proves successful. In remediating certain aspects of games and their component parts, this project examined the nature of adversarial and non-adversarial games and how, in the end, gamers play them because they are games. Gamers talk about games they enjoy and games they hate. Gamers don’t limit their enjoyment by genres of games they play, either adversarial or non-adversarial.
The best example for gamers’ balance of attention between adversarial and non-adversarial games exists in Valve Corporation’s first-person puzzle-shooter game Portal. The player experiences the narrative through the eyes of a test subject. The player character, a woman, is given no “real” weapons aside from the Aperture Science Hand-held Portal Device, a gun which shoots two types of trans-dimensional portals onto certain kinds of surfaces. The player only interacts with the environment and the supervising computer program, which goes unnamed through the program. Initially, the game appears to be just a simple exercise in the intensive practical application of physics, which has many of the key features of a non-adversarial game. The player has only to solve the puzzle and move on to the next. Cake is promised at the end.
However, as the story progresses and the computer program attempts to murder the player character, the player must survive this now adversarial encounter without the benefit of actual bullet-spewing weaponry. The player must think of ways to turn the opponent’s weapons, AI-controlled machine gun and rocket turrets, against their controller. At one point, the adversarial computer program decries the player’s actions as “extremely violent behavior.” Given that the player cannot actively destroy anything except by turning the forces of the environment against itself, this seems false. Even defeating the final enemy, the computer program’s host system, involves using the environment against the adversary. The true weapon, in this case, is the player’s brain.
Portal addresses both adversarial and non-adversarial issues, and redirects opponents’ aggression back against themselves. This game sums up the best of both genres and packages them nicely, with a funny song at the end. Given the opportunity to complete a project of this kind again, I would examine the various aspects of adversarial and non-adversarial gaming using only Portal as the template. The gaming community has expressed deep interest in the issues this game raises, as well as the fantastic level of enjoyment one can derive from simply playing with the physics engine.
However, by combining aspects from different games of different ages, as the digital remix subproject spanned twenty years of video game development, I feel the project completes its assigned task well. The gaming community shares so many games and gaming experiences that to ignore that rich culture, and to limit analysis and creation to only a single game would be insufficient. By combining key concepts from several different aspects of gamer culture, the project is stronger as a result. Even the action of using a song from 1967 Beatles album as the backdrop for a game released almost forty years later addresses this combination.
Gamer communities will continue to evolve and incorporate different aspects of their lives into their games. Jacques Morrisey will continue to play Tetris on his phone, as will millions of gamers around the world. But these gamers will always remember where their desire to play stems from, and anticipate with great enthusiasm where their calloused gaming fingers will take them next.
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