Taking Games Seriously

The idea drives the intelligentsia nuts, but it's becoming clearer all the time that culture isn't being destroyed online but re-invented here. This sensibility is behind a new Web site that takes the culture of gaming as seriously as it deserves to be. (Read More)

"The spirit of the hacker is one of the great creative wellspings of our time, causing the inanimate circuits to sing with ever more individualized and quirky voices; the spirit of the bard is eternal and irreplaceable, telling us what we are doing here and what we mean to each other." -- Janet Murray, Hamlet On The Holodeck

What will it take, wondered MIT Professor Murray in her classic 1997 book, for authors to create rich, satisfying stories that exploit the charactertistic properties of digital environments and deliver the aesthetic pleasures that cyberspace seems to promise?

For Murray, one of the first academics to take seriously the evolving digital world as culture, there's no doubt that the next Shakespeare will come from cyberspace.

Her prediction was especially bold at a time when the Net had already become almost synonymous with obsession, addiction, bomb-making, gun-buying, and porn. But day by day, it's clearer that she was right. Culture isn't being destroyed online, but re-invented. The next Shakespeare is probably clacking away on some Weblog or messaging system. In our time, the Net is where smart, curious, freedom-seeking and restlessly creative minds go to express themselves, experiment, and create a new kind of culture.

Wherever he or she is, her work will probably pop on a Web site something like MyVideoGames.com, launched a few months ago by Neil Morton and Steve Park, two former editors of the culture-savvy Canadian magazine Shift.

MyVideoGames is already an important site, just by dint of its existence. It acknowledges, implicitly and explicitly, that games are no longer simple forms of entertainment, but increasingly creative, complex -- even political -- expressions of the new culture forming online. It's the gaming equivalent of the newsmagazine in the media world of yore - stylish, literate, interesting.

The site offers breaking vid news, reviews, profiles of game heroes and heroines, and essays. One recent edition featured reports on the sleazy days of gaming, and the controversial "tits-and-ass game" Panty Raider, as well as ruminations on the sometimes-addictive nature of creative games. Such a site, almost inconceivable even five years ago, now seems a benchmark of the way new media evolve to recognize and shape new culture. The mainstream press, as usual, gets left behind, clucking about the new world like Temperance Ladies outside a bar.

It makes sense that this new kind of medium is forming around a complex community of gamers who seek not only amusement but intellectual challenge, stimulation, role-playing and community. Gaming is becoming a bigger part of the cultural lives of more and more people all the time. On eBay, some game characters are auctioned for tens of thousands of dollars. Barely recognized off-line at all, gamers number in the tens of millions, a following as large or larger than that which follows many traditional forms of culture -- opera, classical music. Gaming, given the storytelling inherent in video and computer games, is perhaps the most vital new cultural form emanating from cyberspace. Many games have evolved far beyond mind games like chess and Scrabble. Their characters, storylines and intellectual challenges are demanding and highly evolved.

This isn't by accident. The formulaic nature of storytelling, Murray points out, makes it especially suitable for the computer, so skilled at modeling and reproducing patterns of all kinds.

The idea of cyberspace as culture is a particularly bitter pill for many of the shapers of thought and opinion -- educators, academics, journalists, writers, members of the clergy, the so-called intelligentsia -- to stomach. In fact, Murray still has few colleagues supporting her contention that networked computing is re-shaping culture in diverse and highly creative ways.

Undaunted, Murray began teaching a course in electronic fiction in l992. "These stories cover every range and style, from oral histories to adventure tales, from the exploits of comic book heroes to domestic dramas." She is, she writes in her book, drawn more and more each year to imagining "a cyberdrama of the future ... I see glimmers of a medium that is capacious and broadly expressive, a medium capable of capturing both the hairbreadth movements of individual human consciousness and the colossal crosscurrents of global society. Just as the computer promises to re-shape knowledge in ways that sometimes complement and sometimes supercede the work of the book and the lecture hall, so too does it promise to reshape the spectrum of narrative expression, not by replacing the novel or the movie but by continuing their timeless bardic work within another framework."

Murray's idea will remain bitterly controversial for some time, especially among the guardians of conventional culture. But that's exactly the sensibility that pervades MyVideoGames.com, from Sean Monkman's essay on the physical challenges of videogames on the hands to Jonathan Kay's heartfelt -- and very truthful -- essay on how vid-games became the "ultimate scapegoat" after the Columbine High School massacre in l999.

Morton and Parks got the idea for MyVideoGame last October after they noticed half the workers in the Shift offices playing and talking constantly about games, and organizing get-togethers to play after work.

"So, I thought, heck, I gotta start a site that focuses on nothing but that," he e-mailed. "Videogames are a new mass medium. So let's do real videogame journalism like [Jann] Wenner did with music when he started Rolling Stone." Morton and Parks noticed that while a number of sites were devoted to cheats and reviews, hardly any focused on gaming's growing importance as a cultural force. "So we made a quick adjustment ... Let's focus on implications, not just applications of gaming." The site began soliciting contributions from academics and journalists, game addicts, designers and players.

With the result, Norton and Parks have made a bit of media history, once again demonstrating how mainstream journalism has napped through many significant, if less sensational, parts of the digital revolution. MyVideoGame.com recognizes precisely what Janet Murray describes so convincingly in Hamlet On The Holodeck, now out in paperback from MIT Press.

One of the most vigorous, rapidly expanding forms of popular culture, games are growing astonishingly inventive, creative, challenging and complex. Some, without question, are works of art both graphically and conceptually. For growing numbers of Americans and people elsewhere in the world, gaming is intrinsically conected to story-telling, mental stimulation and recreation, for all that school administrators, politicians and many parents still don't get it -- or fear it.

Murray's notion of the transformative power of computing as an advance in the history of narrative also is reflected on the discussions and editorial agenda of myvideogames.com.

"Computers offer us countless ways of shape-shifting," writes Murray. "Using 'morphing' software, we can transform faces so seamlessly that a grinning teenage boy melts into a haggard old woman, as if under a magic spell. The transformative power of the computer is particularly seductive in narrative environments. It makes us eager for masquerade, eager to pick up the joystick and become a cowboy or a space fighter, eager to log onto the MUD and become ElfGirl or BlackDagger."

Comments

As a service to /. readers...

[Rombuu]

I have taken Jon's article, run it through Microsoft Word 97's Autosummarize feature, and posted the results here, so thatyou may enjoy, pure, distilled if you will JonKatz, in one-tenth of the normal time. The faint of heart and pregnant women should probably avoid this summary. Lets see what happens...

Culture isn't being destroyed online, but re-invented. The site offers breaking vid news, reviews, profiles of game heroes and heroines, and essays. Gaming, given the storytelling inherent in video and computer games, is perhaps the most vital new cultural form emanating from cyberspace. Many games have evolved far beyond mind games like chess and Scrabble. Murray's idea will remain bitterly controversial for some time, especially among the guardians of conventional culture. One of the most vigorous, rapidly expanding forms of popular culture, games are growing astonishingly inventive, creative, challenging and complex.

Save six bucks.

[Golias]

Don't bother buying this paperback. I can summarize it and every literary "futurist" book about the "computer revolution" for you in a fraction of the space. All you need to do is define your variables, and it boils down to this:

I think that $CURRENT_TREND is forcing us to re-examine our entire culture.

With my vast imagination, I predict a time when these developments could lead to $OBVIOUS_APPLICATION.

Other clueless liberal-arts majors in my field scoff at the notion, because they don't "get it" like I do.

Technical experts tell me that all this is currently impossible, but that will all change once $FAR_OFF_BREAKTHROUGH happens, and we should be ready.

I have no idea what it will take to make this a reality, but that's because I'm a big-picture person, not a detail person.

You geeks, who clearly never would have thought of this without me, should all get behind my vision so we can make $OBVIOUS_APPLICATION happen someday.

The much maligned "intelligentsia"

[jass]

I am often considered part of the much maligned "intelligentsia"; I'm
a professor at the most famous Ivy League University (along with being
a partner at a software startup). And I for one *do* think that video
games *may* become the central artform of the 21st century. At the
beginning of the 20th century, film was a used for little more than
silly experiments and peep-shows that people who could not afford the
theater attended. But by any reasonable measure film became (along
with the novel) the great artform of the 20th century: Kurosawa,
Bergman, Kubrick etc.

But greatness is just the promise of video games. No video game has
achieved anywhere near the sublime greatness of ``Wild Strawberries''
(a better example for this audience would probably be ``2001''). I do
think, however, that video games may achieve greatness sometime in
this century. Such video games will almost certainly look vastly
different than they do today.

I usually don't bash J. Katz, but this post was aggressively stupid.
Katz often rants about the stereotyped, oppressed geek. But I guess
stereotyping the ``intelligentsia'' is fair game. Nowhere does he
present the arguments that *SOME* in the ``intelligentsia'' would make
against video games---arguments with which I do not agree. He just
bashes them for their conclusions.

Moreover, I would welcome the next ``Shakespeare''. But given that we
haven't had one since the original, I'm not holding my breath. We've
had great, fantastic wonderful writers and artists, but no one with
the overwhelming culture transforming power which was Shakespeare. I
refer Katz to Harold Bloom's masterpiece ``Shakespeare: The Invention
of the Human''. But wait, offer a reference? That's just what
someone who's part of the ``intelligentsia'' would do! Never mind
that Harold Bloom (who is a professor at Yale) is much hated by many
members of the literary establishment. Does that still qualify him as
a member of the ``intelligentsia''? I thought only geeks were allowed
to disagree and have the right not to be stereotyped. Then again,
many members of the ``intelligentsia'' are geeks, one would say most
members if one follows Katz's very expansive definition of geek. MR.
Katz you are full of contradictions. I wish that were the only
problem that the post had.