Writing Machines is the course website for English 170L at Pomona College in Claremont, California.
Interactive Fiction Competition and some words on gaming
Submitted by Shock and Awe on 1 October 2006 - 9:06pm.
For those of you interested in further exploring hypertexts/interactive fiction, the twelfth annual Interactive Fiction Competition is going on right now. You can download and judge the entries. Interactive fictions of this sort present the reader with the beginning of the story. Then the reader types in actions for the characters to perform. The story responds by telling what happens as a result of these actions. Your decisions influence the outcome. It very much reminds me of a textual version of a video game like Myst. The reader is presented with an environment and must use their intelligence to navigate through it.
I was very interested by the questions about video games that our discussion about hypertexts led to. Are video games art? Can they be literary? Can they be critiqued as such?
I'd like to hear how some of you feel. Gaming is a completelyl foreign world to me. I recently read that 7 million people across the globe are playing World of Warcraft and it was international news when a guild from the US defeated something called the Four Horsemen. This blew my mind. Seven million people simultaneously involved in a virtual world together, questing and battling from computer screens across the world. Each using their own character. A fantasy self. The possibilities of this type of virtual community daunt me.
I'm intimidated by the sheer amount of time gaming seems to require. I find it ironic that, although we think of technology as making our lives easier, it could actually be making our art much more demanding. At what point does the gamer say, "this is just a game, time to get back to real life." Or is that even a relevant question? Is it just my own bias that leads me to view excessive video game playing as a waste of time? Are we edging toward a world in which success in the virtual world can be just as important as success in the real world?
Even with the very limited number of video games that I've played, I feel confident in saying that the best ones most certainly are art. But I'm still in the dark, and curious, about what media theory has evolved around them, how they see them evolving,and what their place in society will be.
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Video games: an entropic medium?
At what point does the gamer say, "this is just a game, time to get back to real life." Or is that even a relevant question? Is it just my own bias that leads me to view excessive video game playing as a waste of time? Are we edging toward a world in which success in the virtual world can be just as important as success in the real world?
This reminded me of a really creepy (or at least I thought so) article that I read this past spring. It's about an online computer game called Entropia Universe, and according to the chief executive of MindArk, the company that produces Entropia, the ambition of the games creators is that it be "a full second reality" where you can "have fun, make friends, make a business, enjoy music and art and do it in our game." This isn't your run of the mill virtual reality hyperbole. Entropia Universe has a Real Cash Economy, which means that 10 of Entropia's P.E.D.'s (Project Entropia Dollars" equal 1 U.S. dollar, and you can withdraw your P.E.D.'s in dollar form using your ATM card. People do: a player cited in the article makes around $12,000 (that's in real money) per month on his real estate properties, "and his big nightclub is still under construction"; and the total economic activity generated by players last year was $165 million.
Not only that, but this game is huge. According to Wikipedia, over 400,000 participants from over 220 countries belong to Entropia's online community. "The community has produced several real world marriages as well as creating a multitude of cross-border friendships." And you can manipulate your character avatar down to really minute details, like even the position, size, and shape of facial features.
I know I've been going on for a while, but I find this all very weird and very fascinating. A game like this says that the distinction between game universe and real universe is less and less relevant, and that, by pretty much all the standard cultural criteria--social, physical, interpersonal, economic--virtual success is directly convertible into real life money, commodities, and relationships. In all honesty, I probably wouldn't be nearly as creeped out by this premise if it weren't for the name. Entropia? Does that mean that the utopian ideal of this online universe is entropy? In other words, right now the systems and interactions in this virtual universe are as cool and high-participation as can be, but since the entropy of the universe tends to a maximum, the hotter, more fixed surroundings of the Entropia Universe, the program code that doesn't let you choose, will disperse throughout the system until all the heat energy is evenly distributed and the universe suffers a heat death because there's no energy left to sustain movement or life.
Yeah, Entropia is a terrible name.
I linked to this article in
I linked to this article in the wiki when someone wrote World of Warcraft in it, but it's so crazy, I have to link to it again:
World of Warcraft: Is it a game?
People make real live business deals on these things, they meet people, get married, sell clothing - anything you want. People turn this into a living by taking people's characters and getting them a bunch of quick points by playing them for a day - for cash, of course. Someone actually died because they played for too long without eating or sleeping.
hypertext fiction, games, virtual community
Clearly games constitute art -- good art or bad art, as the case may be. But as narrative or literature, they strike differently.
Gameworlds like WoW, Everquest or Entropia manipulate feelings and abstractions that previous generations managed socially, literarily, dramatically, musically, and so forth. I should think a truly comprehensive matrix of criticism could integrate both. But I doubt this happens by transplanting a well developed matrix of literary ideas onto the game world. Integrating game-expression and game-art into our criticism will involve re-thinking literary form as well.
What I'm wondering, then,
What I'm wondering, then, is where we draw the line between literature and games.
I mean, the distinction sounds clear. Obviously there's a difference between playing The Sims and reading a print novel--but the line gets a lot blurrier when we start talking about hypertext fiction. Or wiki fiction, which is capable of being truly multimedia, in the sense that we could embed sounds, images, video clips...
I'm not thinking so much about WoW here, but older games (like Myst) that were limited in their possible outcomes and not so interactive (in the sense that they were single-player games). Does the experience of playing a game like that differ so drastically from, say, reading a hypertext that we can draw a line between them? Either way, you're just navigating someone else's fictional universe, trying to find a pathway that makes sense.
Mysty myst mystoo.
Myst was, in fact, built on a system called HyperCard, which is the same thing StorySpace utilizes. It *is* actually a hypertext. Well, maybe a hyper....space, but if you think about the way you interact with it (the original game, not Riven et al.), it is very much like a hypertext.
I wish I could make something like *that* for my term project.
gaming
Indeed, the world of gaming is fascinating. I recently found out that gamers can use *real* money to buy *fake* virtual weapons for certain games like CS, WoW, etc. Apparently, there are even auctions on ebay for fake virtual weapons that you can use for those games. Anyway, it's a huge industry, and a lot of teenage boys find it to be a highly social hobby, even though one is confined to one's room while playing. Whenever I go over to my cousins' houses for holidays, I see them glued to their computer screens, shooting things and simulataneously talking to their friends. I wish I knew more about these games and what the deal is. Is the game the same every time you play it, or not? Is it like hyperfiction in that in an ultimately fixed world, there are still multiple possibilites? I don't know, but I think the fact that players play each other in real time makes it a different game each time, thus making it more exciting.
The guilds thing reminds me
The guilds thing reminds me of this story my boyfriend was telling me, in which he couldn't go out one evening because he had to "go on a guild run for Andrew."
"As in World of Warcraft guilds? You guys are such big dorks. Why can't Andrew just do this himself?"
"He's going to the beach with his girlfriend's family for the weekend, but if he's not at the guild run through the dungeon, he's seriously weakening his guildmates and their chance at success isn't great. Plus, dungeon runs get you all sorts of points. But he couldn't get out of this thing at the beach -"
"He wanted to get out of it?"
"- and so he's got me playing for him."
"So being in a guild is an actual commitment to a team, like...like sports?"
So from this conversation with someone who knows, gaming is an actual responsibility at a certain level. Which is totally weird to me.