Game Spaces (up for a re-write)

Video games have a limited appeal and cultural relevance. These things are growing, certainly, but in their current form and with their current direction they will always be limited. By this I don't mean limited like books are limited to those who can read, I mean limited to a minority population that won't grow (mostly because gamers don't really breed well).

To track the train of thought: Read this article on DS Fanboy in my farting about today. Understood that of course people who are playing their DSes don't want to talk to their DSes: they don't want to talk to anyone. They're playing video games. They're absorbed into that little world and they don't want to share it. Into that little world. And therein lies the limiting factor: video game systems are considered a portal into the software's world, as opposed to a portal for the software to enter our world.

Why is this bad? It's not bad, it's just limiting.

I think of the most fun I've had playing games, the standout experiences. There was the time as kids when my older brother's friends were playing Monopoly with us and one of them offered the few remaining players actual, real money for the remainder of their properties and Monopoly money. There was another time when the side of my family that basically only gets together for weddings and funerals tried to play Cranium. My little brother was charged with humming "Brick House," which he did, thumping out the baseline and everything, but his teammates just didn't get it, as they'd never heard the song before, or never listened to it at any rate. Just the other night a friend was telling me about a new game he bought that charged him with building a snorkel and mask from household items and I'm totally sold on the game. I love the card game "Cheat."

So what makes a good game experience for me? The game entering into and commenting on, asking questions about or turning me around and getting me to look at MY world, not the game's world. And MY world is populated by friends and family, not by NPCs.

But my examples of game experiences are board games or family games. Are video games different? They are, but only because of a mistake on the part of designers and developers. Video games are now made by people who see them as a novelty that can make a few bucks, like Pong or as a curiosity to be tinkered with like Computer Space. They have created a market that wants newer and shinier, not better. They develop consoles and say that now they have 16 bits, 32 bits, 64 bits, etcetera, and that that makes them better or worthwhile. They go from disks to cartridges to disks to hard drives to the internet. They just keep making the box they want to jam their little worlds into bigger instead of opening the box and letting the world pour out. And, no, this hasn't changed with online gaming. And no, the Wii jumping-up-and-down games haven't changed this. And no, the DS yelling-at-your-console hasn't changed this. BUT, these Nintendo innovations are interesting directions, not castoff novelties.

Let me look at that statement. Nintendo did not invent these input schemes, but they put them into peoples hands and homes, and doing that is innovative. But why must I say that they are not castoff novelties? Because much of the gaming community has been tricked into thinking that a bigger box makes for a better game and that's all there is to it. Or, rather, that a bigger box with nicer paint on and in it makes a better game. No, if video games are to make an input, the bigger box paradigm will be the novelty. Or will rather be looked at with a laughter-filled nostalgia ("Remember when we had those games that had real-looking people in them instead of real people in them?"). No, experimenting with input schemes is a direction, not a novelty.

Will Wright is taking careful steps in the right direction with Spore, too. Again, "gamers" and their attendant commentators are quick to dismiss his innovation as novelty, but at least know well enough to wait and see the product. Spore is bringing pieces of the social networking and user-created-content worlds of the internet into gaming. I'll let him elaborate more fully in his own way. Mr. Wright knows better than to try to tell stories with video games. Interactivity is about building an experience WITH the player, not FOR the player. Mr. Wright knows this. He's holding back, though, I know it. He hasn't given us a fully-realized multi-player game here. Neither has he given us the true multi-platform game that he will soon.

And that is what I'm looking forward to: true multi-platform gaming. By this I don't mean being able to shoot my buddy on his XBox from my PC. I mean pulling the bits of the social-networking and user-created-content Web 2.0 that allow users to bring the internet into their lives. The cameraphone bits, the SMS bits, the Jott bits, the live streaming performance bits, the click-this-prim-in-Second-Life-to-interact-with-this-website bits. The bits that blow the boxes to bits.

The really disheartening thing is that WE ALREADY HAVE THE TECHNOLOGY! I can press a button on my earpiece and say a few words to update my Twitter and Facebook status. I can set up RSS feeds that stream that information into SL or onto my blog. And that's all with no technical

Okay, I'm going to skip ahead a few steps here and give my conclusion, then return to this thought and re-write it another time. I want a game that I can interact with any way I choose: through my phone, digital camera, pen and paper, phone conversations, through a video game console, through my computer, drumming on my desk, twirling my hair. I want a game that I can laugh about during and after play with my friends. I want a game I can play any time, anywhere, with anyone. This can happen tomorrow, we have the technology. We just need to forget about the big boxes.

What Using Linux has Taught Me (about computers)

1. Put it somewhere safe
You are going to lose it all. Whether because you want to try a new distro on a whim or you don't feel like re-creating the root folder you nuked, you are going to lose it all. Take it all, make a copy and put it somewhere safe. Do it all the time. Store it safely.
2. It's probably not that important
Even when you do lose it all, you quickly learn that if it was really important, someone else would already have it and all you'd have to do is ask for it.
3. Ask for help
You are not so special and unique that no-one has ever been through the same hell. Someone else has the same hardware. Tons of people have the same software. They've done it before you and they want to help.
4. There is another way
So, it's not terminally easy to get MS Office or whatever you're used to. And?
5. Compile from source
Even if you follow step-by-step instructions as verified by three or four different forums on how to do this, pick a piece of software and do it. You'll feel better about yourself even at just sneaking a glimpse of what it's made of.

Going the Narrative Distance

Holy misappropriation, Batman! My personal scrivener, Angry, and I have developed a new mask for me in his fiction. New masks for the two of us, rather: the First Nations versions of us. I really want to think this is a really bad thing, to be giving words and voice to this character I really don't know, but I don't. It works for the audience and gives a context for my very geographically-defined worldview. Having just been given license to elaborate on this by my scrivener, I shall...

The mask in satire has always held an attraction for me. Great English-language satirists like Geoffrey Chaucer, Jonathan Swift and Marshall Bruce Mathers III do all their real work behind your eyes, forcing you to question their speakers' reliability. If you don't do this, you lose the work. It's simple: probe the ethos of the speaker, ignore the "author." Simple.

So simple that for me, that is the real job of the reader. I am far more interested in how a story is told than I am in what the story is, although a "good story, well told" is the epitome of fiction for me. The "good story" part of the equation comes without much work on the writer's or the reader's part. It is just the truth, and it sits there waiting to be delivered. How much of that truth is brought to us depends on the "well told" part of the equation.

Now to the mask. This is a major part of the delivery system. I don't need to elaborate on that. I do need to justify allowing myself a First Nations mask. So...here goes. First of all, I'm not writing this stuff, my half-Native scrivener is. I may have a hand in composing it, but Angry is the writer, his name appears on the stuff. So they're his characters. My hands are clean...but why is it important that they be Native. Well, admittedly, it has nothing to do with the Aboriginal experience.

It has to do with the audience's experience with the Aboriginal. A reader will allow herself to make connections between landscape, both geographical and social, and history, both broad and personal, when they are dealing with First Nations characters. A reader will allow herself an uncomfortable relationship with language to run far below the surface of words spoken by a Native mouth without needing it to surface. A reader will allow Aboriginal characters a certain kind of active idleness that highlights a tension between self and mainstream. These three features define this Didi and Gogo pairing that Angry and I have created.

I'm looking forward to watching them go nowhere.