Between
1981 and 1982, renowned photographer Ira Nowinski hiked all over the
Bay Area, taking hundreds of photos of arcades. In all, he snapped
around 700 images, and in awesome news for retro gaming fans many of
them are now available for viewing, courtesy of their acquisition by
Stanford University's library.
Once you're
done looking at the games, and in particular that cruisey arcade that's
nearly all cocktail units, get a load of the fashion. While
arcades still exist today, they sure don't have the same diversity of
clientèle you see here, like Mr. Texas on the Pac-Man cabinet up top.
The Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) last week announced that
it is bolstering its collection of work with 14 videogames, and plans to
acquire a further 26 over the next few years. And that’s just for
starters. The games will join the likes of Hector Guimard’s Paris Metro
entrances, the Rubik’s Cube, M&Ms and Apple’s first iPod in the
museum’s Architecture & Design department.
The move recognises the design achievements behind each creation, of
course, but despite MoMA’s savvy curatorial decision, the institution
risks becoming a catalyst for yet another wave of awkward ‘are games
art?’ blog posts. And it doesn’t exactly go out of its way to avoid that
particular quagmire in the official announcement.
“Are video games art? They sure are,” it begins, worryingly, before
switching to a more considered tack, “but they are also design, and a
design approach is what we chose for this new foray into this universe.
The games are selected as outstanding examples of interaction design — a
field that MoMA has already explored and collected extensively, and one
of the most important and oft-discussed expressions of contemporary
design creativity.”
Jason Rohrer
MoMA worked with scholars, digital conservation and legal experts,
historians and critics to come up with its criteria and final list of
games, and among the yardsticks the museum looked at for inclusion are
the visual quality and aesthetic experience of each game, the ways in
which the game manipulates or stimulates player behaviour, and even the
elegance of its code.
That initial list of 14 games makes for convincing reading, too:
Pac-Man, Tetris, Another World, Myst, SimCity 2000, Vib-Ribbon, The
Sims, Katamari Damacy, Eve Online, Dwarf Fortress, Portal, flOw, Passage
and Canabalt.
But the wishlist also extends to Spacewar!, a selection of Magnavox
Odyssey games, Pong, Snake, Space Invaders, Asteroids, Zork, Tempest,
Donkey Kong, Yars’ Revenge, M.U.L.E, Core War, Marble Madness, Super
Mario Bros, The Legend Of Zelda, NetHack, Street Fighter II, Chrono
Trigger, Super Mario 64, Grim Fandango, Animal Crossing, and, of course,
Minecraft.
Art, design or otherwise, MoMA’s focused collection is an uncommonly
informed and well-considered list. And their inclusion within MoMA’s
hallowed walls, and the recognition of their cultural and historical
relevance that is implied, is certainly a boon for videogames on the
whole. But reactions to the move have been mixed. The Guardian’s
Jonathan Jones posted a blog
last week titled Sorry MoMA, Videogames Are Not Art, in which he
suggests that exhibiting Pac-Man and Tetris alongside work by Picasso
and Van Gogh will mean “game over for any real understanding of art”.
Canabalt
“The worlds created by electronic games are more like playgrounds
where experience is created by the interaction between a player and a
programme,” he writes. “The player cannot claim to impose a personal
vision of life on the game, while the creator of the game has ceded that
responsibility. No one ‘owns’ the game, so there is no artist, and
therefore no work of art.”
While he clearly misunderstands the capacity of a game to manifest
the personal – and singular – vision of its creator, he nonetheless
raises valid fears that the creative motivations behind many videogames’
– predominantly commercially-driven entertainment – are incompatible
with those of serious art and that their inclusion in established
museums risks muddying its definition. But while many commentators have
fallen into the same trap of invoking comparisons with cubist and
impressionist painters, MoMA has drawn no such parallels.
“We have to keep in mind it’s the design collection that is
snapping up video games,” Passage creator Jason Rorher tells us when we
put the question to him. “This is the same collection that houses Lego,
teapots, and barstools. I’m happy with that, because I primarily think
of myself as a designer. But sadly, even the mightiest games in this
acquisition look silly when stood up next to serious works of art. I
mean what’s the artistic payload of, Passage? ‘You’re gonna die someday.’ You can’t find a sentiment that’s more artistically worn out than that.”
Adam Saltsman
But while he doesn’t see these games’ inclusion as a significant
landmark – in fact, he even raises concerns over bandwagon-hopping –
he’s still elated to have been included.
“I’m shocked to see my little game standing there next to landmarks
like Pac-Man, Tetris, Another World, and… all of them really, all the
way up to Canabalt,” he says. “The most pleasing aspect of it, for me,
is that something I have made will be preserved and maintained into the
future, after I croak. The ephemeral nature of digital-download video
games has always worried me. Heck, the Mac version of Passage has
already been broken by Apple’s updates, and it’s only been five years!”
Talking of Canabalt, creator Adam Saltsman echoes Rohrer’s sentiment:
“Obviously it is a pretty huge honour, but I think it’s also important
to note that these selections are part of the design wing of the museum,
so Tetris won’t exactly be right next to Dali or Picasso! That doesn’t
really diminish the excitement for me though. The MoMA is an incredible
institution, and to have my work selected for archival alongside obvious
masterpieces like Tetris is pretty overwhelming. “
MoMA’s not the only art institution with an interest in videogames,
of course. The Smithsonian American Art Museum ran an exhibition titled
The Art of Video Games earlier this year, while the Barbican has put its
weight behind all manner of events, including 2002?s The History,
Culture and Future of Computer Games, Ear Candy: Video Game Music, and
the touring Game On exhibition.
Eve Online
Chris Melissinos, who was one of the guest curators who put the
Smithsonian exhibition together and subsequently acted as an adviser to
MoMA as it selected its list, doesn’t think such interest is damaging to
art, or indeed a sign of out-of-step institutions jumping on the
bandwagon. It’s simply, he believes, a reaction to today’s culture.
“This decision indicates that videogames have become an important cultural, artistic form of expression in society,” he told the Independent.
“It could become one of the most important forms of artistic
expression. People who apply themselves to the craft view themselves as
[artists], because they absolutely are. This is an amalgam of many
traditional forms of art.”
Of the initial selection, Eve is arguably the most ambitious, and
potentially divisive, selection, but perhaps also the best placed to
challenge Jones’ predispositions on experiential ownership and creative
limitation. It is, after all, renowned for its vociferous,
self-governing player community.
“Eve’s been around for close to a decade, is still growing, and
through its lifetime has won several awards and achievements, but being
acquired into the permanent collection of a world leading contemporary
art and design museum is a tremendous honour for us,” Eve Online
creative director Torfi Frans Ólafsson tells us. “Eve is born out of a
strong ideology of player empowerment and sandbox openness, which
especially in our earlier days was often at the cost of accessibility
and mainstream appeal.
Torfi Frans Ólafsson
“Sitting up there along with industrial design like the original
iPod, and fancy, unergonomic lemon presses tells us that we were right
to stand by our convictions, so in that sense, it’s somewhat of a
vindication of our efforts.”
But how do you present an entire universe to an audience that is
likely to spend a few short minutes looking at each exhibit? Developer
CCP is turning to its many players for help.
“We’ve decided to capture a single day of Eve: Sunday the 9th of
December,” explains Ólafsson. “Through a variety of player made videos,
CCP videos, massive data analysis and info graphics.”
In presenting Eve in this way, CCP and the games players are
collaborating on a strong, coherent vision of the alternative reality
they’ve collectively helped to build, and more importantly, reinforcing
and redefining the notion of authorship. It doesn’t matter whether
you’re an apologist for videogames’ entitlement to the status of art, or
someone who appreciates the aesthetics of their design, the important
thing here is that their cultural importance is recognised. Sure, the
notion of a game exhibit that doesn’t include gameplay might stick in
the craw of some, but MoMA’s interest is clearly broader. Ólafsson isn’t
too worried, either.
“Even if we don’t fully succeed in making the 3.5 million people that
visit the MoMA every year visually grok the entire universe in those
few minutes they might spend checking Eve out, I can promise you it sure
will look pretty there on the wall.”
Personal Comments:
Passage is still available here, a game developed during Gamma256.
Canabalt is available here, while mobile versions are available for few bucks (android, iOS).
Choosing sides: Google’s new augmented-reality game,
Ingress, makes users pick a faction—Enlightened or Resistance—and run
around town attacking virtual portals in hopes of attaining world
domination
I’m not usually very political, but I recently joined the Resistance,
fighting to protect the world against the encroachment of a strange,
newly discovered form of energy. Just this week, in fact, I spent hours
protecting Resistance territory and attacking the enemy.
Don’t worry, this is just the gloomy sci-fi world depicted in a new smartphone game called Ingress
created by Google. Ingress is far from your normal gaming app,
though—it takes place, to some degree, in the real world; aspects of the
game are revealed only as you reach different real-world locations.
Ingress’s world is one in which the discovery of so-called
“exotic matter” has split the population into two groups: the
Enlightened, who want to learn how to harness the power of this energy,
and the Resistance, who, well, resist this change. Players pick a side,
and then walk around their city, collecting exotic matter to keep
scanners charged and taking control of exotic-matter-exuding portals in
order to capture more land for their team.
I found the game, which
is currently available only to Android smartphone users who have
received an invitation to play, surprisingly addictive—especially
considering my usual apathy for gaming.
What’s most interesting
about Ingress, though, is what it suggests about Google’s future plans,
which seem to revolve around finding new ways to extend its reach from
the browser on your laptop to the devices you carry with you at all
times. The goal makes plenty of sense when you consider that traditional
online advertising—Google’s bread and butter—could eventually be
eclipsed by mobile, location-based advertising.
Ingress was
created by a group within Google called Niantic Labs—the same team
behind another location-based app released recently (see “Should You Go on Google’s Field Trip?”).
Google
is surely gathering a treasure trove of information about where we’re
going and what we’re doing while we play Ingress. It must also see the
game as a way to explore possible applications for Project Glass, the
augmented-reality glasses-based computer that the company will start
sending out to developers next year. Ingress doesn’t require a
head-mounted display; it uses your smartphone’s display to show a map
view rather than a realistic view of your surroundings. Still, it is
addictive, and is likely to get many more folks interested in
location-based augmented reality, or at least in augmented-reality
games.
Despite its futuristic focus, Ingress sports a sort of
pseudo-retro look, with a darkly hued map that dominates the screen and a
simple pulsing blue triangle that indicates your position. I could only
see several blocks in any direction, which meant I had to walk around
and explore in order to advance in the game.
For a while, I didn’t
know what I was doing, and it didn’t help that Ingress doesn’t include
any street names. New users complete a series of training exercises,
learning the basics of the game, which include capturing a portal,
hacking a portal to snag items like resonators (which control said
portals), creating links of exotic matter between portals to build a
triangular control field that enhances the safety of team members in the
area, and firing an XMP (a “non-polarized energy field weapon,”
according to the glossary) at an enemy-controlled portal.
Confused much? I sure was.
But
I forged ahead, though, hoping that if I kept playing it would make
more sense. I started wandering around looking for portals. Portals are
found in public places—in San Francisco, where I was playing, this
includes city landmarks such as museums, statues, and murals. Resistance
portals are blue, Enlightened ones are green, and there are also some
gray ones out there that remain unclaimed.
I found a link to a larger map
of the Ingress world that I could access through my smartphone browser
and made a list of the best-looking nearby targets. Perhaps this much
planning goes against the exploratory spirit of the game, but it made
Ingress a lot less confusing for me (there’s also a website that doles out clues about the game and its mythology).
Once
I had a plan, I set out toward the portals on my list, all of which
were in the Soma and Downtown neighborhoods of San Francisco. I managed
to capture two new portals at Yerba Buena Gardens—one at a statue of
Martin Luther King, Jr. and another at the top of a waterfall—and link
them together.
Across the street, in front of the Contemporary
Jewish Museum, I hacked an Enlightened portal and fired an XMP at it,
weakening its resonators. I was then promptly attacked. I fled, figuring
I wouldn’t be able to take down the portal by myself.
A few hours
later, much of my progress was undone by a member of Enlightened
(Ingress helpfully sends e-mail notifications about such things). I was
surprised by how much this pissed me off—I wanted to get those portals
back for the Resistance, but pouring rain and the late hour stopped me.
Playing
Ingress was a lot more fun than I expected, and from the excited
chatter in the game’s built-in chat room, it was clear I wasn’t the only
one getting into it.
On my way back from a meeting, I couldn’t
help but keep an eye out for portals, ducking into an alley to attack
one near my office. Later, I found myself poring over the larger map on
my office computer, looking at the spread of portals and control fields
around the Bay Area.
As it turns out, my parents live in an area
dominated by the Enlightened. So I guess I’ll be busy attacking enemy
portals in my hometown this weekend.
Indie developer Nimblebit dropped a PR bomb on Zynga yesterday
with it’s letter addressing the similarities between their hit iPhone
game Tiny Tower and Zynga’s upcoming release, Dream Heights. This
galvanized the gaming community, with thousands of people, from prominent bloggers to gamers on Reddit criticizing the company.
However, just after the new year, Atari ordered the removal of Black Powder Media’s Vector Tanks, a game strongly inspired by Atari’s Battlezone.
This galvanized the community in a similar way, except this time,
gamers were furious that Atari shut down an indie game company that made
an extremely similar game.
Unfortunately, the line between inspiration and copying is incredibly
blurry at best. The one thing that’s certain is that copying is here to
stay. Copying has been present in some form since the dawn of capitalism
(if you need proof, just go to the toothpaste isle of your local
supermarket). The game industry is no stranger to this trend: game
companies have been copying each other for years. Given it’s repeated
success, there’s little reason to think that this practice will stop.
Indie flash game studio XGEN Studios posted a response to Nimblebit,
showing that their hit games were also copied:
Some would even argue that the incredibly successful iOS game Angry Birds was a copy of the popular Armor Games flash game, Crush the Castle, but then Crush the Castle was inspired by others that game before it. Social games even borrow many of their game mechanics from slot machines
to increase retention. So what is copying, or more importantly, which
parts of it are moral and immoral? Everyone seems to have a different
answer, but it’s safe to say that people always copy the most successful
ideas. The one thing that those in the Zynga-Nimblebit conversation
seems to have overlooked is that everyone copies others in some way.
Of course, while imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery,
it doesn’t feel good to be imitated when a competitor comes after your
users. In this case, people may question Zynga’s authenticity and make a
distinction between inspiration and outright duplication. But at the
same time, Zynga’s continued success with the “watch, then replicate”
model shows that marketing, analytics, and operations can improve on an
existing game concept. Or just give them the firepower to beat out the
original game, depending on how you look at it.
How a little-known 1971 machine launched an industry.
Forty years ago, Nutting Associates released the world’s first
mass-produced and commercially sold video game, Computer Space. It was
the brainchild of Nolan Bushnell, a charismatic engineer with a creative
vision matched only by his skill at self-promotion. With the help of
his business partner Ted Dabney and the staff of Nutting Associates,
Bushnell pushed the game from nothing into reality only two short years
after conceiving the idea.
Computer Space pitted a player-controlled rocket ship against two
machine-controlled flying saucers in a space simulation set before a
two-dimensional star field. The player controlled the rocket with four
buttons: one for fire, which shoots a missile from the front of the
rocket ship; two directional rotation buttons (to rotate the ship
orientation clockwise or counterclockwise); and one for thrust, which
propelled the ship in whichever direction it happened to be pointing.
Think of Asteroids without the asteroids, and you should get the picture.
During play, two saucers would appear on the screen and shoot at the player while flying in a zig-zag formation. The player’s goal was to dodge the saucer fire and shoot the saucers.
Considering a game of this complexity playing out on a TV set, you
might think that it was created as a sophisticated piece of software
running on a computer. You’d think it, but you’d be wrong–and Bushnell
wouldn’t blame you for the mistake. How he and Dabney managed to pull it
off is a story of audacity, tenacity, and sheer force-of-will worthy of
tech legend. This is how it happened.
SAN FRANCISCO—One Sunday afternoon last month, a hundred boisterous
patrons crowded into Mad Dog in the Fog, a British sports bar here, to
watch a live broadcast.
Internet e-sports like Starcraft2 have
big-name pro players, announcers who broadcast matches, and millions of
fans who'd rather watch the action online or in bars than play
themselves. WSJ's Amir Efrati reports.
Half the
flat-screen TVs were tuned to a blood-filled match between two Korean
competitors, "MC" and "Puma." The crowd erupted in chants of "M-C! M-C!"
when the favorite started a comeback.
The pub is known for
showing European soccer and other sports, but Puma and MC aren't
athletes. They are 20-year-old professional videogame players who were
leading computerized armies of humans and aliens in a science-fiction
war game called "Starcraft II" from a Los Angeles convention center. The
Koreans were fighting over a tournament prize of $50,000.
This summer, "Starcraft II" has become
the newest barroom spectator sport. Fans organize so-called Barcraft
events, taking over pubs and bistros from Honolulu to Florida and
switching big-screen TV sets to Internet broadcasts of professional game
matches happening often thousands of miles away.
Fans of 'Starcraft II' watch a live game broadcast in Washington, D.C.
As
they root for their on-screen superstars, "Starcraft" enthusiasts can
sow confusion among regular patrons. Longtime Mad Dog customers were
taken aback by the young men fist-pumping while digital swarms of an
insect-like race called "Zerg" battled the humanoid "Protoss" on the
bar's TVs.
"I thought I'd come here for a quiet
beer after a crazy day at work," said Michael McMahan, a 59-year-old
carpenter who is a 17-year veteran of the bar, over the sound of noisy
fans as he sipped on a draught pint.
But for sports-bar owners, "Starcraft"
viewers represent a key new source of revenue from a
demographic—self-described geeks—they hadn't attracted before.
"It was unbelievable," said Jim
Biddle, a manager of Bistro 153 in Beaverton, Ore., which hosted its
first Barcraft in July. The 50 gamers in attendance "doubled what I'd
normally take in on a normal Sunday night."
For "Starcraft" fans, watching in bars
fulfills their desire to share the love of a game that many watched at
home alone before. During a Barcraft at San Francisco's Mad Dog in July,
Justin Ng, a bespectacled 29-year-old software engineer, often rose to
his feet during pivotal clashes of a match.
"This
feels like the World Cup," he said. "You experience the energy and
screams of everyone around you when a player makes an amazing play."
Millions of Internet users already
tune in each month on their PCs to watch live "eSports" events featuring
big-name stars like MC, who is Jang Min Chul in real life, or replays
of recent matches.
In the U.S., fervor for "Starcraft II"
is spilling into public view for the first time, as many players now
prefer to watch the pros. In mid-July, during the first North American
Star League tournament in Los Angeles, 85,000 online viewers watched
Puma defeat MC in the live championship match on Twitch.tv, said Emmett
Shear, who runs the recently-launched site.
The "Starcraft" franchise is more
popular in Korea, where two cable TV stations, MBC Game and Ongamenet,
provide dedicated coverage. The cable channels and Web networks
broadcast other war games such as "Halo," "Counter-Strike," and "Call of
Duty." But "Starcraft II" is often the biggest draw.
The pros, mostly in their teens and
20s, get prize money and endorsements. Professional leagues in the U.S.
and Korea and have sprouted since "Starcraft II" launched last year.
Pro-match broadcasts often include breathless play-by-play announcers
who cover each move like a wrestling match. (A typical commentary: "It's
a drone genocide! Flaming drone carcasses all over the place!").
Barcraft goers credit a Seattle bar,
Chao Bistro, for launching the Barcraft fad this year. Glen Bowers, a
35-year-old Chao patron and "Starcraft" fan, suggested to owner Hyung
Chung that he show professional "Starcraft" matches. Seeing that
customers were ignoring Mariners baseball broadcasts on the bar's TVs,
Mr. Chung, a videogame fan, OK'ed the experiment.
In mid-May Mr. Bowers configured
Chao's five TVs to show Internet feeds and posted an online notice to
"Starcraft" devotees. About 150 people showed up two days later. Since
then, Mr. Bowers has organized twice-a-week viewings; attendance has
averaged between 40 and 50 people, including employees of Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp., he said.
The trend ended up spreading to more than a dozen Barcrafts across the country, including joints in Raleigh, N.C., and Boston.
The "Starcraft II" game lends itself to
sports bars because it "was built from the ground up as a spectator
sport," said Bob Colayco, a publicist for the game's publisher, Activision Blizzard Inc. Websites like Twitch.tv helped "Starcraft's" spectator-sport appeal by letting players "stream" live games.
Two University of Washington graduate
students recently published a research paper seeking to scientifically
pinpoint "Starcraft's" appeal as a spectator sport. The paper posits
that "information asymmetry," in which one party has more information
than the other, is the "fundamental source of entertainment."
