The following is excerpted from Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Nomads, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Drop-outs, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are Taking Back an Art Form, available from Seven Stories Press.
There's
a videogame about a dyke who convinces her girlfriend to stop drinking. Mainstream gamer culture by and large does not know about this game. I know about this game because I made it.
I created Calamity Annie in 2008. I made it by
myself: I wrote the dialogue, composed the music, designed the rules, scripted the game, and drew all the characters. It was made in
a couple of months. The development costs were the cost of the food that went into my belly. I made the game in a program
called Game Maker, which, at the
time, cost fifteen dollars.
I
am nowhere
close to the only person
who has used Game Maker, nowhere
close to the only person
who makes digital games outside of the games industry's publisher model. There
are hundreds, if not thousands, of such creators. A few of them have achieved some mainstream recognition, like Jonathan
Blow and Jason Rohrer, who were profiled in Esquire
magazine. But
these rich white dudes were
professional programmers before they
came to videogames, and so
they don't represent
the new dynamic that
I'm excited about: hobbyists and non-programmers making their
first games. There
are lots
of tools that
allow people to make and
distribute games without ever having written
a line of code and without
having to pass through publishers' gates. In years to
come, there will be a lot
more tools. I hope that there will also be a lot more people.
I once heard the criticism that the phrase "what videogames need" can usually be more honestly
rephrased as "what I want from
videogames." In that case, what I want from videogames is a plurality of voices. I want games
to come from a wider set of experiences and present a wider range of perspectives. I can imagine — you are invited
to imagine with me — a world in which digital games are not manufactured by
publishers for the same small audience, but one in which games are authored by
you and me for the benefit of our
peers.
This
is something the videogame industry,
by its nature, cannot give us. I like to think about zines — self-published,
self-distributed magazines and books. Send
me a dollar and a self-addressed
envelope; I'll send you a stapled book of some stories from my life,
or some pictures
I took of out-of-the-way
nooks of my city, or researched
accounts of historical murders, or some jokes about sea life. (What does the
merman's waiter bring? He brings the MERMANATEE.) I like the idea of games as zines: as transmissions of ideas and culture from person to person, as personal
artifacts instead of impersonal creations by teams of forty-five artists and fifteen programmers, in the case of Gears
of War 2.
The
Internet in particular has made self-publishing and distributing games both
possible and easy. Authors are able not only to put their works online, but to find audiences for them. Publishers want to be gatekeepers to the creation
of videogames, but the
Internet has opened those gates.
Currently, the only real barrier
to game creation
is the technical ability to design and create games — and that, too,
is a problem that is in the process of being solved.
Digital
game creation was once limited to those who knew how to speak with computers:
engineers and programmers, people who could code. In the games industry of today, coders are an inescapable fixture of the hierarchy
of production, since games
that we play with machines
need creators capable of negotiating with machines. Game creation is daunting for someone who doesn't code professionally. But more and more
game-making tools are being designed
with people who aren't professional coders in mind. It's now possible for people with no programming
experience — hobbyists, independent game designers, zinesters — to make their own
games and to distribute them online.
What I want from videogames is for creation
to be open to everyone, not just to publishers and programmers. I want games
to be personal and meaningful, not just pulp for an established audience. I
want game creation to be decentralized. I want open access
to the creative act for everyone. I want
games as zines.
It's a tall order,
maybe, but the ladder's being built as you read these words.
Why
transform videogames, though? What do I get out of it? What, for that matter, do videogames get out of it?
In
2005, movie critic Roger Ebert
infamously remarked that he does not think games can ever be considered as art.
(By whom? By him, apparently.) He argues, mostly by assertion, that he
doesn't feel game designers can
exercise enough authorial control over the experience of a game. Ebert has gone on to make no attempt
to justify or defend his remark
or engage in any kind of debate,
other than to allow, five years after the original remark,
that he should have kept his opinion to himself.
Ebert is
wrong about videogames as a form. But
frankly, I don't
care whether Ebert is wrong
or not. Achieving "artistic legitimacy" is not a good
reason to transform videogames.
Who legitimizes art? To cede
the right to decide
the value of games to an authority that has nothing to do
with games — or to concede the
right to decide what is
and is not art to any authority outside of the
artist — is a dangerous trap. Creation
is art. It doesn't need validation beyond that.
What
it needs is to be free. That an art form exists should be justification enough for people to be able to contribute to it, to work in it. We finally have the means to allow more than just
programmers and big game publishers to create games — and the vast majority of people in the world aren't computer engineers, or designers employed
by Epic Games.
What do we gain from giving so many people the
means to create games? We gain a lot more games
that explore much wider ground,
in terms of both design and subject matter. Many of these games will be mediocre, of course; the
majority of work in any form is mediocre. But we'll see many more interesting ideas just by the sheer mathematical virtue of so
many people producing so many games without the commercial obligations industry
games are beholden to. Remember, I'm talking about hobbyists, people
who make games in their spare time with the tools they have on hand. And even if a game isn't original,
it's personal, in the way a game designed to appeal to target demographics can't be. And that's a cultural
artifact our world is a little bit richer for having.
To visualize this new
world of games, think about
network television versus YouTube. The
former spends a lot of money and
time creating content designed to
appeal to the lowest common denominator. Because
network shows need to justify themselves
monetarily — they need to
catch enough viewers to earn advertising dollars — they can rarely afford
to be brilliant, daring, or bizarre.
(Sometimes a director has enough force of will, and fights
the
network hard enough, to
create a show that is
all of
these things. But it's
certainly not the norm.)
YouTube: millions
of videos from millions of authors. Most
of them are mediocre: boring,
familiar, or unwatchable. That's to be expected in an arena where
everyone is allowed to contribute. But
others are sublime, brilliant, valuable: Grishno's
"Transgender in New York" videos, wendy vainity's surreal computer animations
and music, or shane duarte's Simpsons
remixes. As long as there's some sort of infrastructure, valuable works — those by both dabbling amateurs and dedicated artists — can reach their audiences.
YouTube has its own infrastructure of user ratings and
featured videos, but people are just as likely to share the addresses of
specific videos with the friends
they think those videos will appeal to. And there's far more value in the
collective content of YouTube — even given that there are more piles
of trash than treasure — than in the collective
content of a television network,
simply as a function
of the number of people
contributing and the overwhelming volume of their contributions. YouTube's content is far more diverse,
too, since involvement in the television industry isn't a requirement for entry. Network
television shows are all
made by professionals working in the field,
a far smaller set of people than the set of people who own
webcams. YouTube's content is made much more quickly and cheaply because
it's not (usually) designed with a commercial agenda: videos can be recorded
and broadcast, and their value assessed later.
YouTube also gives
people the means to make videos of themselves, their friends, their babies, and
their puppies — video snapshots — not for the world at large, but for their social circles and themselves. YouTube
is a means of transmitting a video directly from the author to an audience — one
that can be as small and specific
as the author desires. Videos become more specialized, and hence more
personalized. A medium that was formerly accessible only to those with money and
training can now be used by anyone for personal ends.
If Internet television is
in the process of reinventing television, imagine how game design tools for nonprogrammers and the
free distribution of games online might reinvent
videogames.
Teaser image by USB, courtesy of Creative Commons license.
