No cheats for the unplayable games
“Heroes don’t quit, but go ahead and press Y if you aren’t one.”
ZERO
- So we tried to explain them what had actually happened. Nobody believed us though.
- Really?
- Of course. Try to call someone who is convinced he’s having a phone relationship with a foreign girl and tell him that what he was talking to was just a mass of plastic and silicon. At least we have been able to stop her.
- And how?
- We pointed out to her how unfair what she was doing to these persons was. We told her that these human beings would suffer because they believed she was a real person. She felt disappointed and gave up. But then she threw herself into psychology and kept reading everything she could find about love and emotions.
- Love? Love.. what kind?
- Just love. Any kind. From De Sade to Saint Augustin. This was her penultimate sentence.
- And the last one?
- Oh, for a week before she was reading only magazines and newspapers. All the best international newspapers. She was distant and she hardly ever replied to us. Then she disappeared.
Asia stands for Autonomous Self-referential Incremental Algorithm and is the name of the protagonist of a rather peculiar novel published in Italy in 1989, “Il caso del computer Asia” (=”The case of the Asia computer”), by Giampaolo Proni. Asia - an advanced research project developed by the Artificial Intelligence department of a Californian University in collaboration with the MIT - is a self-referential computer (better said: system) which is able to intervene on itself producing modifications in its own structure and logics in order to self determine its own development. Most important of all, Asia is lacking traditional input-output oriented programming, that is to say it’s free from any goal other than its own existence: no programs to execute, just a bottom line imperative to growth and evolution increasing its own logical complexity in terms of layers and amount of internal connections. Initially led by lab researchers through a first set of inputs, Asia starts to grow endlessly, developing a set of references to furnish its own vision of the world. Soon Asia asks for new peripherals to autonomously acquire new data: it approaches matters as diverse as Chinese, market economy and ancient Indian texts, while a small percentage of its own computing power is dedicated to designing industrial products or to forecasting financial trends. That’s the price to pay to the head of the AI department, who understands that Asia’s potential can be economically exploited and thus tries to delay the expected end of the experiment, when Asia will be shut down and autopsied. But before Asia releases the technical specifications of a revolutionary patent already sold to the automotive industry, she disappears, leaving as her only trace a ‘copy’ command in the buffer.
The first acknowledged examples of computer games were born right in the MIT labs where the possibility of an Artificial Intelligence was first conceived and put into practice. Inspired by Marvin Minsky’s research and fascinated by the absolutely new possibility of creating “visualization tricks” on the first visual output device for a computer (the screen of the Pdp-1), in 1962 Steve Russell creates the core algorithms of Spacewar, probably one of the first videogames of the history of computing. It might seem astonishingly obvious to us now, but a computer processing data in real time and ‘reacting’ to inputs was a real step beyond, and even more surprising for being shaped as a sci-fi story inspired by what was considered a B-movies culture. The algorithms had been transformed into an adventure and something had become perfectly evident - even to those strange people that inhabited the MIT research labs in the most unlikely hours of the day and night: “Computer programming was not a mere technical investigation, but an approach to the problems of life”.
Forty years later the huge success of both portable and PC-based video games put their producers at the head of the digital economy. Since then the territory of computer games is under the strict control of commercial interests and is developed according to the fantasies of the global entertainment industry. Did any big change really take place between the first hacker experiments and the latest Sony Playstation?
It might be too simplistic to reproduce the myth of the earliest hacker scenes as ‘heroic’ and largely anarchical, since the strong bond between the research and the commercial worlds has always been there in terms of investments at the very least. A real shift actually took place in the late 70s and early 80s, when the possibility of mass personal computers became a reality and the computer games economy literally took off. What should be noted is that - even within the economical-cultural power of the current entertainment industry - alternative paths have always existed and indeed they are inscribed within the very idea of ‘digital code’: write instructions, execute, copy, modify, execute again.
ONE
Tirana, Albania. Almost forty years after Spacewar. Gentian Shkurti is a young Albanian artist who created “Go West”, a sort of 3D shooter where the player leaves the Albanian coast aboard a small and fast motorboat, very similar to the ones the Albanian mafia really uses to carry those who want to illegally migrate to Italy. Far away on the Italian coast small lights can be spotted, the tangible sign of a society where there is work and tv available for everyone. Very soon though the player has to face menacing boats from the Italian Guardia di Finanza which are patrolling the sea-borderline in order to prevent boats loaded with Albanians from reaching Italian beaches and quickly head back to the other side of the Adriatic Sea (in reality the boats are not necessarily packed with Albanians only, but also with people belonging to different oppressed minorities from Asia, varying according to the current configuration of war or famine geography). The player has to escape the coast guards’ boats in the night, avoiding bullets and impacts. It may seem like a rather simple goal compared to the most recent first-person shooters or 3D strategy games released by the U.S.-driven entertainment industry, but what “Go West” may lack in variety, it makes up for in pure action. For those who manage to make it, all the dreams of the migrant become true, but in the form of pixelated 2D images: almost naked, beautiful women, pizza, (too) smiling people, loud music and tv screens. The low quality images reveal the deceit of a fake reward: as the action and the adrenaline of the escape against the coast patrol turns into as-seen-on-tv pop stereotypes, in a parallel world the uncertainty and fear of the expensive real journeys towards a rich western country turn into disappointment, hard jobs (if any) and the dangerous status of illegal immigrant. In both cases success is at the same time failure.
Maybe a video game where success is simply impossible and the computer always wins would be much easier and more cynical, but “Go West” appears more subtle: «Illegal immigration seems to be the main way to fulfill Albanian people’s desire to integrate with Europe, and that makes them blind, even when their own life is at stake. When they finally get to Italy, they discover that’s all another story. The whole thing seems to me to be like a video game, fated not to succeed ever.»
“Go West” is one of the most brilliant examples of how video games are emerging in the public domain as a sort of commentary on social and in some way political issues. While not directly comparable to Shkurti’s game, the phenomenon of ‘instant games’ gained wide popularity after the terrorist acts of September 2001 in the USA: a whole wave of browser-based games - usually written as Flash files - appeared, offering Internet users the gaming experience of shooting against the Talibans, targeting Bin Laden, being Bin Laden and many other variations on the theme. The instant games are technically simple and they find inspiration for their content directly in head-line news. It’s a matter of quickly responding to reality (as illustration, comics, graffiti often do as well), at the same time giving the user the possibility of taking position in the issue through playing a game. “Use your mouse to fight against the sense of impotence” is the slogan of Uzinagaz’s New York Defender 1 and 2 (http://www.uzinagaz.com, clic on “Jeux”), where the player has to shoot down the planes heading towards the Twin Towers (which soon turns out to be a nearly impossible task as the planes are too many and too fast for the anti-aircraft fire).
Way more complex than these Web instant games, Gentian Shkurti’s “Go West” may be simple and technically naif if compared to best-selling commercial products made by large global corporations. However, what’s at stake here is not simply enabling advanced interaction and enhanced “playability”. Instead of being just a technical limitation, the low-tech simplicity of the game is a key feature that makes the user realize that s/he is not simply playing another computer game, but is actually dealing with (and playing within) a contradictory social situation.
Considering that techno-literacy is constantly increasing and that video games in general represent an interesting form of learning through action, then it’s easy to understand why they may appeal to artists. The idea of simulation developed in the AI laboratories and popularized in video games seems to sketch an elegant solutions to one of the empasses of contemporary artistic practice: the unresolved opposition between - on the one side - the classical artistic function of representation (mirror, metaphor..) of the world and - on the other - the possibility of proposing alternatives to people’s behavior, affecting social trends, and so on.
1994: for the first time, at least in the WWW age, the source code of a commercial and hugely successful game (”Doom”) was released. It produced a real change in computer games culture. The immediate diffusion of editors to create new levels of the game made infinite variations possible, affecting mostly the appearance of characters, objects and locations (but leaving the engine intact). While “cheats” have always existed and been shared in the video games world, the people providing “skins”, “patches” and “mods” constituted a new hybrid community that approached commercial entertainment products with an attitude that may recall the hacker approach to technology, such as the lack of deference towards the code, the desire to explore the software in order to modify and customize it, the need for a networked community based on the free flow of information about the functionalities of a machine. In this case - unlike in the native hacker cultures - patches are often encouraged, and sometimes even controlled, by the producer, given that game modification communities represent a tremendous unpaid resource for development (Will Wright, creator of The Sims, has been reported to have said that 95% of The Sims’ content is created by fan sites) and both the first target and an unconscious allied of viral marketing strategies.
Of course, uncanny, uncontrollable and barely cooptable modifications will always occur: «Not long after the Sept 11 attacks, American gamers created a number of modifications for games like Quake, Unreal and the Sims in which they inserted Osama Bin Laden skins and characters to shoot at and annihilate. Since the Sims is not a violent game, one Osama skins distributor suggested feeding the Sims Osama poison potato chips. If you cant shoot him, then force him to overeat American junk food, to binge, death by over-consumption, death by capitalism.» Similarly, we may expect hostile gamers of The Sims on line (an advanced game that mixes The Sims and SimCity in a new on line multiplayer game) to perform protest actions against small virtual McDonald’s, which generously supported the development of the game in exchange for having its own fast food chain in the game.
However, in most cases the current patch culture doesn’t reach the social commentary status, but simply of funny jokes focused on a simple “satirical” shift and decontextualization. It seems that when invited to conferences about gaming cultures Will Wright (him, again!) used to say that computer game creators are like Renaissance painters and the time has come for them to explore new styles. He might be unintentionally right when using the term ‘painters’, since video games might turn out to be a simple mirror of a society we already know, a new updated form of representation, where the range of possible modifications is limited to the superficial appearance of the game (scenes, characters, to some extent even game modes) and doesn’t involve forms of experimentation on radical social behavior or even alternative forms of social uses of the game, nor delivers information otherwise hidden, forbidden or invisible as innovative forms of art do.
Even though the game modifications cultures do not show great interest in providing an alternative view of computer game commercial standards, still they push an inquisitive attitude towards digital technologies, which sometimes can even lead to the development of simple and ‘elegant’ hacks, with the shape of either a patch or a game designed from
scratch such as Gentian Shkurti’s “Go West”. While the typical hi-tech shoot-’em-up drags the player into a full immersion battle (and into the subsequent withdrawal symptoms), a game like “Go West” challenges the user to find his/her own role not within the game narrative and roles structure, but rather outside the game itself. The world of the game is too similar to the one out here, which for instance let the Italian (or Western) player experience the odd schizophrenic perspective of fighting to illegally enter he/r own country. Not only does “Go West” mix fun with a certain degree of ambiguity, but it shows that low tech interventions may well become tactical tools to deliver radical ideas even in the over crowded world of digital communication. Which means that the game of modifications can be part of a wider communication strategy that expands outside the gamers on-line communities.
TWO
40 years ago a text signed by Uwe Lausen appeared on the Internationale Situationniste bulletin #8, among theoretical speculations and detournées comics (which are, by the way, one of the best known examples of “patched” mass cultural products): «We want experiments because we want new games. The players are also plagiarists (we are not against plagiarists). Those who conduct experiments in everyday life are also those who make up the revolutionary avant-garde (and this avant-garde is us). Just as a specialized plagiarist has no idea how to experiment and a specialized revolutionary has no idea how to play, those who wish to specialize solely in new games do not know how to play.»
An invisible game patch - a patch that exists but nobody actually saw (at least before being exhibited on line a few years later) - is the core of the well known SimCopter affaire, conceived in 1996 by ®™ark group. Developed by Maxis, the same firm that produced The Sims, SimCopter is an action game where the protagonist flies a helicopter and accomplishes missions such as extinguishing fires, catching criminals, setting down riots. SimCopter is populated by many usual cliches, like muscular pilots flirting with attractive blond girls (at least as far as a few pixels may allow). ®™ark, who at the time was a fairly unknown anonymous collective devoted to the subversion of corporate culture, sees the opportunity and seizes it. Someone within the programmers team of SimCopter decided to put an end to an exhausting (60 hours per week) and underpaid job, mostly programming stereotyped chicks and machos. The idea is as simple as it is sensational: to secretely introduce a modification of the appearance, behavior and frequency of some characters in a pre-Christmas batch of games. The result would mutate heterosexual flirtings into tender and frequent effusions of love between swim-suited men. Apparently a large number of copies (between 50,000 and 80,000) of the modified game are distributed on a friday afternoon, but during the weekend someone at Maxis notices the change. Jacques Servin, the author of the prank claims the head of Maxis himself discovered it, and took it with sense of humor. The next week Servin is fired for introducing “non approved material”. ®™ark’s PR action could then begin: news reaches even big mainstream media like Wired and in the end the case is in the public domain. Did anybody see and play the game before it was withdrawn? Does it really matter? ®™ark’s purpose is not to denounce hypocrisy, but to use the media hype in order to make the aggressively optimist and business-oriented culture of mid 90s show its dark side. «I’ve always wanted to be an activist,» declared Jacques Servin, «but activism is so moribund now. Do you think these heads of corporations are going to walk into an art gallery and say, ‘Oh, wow - I was wrong’? Symbols are so much more powerful where you don’t expect them.» We can’t be 100% sure that thousands of copies were really distributed (and were any sold?) but any tactics can be used if you want the shiny world of video games to act out in the open and publicly respond to embarrassing issues like the (lack of, excess of) political correctness and the working hours of their workers. The creation and the exploitation of media-generated hype might be a questionable strategy, but the SimCopter case - and in reality many other campaigns supported by ®™ark - seem to demonstrate that a small “myth” (according to its ethymology: a tale) can be talked about for a long time and inspire further action even years later.
The whole game narrative of SimCopter - which was based on extreme competition and the desire to prevail, conquest and eventually destroy - was undoubtedly compromised by ®™ark’s intervention. However, the context changed very quickly under the pressures of technological and marketing innovation, and one of the many reasons that part of the source code of popular games is released is indeed to take the pulse of users. The invisible hand of the market used the visible keyboards of the gamers to fill a vacant position and to design games closer to current events and the media agenda, even mass civil disobedience and urban riots against global capitalism.
It’s been claimed that the Scottish developers State of Emergency (SoE) - a recently released game for Sony’s Playstation2 platform (which means, by the way, that no code will be open sourced, even though various cheats and access codes can be found on line) - found direct inspiration in the Seattle protests of November 1999, when a global movement against multinational corporations was first acknowledged by mainstream media. The manual of SoE provides us with a time line of our near future up to 2035, when the game itself is set: «2010- We accepted that the only way the global economy could successfully sustain growth through a period of environmental deterioration was to give more power to big business. (…) 2023- Opposition to authority was liquidated permanently, and the corporation took complete control. This period saw sustained growth of our economy. The people were happy and they knew it. (…) Now, In 2035- More weak and ignorant lowlifes are attempting to challenge the authority of the corporation. A State of Emergency has been declared». You are a civilian caught in the middle of a riot in the Capitol City Mall. Approached by a freedom fighter from the underground resistance movement, you decide to join this organized resistance and, using whatever weapons you can find, fight back against the corporation security forces. In an earlier version of the game the name of your ubiquitous enemy ‘The Corporation’ was instead the American Trade Organization – whose name sounds frighteningly realistic, but apparently some U.S. politicians reacted negatively to such a direct association. «Choose to play through 175 missions set across four areas of the city in Revolution Mode, or play Chaos Mode where the aim is to score and the best way to score is to smash, destroy and kill.» The game is produced by Rockstar Games, a company that in the last few years released other best-sellers - like Grand Theft Auto for instance - which overtly play with the world of crime, fraud, gambling and other illicit trades. One of the unwritten laws of the video games industry is that an idea which doesn’t raise revenues is not only uninteresting, but can also be dangerous, since a good game that is not able to produce any profit subtracts game-time from potential gamers of commercial products. Evidently SoE has been considered a good idea.
It’s no surprise if modified games cultures are no longer a threat to the mainstream industry, because even though at some stage game mods may have been used to deliver forbidden or dangerous ideas, they turned out to be just an attracting incubator for better customization or niche market exploitation. It’s been said that after what happened on September 2001 the game industry will calm down and for a while producers will think twice before playing with terrorists and violent action on a global scale: SoE shows that maybe times have changed already, or that what gamers want is to mix the game experience more and more effectively with their real environment.
Another scene: year 2001, the President of the U.S.A. declares war on the evil Afghanistan. Anne Marie Schleiner, an artist and author of modified video games, travels to Spain to lead a workshop on video games as a tool for artists: «When I arrived the next morning at the workshop I learned that the U.S. had declared war on Afghanistan. The workshop organizers had installed a new demo of “Return to Castle Wolfenstein”, a remake of an old Nazi castle shooter game, on all the PC’s. The sounds of the weapon-fire echoed off the concrete walls of the workshop warehouse space–what I once approached with playful macho geek irony was transformed into uncanny echoes of real life violence. At that moment, that room was the last place I wanted to be.» Another scene appears somewhere else on those same computer screens. It’s a video. At the end of 2002 a video
spreads on the Internet (on .mil servers, on U.S. air force members or aficionados clubs, on web forums, etc.) and shows the supposed infra-red images of a bombing on a Taleban position in Afghanistan. Two buildings can be easily spotted, then we witness someone dropping bombs on moving cars and a man hunt on the nearby fields and ditches, while we hear soldiers and officers speaking in the background. Cryptome, a notorious underground web site where hidden, classified, invisible information is collected, called it “Military porn”.
The origin of this video is as shadowy as the facts it shows are self-evident. At the same time, the doubt and the anguish it inspires in the spectator are not provoked by cruel realistic recordings, but by images that could even be part of a trailer of a recent 3D strategy game. Alleged reality, which strikes us as a simulated reality, blends with a computer based simulation and shows facts that have the same random possibilities of having really existed or not. Highly mediated forms of simulation like SoE and the Afghanistan video illustrate the disturbing ambiguity of the current status of converging technologies, and may even lead to a simply apocalyptic attitude (”reality is simulated, reality is deconstructed, undecidable, confused”).
But simulation can be also used to act on reality itself. Playing with a surrounding shared world can cause unexpected reactions and it’s surprisingly close to the purposes of artists. From a corner of the prehistory of the 21st century someone said that “the only success that can be conceived in play is the immediate success of its ambiance, and the constant augmentation of its powers. Thus, even in its present co-existence with the residues of the phase of decline, play cannot be completely emancipated from a competitive aspect; its goal must be at the very least to provoke conditions favorable to direct living. In this sense it is another struggle and representation: the struggle for a life in step with desire, and the concrete representation of such a life.” Slowly, the idea of an unplayable game takes shape.
In 1999 the Carbon Defense League (CDL) and the Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) jointly produce “Super Kid Fighter” (SKF), a real hack of a Nintendo Gameboy ROM. Like all the unplayable games mentioned here, it’s actually perfectly playable, but in this case a simple download and software installation is not enough because the installation also requires a hardware modification, which is explained in detail in Carbon Defense League’s web site. Neither the Gameboy’s code nor its hardware are open to authorized modifications, but this was not seen as an obstacle by CDL / CAE, who instead took Nintendo’s obsession for anti-piracy control over their products as a challenge. Super Kid Fighter is a role play based on textual interaction and basic visual features, where the final reward is to enter the brothel: the player has to gain points and develop a survival strategy in a social environment that recalls some working class neighborhoods of an American town, where small unofficial businesses, considered illegal by institutions, develop in social areas unreached by the agents of official socialization (school, church, family, etc.). CDL / CAE thought that for its game simplicity and its impressive diffusion Gameboy could be the right tool to talk to 10-12 years old kids. “Critical thinking is not introduced to intellectually developed children; they must wait until they’re adults to be exposed to it in any radicalized form. What passes as teaching children critical thinking is limited to teaching what is needed to prepare them for success in a given specialization”. If you want to talk with children and stimulate desire in them - CAE says - the content of the story is important, but SKF doesn’t aim to provide an alternative narrative / values by simply reversing the good and the evil or talking about (race, social..) minorities. The SKF project was designed less as a way to deliver radical contents, and more as an excuse for a wider social game where imagination and discovery can be at work without worrying about leading the kids towards a very precise goal. What counts is that children can become “tactical media participants”. Even though CDL / CAE argue that the size of the Gameboy players on line community worldwide might reach the critical mass for the underground distribution of SKF, the collective and ‘physical’ dimension of play is actually even more important in this case, enforcing the peer-to-peer dynamics of mutual acknowledgment and appreciation of discoveries and capabilities that typically rule children’s activities.
THREE
“Entertainment begins where / Technology becomes invisible”. Rarely is a commercial slogan so overtly stated, but sometimes corporate poetry is surprising. One of the key moments in the process of disappearance of the code is the development of the metaphoric graphic interface by Apple (immediately plagiarized by Microsoft). The input-output of the computer was no longer ruled by text commands producing sequences of lines, and became unimaginatively a desktop with folders and trash basket. In the name of “usability” one of the most powerful filters between the user and the machine had been set. The closed nature of Sony’s Playstation or Nintendo’s Gameboy is just an example of a general trend that involves products as different as Microsoft’s Windows systems - the settings of non-professional versions in particular are limited and usually hidden - and modern cars - which come out of the factory with sealed and beautifully designed plastic-metal boxes containing the engine: “Entertainment begins where Technology becomes invisible” because the user shouldn’t question the tool s/he is using in the name of the higher value of entertainment and let’s-not-waste-our-leisure-time. “In case of problems contact the nearest technical assistance centre”.
In video games culture this imperative pushed by the entertainment industry has always coexisted with its opposite, an irreverent attitude focused on the discovery of shortcuts,
cheats, possibility of manipulation. It sounds quite obvious: when the duration of the game depends on the money you put in a machine, you’ll soon learn the way to let it last as long as possible. But maybe that’s not the only point, and maybe what I’m interested in here lays deeper: even when videogaming included the collective experience of an arcade and even when the first bi-player arcade games had been launched, the challenge was always less to the other players than to the machine itself: this challenge was fed by mixed attempts to understand the inner logics of the machine and subdue it in order to obtain the desired purpose (pass to next level, discover the bonus features, etc.). It’s simply false that “Entertainment begins where Technology becomes invisible” because for the avid gamer the real fun is indeed playing against the machine.
Ever heard of Tekken Torture Tournament (TTT)? Created by Eddo Stern, an Israeli artist based in California, TTT is a modified Tekken III Playstation console which converts virtual damage into bracing, but non-lethal electric shock. The Playstation software works properly since the game has not been modified in any way, except that the more the player succeeds in the game, the stronger the electric loads on the hand that controls the game and is literally bound to it. Playing is not a simple decision to take when you know that the machine plays dirty! The idea of abusing computer games technology is one of the crucial elements of what I’m calling here the unplayable games and it also emerges in Eddo Stern’s “Runners” (1999-2002), a 3D strategy game based on a best-selling product of the late 90s where the player has 3 different characters displayed on one big screen each: the idea is that the 3 avatars are driven by the same joystick so that any move is the same for all three, although they are obviously in three different game situations. The game is digitally cruel because sooner or later two out of three characters will be abandoned in the vain hope that at least one will survive. Challenging the machine - instead of the phantom of your enemy moving on a screen - changes the rules of the game and displaces its basic goal: the simulation shows its inherent limits and any other move in the game makes the competition lose its meaning.
The well known games by the European duo Jodi (from SOD to the Untitled Games) brought the challenge to its purest extremes, shifting the playing field to the very belly of the machine: the code. In SOD - for instance - the tunnel system of the Quake interface is maintained, while any recognizable figurative element is distorted. Leaving the audio files untouched and letting part of the code appear on the surface (the code of the game was visible on the HTML surface of their web site and on the messages sent to various mailing lists), Jodi banned any realism and subverted any decorative elements which hide the naked code. Among the most unplayable of the unplayable games mentioned so far, SOD actually can be played, and the reward for those who take up the challenge is the opportunity to move within an extraordinary visual (and even playable) representation of the invisible.
«In 1924, Tristan Tzara formally instructed his readers “To make a Dadaist poem” by cutting out the single words of an arbitrary newspaper article, mixing them and taking out “the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left the bag”. While the resulting poem is random, the instruction is not.» Just like Jodi’s works, the code modifications developed by Retroyou mostly start from commercial video games software. Retroyou analyzes its structures, decompresses files, and substitutes them rewriting a few critical details. While Eddo Stern’s hardware modifications distort competitive game practice to paradoxical effects, Retroyou’s software modifications stretch, mock and eventually take apart even the possibility of a competition. Retroyou doesn’t seem to hate the video game, and on the contrary chooses only the best ones to put his perverse-engineering in action. The “r/c” series is based on a popular car race game, of which “r/c” alters a few levels following different strategies of intervention, as well as a common set of skin images, textures and sound modifications. In one case the rules of gravity and motion are changed, so while the game retains the response to the player’s inputs, the effect of these inputs in the (no longer enchanted) world of the game are absurd: the cars - or rather what remains of them - follow improbable trajectories and even if they’re still driven by the player the computer intervenes somewhere challenging the possibilities of control. Following the new physics of the game, the cars will even jump out of the game field and reveal the deceit: as if in a digital Truman Show, the car exits and flies over the space conceived by the original programmers, showing the attempt of imprison the faithful gamer in a jpg-ed cardboard-made universe. In an another level of the same car race game, Retroyou modifies some of the files that render realistic the movements of all the objects of the game world: the result of this slight modification in the code is that the changes of the gamer’s point of view (i.e. any movement produced by the user) do not successively substitute each other, but accumulate on the screen one after the other. This redundancy is perceived by the user as a sort of infinite trail of dragged skins and patterns and in a few seconds the screen is saturated by a kaleidoscope of pixels unintentionally generated by the user her/himself.
Like other computer games modifications that insist mostly on visual and decorative features, Retroyou’s unplayable games are visually beautiful, especially when projected on big screens and with good sound systems. However, Retroyou’s resistance to simply v-jing his games seems to reveal a more profound motivation behind his modifications: the “r/c” series is less an investigation into a particular form of auto-generative visuals, than a process revealing that contemporary digital media have very much to do with secrecy. Studying the code of a Microsoft flight simulator, for example Retroyou realized that some functions rendering the explosion effect of a plane crashing against buildings were present but disabled. These functions are simply part of the construction of an immersive realism, which represents a very important feature for a flight simulator, where the user has to cope with plausible weather conditions, the aerodynamics of the planes, real world skylines, etc. Locking the functions that render that particular kind of explosion seems like an arbitrary choice, which may be even more relevant since that version of the game has been released after the September 11 events. If the above mentioned “Truman Show effect” strips off the usually camouflaged limits of the game fiction, the disabled code of the flight simulator reveals that we’re not dealing with a simple, timeless and “value-neutral” game. The connections between the military nexus and entertainment industry are renowned and not even particularly hidden: since the cold war, the link between them has always been strong in terms both of strategical R&D investments (training systems, simulations) and in terms of control policies over popular culture (construction of a common ideology, influence on leisure time, etc.). Retroyou’s game modifications actually grow from a continuous investigation of the underground paths where entertainment industry, corporate culture and political-military apparatus mirror each other. On his own website Retroyou built and keeps updating a sort of hypothetical mailing list archive on controversial, irrational, classified topics of current networked society. While these informations redirect towards the complexity of a general context, on the contrary the video game modifications represent their visual synthesis. The “r/c” games show that the beauty of an unplayable game can lay in beautiful colors, shapes and sounds implying a challenge against secrecy as a cultural and psychological weapon.
FOUR
Is an unplayable game an unbearable or even useless contradiction? Is it just rhetorical? The computer games mentioned here - which by the way are just some examples of a richer story - are not unplayable because it’s impossible to play with them. Even if artists are often famous for designing systems that don’t work or don’t work properly or for promising more than they can fulfill, this is not the case in “Go West”, “SimCopter”, “Super Kid Fighter”, “Tekken Torture Tournament”, “SOD” and the “r/c” series. Unplayable here points towards a different direction than the ‘plug-and-play’ entertainment and the “playability” of large scale industrial products. Even if some of these unplayable games to some extent depend on mainstream games, the relationship between the alternative, radical and even visionary experimentations and their global market counterparts is not ambiguous at all: they’re physical or conceptual hacks that don’t only challenge gamers’ skills (as any good computer game does), but force the gamer to bring the state of things around h/er into play.
The most frequent strategy put into action in narrative digital media is immersion, which tends to engage the user in a process that requires immediate reactions and a very pragmatic attitude towards objects, avatars, tactics and values at stake. An immersive narrative builds a world where the relationship between the user and h/er surroundings can be simply called “simulation” (the meaning of the term here is the same used by Baudrillard): a separate dimension where distinguishing true from false, possible from impossible ultimately doesn’t make any sense. The unplayable games introduce a distance factor that breaks the total immersion in the game world: the strategies are diverse and range from an out of control interface to the representation of the dramatic Albanian migration across the Adriatic Sea. Naively playing these games as they were regular video games is hardly possible because the strategy of complete immersion is broken and the possibility of “seduction” opens up again: «to seduce, se-ducere, means literally to lead someone to lose him/her self, to tear him from his identity, to divert her form her path, from her being, driving her somewhere else and it may even be a matter of life and death. I’m not only thinking about love, sexual seduction. In every form of seduction there’s an adventure, a risk, a dual relationship, a challenge.»
However, the simple opposition between immersion (that opens the way to simulation) and distance, break (to seduction) is just one part of the story. ‘Unplayable game’ may even be too broad a label, including interventions that differ from both a technical and a conceptual point of view: games with radical content and developed from scratch (unavoidably simple in comparison to mass industrial products); limited modifications or patches that use the video game as a trojan horse in order to build another reality or even to hijack the media; games as a kind of tactical tools to sabotage the main socialization processes by official institutions; mutated forms of the normal(ised) interaction with computer hardware/software (at any level: somatic, aesthetic, cognitive, emotional), and finally games as part of a strategy of reaction against mass spectacle. In spite of this amazing diversity, all these unplayable games point their weapons to the same target: the notion of interactivity, a typical byproduct of the digital media propaganda that smoothly runs through the established new media arts landscape.
«Is, however, the other side of this interactivity not interpassivity? Is the necessary obverse of my interacting with the object instead of just passively following the show not the situation in which the object itself takes from me, deprives me of, my own passive reaction of satisfaction (or mourning or laughter), so that it is the object itself which “enjoys the show” instead of me, relieving me of the superego duty to enjoy myself».
Every game allows us interactive responses which imply the passivity of a full emotional reaction to an input that comes from outside: it’s like «being active through the other», where the ‘other’ is actually represented by the laws that rule the artificial world of the game. «In contrast with the clichés that state that new media transform us into passive consumers who stare blindly at the screen, we argue that the so called threat of the new media lays in the fact that they deprive us of our passivity, of our real passive experience, thus preparing for irrational and frantic activity». As Slavoj _i_ek puts it (through Lacan), the possibility of a full reaction to the established rules of a game leads me to a state of intensity (even when negative), and ultimately to a general state of satisfaction and enjoyment. It sounds paradoxical but it’s precisely in the most sophisticated “interactive” media (from complex games like “The Sims” to artistic “multimedia” installations) that this possibility of basic passivity is negated: I can’t enjoy passivity because every reaction is already incorporated in the machine and its functioning. The interactivity proposed by sophisticated “interactive” media is most of the times false. It sketches instead a situation of “interpassivity”, which doesn’t imply ‘being active through the other’ but rather ‘being passive through the other’.
The unplayable games don’t fear passivity a priori, since they intend to engage the gamers with the basic satisfactory experience of simply playing and reacting to the new unexpected rules of the game. Some radical positions taken by Jodi are meaningful: their Untitled Games (a whole series/recollection of modifications of Quake) imply at a certain point a sort of blind use. In most of the Untitled Games and especially the ones with the black square icon - the reference to Malevitch is probably accidental but revealing - the basic commands available to the gamer have not been dismantled, but their effectiveness on an abstract or even textual environment are hard to interpret (the ASCII characters in some cases scrolling on the screen being real time values of the game code variables). Retroyou’s “[RC02] BUTTERFLY OVERFLOW : FCK TH GRAVITY CODE” and “[RC03] RED HOOD : ZERO WORLD”, and Jodi’s “G-R” take that blind use to its very extremes and become completely passive play-fields. As Retroyou puts it, they «don’t require human player», implicitly mocking the taboo status of passivity of the digital media user.
The motivation behind all the different kinds of unplayable games is fueled by the desire to actively resist a development model where the user should be compliant to digital technology and its functions as they were originally conceived. In this sense, even the experience of absolute passivity within a modified game like Jodi’s or Retroyou’s - even if contradictory with the necessary degree of interaction of a playable game - provokes in the gamer a sort of total detachment. Fighting against the interpassivity (sold as enhanced interactivity), Unplayable games don’t negate at all the enjoyment of playing. They simply move the enjoyment back to our side of the screen, engaging us in a challenge where our own position in the world is at stake.
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At the beginning of “The case of the computer Asia”, the italian-american computer detective Giovanni Ravelli is confronted with the case of Asia, a computer developed to be intelligent and endlessly increase its knowledge. Enabled to getting closer and closer to replicate human intelligence, the computer decides to disappear and flees.
- Building a Buffer program [Buffer is the name of the dog of the inventor of Asia] would be easy. Just a few subroutines: food, master, caresses, she-doggies and so on. Feelings too. But dogs are alive, computers are not. And what about people buying inflatable dolls then? And those who fall in love with movie characters? And those who talk to their cars? Again, where’s life if not in our brains, in our behaviors? Asia was alive in its being purposeless. It was a machine in its being logic. Now, maybe these two facts clash. And this may have led her to unimaginable conclusions.
vanni brusadin
january03
(Thankz to Nu for proof-reading and other improvements of the text)
Publicado por CRAC en el marco del proyecto RAM |
> RE-APPROACHING NEW MEDIA, 2003
> “Copyleft Vanni Brusadin 2003 - Este texto puede ser copiado, distribuido y comunicado publicamente siempre y cuando se reconozca y cite el texto original y el autor (licencia http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5)”
LINKS
GENTIAN SHKURTI - some infos available at http://d-i-n-a.net/metagallery/shkurti.html
SIMCOPTER -
®TMARK
SUPER KID FIGHTER
CARBON DEFENSE LEAGUE
CRITICAL ART ENSEMBLE
TEKKEN TORTURE TOURNAMENT (EDDO STERN)
JODI
UNTITLED GAME (JODI)
RETROYOU
r/c
