Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Day 24
Indie Games
o So, as I suggested in class last week, one of the significant
changes in the game industry in the last decade is the
much cheaper access to what Marxists would call the
means of cultural production, meaning the tools and
distribution networks you need to actually produce and sell
culture.
o This produces an immense rise in the production and
availability of what are known as indie games, meaning
games that are made independently of any major game
studio/company.
o Indie games are designed both by individual game
designers (like Jonathan Blow, who made Braid, or Jenova
Chen, who made Flow and Flower) as well as by small
studios like Amanita Design (Czech Republic), makers of
Machinarium, or Metanet Software (Canada), makers of
N+.
o A number of indie games are simply smaller and/or highly
addictive and fun platformers, like N+; others are
compelling puzzle-based games like Limbo (2006, made by
the Danish studio Playdead), using highly unusual visual
language and storytelling to create compelling
experiences.
o Lets spend a bit of time looking at gameplay from three of
IGNs top 15 indie games of 2013, to give you an idea of
the range of possibilities here. Some games, like The
Stanley Parable (Galactic Cafe, 2013), are using highly
original narrative structures of the type never before seen
in video gaming.
Cooperation
McGonigal argues that games, even antagonistic games, are
essentially about cooperation, since they require players to act
together to maintain the magic circle that includes the game
rules, the game-world, and so on.
This sounds amazing until you realize that under these conditions
a war between two countries is also cooperative, and so is, say,
the relationship between terrorists and governments.
In any case however this highlights the degree to which
collaboration and cooperation matter to gaming, and points the
way to the possibility of enhancing reality by creating more
opportunities for them.
Here we might want to remember that players collaborate and
cooperate every time they engage in metaculture, whether
instrumental (sharing cheats, writing walkthroughs) or expressive
(fan fiction, etc.). Indeed you might think of the social as a giant
arena for collaboration and cooperation (as well as, of course,
griefing and antagonism and mindless cruelty).
But heres whats really interesting:
The internet makes it clear that people are willing to do lots of
work for very little money, and only minimal social recognition.
Lets recognize that as part of what the internet makes possible,
because among other things it actually changes our sense of
what humans are like.
The question is how we can take advantage of that newfound
knowledge in ways that make life better, not just in terms of the
number of hilarious cat videos (or culture more generally) but in
ways that reach beyond aesthetic culture.
So lets talk about education
So one thing thats clear is that people are moved and motivated by
various forms of online culture, including games. One of the things I
worry about is what this means for teaching. The general version of the
problem McGonigal addresses for us is, If video game culture is so
much more compelling than regular life, what will happen if people
simply withdraw from regular life?
The more particular version is this: How are you supposed to teach
people (in school) when their major positive experiences of
engagement are so differentand so much more compellingthan the
ones that school provides?
Ok, and because I love Jason Roher
DAY 27:
McGonigal and Gottschall
Both McGonigal and Gottschall recognize, in different ways, the
vast power of the psychological tendency to think positively.
Gottschall is careful (unlike McGonigal) to emphasize that
positive thinking as it is projected both backwards and forwards
tends to be highly unrealistic. That lack of realism is in fact
psychologically necessary:
William Hirstein:
The truth is depressing. We are going to die, most likely after illness; all
our friends will likewise die; we are tiny insignificant dots on a tiny
planet. Perhaps with the advent of broad intelligence and foresight
comes the need for selfdeception to keep depression and its
consequent lethargy at bay. There needs to be a basic denial of our
finitude and insignificance in the larger scene. It takes a certain
amount of chutzpah just to get out of bed in the morning.
Reality: broken, but, necessary
And so we come back to the basic McGonigal questions, which we can
now connect to Gottschall: given that much of the time stories and
games are better than realitymore engaging, more compelling,
more absorbing of our attention and energy, and more likely to push us
to work on their behalf:
1. What is the future of reality as an anthropological field?
2. What can we do to make that future better (freer, safer, fairer)?
And now more personally