PLAYING WITH THE FUTURE: DEVELOPMENT AND DIRECTIONS IN COMPUTER GAMING

ABSTRACT

Mods, Gods, and Creative Computer Gameplay

Andrew Mactavish

Signs of the deific are everywhere in the computer game universe: from the god game genre in which players take the part of near-omnipotent gods (Black and White, Civilization, The Sims, Roller Coaster Tycoon), to the commonplace use of supernatural figures such as wizards, aliens, daemons, and other spiritually possessed beasts from the netherworld, to the game production industry where developers are deified by players, gaming magazines,¹ and sometimes even by themselves². It should come as no surprise that game developers are deified. After all, they are literally the creators of virtual worlds. They design what these worlds look and sound like and they program the artificial intelligence that lends believability to a virtual world's environment and the beings that inhabit it.

Yet, while game designers may be the gods of the many virtual universes that dominate today's high-tech computer game culture, they are not the only creators involved in computer gameplay. In many respects, players are also creators: they help to perform a game's special effects, they shape a game's storyline, and, in the case of god games, they create worlds within the boundaries of a game's universe. For the experienced gamer undaunted by computing learning curves, gameplay can also include the creation of deep modifications to games and gaming environments using development tools made freely available by game developers. In other words, computer gameplay involves a spectrum of creative practices.

As these examples of creative gameplay suggest, the configuration of the developer-player relationship is not arranged according to an uncomplicated division of roles where developers only develop and players only play. There is nothing startlingly new about this configuration of the producer-consumer relationship. Indeed, the advent of digital communications technologies, especially the World Wide Web, has resulted in similar observations about other forms of digital media. Hypertext theorists argue that the hypertext link fundamentally reconfigures the author-reader relationship and makes the reader more authorial³. And a similar redistribution of power is taking place in the film and music industries where independent video and music artists now have greater access to higher quality equipment and Internet-based distribution channels. Clearly, the digitization of media and its distribution channels is giving cultural consumers greater opportunities to be cultural creators.

In this paper, I examine how being a creator of and within computer game virtual worlds is a complex interweaving of pleasure and expression within both the virtual and the real. In this context, I argue that creative gameplay 1) involves the pleasures of creation, experimentation, and control of virtual environments and 2) acts an expression of power within real-world social arrangements, for computer virtuosity is a sign of access to, participation within, and performance of materially mediated signs of social and cultural power.

The major sections of this paper are:

1. The Pleasures of Creative Gameplay:
   In this section, I define creative gameplay and demonstrate that a key component of the pleasure of computer games is becoming a creator of virtual worlds. Players become creators in many ways, such as through the performance of special effects, the shaping of storyline, the creation of virtual worlds within a game's universe (god games), and, most importantly for this paper, through the creation of mods (game and level modifications), skins (new game characters), and total conversions (new games based upon a game's original design engine). I argue that the pleasure of creative gameplay is composed of a mixture of experiencing and participating in technological virtuosity. This discussion points to many games, but focuses on the enormous mod, skin, and total conversion industry surrounding Valve Software's Half-Life.
   
2. The Myths of Creative Gameplay:
   In this section, I theorize creative gameplay within a cultural context. I consider current understandings of interactive digital media as a reconfiguration of producer-consumer relationships, including the seeming democratization that this reconfiguration promises. In doing so, I focus mainly on those critical assessments that rely upon or are derivatives of hypertext theory from the early 1990s.
   
   Ultimately, in this section I demonstrate that creative gameplay does indeed give players opportunities to be the creators of virtual worlds, but that this creativity is bound by the properties of the game worlds, by the technology requirements of the game, by a general culture of technological progress, and by the place of computing technology within real-world social arrangements. I show the ways in which creative gameplay, even in its greatest expression in player-based mod-development, is not an open, boundless field, but rather an environment substantially shaped by social, cultural, and material issues of technology.
   
   
3. The Politics of Creative Gameplay:
   In this section, I continue the line of argument from the Myths of Creative Gameplay and focus on the question of access to creative gameplay. Since creative gameplay is heavily dependent upon access to technology, then there is a material and social politics to creative gameplay. To become a creative gamer who builds virtual worlds, a player must live within social circumstances that provide not only the necessary time and money that creative gameplay requires, but that also provide a structure for legitimacy, even if only as a subculture. In other words, the culture of hardcore gaming, which includes mod developers, relies heavily upon the social, cultural, and economic elements of mainstream culture.

In summary, this paper examines the spectrum of forms of creative gameplay to demonstrate the pleasures, myths, and politics of playing god in the digital sandbox of today's high-tech computer games.

References

¹ See PC Gamer September 1999 and November 2000.
² The best example of self-deification in the computer game development industry is the company called G.O.D. (Gathering of Developers). Initially founded to foreground game developers over game marketers, G.O.D. has fallen from grace and been taken over by Take-Two Interactive re-deified as GodGames.
³ See Landow, George P. Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997.

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