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Everything Will Be Games

  
 
Matthew Fluxington
19:05 / 04.08.02
Grant Morrison, in the Sequential Tart interview:

I'm doing a lot of work on video games including Battlestar Galactica of all things and that's the area I'm becoming most interested in for the future.

Everything will be games in ten years.

Everything.

This strikes me as a VERY horrifying prediction which is pretty well grounded in reality. I'm interested in hearing what you all think are the pros and cons of a culture dominated by games and interactive technology. Should I not be so frightened, or am I completely justified in wanting out of a culture of video games?
 
 
Spatula Clarke
20:40 / 04.08.02
I suspect you're stereotyping videogames. I suspect you're far from the only person here who'll do so.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
21:02 / 04.08.02
I've also got to say that I think Morrison's going to be monumentally disappointed by the restrictions he'll be faced with. He's hinted that he believes that the medium has a very bright future - with a very important place in 21stC culture - on a few occasions now.

Problem: it's a medium which has been stifled, in creative terms, by its own financial success. Original titles don't sell. Publishing companies aren't willing to take any risks and so developers only create games that they know they'll get signed.

It's a bad sign when the most adventurous years in any medium were its early ones.

FLux> can you explain yr horror, please?
 
 
Ellis says:
21:13 / 04.08.02
(Did you read last months Edge magazine by any chance Randy?)
 
 
w1rebaby
22:39 / 04.08.02
I would also be interested in discovering exactly what you think GM means by saying that, before launching into a vicious attack on whatever you think is bad about the concept.

(This prejudice comes from a general view that games and game-playing should be an essential part of human life, and that computer games as as valid an expression of this as Kerplunk or Lego. Which I'd be quite prepared to defend in context.)

He also says "Elephant head, elephant head, I worship a god with an elephant head." Are there links between GM and Ganesh that we should be aware of?
 
 
Spatula Clarke
23:25 / 04.08.02
He means the other elephant-headed god.

Good point re: games, fridge. "Everything will be games" doesn't necessarily mean videogames (despite the context). 'Twould be nice if Mr M had expanded on that comment. At all.

Ellis> Yeah, but it's a worry I've voiced before. Basically, I think that certain business interests became aware of the profitability of the form too early in its life. I'm hoping for a creative backlash and return to small, self-publishing development teams. It's certain to happen eventually - similar things happen in every entertainment medium - but it may not happen soon enough.
 
 
Tom Coates
09:18 / 05.08.02
I think the gradual development of gaming as a form of narrative is inevitable and probably quite a good thing if done properly. I was going to write something along these lines as a chapter in my doctorate, actually - about how drama emerges from greek participatory ritual practice - small groups performing sacrifice - and then evolves through greek theatre towards an identificatory rather than participatory relationship - which then gradually becomes larger until technology makes it possible for the degree of the spectacle to rise (but at the cost of individual specificiity - ie. it has to be mass market to sell) - which is now moving towards participation again through gaming, eventually to end up at that purity of a ritual experience, or a gaming environment indistinguishable from everyday life and designed to operate around individual fantasy...
 
 
Sax
12:19 / 05.08.02
If Morrison's so hot on games why doesn't he try to make an Invisibles game instead of pissing about with Battlestar Galactica of all things?
 
 
Jack Fear
12:44 / 05.08.02
But THE INVISIBLES is a game, silly. Just as it is, in its present form.
 
 
Sax
14:03 / 05.08.02
Yeah, but think how much mugs like us would pay for it. Especially with a limited edition can-with-face-attachment.
 
 
Mystery Gypt
00:37 / 06.08.02
apparently you've know idea how hard it is to sell videogame concepts, Sax... knowing morrison, Battlestar Gallactica will BE the invisibles game, won't it?
 
 
Sax
06:37 / 06.08.02
In that case I'll probably experience my enlightenment while gambolling about as a fucking Daggit.
 
 
Sebastian
12:43 / 06.08.02
There is an undeniably growing tendency in GM interviews to make predictions, now ranging boldly over the next 50 years (I think they used to stop in 2012 in the past), and as a mannerism -self conscious or not- it is beginning to exasperate me from somewhat light hearted to definitely fatuous, especially considering that most of these predictions apply to a distinguished human elite to which only we guys in front of a PC and reading or writing comic books belong, while they pretend to predictively encompass the entire living specie, half of which will not have a chance to get out of the game of trying to get decent nourishment for an entire life span, at least as I see it. Just check his prowling predicitons of super-heroes and then you tell me.

Comprehensibly, the man has given way to many interviews, and has a good clear target for doing them, and such predictions are probably chewing candy for his audience, but I prefer to think of RA Wilson when he amusingly reviews his over-optimistic predictons of the seventies and early eighties that are still being reprinted in his former books, throwing a good light of tender comprehension to the enthusiastic prediciton-maker he was.

As for what does it mean, I think -speculatively- it refers to the possibility of a growing massive awareness that life can be interpreted as a game, just in the way he has depicted in Invisibles and through other interviews. Role playing games may be thought of as the ante-chamber of this. Now, how massive this awareness will be I can not think of, because individuals have to make a leap from "life" to the game, and no matter how many role playing games you are involved in, you might get stuck in them forever and still go through life as our ancestors did. As a side comment, it is worth to notice that brief (or strategy) therapy, NLP, neurosemantics (an NLP derived approach to therapy), have slowly started to instill in self-transformation technologies the notion of themselves being a process through which the individual discovers about the rules his life is subjected to, and about the games he has been playing without having been formally invited to play.

For the moment I will personally continue to nourish this game awareness for myself, check who is writing the rules, and stealthily wait and stalk till I meet another player.
 
 
w1rebaby
12:59 / 06.08.02
I don't think that "life can be interpreted as a game" is a concept particularly original to Mr Morrison or the Invisibles... he's just put a certain interpretation on it. It's been around for a while. I'm sure Haus could give us some classical examples.
 
 
Our Lady of The Two Towers
14:01 / 06.08.02
I have tended to find that the only predictions that Grant makes that come true are the ones that-like Nostradamus- are so fucking vague that people then spend their time arguing over whether they have come true, or that Grant can smugly point to and say "when I said x, I meant y." IIRC, In the book on comic writing he made a prediction that within 18 months we would make contact with a fictional reality. The book came out about 3 years ago. if such a thing happened the relevent government are showing extreme uncharacteristic skill in keeping it quiet.

Still, I think to evaluate this we'd have to know what GM considers a 'game' to be. I remember NASA were giving schools a chance to give instructions to that Mars Pathfinder thing when it landed. Is that a 'game'? I had a friend who worked briefly for DERA and in between gibbering about "the terrible knuckles!" would talk about how they were working on transfering most of the physical dials in a fighter pilot's cockpit to some sort of 3-d laser display on the visor of the pilot's helmet. Would that be a 'game'? It's whether he means everything 'literally' becoming a game or whether he means the interface, which, given that the US government are trying to perfect the Green Goblin/War Cyborg so they can kill more people with even less danger to their troops, is possible.
 
 
yawn - thing's buddy
14:08 / 06.08.02
911 was our contact with fictional reality.

surely you knew....
 
 
w1rebaby
15:12 / 06.08.02
Okay, I think we may be putting a bit too much on the comment to assume that GM was saying that everything will be games in ten years. I took it to mean that he was saying that the trend was away from the passive narrative fictional experience and more towards the interactive. That's not quite such a bold claim as "everything will be games! you will be games! your dog will be games!"

Which is, of course, what people have been saying for decades, and it doesn't seem to have come true in terms of demand. Technology has made interacting with narratives and producing new ones easier, and that's popular, but I can't see that the demand for non-interactive fiction has reduced significantly.

I'm interested in Tom's concept of drama evolving from ritual, but I can't help but see participation in ritual as intrinsically different from participation in collaborative fiction (which, at the heart, is what I consider "gaming" to really be about; the competition aspect is secondary, a spur, you are creating a new narrative based on your "actions" and the ideas of the game's creator). Rituals have fixed forms and different motivations. There are restrictions in games, but they're rules to shape form rather than hold creation back, or should be (e.g. playing an RPG, having rules that reflect that particular world and restrict your actions are there to channel your creativity and allow you to identify and role-play; they're tools.)

Getting a bit Head Shop, this.
 
 
Tom Coates
15:40 / 06.08.02
It's only head shop if it's about philosophy, cultural studies etc - not because it is 'intellectual'! Hopefully, all the revolution fora are to an extend 'intellectual' otherwise there's something very wrong with the board...
 
 
w1rebaby
16:02 / 06.08.02
I mean I was rather moving away from using technology in games, to the nature of games themselves.

Oops, back on the "what forum for gaming topics?" thing again. Let's not even go there.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
19:06 / 06.08.02
There's a lot of noise about games as a form of narrative in this thread. Surely one of the things which can make them unique in entertainment media is their ability to provide the player with abstract experiences?
 
 
w1rebaby
19:10 / 06.08.02
what do you mean by "abstract experiences"?
 
 
Spatula Clarke
20:22 / 06.08.02
As distinct from the vogue for creating visions of reality. Games that don't attempt to represent anything solid, that instead go all-out to hotwire themselves direct to your head. Right now we're bogged down with games that are mostly concerned with emulating either Hollywood or sports channels. This is fast becoming my catchphrase, but I'm looking at things like Jeff Minter's takes on Tempest and thinking that somebody should be taking what he's done with those further.
 
 
Rage
01:21 / 07.08.02
Everything already is a game, no?
 
 
gravitybitch
05:01 / 07.08.02
Don't know if everything will be games or not (more so than everything already is), but gaming as a narrative struck me today while I was waiting for a reaction to finish, and I ended up casting everybody in the lab in my own private RPG. Hugely entertaining, and I got a few insights out of the process of setting rules, goals for the game, and the like. (My boss looks kinda funny as an ogre, though.)

Seriously, most future-modeling exercises could be construed as gaming. I just tend to want to quibble with how well the models represent current "reality" ....
 
 
Sax
06:44 / 07.08.02
I always find it amusing when people use games as an escape from reality. Aren't games just real life simulations but with more rules?
 
 
w1rebaby
10:48 / 07.08.02
e randy dupre: Games that don't attempt to represent anything solid, that instead go all-out to hotwire themselves direct to your head.

Ah, okay. I think I see what you mean. I don't think I'd classify that sort of game as narrative free, though - just non-representative. They're creating their own narrative, just in their own context. I'm sure we've all been bored by people telling us about how they were playing game X and they got to level 12 but then there's this really difficult boss and you have to still have the power-up from the last level... even if the entities involved are all abstract non-real-world ones, it's still a story, there's a series of events that are the result of actions of the player and creator. Moving away from computer games, there's a story behind a games of chess.

Doesn't make games unique, either - what about abstract art? Music?

If you're saying that it's important to take from people like Minter that quality of real-world simulation doesn't correlate with quality of gameplay then I agree. By setting things in a very abstract universe he can say "look, there's no people, no backstory, but it's fun". There are other elements to enjoyment of a game than narrative. People enjoy having their reflexes and wits challenged, that's just the way we are. But I think the "abstract" thing is just a discipline and medium. Less real-world reference can allow you to concentrate on these aspects, but it doesn't make it qualititively different.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
11:35 / 07.08.02
Doesn't make games unique, either - what about abstract art? Music?

The difference is interactivity. Although it's entirely reasonable to argue that there's an element of audience participation in art and music (the viewer/listener interacting in the sense of bringing their own interpretation to the piece), the level of interation is completely different. Someone viewing a painting, for example, will have their own ideas about what it represents, but those ideas won't immediately affect what another person viewing it at the same time thinks it means. There's an opportunity with games to make the player the artist.

I haven't really thought any of this through properly, by the way, so apologies if it doesn't make a huge amount of sense on-screen.

Moving away from computer games, there's a story behind a games of chess.

True, but the effectiveness of the course of events as a narrative is dependent on the complexity of the game in question. You could form a narrative out of a Tetris session - there's always a recognisable beginning, middle and end - , but it'd be vey basic.

always find it amusing when people use games as an escape from reality. Aren't games just real life simulations but with more rules?

The same can apply to novels or movies. They're simulations in the sense that you get caught up in them, that you're taken along for the ride, but the rules of participation are even more strict - you don't have any impact on events whatsoever. The imposition of rules in games is part of their appeal; doing a to b will always lead to c happening. You don't get those kind of assurances irl. With that in mind, the attempts to create more of a real world feel by introducing random outcomes/outcomes based on actions taken throughout the game is interesting.
 
 
Molly Shortcake
16:03 / 13.08.02
Ten years? Already here in South Korea. 26,000 broadband online games rooms, called baangs, are the new singles bars, half of the country is wired for broadband, video game competitions are broadcast on live TV. Gaming has profoundly affected the countries social structure.

Wired has an excellent article in the August 2002 US edition.
 
  
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