(Presentation follow-up to
be posted later tonight)
In the eighth chapter of
“Videogames”, Newman proposes a model for understanding
'character' in simulation games without engrossing narratives. Here,
he resorts to a sort of cybernetic argument, making mention of the
now vintage “Cyborg Manifesto” of Donna Harraway. I happen to
think that this approach is way off mark.
Instead, I would propose
that characters in these sorts of games factor into a process of
'history-making'. I was a real-time strategy fanatic when I was
younger, back when the genre was much more prolific then it is
currently. For many of these games – Starcraft, Age of Empires,
Command & Conquer, etc – characters and story were present, but
often had a marginal role in the actual gameplay, and none at all in
multiplayer matchups. Yet in some senses, these elements could be
invented during play. Over the course of a game, I was conscious of
the entire course of the match – how a particular piece of ground
was contested, or the slow, grinding siege of a particular base.
Individual units might not have been noteworthy, but I certainly kept
track of the various formations that I established, each having a
particular role – artillery support or a crack commando team –
which itself lead to differences in form. Occasionally, I might take
a battle-weary unit and securely seclude it at the rear of my base, a
'Saving Private Ryan'-like gesture when all of its comrades had
fallen in battle.
Even in non-military
simulations, such as SimCity, this manufactured history still played
a major role. The tremendous metropolis that one might create does
not simply hang in a moment of time, but is given value by one's
knowledge of its course and development. After all, it would not be
much fun to play without being conscious of the path your city took,
from quaint village to bustling metropolis, through booms, budgetary
droughts and natural disasters. The city itself becomes a story, and
a cast of characters and events are spontaneously manufactured to
around it.
Many simulation games
encourage this sort of experience. For example, most Real-time
strategy games offer a final tally at the end of each session, single
or multiplayer, laying out the statistics of the game. By looking at
this end screen, it is possible to determine whether a particular
match was relatively peaceful or extremely bloody, whether a
particular player ran a skillful economy or a wasteful system. Some
games, such as Age of Empires II, offered a graph detailing the
relative progression of each player toward victory or defeat, a sort
of session history in miniature.
Furthermore, certain games
include an option to save recordings of matches, allowing for the
broad dissemination of such histories. As much as replays are framed
as player versus player events, spectators cannot help but refer to
units, bases and armies as individual entities, as if separate from
the will of the player.
These types of games are
enjoyable not out of some sort of 'cybernetic' connection with the
title, but rather because they are held at arm's length, indulging in
a sort of assisted fiction creation.
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