Plenty of Room on This Bandwagon

Well here we go: the last bit of the Slate piece dives right into this “why do so many games have a women-alienating adherence to a culture constructed around adolescent male tropes” notion I’ve been blogging about here, complete with links to blogrants on the subject other than my own.

So, woot. Other people appear to have noticed. What now?

I finally found mentions of the only games I play in the Slate comments section, where people note that Sims and WoW are hugely popular. I also found a brief “I hate sports games” confessional somewhere in the linkage (further evidence of this rift between game-players-looking-for-a-movie-substitute and game-players-looking-for-a-game), and another link blaming Spore’s disappointing performance on various factors.

I’ve been lately offended by a couple of marketing campaigns, one for Windows and one for some other computery thing, might be Yahoo. Anyway, both campaigns feature people who look like they’d be high-maintenance complainy attention-sponges going on about how finally their favorite computer corporation realized they are the only person in the world and tailored their products exclusively around them. The one that caught my attention today had some guy in an impeccably razored goatee asserting that Windows made their OS faster because he told them to.

Something about both campaigns feels extremely clueless and conciliatory. “All you test market focus groups who didn’t like our earlier ads, fine! Here’s our new campaign, it’s about how everything’s all about you, and I hope you’re happy now, asshats.”

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like if computers, the internet, video games and everything had been invented in a different era. Like say, the fifties. All the games would be about cowboys and Indians, with maybe a few daring-edgy-topical games about WWII. Games for men and women would be segregated . . . sort of how they are now, but with less jiggling boobage and more subtle entendre. And there would be no token female NPCs standing around with assault rifles and broadswords.

Or how about the sixties? It’s hard to tell whether the whole psychedelic drugs and flower power thing would have involved computers, a lot of the proponents of that scene seem a little math-impaired. Still, computers can help produce psychedelic light shows and mix acid rock, so might have been glommed onto by futuristic early adopters to email Grateful Dead mixes all over the place. And if computers had been around in the sixties, they probably also would have picked up a dubious taint of association with hippies. “Oh come on grampaw, not the computer again, Hendrix is old school and those light shows cause seizures.”

The seventies would have been great for computers. I mean, consider that all those disco hits were mixed in labor-intensive analog (you know, where you have to splice audio by making actual cuts to the storage medium, with a razor blade) (also . . . they frequently used real orchestras, not just samples). And George Lucas might have been able to get the FX right the first time in Star Wars. There was also a fad for organic and unprocessed things, which might have led to an anti-computer backlash (much sci fi from the period is about humans rebelling against a large omnipotent computer trying to control them), and might also have led to computers in plastic cases with factory-applied wood-grain painted on (like an alarm clock I had when I was a small child; I also had some headphones that were covered in blue denim, so maybe all the laptop bags would have been made out of old jeans).

I had computers in the eighties, but most people didn’t, they were still pretty primitive, especially in the graphics department. There were Nintendos and Ataris for console fun, and coin-ops were very popular as they had lots more dedicated processing power. And the games then . . . the field was wide open and hadn’t been fenced off into genre corrals, so you could make a video game about smashing asteroids in space or being a yellow smiley face fleeing ghosts through a maze without a lot of assumptions about what players wanted. The creativity far outweighed the technology, and there were many games around asking you to suspend your disbelief long enough to pretend that the low rez brick on your screen was a person, or a dragon, or a treasure chest. And people played them, enthusiastically.

You could even say the same for the nineties, and in fact, people are still playing retooled versions of nineties hits like Warcraft and Sims and Civilization and Diablo. Then the turn of the century happened and games became Serious Business, and the idea of a little company (like say, Bullfrog) putting out genuinely entertaining little snarky games became unthinkable – to unleash a game, now you need a Cecil B. DeMille like cast of thousands, backed by many corporate dollars, under the helm of . . . some guy who has no clue whatsoever about games, and thinks female-friendly franchises like Sims need to be fixed by introducing Indiana Jones.

And the games developed this serious boys club atmosphere that had previously been lacking, back when if you didn’t want to play a soldier firing at civilians it was okay, there were a thousand other games to choose from. Ms. Pac Man was basically the same as Pac Man, and didn’t need a lot of pink packaging and buzzword-filled hyperbole about “girls are wired for social networking and boys are wired for pwnage.”

Since there are lots of factors involved, and since computer games are new, and since they are also lucrative enough to inspire clueless management types to try to force them to comport to previous standards for products such as movies, it’s hard to tell whether the gamerverse will be the same in ten years. Or whether the playerbase will be for that matter. Maybe there will be a backlash, which would be nice. Maybe the “thousands of little games” environment which morphed into “you may have a product from a limited selection produced by huge multinational corporations” will be something entirely different in 2015. The medium itself pretty much begs for the end-user to tweak and rewrite it despite the fervent longing of late 20th century types for a world where everyone shops at the same store for the same top ten movies while wearing the same brand of jeans. That paradigm is gone and will never be back (woohoo).

And even now, the situation is changing to “the meager selection of available corporate games is misogynistic and depressing despite large budgets and colorful graphics so I think I’ll just go get another iPhone app instead.”

Time for a sidetrack. I fussed around with the beta version of the Sims “create a world” utility this weekend. I’m pretty good at this computer stuff, and it confused me, so I’m going to leave it alone until it’s out of beta, although I’m sure the fine folks that have been producing Sims hacks for the rest of us, such as More Awesome Than You, will be diving in and creating all kinds of worlds, and maybe even writing more user-friendly interfaces to re-customize them.

I did read the manual though. The emphasis seems to be on helping players to create small, download-friendly sim neighborhoods that can be shared. I’m someone who likes to create huge places filled with custom content (and someone who looks down their nose at lazy designers trying to get players to do the creative work – if customers went to a movie and were treated to fifteen minutes of a director going “well, we’ve got a romantic male and female lead but nobody could figure out if they like each other or not so ushers will be passing out notebooks for you to write the rest of the story” there would be rebellion).

But from an artistic standpoint . . .

Let’s get back in the time machine, and this time, let’s bring Harper Lee to ten-years-or-so-from-now, to re-write To Kill A Mockingbird (which is one of those books that Everybody Has Read, so if you haven’t, you’re out of step, go read it, or at least the Wiki summary). Instead of narratively leading young Scout through her neighborhood, meeting Boo Radley and Dill, watching her dad’s case enfold in court, Ms. Lee could create a virtual version of the town (Macon, if I remember right), and build the important houses, complete with the hollow tree near the school. Then you, as the player, could go into that world, meet the characters and decide what you want to do there, whether it’s hanging out with Atticus in his law office after hours or helping the kids make their costumes for the school pageant.

You’d be trading narrative flow for detail. You’d also be taking the chance that some antisocial players might prefer staying in the house with Boo Radley, or cheering for the evil characters in the courtroom drama.

There still might be a story in there, however . . . remember the people in the Slate article who had no use for the campaign scenario and just wanted to group up with other players for some pwnage? What if most of the Virtual To Kill A Mockingbird players wanted to ignore Scout entirely and hang around in Macon’s red light district drinking moonshine and sexually harassing women? What if the lynch scene became the focal point of the game, with players competing to stop the lynch mob (and griefers joining the lynch mob just to mess with the “nice” players), and all of the carefully delineated character development went by the wayside?

If there is art in that kind of scenario, especially art that has to peacefully co-exist alongside people who are only there for the adrenalin, it would take a different kind of mind to bring it forward and make it time-independent enough so that narrative no longer takes the focus.

Maybe those are the sort of “novels” our grandchildren will encounter, with the details waiting in the background for those patient enough to discover them while the masses stampede through in their quest for immediate distraction.

It intrigues me, though. Maybe I should stop fussing over my ideas regarding the novel I’d like to write and try something a little more experimental, and see exactly what a creative and formerly-writerly person can do with a three dimensional town simulacrum as opposed to a sheet of paper and a narrative trajectory.

And as far as the “boys club” dilemma, people are talking about it, which makes me think that more people want to make large amounts of money by solving it. Until they get there, I still need twenty-three more levels on my mage, and my DK and hunter need some better gear, and my priest needs to learn jewelcrafting, plus I’m going to need a whole lot of abyss shards. Did I mention I really love the new looking-for-group interface? Best WoW invention yet. There are several “oh no, I accidentally wound up in a social environment with a jerk” defenses such as blacklisting and “voting them off the island” and most people seem to have figured out that being a jerk will cut them off from the free-flowing supply of gold and shiny things. Most of the complaints I’ve heard are actually from abrasive people moaning about how they can’t force people to put up with them any more. My heart bleeds for them . . . well, actually, no, it doesn’t.

Incentivize the desired behavior. Penalize the antisocial behavior. Duh. About time these game designers figured that out.