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Transforming Spaces
Do not despair! It's true that cultural rhetorics are complicated, but that does not mean they cannot be successfully incorporated into a game design. In fact, it is possible for games to take the concept of cultural rhetoric by the horns, not only representing and challenging ideologies, but also changing them. Most of our examples so far in this chapter have focused on the way that the space of meaning internal to the magic circle reflects cultural rhetorics external to the game. Both The Landlord's Game and Monopoly reflect existing ideas about power and economics and were designed to express these ideas. But games have the ability not only to reflect but to transform cultural values. When this happens, external contexts are shaped by ideologies internal to a game. We have already mentioned that the cultural play of a game is free movement within more rigid cultural structures. But when game play alters and shifts those cultural structures, the play becomes truly transformative: the rigid structures out of which play emerges are themselves reshaped through the very act of play. A wonderful example of transformative play as a game design practice is the New Games Movement, which utilized play to comment on and experiment with new conceptions of culture and community. An outgrowth of 1960s San Francisco counterculture, the New Games Movement believed that the kinds of games people play and the ways they play them are of major significance to society."Sports represent a key joint in any society," George Leonard writes in The New Games Book, "How we play the game may turn out to be more important than we imagine, for it signifies nothing less than our way of being in the world."[13] The New Games Movement was less about the design of individual games and more about the development of an ethos intended to alter the way people interacted with one another. Its goal was to transform culture by creating opportunities for people to play collaboratively. Play hard. Play fair. Nobody hurt. These three core principles order the design (and play) of any New Games game. The movement organized festival-like "Tournaments" that brought people together to play cooperatively, erasing (if only for a brief time) barriers of race, age, sex, size, ability, socioeconomic background, and creed. Values of freedom and the creation of community through game play were woven into a utopian rhetoric that advocated new forms of player empowerment. As Bernard DeKoven notes in The Well-Played Game, "No matter what game we create, no matter how well we are able to play it, it is our game, and we can change it when we need to…. This is an incredible freedom, a freedom that does more than any game can, a freedom with which we nurture the play community. The search for the well-played game is what holds the community together. But the freedom to change the game is what gives the community its power."[14] This powerful, poetic rhetoric conflates the act of changing an individual game with changing the larger "game" of society—a premise at the heart of the New Games Movement. Earthball, a classic New Games design, clearly embodies the movement's rhetoric. Created in 1966 by Stewart Brand for a public event sponsored by the War Resisters League at San Francisco State College, Earthball involved a huge inflatable ball painted with continents, oceans, and swirling clouds, guided by opposing teams. The game had a single rule, which Brand explained in the following way: "There are two kinds of people in the world: those who want to push the Earth over a row of flags at that end of the field, and those that want to push it over the fence at the other end. Go to it."[15] Intended as a way of formalizing player interaction and victory conditions, when the game was first played these simple rules created a space of possibility with a surprising ideological outcome: People charged the ball from both sides, pushing and cheering. Slowly it began to move, first toward one end, then back to the other. The game got hotter. There was plenty of competition, but something more interesting was happening. Whenever the ball approached a goal, players from the winning side would defect to lend a hand to the losers…. That first Earthball game went on for an hour without a score. The players had been competing, but not to win.Their unspoken and accepted agreement had been to play, as long and hard as possible. [16]
Samus Aran: Metroid
MS.Pac-Man
Vanessa: Virtua Fighter 4
SISSYFIGHT 2000
Chun Li: Street Fighter
Nina: Tekken 3
Ling: Tekken 2
Ivy: Soul Calibur 2
Although the game was premised as a competition between two teams, the play that emerged was radically cooperative (in the sense of player cooperation defined in Games as Systems of Conflict). The emergence of collaborative play from a formal structure designed to support competitive interaction demonstrates the power of the New Games Movement rhetoric. The game may have looked competitive on the surface (two teams facing opposite goal lines), but the players enacted cultural rhetorics that valued collaboration and play-for-play's sake. These philosophies emerged from within the game to transform the game, turning traditional competitive play into something else entirely. Later New Games games explored game structures that more explicitly embodied the cultural rhetorics of the movement. For example, the game of Catch the Dragon's Tail (first mentioned in Games as Systems of Conflict), has a definite winning condition and goal, but certain players (in the dragon's middle) are not clearly on one team or the other. The New Game titled Vampire (analyzed in Games as the Play of Simulation, not to be confused with the LARP game Vampire: The Masquerade) also plays with competition, collaboration, and victory conditions. The game can end with the players either all turned into vampires or all cured of their vampirism; in both cases the initially heterogeneous group resolves to a state of homogenous equality. Was the New Games Movement a success? Did it manage to transform society in the way that its founders intended? Yes and no. Although the New Games Movement has waned in recent decades, it asserted tremendous influence on physical education in the United States. If you played with a giant rubber Earthball or a parachute in your elementary school gym class, you can thank the New Games Movement, which helped transform the traditionally sports-based curriculum of phys ed into a more play-centric, cooperative learning experience. Much of the success of the New Games Movement emerged because of its relationships with other forms of counterculture. New Games "Tournaments," for example, mixed the communality of a peace protest with the cultural nihilism of an art happening. There is no doubt that in many ways the New Games Movement and its game designs emerged out of a particular cultural milieu. But the uniquely transformative agenda of the movement is truly inspiring. Playing with the codes and conventions of gaming and social interaction, the New Games Movement sought to create positive social change through play. It did so not by creating games with explicit political content, but by designing play experiences that intrinsically embodied its utopian ideals. Is there room for a similar movement in present-day game design? The New Games Movement was a function of its historical moment, and could not be revived in precisely the same form today. But the notion that game designers could take on transformative rhetorics, unleashing them in culture as a mighty revolution of play, is by no means unrealistic. It did happen; it can happen again. [13]Andrew Fluegelman and Shoshana Tembeck,The New Games Book (New York: Doubleday, 1976), p. 10.[14]Bernard DeKoven, The Well-Played Game (New York: Doubleday, 1978), p. 68.[15]Fluegelman and Tembeck, The New Games Book, p. 9.[16]Ibid.
