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Battling Toys
By now it should be clear that we can connect games' artificial spaces of meaning to the values and ideologies of the world at large in countless ways. Each of the examples we explored within this chapter shares a common premise: games are part of culture. Whether they reflect or transform notions of economic class, subcultural style, gender identity, or utopian community, games exemplify ideas about the ways things are, or even the way we would like them to be. This chapter concludes by exploring the reflection and transformation of cultural rhetoric in the context of a particular game design. Toys is a game for two players Eric created in collaboration with school children during a residency at the Bellevue Museum of Art in Seattle in 2000. The design mimics the battling character structure of a game like Pokémon, feeding on the rich social codes created by children for their toys— one plays the game by inhabiting, interpreting, and disputing these codes.
To begin the game, each player selects three character toys from a large collection of action figures scavenged from Seattle flea markets; the figures then "fight" with each other one by one. The battles between toys are waged via modular sentences, randomly constructed from a set of 44 cards. These statements, such as "The female toy beats the unwanted toy," or "The American toy beats the expensive toy," determine the outcome of conflict. Once the sentence has been dealt, it is up to the players to resolve the battle between the pair of toys by interpreting the statement and coming to an agreement on which toy it identifies as the victor.
Toys: A social game for two players.
Setup:
Each player selects 3 toys to create his or her toy collection.
Shuffle the game cards and deal 2 to each player. Keep these cards hidden.
Place the rest of the cards face-down in a pile.
Object:
The goal of the game is to defeat your opponent's toy collection. Game play:
First, each player selects one toy to fight. Deal two cards from the deck face-up and place onto the dotted line rectangles printed on the gameboard. The result will be a statement like, "The naked toy beats the violent toy."
Both players must then decide the result of the match based on the best application of the statement to the two toys. If the players cannot agree, deal two new cards to create a new statement. At any point in the game, players can use the two cards they were dealt to change the statement on the board. After a match the loser selects a new toy from his or her collection to face the winning toy. If you defeat all three of your opponent's toys, you win.
Conflict is an intrinsic part of every game. As we outlined in Games as the Play of Simulation, game conflict is typically a territorial military conflict, a numerical economic conflict, or a conflict over fixed units of knowledge. The design of Toys, however, presents an alternative model. Although it superficially resembles a fighting game, in actuality, it is a game of cultural conflict. Battles between toys pit cultural feature against cultural feature (expensive, popular, American, female) and are resolved through an explicit ranking of these features within a shared system of meaning. The resolution of each match rests in the negotiation of the toys' symbolic value. In order to reach the conclusion that a Transformer toy is more masculine than a Big Bird figure, for example, players must agree that the value of one toy exceeds that of the other when it comes to relative maleness. What makes the collaborative element of Toys so compelling is that players work together not only to meet a set of victory conditions (this toy beats that toy) but also to navigate a rich playground of cultural signs. The game complexifies this negotiation by using not just one comparative term but two (the American toy beats the expensive toy) and by allowing players to intervene twice during a game to strategically change the linguistic equation.
The statements generated in Toys contain a high degree of strategic and cultural ambiguity; resolving this ambiguity is the point of the play. Although there are many games that reward players for cultural knowledge (such as Trivial Pursuit), these games generally provide correct answers to game questions. Toys does not provide the right or wrong answer to the resolution of a match; the game instead relies on the players' authority in determining the answer. In most games, players are expected to act in their own self-interest. But Toys turns the conventional authority structure of a game inside-out: instead of relying on the rules of the game to resolve the conflict each turn, players must resolve the battles through a potentially heated negotiation.
In developing and testing the game with school children, Eric found to his surprise that two players would virtually never both gratuitously claim victory, but almost always reached rapid mutual agreement on which toy won a conflict. In effect, the game revealed that the kinds of meanings circulated in chil-dren's play culture are shared, and through their shared value, they acquire the status of fact—a fact that overrides even a player's desire to win. A game about the negotiation of complex social and cultural systems, Toys illustrates how symbolic codes of race, class, gender, and aesthetics circulate within culture at large. Throughout the game, the signifiers of a toy's cultural status are used as the basis for both conflict and resolution. Knowing which toy is "stronger,"faster," or more "popular" than the other not only makes the game possible but fun as well.The Swamp Thing versus My Little Pony: The ridiculous toy beats the naked toy. Who wins? As Toys playfully demonstrates, games are social contexts for cultural learning. Games always reflect the cultural rhetorics of the spaces in which they were designed or played; some games can even transform the ideologies of their contexts. The real game design challenge is to engage with cultural rhetoric on more than just a superficial level. Rather than merely applying a veneer of political content or cultural narrative to your game, how can you embed your questioning or refashioning of cultural rhetoric into the actual play itself? These are truly difficult design problems. But for game designers seeking to create meaningful play on not just a formal or experiential level, for game designers that want to explore play and innovation in culture itself, Games as Cultural Rhetoric is an indispensable design tool.
Toys: sample playing cards
Toys: gameboard
