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I think one of the changes of our consciousness of how things come into being, of how things are made and how they work…is the change from an engineering paradigm, which is to say a design paradigm, to a biological paradigm, which is a cultural and evolutionary one. In lots and lots of areas now, people say, How do you create the conditions at the bottom to allow the growth of the things you want to happen? —Brian Eno
Introducing Open Culture
In 2001 at the Institute for Contemporary Art in London, musician Brian Eno gave a lecture linking his compositional process to John Conway's Game of Life. The "game" of Life, something we first encountered in Games as Emergent Systems, creates unexpected patterns of events out of a very simple set of rules. Working along similar lines, Eno generates unexpected musical compositions from the interactions of simple algorithms. In his comments, Eno identified the design challenge of generative music as the difficulty of writing the rules for his system: "How do you create the conditions at the bottom to allow the growth of the things you want to happen?" The designer of an emergent system is never directly designing actual behavior or outcomes. Instead, he or she can only design the formal structures that then go on to produce patterns of events. A game designer faces a similar challenge, designing rules directly but only indirectly creating play.Because games are emergent, it is not possible to fully anticipate how a given set of rules will play out in a particular play experience. These concepts should be familiar by now. In Games as Emergent Systems, we saw how the coupled and context-dependent formal operations of a game give rise to unexpected complexity. In our PLAY schemas, we investigated this phenomenon further: exploring how the emergent same-but-different quality of a game seduces players into repeat play; or how a simple social game like Mafia can produce emergent social play; or how emergent (as opposed to embedded) narrative game structures produce unexpected story outcomes. But what about CULTURE? What would it mean to frame games as culturally emergent systems, where the complex play produced by the game occurs not just on a formal or experiential level, but on a cultural level as well? We know from our chapter on Systems that games can be considered either open or closed systems. Closed systems do not permit exchange between the game and its environment; open systems do. When a game is considered as an open culture system, the space of possibility is expanded to include contexts outside the magic circle. The exchange of meaning between a game and its surrounding cultural context can change and transform both the game and its environment. This schema, Games as Open Culture, stems from two propositions: that the emergent, open-ended play of a game can occur on a cultural level; and that as an open system, games exchange meaning with their surrounding contexts. Games as Open Culture builds on the insights of our previous CULTURE chapters, while expanding them considerably. This schema also brings us back more concretely into the realm of design. Framing games as open culture reminds us that even as culture, games are systems composed of designed elements that interact to produce emergent cultural effects. A game designed as open culture allows players in some way to access the game structure and directly change its meanings. But what is the extent of this change? How deep is the exchange of meanings between the game and its context? Is the game system affected on an aesthetic level, as when the skins of game avatars are customized by players? Is the game system affected on the level of experience, as in a custom mod that adds new interactive possibilities? Or are the game rules themselves changed, at the level of code? How does each of these transformative effects change the cultural meaning of the game?
