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Introducing Cultural Resistance
previous chapter, including player-production, transformative cultural play, and the exchange of meaning between a game and its context. In doing so, however, our focus narrows considerably. Games as Cultural Resistance highlights design interventions that call specific attention to the borders of the magic circle through acts of creative resistance. What exactly do we mean by "resistance?" We see the concept of resistance through a broad rubric of friction, a more general notion than the usual understanding of "resistance" as political opposition. Resistance can sometimes be political, but it can take other forms as well. When two phenomena come into conflictual contact with one another, friction, or resistance, results. In this chapter, we look at the friction that can occur between games and their cultural contexts, when one acts to resist the other. The term "friction" may make this process sound negative, but the resistance that results can affect play in deeply meaningful ways. For example, we can use the concept of friction to reframe the relationship between rules and play. In Defining Play, we identified play as free movement within a more rigid structure. Considering a game as resistance or friction, free-wheeling play rubs up against rigid structures of rules, producing tension. The exact quality of this tension determines the specific play experience of a game. Framed as this kind of resistance, "free play" is always already transformative. Play never merely resides in a system of rules, but through an ongoing process of friction, affects change in the system.The friction of water flowing against rock and earth over time will alter the more rigid structure of a riverbed. Similarly, when we frame a game as a system of resistance, the very play of the game is intrinsically transformative. This transformation not only takes place on the level of rules but on cultural levels as well, as the resistance creates tensions between the magic circle and the contexts surrounding the game. In the previous chapter, we introduced Jenny and Pimp Daddy as characters who emerged out of an act of transformative play. From the perspective of cultural resistance, the pair gain resonance not only within the formal constructs of the Ultima Online game world, but also as a strategy of resistance against received cultural assumptions about what constitutes a "proper" profession in the game. In effect, the friction created through the addition of an "unsanctioned" profession called attention to invisible moral biases in the game.The bias was tinged, perhaps, with a play as progress cultural rhetoric that sought to repress forms of transgressive sexual play. Yet one has to wonder whether the emergent play of Jenny and Pimp Daddy itself produced further instances of friction. For example, a feminist critique against Jenny's status as a female sexual object might have sprung up in the game, leading to anti-prostitution protests, or perhaps an all-male gigolo service. Resistance in a game often leads to more resistance, creating multi-layered systems of cultural play. Key to this example is the fact that the "profession" of prostitution in Ultima Online emerged as a property of player interaction. Jenny and her pimp were created as in-game characters; the resulting transformative play grew from an understanding of the roles such characters would play in the real world. Prostitution in Ultima Online emerged from the formal and narrative structures of the game as they came into conflict with real-world narrative expectations. The whole result, as with all complex systems, was more than the sum of the parts, an instance of play that modified the game, even as it transformed the attitudes and assumptions of the game community.
