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Resistant Strategies
Designed strategies of resistance in a game, whether created by players or designers, are called game modifications, or mods. Modifications can be officially sanctioned, such as a developer-distributed modification that enhances game play or fixes a bug, or they can be "unofficial," such as unsanctioned game levels, designed and distributed by players. Typically, player-produced modifications are not designed to "mend" an error in the game but are specifically developed to alter game play in some way.[3] Modifications call attention to the borders of the magic circle by creating friction between existing and alternative versions of the game. This is especially true when we consider the larger social contexts for which game modifications are designed, disseminated, and put to use. Game modifications are inherently transformative—they do, after all, literally change the game. The friction they create connects game to context, player-as-producer to player-as-consumer, designer to user, fan to developer, programmer to hacker. In blurring these categories, game modifications enact cultural resistance in a variety of contexts.
Not every act of game resistance is explicitly political. Remember that our use of the term "resistance" refers generally to any act of play that creates friction with more rigid structures. Resistance can be a highly useful model for game designers, particularly if you want your game to engage culture along critical lines. There are many examples of design interventions that modify games to create a dialogue with larger institutional forces. In his study of game patches, Erkki Huhtamo notes that these strategies include modifications motivated by ideological concerns, an urge to re-assert the role of the player as a co-cre-ator, or the subversion of prevailing race, class, or gender rela-tions.[4] Like the borrowed safety pins or swastikas of punk, game modifications have the potential to mutate and resist traditional symbolic codes, creating a critical view from within familiar contexts. Whether political or not, game modifications can act as forms of resistance, affecting the meaning, experience, and cultural identity of a game. In the next several pages, we look at a range of different game modifications, broadly grouped according to design method. We have divided the modifications into examples of alteration, juxtaposition, and reinvention, each category representing a different strategy for achieving resistance in a game:
Strategies of alteration make changes to existing game structures.
Strategies of juxtaposition combine unexpected elements within a game space.
Strategies of reinvention rework entire game structures on deeper levels.
Although these three methods overlap, as a whole they provide a conceptual model for understanding existing forms of game resistance, as well as planning new ones.
Strategies of Alteration
Alterations are game modifications that rework existing forms of representation or interaction. Game patches such as the Fighter Chicken patch for DOOM or the Gumby Doll patch for Marathon Infinity, for example, alter traditional forms of cultural representation by substituting standard game characters with player-produced ones. Replacing traditionally "macho" soldier images with silly or absurd characters, "Fighter Chicken" and "Gumby Doll" reframe stereotyped depictions of the male heroic ideal. The friction that results from this play between the new representations and those supported by traditional codes challenges assumptions about what, and who, games represent.
SOD
Dirk Paesmans and Joan Heemskerk, artists known by the joint name Jodi, transform game systems through formalist reductions of game code. Their patch for Castle Wolfenstein, a modification called SOD, strips the 3D shooter of all color and depth. Basic geometric forms such as squares, circles, and triangles replace the game's original visual components—the castle walls, guards, and weapons. Rather than replacing character sprites with alternate character images, Jodi designs resistance by completely emptying the game of figurative representation. The resulting game space is rendered as simple geometric blocks and lines and players are forced to consider how the game engine creates a meaningful space through illusions of depth, movement, and object behavior. Although the graphics code has been altered, the soundtrack remains untouched, resulting in screaming triangles and barking, rotating squares that confront the player. Through several layers of absurdist juxtapositions, SOD's overt but expressively enigmatic alterations create new connections between abstraction and representation, flatness and depth, sound and form.
Sailor Moon Wad
Humor and parody can inform a strategy of alteration as well. The Sailor Moon Wad, developed by the SOS Doom Team in support of the Save Our Sailors (SOS) campaign, "aims at keeping Sailor Moon on the air in North America."[5] Drawing directly on the lexicon of Japanese Animé in the construction of its heroine Priss, the wad (a nickname for DOOM level files based on the filename extension) alters the gothic architecture of DOOM by littering the space with objects from the world of Sailor Moon: cupcakes, slices of chocolate cake, hearts, roses, bunny suitcases, and messenger bees. Here the implicit masculinity of DOOM is playfully called into question through the addition of an entire system of feminized artifacts.
SOD
Sailor Moon Wad
SimCopter Hack
Whereas the previous two examples involved modifications by resistors who did not design the original game, sometimes the game developers themselves can use alteration as a strategy of resistance. SimCopter Hack was was the result of a collaboration between the art collective rtmark and a programmer actually working on the computer game SimCopter. While the game was still in development, the programmer (an rtmark member) substituted what rtmark has since termed "boy bimbos" for the game's token bikini-clad females, "infecting the game's traditional heterosexual gaze with homoerotic undertones."[6]
In SimCopter Hack, the play of resistance occurs across several levels. Like Fighter Chicken, Gumby Doll, and the Sailor Moon wad, SimCopter Hack created friction around systems of cultural representation, particularly along gender lines. Additionally, SimCopter Hack created tension within the marketplace. According to rtmark sources, the game may have sold as many as 80,000 copies before the modification was discovered.[7] Maxis, the company that developed the game, surely viewed the modification as an act of economic sabotage, albeit one that had only been intended to rouse critical debate.
Strategies of Juxtaposition
A second strategy of designed cultural friction, juxtaposition, achieves resistance by placing unexpected elements together in the same space. It is a strategy that has long been used as a form of resistance by those interested in achieving critical conflict. From the artist Marcel Duchamp's inclusion of a urinal in the Armory Show of 1917 to designer Jamie Reid's pairing of a safety pin and British royalty on the 1977 album cover of the Sex Pistol's God Save the Queen, juxtaposition is an established means for "talking back" to culture. A special form of game alteration, in the examples of juxtaposition that follow, resistant meanings emerge through the expressive pairing of unlikely elements.
Frag Queens
Many of the early female skins designed for Quake evolved out of a strategy of juxtaposition enforced by the limitations of the software. The original version of Quake included only male 3D geometry for designing new skins. Players interested in playing female characters ended up with female skins mapped onto the standard male muscular figure. The juxtaposition between "feminine" attributes (hair, clothing, facial features) and the "male" base figure resulted in what came to be known as "frag queens." The female skinners of a Quake clan known as the Psycho Men Slayers embraced this limitation by mixing and matching elements to create frag queens of ambiguous gender. Not quite male, not quite female, but undoubtedly tough, the newly minted avatars challenged traditional notions of gender, introducing into gamer culture highly transgressive forms of identity.
Blacklash
A game designed by the London-based activist group Mongrel, Blacklash juxtaposes racial politics and arcade nostalgia in a racial re-versioning of the arcade game Tempest. Building upon the game's existing shoot-or-be-shot structure, Blacklash transforms the aliens of the original game into comic book renditions of hooded Ku Klux Klan members and uniformed British police officers. Described by Mongrel as "a wake-up call for young black youth under threat by ignorance and racist fools,"[8] Black-lash references the retro styling of the arcade classic as a means of calling attention to outdated acts of racial prejudice. A conceptual game modification, Blacklash creates resistance between the formal and experiential components of the game. The use of Tempest's rule structure as the basis for Blacklash's political commentary encourages players to make a connection between feelings of nostalgia for a beloved game and patterns of institutional racism, patterns that players experience formally through the play of the game.
Frag Queens
Blacklash
Los Disneys
Los Disneys, a game patch for Marathon Infinity by Jason Huddy, rearticulates the genre of the first-person shooter though the creation of a game level that mimics Disney's Magic Kingdom. The patch transforms the theme park into a post-apocalyptic playground, replete with surveillance camera-toting tourists and clusters of pleasure-seeking children. Los Disneys creates friction between the simulated actions of the game and the external events those actions mirror. Players can shoot any number of oversized Disney characters (including Mickey, Donald, and Goofy) wandering the grounds and are also at liberty to blast their way through lengthy lines of children and their parents waiting for rides. The interactivity and aesthetics of Los Disneys subverts accepted conventions of the first-person shooter by reforming them into critical caricatures. The substitution of aliens with guns by tourists with surveillance cameras, for example, offers a softer, more insidious experience of game attack and conflict. Los Disneys' "play" on the play of violence in games is an articulate and humorous strategy of resistance.
Strategies of Reinvention
Our third strategy of resistance—reinvention—overlaps with the categories of alteration and juxtaposition, while offering some distinct critical affordances of its own. Like the two previous strategies, reinvention affects form and context through a change in the game's representational or interactive structures. But strategies of reinvention go deeper, modifying the core structures of a game, reshaping them from the inside out. Of the three categories we outline, strategies of reinvention are perhaps the most radical form of cultural resistance through transformative play.
Universal Square
In artist Uri Tzaig's Universal Square, two Soccer teams (one composed of Jewish Israelis, the other Arab Israelis) were invited to take part in a televised Soccer match. Held in Lod, Israel in 1996, the game was played according to the standard rules of Soccer, except for a simple modification: Tzaig redesigned the game so that it was played with not one ball, but two at the same time. This elegant design act created resistance in several ways. The game could not be played in a "normal" fashion: players had to invent new forms of interaction that took into account the loss of a single, unifying object around which all of the game activity was centered. Similarly, the behavior of spectators was transformed as well. With the addition of a second ball came the loss of the customary angle of vision (the eyes of all spectators focused on a single ball). Photos of the crowd show them looking in many different directions, rather than the typical, singular focus of a sports spectator audience.[9]
Tzaig's transformation of the game of Soccer is effective for several reasons. His successful dispersion of the crowd's normally unified point of view creates a critical commentary around ideas of cultural spectatorship. Adding a second ball made the game quite difficult to play, forcing a new level of collaborative play among the players from both teams. Tzaig's design reinvention dislocated the centralized power structures in the game, a particularly poignant decision in Tzaig's cultural context. The doubled Soccer game became a representation of the chaotic, decentered, and multi-layered cultural conflicts of the Middle East. At the same time, the redesign offered a model for how such a complex conflict could be contained and resolved through new forms of interaction. In this powerful work, an elegant formal design choice takes on culturally transformative significance.
Counter-Strike
A tremendously popular modification of Half-Life, Counter-Strike, is an excellent example of how the player-as-producer paradigm can reinvent a game. More than just a mod, Counter-Strike transformed the original game on numerous levels, creating a game experience wholly its own. Unlike many mods that simply tweak the game's look and feel, the design of Counter-Strike shifted the representational plane entirely, stripping away the sci-fi narrative of Half-Life and replacing it with an engaging naturalism. In a review of Counter-Strike, game critic Justin Hall notes, "Counter-Strike exists only in the world prepared for it by the war in Vietnam and COPS,where game-players grew up seeing footage of real men with real guns storming into houses and buildings and fields. Television made that veracity attractive. Minh Le [the mod's designer] made it interactive."[10] In casting the game as a terrorist/counter-terrorist conflict, Counter-Strike created rich, team-oriented game play.The resistance between typically fantastic first-person shooters and the real-world setting of Counter-Strike was heightened by the intensified social reality of the game experience. Counter-Strike's resistant strategies include economic reinvention as well. The mod evolved out of collaboration between small groups of shareware developers and later became a commercial product sold in stores. Winning several major awards at the 2001 Game Developers' Conference, including the Rookie Studio Award and the Game Spotlight Award, Counter-Strike's movement from the noncommercial culture of shareware to the commercial marketplace offers reinvention as a model for independent game development. Alteration, juxtaposition, and reinvention offer methods to design or redesign games along cultural lines, aggressively engaging symbolic spaces beyond their borders. Whether the approaches taken are more formal in nature, as in the case of SOD,or politically driven, as in Blacklash, the cultural dimensions of these acts call attention to the typically invisible magic circle. When a game enacts cultural resistance, the seamless transition between the space inside and outside the game is interrupted; players are made aware of aspects of the game which usually pass unnoticed. Allowing players to experience this kind of transformative play increases options for play: when critical consciousness is enriched, play too becomes richer. [3]Erkki Huhtamo, "Game Patch: the Son of Scratch? " In Cracking the Maze, curated by Anne-Marie Schleiner. July 16, 1999.<switch.sjsu.edu/CrackingtheMaze>. [4]Ibid. [5]Anne-Marie Schleiner, "Game Plug-ins and Patches as Hacker Art. " Cracking the Maze. July 16, 1999.<switch.sjsu.edu/CrackingtheMaze>. [6]Ibid. [7]Ibid. [8]Ibid. [9]Janet Abrams, "Other Victories. " In If/Then, edited by Janet Abrams. (Amsterdam: Netherlands Design Institute, 1999), p. 245.[10]"Brave New Worlds: A Special Issue on Video Games, " Feed Magazine.
