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Resist!
The resistant strategies taken by independent game designers such as the Counter-Strike team, dedicated players such as the Sissyfightnews crew, and game artists such as Uri Tzaig suggest how games can be designed or redesigned from a cultural perspective to support transformative play. Whether the approaches taken are formal, aesthetic, or politically inspired, the cultural dimensions of these acts of resistance shape ideology and interaction. If game designers were to embrace strategies of resistance more often, the potential for games to affect culture in significant ways would surely increase. Remember: games intrinsically support and encourage the movement of free play. It is always possible for players to throw a monkey wrench into the system, bending it into a new shape. Game designers must consider how this process can be enhanced or interrupted, modified or transformed, either by players or by the design of the game itself. The Sissyfightnews manifesto, for instance, turned the practice of resistance into a cautionary tale, tightening the borders of the magic circle just enough to remind players that the game, too, could bite back. Games clearly derive meaning from the contexts within which they are played. Consideration of these contexts enables game designers to see potential lines of cultural engagement. The open dissemination of the DOOM source code, for example, was visionary in its recognition of a hacker mentality already present in communities of gamers. Given the right tools, players will transgress the magic circle in pursuit of alternate forms of expression. These transgressions can shape and reshape the game so that the values of the "real" world are made explicit within the artificiality of the game, values that might be reinforced, questioned, inverted, or subverted through play. What if game designers considered the possibility of working with this natural desire of players to bend the shape of the game? In massively multiplayer games such as EverQuest or Ultima Online, vast resources are spent trying to root out and punish cheating. But other scenarios are possible.What if players were allowed to police each other, as a form of game play? Or what if players were encouraged to cheat? Or given the source code and let loose in the field of play? Clearly we would have a very different kind of game, perhaps a game that would radically reinvent the potential for culturally transformative play. The possibilities are out there. But until you begin to resist the conventions of game design, we will never find out just how fun they are to play. Fight the establishment! Down with the old rules! Vive la resistance!
