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Introducing Cultural Environment
This is the premise of Games as Cultural Environment, a chapter engaged with the question of the "reality" of games, a schema that interrogates the relationship between the artificial world of games and the "real life" contexts that they intersect. Rather than calling attention to the borders of the magic circle, as we did in earlier CULTURE schemas, here we look at games in which the boundary is so completely erased that it is difficult to distinguish the space of play from ordinary life. These kinds of games have a number of curious characteristics. They create a heightened overlap between the artificial space of the game and the physical spaces and lifestyles of their players. They blur the distinction between players and non-players, sometimes involuntarily roping in unsuspecting participants. Perhaps most importantly, these sorts of games raise fundamental questions about the artificiality of games and their relationship to real life.
The most familiar examples of games that bleed over into their cultural environment are designs such as Assassin (also known as Killer), made popular on college campuses in the 1970s and 1980s, a game in which players stalked, hunted, and evaded each other with dart guns over days or weeks of real time. Game play took place not in a special, isolated game space, but in and among the activities of daily life. Recent digital games have adopted similar design strategies, such as Majestic, a large-scale experimental game by Electronic Arts that took place through fictitious web sites, faxes, and telephone voicemail. When a player's phone rang in the middle of the night it might be a call from the pizza delivery service—or from a character in the game whispering a secret code. Other games, such as the cell phone game Botfighters, tracks the physical location of players at all times and lets them challenge one another to unexpected duels. This chapter will focus on these kinds of games: play activities that overtly become part of their cultural environment.The idea that a game can become so co-extensive with its context that it blurs the borders that facilitate its own artificiality is a rarely taken but powerful approach to game design. And as we will see, it has important implications for the design of all games. Considering games as cultural environments raises a number of questions. How does the play of a game change when the difference between the "inside" and the "outside" of the game is ambiguous? How permeable is the boundary between the real world and the artificial world of the game? Are only certain games capable of blurring these boundaries, or does it happen to some extent in all games? To answer these questions, we revisit many of the fundamental elements of games. More so than in any other schema, we make generous use of terms and concepts introduced in chapters leading up to this one. Part of the reason for doing so is that these concepts genuinely inform an analysis of games as cultural environments. However, our hidden agenda is to use these game analyses as an informal review of material covered previously. The review is not meant to be comprehensive, but it does demonstrate how a framework of related ideas, connected through the concept of meaningful play, is necessary for a truly sophisticated and integrated understanding of game design.
