Under The Mask: Games Culture

David Hayward gave a keynote at Under The Mask: Perspectives On The Gamer at the University of Bedfordshire last week. Here are slides for the talk, and a complete transcript below them. You can find image credits and links over at Functional Autonomy.

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I’ve always liked games a lot, but in 2004, I almost gave up on them completely, because I was basically bored of immature, hypersexualised protagonists. At the time, I thought games had almost no cultural value. Then someone pointed me to Katamari Damacy.

I found out I hadn’t been looking hard enough for interesting games. In fact, I kept on finding more and more. Nonetheless, even now I still meet people who give me a pitying look when they find out I work with videogames because all they think games are is this:

There’s still a fairly well entrenched stereotype that games are for children, teens, manchildren, nerds and geeks, and not just any kind of nerds and geeks but the ones who were around before they were cool.

That stereotype hasn’t always been inflicted on gamers. The very first videogames were made to run on ocilloscopes and mainframes in the 1950s. This was the second ever videogame, Tennis for Two, designed to run on an ocilloscope with delightfully chunky custom hardware:

It was fourteen years before the Magnavox Odyssey took games to retail in 1972. At that time, the majority of households only had one TV, so it was envisioned that gaming would be a family activity.

In the 80s, however, kids started to get TVs in their own rooms, and video gaming became a more solitary pursuit. In addition to that, the content of games went down a very particular route. Speaking of the American market, Nolan Bushnell said in a recent interview with the Guardian Gamesblog:

“In 1982, 40% of Americans said they’d played a game in the previous week. Then came the punch-kick-fight games like Mortal Kombat which were massively successful. They were so successful amongst this pimple-faced eighteen year old demographic who were spending so much money on those games, that it obscured the fact that the violence lost the women and the complexity lost the casual gamer. The economics of the marketplace didn’t shrink, but the population plummeted from over 100m people to less than 15. And we’re just recovering from that.”

Games aren’t just recovering from it, they’re bounding ahead and overtaking other media. All of the other media industries are shrinking, while games seem to be the only one that is still growing.

Games are coming into their own at a very strange time in human history. When I was a kid, people organised things with paper diaries and calendars, bought music on cassette tapes, bought films on VHS tapes, and organised their social lives with landlines. I’m just young enough, or perhaps my parents were just stingy enough, that I got to organise the first few years of my childhood social life with an actual rotary dial telephone.

The media that were completely dominant and pervasive during my childhood had been built up during another very odd period in human history. Before the 20th century, before any kinds of performances could be recorded, mass produced and sold, all such performances were local and had been that way for millennia.

For thousands of years, spaces for public performance such as theatres, music halls and the like have existed as part of large settlements. Outside of that though, people have had to find smaller ways to entertain each other, so alongside and predating mass public performance, there was a welter of story tellers, troubadours, folk musicians, and the like. This can be considered “folk practice”.

These things weren’t necessarily monetised in any way at all, often they were things that happened on farms, in people’s parlours, in salons and on their verandahs. Even just over a century ago, outside of the printed word there was very little that could be considered in any sense to be mass media. New permutations of old stories and songs emerged organically, and they weren’t anybody’s intellectual property - they were cultural property that was transmitted and modified freely. The idea of applying copyright to them was kind of nonsensical in the face of so many localised variants.

I should clarify that when I say culture, I don’t mean institutionalised “Culture”, culture with a capital C, that you can literally find on a pedestal in a museum. I mean culture with a small c, the every day interactions that recur among any given group of people, the values and motives and common experiences that make up a shared portion of our personalities.

All of us are involved with multiple cultures, or perhaps subcultures. In terms of learned behaviours and common practices, I think there’s something organic and largely unspoken that makes people British or English or Spanish or American. Likewise, shared interests like knitting, cookery, engineering, programming, dance, art and philosophy generate their own cultural practices - a culture doesn’t necessarily coincide with a political entity, its just what naturally occurs by the gathering of people together.

During the 20th Century, the variety of these kind of cultures and subcultures kind of regressed in the face of suburbia, nuclear families and especially mass media such as television, radio, and suddenly other forms of media that, like books and magazines, could be mass produced and sold rather than just being performed.

Many things that had previously existed as cultural property were homogenised and retreated to the walled garden of copyright. Nowadays people are, very healthily I think, trying to reclaim cultural property and assert their right to create it though movements such as copyleft and creative commons. That in itself is an entire other lecture though.

Progressions in Twentieth Century mass media enabled and caused people’s tastes to unify in a way that was historically unprecedented. That’s the environment we were all born into, and it’s breaking back down in such a way that it’s unlikely to ever come back.

Towards the end of the last century, technology started to progress in what seems like an exponential way. Phones with mechanical dials, cassettes, LPs, and the like all started being replaced with dramatically better things. My dad, and all my friends dads, had collections of LPs, and a lot of tapes, which eventually became CDs. When CDs were first around, I was really excited as an 8 year old, just because my dad bought a stereo, and I knew that somewhere inside it there was a frickin’ *LASER*.

The rotary dial phone we had progressed into something with buttons that could tone dial, and they were used for really crap games on live childrens TV. Touch tone phones in turn morphed into cordless phones and mobiles, both of which seemed like something out of Star Trek when they first hit.

Mobiles are now, in the words of Bruce Sterling a technological black hole, sucking up this litany of other devices: Phone, answering machine, camera, videocamera, dictophone, GPS… they’re all migrating into a single device in our pocket.

Likewise with the gaming hardware I grew up with. The first thing I played games on was an Atari 2600, then I went through a Spectrum, an Amstrad CPC-464, a NES, several Amigas, etc.

It was much easier to get our parent to buy Amigas for us, because you could do all of this serious stuff on them as well as game. After that we got onto PCs, and in our teens had the autonomy to get ourselves a Playstation 1.

All of these elements of technological progress were nothing compared to the internet and cheap computing though, because they’ve replaced the limited inventory space of 20th century businesses with effectively unlimited inventory. Films, books and music have become, and are becoming MP3s, AVIs, and TXTs, and likewise for representations of them.

Chris Anderson coined a name for the phenomenon this has caused: The Long Tail. Companies like Apple with the iTunes store, Amazon, and Rhapsody, have found that things that only sell once or twice a year, when you can stock them all, make more money combined than the hits that sell millions.

When products themselves are data that can be incarnated (e.g. print on demand books), and when product catalogues are virtualised, a business doesn’t need stock of everything it offers. It just needs access to be able to send them on to customers when they’re ordered.

A CD or DVD shop can’t get that sort of access without a lot of lag (”special orders” that take weeks), and wouldn’t be able to absorb the inventory costs of a long tail and keep running. The consequent reduction in choice is one of the reasons mass media was so homogenous in the 20th century.

Now though, thanks to the internet and the virtualisation of products, everything is splintering and heading in many directions.

In 2006, a facebook survey asked users what their preferred format for music was. 10% said CD or Other. Over 70% said either MP3 or Ipod. Now granted, Facebook isn’t really a fair sample of culture at large, at that time it was mostly students and technologically savvy ones at that. But people’s au faitness with digital media is growing, and even the mail order businesses based around CDs and DVDs are causing tastes to diverge in a way they never could during the last century.

A top 20 single in the UK now sells a fraction of what a single 20 years ago did. A throng of online services are selling music to every possible niche, and people have migrated to them in droves.

Page 45 is a comic shop run by one of my friends in Nottingham. It’s been running for a decade on a single philosophy: It looks like a bookshop inside, there’s never an intimidating clique of comic nerds around the till, they put superhero comics at the back of the shop, and the front is filled with interesting contemporary fiction comics that fill many, many niches. Half of their customer base is female, they sell comics and give advice to a lot of libraries, they go to places and speak about comics, they write about them. While men in spandex are what has been regarded as “mainstream” in comics, the people Page45 sell a multitude of niches to are what they call “The real mainstream”.

The definition of what “mainstream”, in all media, is radically changing right now (The real kicker I didn’t want to lever into the talk is that 3D printing is going to to do to manufacturing what Napster started with the media industries).

That diversification has been happening to games recently. While the 80’s and 90’s were dominated by game content aimed squarely and kids and teenagers, this has very much started to become just a large niche, with games spreading to many other markets. The Wii, the DS, Singstar, Buzz! and the like are not so much about new markets as neglected ones.

The first inkling I got of this was around the same time I saw Katamari Damacy. I’d been involved for a few years with a games festival called Screenplay, and one of the things that dogged it was this persistent question of who the audience was. We used to have exhibits of retro games, as well as having developers, journalists, and academics on hand to talk about the current state of the industry. So we had this strange problem of all these different audiences rubbing shoulders in the same venue, making it very difficult to programme a whole weekend with something going on for all or them all the time. The keynotes were especially awkward, generally only appealing to a small chunk of the audience.

Since then, things have become a good deal clearer. In asking the question “Who are gamers?” there’s really now only one answer: Everybody.

Everybody is a gamer in some way, and even if they’re not playing videogames at the moment, they will. I quoted Nolan Bushnell earlier, talking about America having a healthy 40% of the population playing games every week in 1982. The BBC did some research on UK gamers in 2006, and published a report called State of Play. The way they defined “gamer” was:

“A “gamer” is defined here as someone who has played a game on a console, a PC, the internet, a mobile, a handheld device or via Interactive TV, at least once in the last 6 months.”

These were the figures they got with a sample of around 3500 people:

Six months is a long time, and once every six months is probably outside of what most people would regard as worthy of the label “gamer”. But the Beeb broke it down by several time periods, and even just taking the part of their sample that played something once a week or more, 48% were gamers, and that grouping was 55% male and 45% female.

Of course, that doesn’t include 0 - 5 years, and 66+, but even if you include those age groups *and* assume that none in them play games, that still leaves us with a healthy 38.5%. Assuming the BBC sample was unbiased, it seems Nolan Bushnell was about right when he said games were recovering to around 40% now.

A few unfair comparisons:
Games are twice as popular as herpes, which affects 20% of people.

With another 6 - 10 percentage points, games would be twice as popular as smoking, which had 24% of the UK population in 2005.

Watching football is less popular than videogaming. Only around 30% of the UK population watch the big international matches involving a UK team on TV, and for smaller international matches with no UK teams that figure drops to around 13%. Nonetheless it commands a huge amount of cultural attention and media clout.

It’s more popular than cinema, with only 37.5% of people in the UK visiting the cinema once a month or more.

38.5% is a lot, but rather than continue to bombard you with data, I’d like to illustrate some of the variety in that 38.5% by taking you on a quick tour of some of the people I know.

I share quite a big house with three or four other people at any one time, and typically, those people are abnormally social creatures. I sometimes get up in the morning and find people I’ve never met preparing breakfast. In the evenings I’ll sometimes find the living room packed with strangers to talk to, and the conversation often turns to games.

As I run through these people, bear in mind that I’m excluding my work contacts, who are all gamers, and I’m exlcuding anyone I don’t know very well.

Where I live, we have and regularly use:
An Xbox 360
A PS 3
A Gamecube
One DS
A couple of PCs
And by the end of June, we’ll also have a Wii.

My housemates Omied and Pete have both been gamers for a long time. In the past month, the three of us have racked up over 150 hours on GTA IV, which we love.

John and David regularly come around to play Omied and Pete at Pro Evolution Soccer.

Our other housemate Tanya hates games that take a long time to play, she loathes it when GTA IV is on the TV, but she loves Wii games, anything social that takes a short amount of time to play. She plays a lot of pool on her iPod touch too, and is partial to a bit of multiplayer Pro Evo. Hannah has similar feelings to Tanya about games, but not as strongly.

All of these people (about a dozen) have either lived with us or visit us regularly. Some of them play games more than others, bring their DSes over, and so on, but without exception, all of them enjoy playing four player Mario Kart on the Gamecube.

Lucy is a DS gamer and Dennis is one of the more traditional, hardcore gamers I know. Likewise for John and Jonny, all three are big PC gamers and put a lot of time into RTS games, FPS, and recently the three of them have caught World of Warcraft pretty badly.

My boss Toby is also a traditional gamer. He has three children, and even though he’s extremely careful to keep inappropriate games away from them, his wife isn’t very happy about violent games. She walked in on him playing GTA IV and asked “What are you doing?”
“I’m picking up my friend little Jacob, then we’re going to get something to eat, then I’m going to drive him back home”
“Oh, lovely”

Someone Toby knows had a similar experience with his own wife, but when she walked in he was getting a lapdance, and frantically mashing the controller to try and abort it.

We share an office with Simon, who is an architect. He would be as into games as me and Toby, but he already got a Wii to try and get his wife Dawn into games and she now won’t let him buy a 360 or PS3 as well.

Ross, Tom, Kim, Jeremy, Andrew, Lex, Ting, and Samuel are all people I meet regularly in a Nottingham tea room, where we drink tea, eat cake, play Mario Kart DS and swear at each other very loudly.

I also know a couple of people, Will and Laura, who don’t want to spend much money on gaming. They do, however, play on last generation consoles and each have huge collections of second hand games for them.

The people I’ve just been through include architects, programmers, fashion designers, graphic designers, musicians, students, managing directors, surveyors, teachers, secretaries, and a whole host of other niches.

When I was playing on the NES, the Amiga, and the PS1, there was never that kind of variety in gamers, and it’s continuing to grow. While hardcore games like Gears of War remain a large niche that won’t go away, there are plenty of very serious and devoted gamers whose interests lie elsewhere.

Though a lot of the gamers I know did like Gears of War, one guy I know who is very passionate about games hated it, describing it as like holding a tinfoil wrapped WWF figure in front of the TV and making pew pew pew noises. These differences of opinion are only going to grow, and that’s a very good thing.

The demographics found by the BBC are going to migrate upward. It’s not just that games as we know them are convincing more people, it’s that on a much wider plane people are growing to expect and understand interactivity.

Clay Shirky was giving a talk a few weeks ago, and related this story: A friend of his was watching a DVD with his four year old daughter, and at some point in the DVD the daughter leapt up, went over to the TV and started rooting around in the cables behind it.
“What are you doing?” asked the friend.
His daughter replied: “I’m looking for the mouse”

As Clay puts it:

“Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change.”

Clay thinks that, during the 20th century, sitcoms were using up a vast cognitive surplus that our species has. To illustrate, the time people have collectively put into creating and editing wikipedia is a fraction of the time our species has spent watching TV.

Mass medium interactivity is not just changing the way we consume media, it’s changing culture. One of the ways that cognitive surplus is now being used is on videogame crafts.

There are plenty of examples of videogame cross stitch, Perler beading, Stained glass, Knitting, Baking, Interiors, Balloon modeling, Pixel Art, papercraft, mosaics, stained glass, etc. These crafts are an expression of people’s values, and they just didn’t exist when I was playing games as a kid.

There are entire communities based around the creation of 8-bit influenced chiptunes, and work like theirs is becoming increasingly mainstream with bands like The Lost Levels and Crystal Castles (Note: Crystal Castles have been accused of chronic plagiarism and IP abuse by the chiptune community and others). I even heard a Ska version of the Super Mario Brothers theme tune at a Festival in Utrecht a few weeks ago.

As generations that include large numbers of gamers reach their twenties and thirties, our modes of expression and creativity are including a growing amount of videogame content. Gamers are increasingly cultured people, with a thirst for intelligent coverage, criticism and discussion.

Zero Punctuation was among the first high profile approaches to games criticism which weren’t necessarily giving a recommendation to not buy. In similar vein, Rock Paper Shotgun provides intelligent coverage of PCs games that isn’t aimed at informing purchasing decisions.

GameCamp happened in May 2008, and was based on the same principle as a barcamp: If you attend, you have to give a presentation on something for everyone. Those kind of events are a great place to go and find interesting niches of a given culture.

Other media outlets are picking up and covering games in more interesting ways than the specialist games press tend to, for instance BLDG Blog with this interview with an NC Soft Concept Artist, and New York Magazine’s recent interview with Dan Houser about GTA IV. This kind of coverage really talks about the cultural content and merit of games, rather than their stories, mechanics, or controversies.

These crafts and discussions represent a broadening of the cultural base of games, and this broadening is also demonstrated in amateur and indie game development. While much of it imitates commercial work, there’s plenty more game development work out there which has no commercial aspiration, instead pushing the medium in different directions for the sake of exploration.

The most interesting niche I’ve seen arise recently has been dubbed “Masocore” games, because playing them is masochistic. Masocore games are made to be incredibly hard by doing unexpected things with existing game conventions.

Blogger Auntie Pixelante put it this way:

“in an age where game over is seen as undesirable, masocore games approach player death as a narrative technique.”

As far as I can tell, they started with remixes of Super Mario Brothers like this:

The design tricks are really evil. Then others started to turn up, such as Syoban action:

The pinnacle of them so far though is called I Wanna Be The Guy:

It takes some of it’s design cues from the Megaman games, but the aesthetics are a mashup of countless 8-bit characters and games. Not only is it an incredibly demanding game, the designer also seems to have a perfect grasp of how to confound people’s expectations. Usually the last thing you expect to kill you will be the next thing to do it.

There’s a full run through of the game on youtube, by user Cloud8745, will all of his deaths included. Some of it is hilarious.

At the other end of the scale in new games are casual and social games. Though what we’re coming to think of as casual games are catering to a neglected market, their mechanics are pretty well defined and the game themselves tend not to be very exciting. In fact, many of them are shovelware. However, there are a couple of games I’ve seen recently that are casual but innovative.

The first is PMOG, which stand for Passive Multiplayer Online Game. It works via a website and a firefox plugin. You have stats, and the plugin gives you missions based around web browsing. It does take you on detours outside of your normal web browsing, but it’s of a very low intensity compared to a traditional MMO.

Another game I’m impressed by is Chore Wars, which is actually a really simple idea. A group of players list all of their household chores, assign point values to them, then compete for high scores. Simply with the attachment of scoring and competition, really tiresome and boring tasks can become a lot more compelling for people.

An exam invigilator I once knew said that to entertain themselves during exams, they played a silent game called Ugly Kid Battleships.

Similarly, I once worked in a nightclub, and there were four of us there who were incessantly polite. We’d get to doors and say “After you”, “No, I insist”, “No, I insist”… it got ridiculous. It became a joke, then it went beyond a joke and we turned it into a game.

We called it One-Behindmanship, and it revolved around stealth manners. The only objective was to be the last person in the group to go through a door, without anyone realising what you were doing. It turned good manners into a competitive game, and in the month or two we played it an amazing array of dirty tricks and methods for getting people to absent mindedly pass through doors in front of you emerged. In that time, our manners also became impeccable.

Likewise for one called “The Game”. I warn you, this has been called a pernicious mind virus. These are the rules

RULE 1: You are playing The Game.
RULE 2: Whenever you think about The Game, you lose.
RULE 3: Loss must be announced.

The objective of The Game is to forget that it exists.

I thought this was stupid when I first came across it, but through having friends who played it avidly I realised there was great joy to be had in finding new and interesting ways to make people lose. Like having “you just lost the game” iced on their birthday cakes, or building some anticipation in text message conversations like this:

“How was your holiday [David]?”
“It was great. I got a tattoo while I was out there”
“A tattoo?! Where? What of?”
“I’ll show you later”
Then I’d write “You just lost the game” on my belly with a sharpie before going off to see them. I’ve tagged all the game players I know on facebook in a photo that simply says “You just lost the game. Tag someone else”.

These kind of games can seem very trivial when we read about them, but in practice even a very basic game or ruleset can create a psychological playground where we outwit and tease each other. Simple rulesets can make otherwise dull experiences into something fun. As a result, games can be an incredibly healthy kind of social glue that engages people and causes them to entertain each other; games of all kinds provide a safe framework for competition and mischief.

I’m not involved with the Hide and Seek Festival, but I’d like to plug it here because I think what they’re doing is fantastic. It’s taking place in London at the end of this month and has a full programme of social games running from the 27th to the 29th. You can find more details at www.hideandseek.co.uk

Whether it’s social games, playground games, board games, sports, videogames, pen and paper roleplaying games, sex games, card games, or any other kinds of game, everyone plays. Humans are meant to play, we enjoy it and we develop through it. Whether we’re playing with objects, ideas or each other, I think play is fundamental to the way we learn about and experiment with ourselves and the world.

There are still people who fail to understand games and fear them, but with the publication of books like Grand Theft Childhood, dust is beginning to settle on the paranoid scare mongering so often stirred up by the anti-videogame lobby. Everyone is surrounded by increasing amounts of technology, and interacts with it more each passing month. People are primed to play games, and videogames are now going to keep spreading and adapting to new markets.

A lot has changed in the past four years. In 2004 it was the work of a few innovative game designers that stopped me from going into photography, or the art world, or writing, and kept me with videogames. At that time I had to really search for anything interesting in games, but now, I can’t go a week without accidentally finding something new and interesting that’s related to them and threatening to gobble up huge amounts of my time.

I think our industry is progressing marvelously. I’m proud to be a gamer, I’m proud to work with games, and I can’t wait to see where else they go this century.