My Notes and Brain Process on Week 4

Rules of Play Game Design Fundamentals

Games as Cultural Resistance

How are forms of player production designed and how do they occur?

highlights design interventions that call specific attention to the borders of thematic circle through acts of creative resistance

a broad rubric of friction that can occur between games and their cultural contexts

friction isn’t just negative

free play is always already transformative

never merely resides in a system of rules, but through an ongoing process of friction… transformation, like water shaping rocks

resistance often leads to more resistance creating multi-layered systems of cultural play

DIY Gaming

The Sex Pistols made a breach in the pop milieu in the screen of received cultural assumptions governing what one expected to hear and how one expected to respond

DOOM and the art of the mod

open sourcing of games

Horor-movie pulp

anti-aesthetic style

aggressive embrace of diy mentality

it meant making noise

removes distinctions between player and producer, between historically rigid categories drawn along participatory lines pg.3

willful annihilation of economic and social hierarchies

encouraging amateur programmers to come up with their own spin on the ground-breaking first-person shooter had the dual effect of dramatically increasing DOOMs longevity

Resistant Strategies

designed strategies of resistance are called mods

specifically player-produced mods are not designed to mend an error but are developed to alter game play in some way

have the potential to mutate and resist traditional symbolic codes, creating a critical view from within familiar contexts

conceptual model for understanding existing forms of game resistance:

alteration, juxtaposition and reinvention

• 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.

Sailor Moon Wad

"aims at keeping Sailor Moon on the air in

North America.”

Strategies of Juxtaposition

A second strategy of designed cultural friction, juxtaposition, achieves resistance by placing unexpected

elements together in the same space.

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.

example:

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.

Counter-Strike

the “half-life”

player-as-producer paradigm

shifted representational plane entirely

include economic reinvention as well.

Alteration, juxtaposition, and reinvention offer methods to design or redesign games along cultural lines, aggressively engaging symbolic spaces beyond their borders.

The text is a manifesto against cheating; it details how to identify and combat rule-breaking in the game, and is directed toward resisting those who would bend the system too far out of shape by conspiring to cheat.

Breaking the Rules was a RULES schema—a formal way of understanding a game. What is rule-breaking in the context of CULTURE, particularly in a schema on cultural resistance?

Remember: games intrinsically support and encourage the movement of free play.

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 concept of “lock-in”

Making political video games may not work. But we have to try

The latest is Asi Burak’s suggestion that maybe things would be better if Donald Trump was a gamer – a fantasy combining all the narcissistic exceptionalism of the games industry with an implication that financial support for the games industry is worth parlaying with a Cheetos-caked ur-fascist.

The Yes Men Fix the World

posing as public/political figures

immediately we see the tactic of media jacking

represents the DOW

immediately we see them swimming in their business suits

what we do is pass ourselves off as representatives of big corporations we don’t like

we make fake websites then wait for people to accidentally invite us to conferences

so it’s something they’ve done in the past and gotten away with multiple times

like vigilantes, like Robin Hood

DOW Chemical bought Union Carbide

but this is a wonderful documentary, we see these men challenging big corporations

they are invited to centers where all of these big businesses and banks congregate and mess with their meetings

human impact threat to humankind

12:00 however you do this you’re going to cost some lives and starts laughing about it

that’s the thing about cults what’s shocking to outsiders seems normal to insiders

example with Jonestown

The Yes Men try to be shocking

20:00

BBC world

world’s worst industrial accident in Bhopal, India

Jude Finisterra

do you now accept responsibility for what happened?

DOW is accepting total responsibility

fully and swiftly remediate

perform an action simply because it’s the right thing to do

comparing the value of money to the value of human life!

these words alone should be shocking to DOW

over an hour and still headline news

I wouldn’t say it’s a hoax in an honest representation of what DOW should be doing

Dys4ia

the levels of the game appear to be like the levels or difficult chapters of this person’s autobiography when dealing with their transition and it’s fascinating to see that it is a one player perspective, allowing the player to see that they are experiencing this transition alone.

along with the symbols and simple 8 bit play

the music also grows lighter as the transition improves