Re: [-empyre-] cages: forward from "Vijay Pattisapu" <lexicontrol@gmail.com>

[Timothy Murray <tcm1@cornell.edu>]

"Actually it's more like a maze than a cage. The parts to gaming that
are interesting are outside of the game. They are the hacks of the game
and the emotion of the players. ...The most interesting players are the ones
who figure out the cheats for
the games."

A certain etiquette has emerged since the 90's. People don't use cheats as
much as they used to. Hackers are banned from most games (that I've played
recently, at least), because cheats are easy to spot.

In fact, some hacks are so easy to spot that their motivation is not use,
but display. For example, in Counterstrike, a person will fly around -- an
obvious hack -- just because he's playing around with the code(s). But no
serious Counterstrikers ( and those people are a serious lot! ) would play
with the flyer.

I hesitate to say that hacking games is becoming more aesthetic than
instrumental, because of the decline in the practice more broadly.

Let us not discount the possibility of that, as in sports or chess, one
attraction of the game is pure  excellence in achievement. The rules of a
game can be so finely constructed that the art is not in hacking the rules,
but in working within them. Take, for example, Starcraft, a 10+ year old
game (!) still going strong (at least in South Korea). A rich welter of
strategy literature continues to grow around the game. There's even a
Starcraft University http://starcraft.strategy-gaming.com/  ;-) People
stopped hacking that game a few years after it came out. I think such gamers
have realized that the harder -- and more satisfying -- challenge is to get
an honest win.

Yes, the externalities of the game are still important. In that space, yet
I'm not sure if the importance of hacks comes anywhere near the importance
of players' emotions.

Yet I wonder -- is the World of Warcraft real estate market just a giant
hack?

Back to The Cage: black markets among prisoners don't change the shape of
the bars.

Vijay

On 16/09/2007, G. H. Hovagimyan <ghh@thing.net> wrote:
>  On Sep 16, 2007, at 10:07 AM, hugh davies wrote:
>
>  >  closed system of a
>  > game to a cage
--
Timothy Murray
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
Director of Graduate Studies in Film and Video Studies
Curator, The Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, Cornell Library
285 Goldwin Smith Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853