[-empyre-] Games, histories and preservation

[Christian McCrea]

Melanie,

Thanks for a great post! For dessert, we're having Russia.

Moments before reading your post, I was looking over last year's wired
article and gallery on Soviet arcade games:
http://www.wired.com/gaming/hardware/news/2007/06/soviet_games

Amazing to see how my assumptions about what makes a game shatter on
the surface of some half-assembled cabinet.
Anyway...


----Nostalgia and Amnesia
---------------------------------------

There is so much to respond to, I'll have to bring attention down to
one element. Nostalgia is a prime motivator, I think, in gameplay
itself - digital and non-digital. Pre-digital theories of play all
make passing mention that play itself might cohere across sports and
games.. that play might need to be thought of on its own terms. (This
is where Buckminster Fuller lost his mind, finally) But nostalgia as a
cultural mechanism is interesting... visible elements of pasts layered
like stains. Material traces stick like lipstick to every
technological occasion; the labour of key ex-Sega employees visible on
the development of Xbox and Xbox 360, the games of Shinji Mikami or
Suda 51 deploying telltale signs of the scenario of their development.

The representation process requires the obvious element of
abstraction, but in this formula an 'indexical trace' (cheers to
Friedrich Kittler here) is also required; one that leaves a mark on
the represented object - for example, the grain of 35mm film camera,
the over-saturated and over-defined aesthetics of a new flat
television, the soft melt of chalk on stone, or the heat bleeding off
the graphics chip inside a console. These are marks that affect our
bodily reactions to media, and they ground our material connection to
gaming.  We tinker with settings, we change the mouse aiming to
'sensitive', and in a final linguistic irony, we may add anti-aliasing
to our vision. Once that wear and tear takes place, history is
allowed.

The trace also leaves with us and our bodies with a sense of
granularity. We look, hear and touch games – and perhaps we are the
final process through which the media must finally pass to become part
of gaming history.  A trace is on our skin, in the fleshy sense of our
Nintendo thumbs and sore eyes in the dead of night – but more directly
in the accumulation of history that we come to know – our
knowing-play. That getting-better-at-games, or more jaded, or more
wistful for the first encounter, is a super-tensile nostalgia.

When we play a stealth action game, we may come with expectations from
our experiences with Thief, with System Shock, or with early MUD
environments. When we play a downloaded hacked ROM file of an old
arcade classic, we may come with expectations from our experiences
with that arcade classic in its native context. In each circumstance,
however, we are articulating a memory of a missing trace. Gaming is a
pursuit of recapturing lost ground, lost territories, lost memories.
No wonder then, that the more game history feeds into game design, the
more game heroes become amnesiacs. Its a self-fulfilling trope at this
point.

The reference of Pac-Man as a historical moment, one summer or date of
original release is somewhat counter-intuitive. It took a period of
six years for Pac-Man to energise arcade spaces growing across the
world in the early and mid-80s (energise sounds like PR-speak I
suppose... I mean in the electricity sense!) What may be rather
possible is an articulation of Pac-Man as an ongoing moment. New
players are acting as the 'defiler' in Kittler's agency, pushing the
Start button for the first time and seeing the faded Namco logo scar
another gouge in the pixel map of a 20-year old CRT. So why is this so
different that the articulation of cinema, or literature, or chalk,
for that matter?

The framing of the digital entertainment environment as the centre of
convergence belies the motivation; the recuperation of all the
collected traces in all media life. Games are greedy! The need to
transform all myths and moments into playable coda; the need to
re-use gaming traditions, the evolution of generic traits, the need to
add more of this, more of that, and very rarely less except in terms
of pure nostalgia for a purer gameplay model.  Taking a cue from
Phillip Rosen, if cinemas are change mummified, games could be are
change reanimated (like the undead.)


---17.5 percent
----------------------

(Melanie, you will probably have better information than I do on the
technical specifics....so apologies for any errors)

Through the dint of patent circularity and differences in broadcast
standard (PAL vs. NTSC being just one of many differences between
systems), the complexity of the gaming image being sent to televisions
the world over from the same original disc is further complicated. For
example, Australia's broadcast standard is 576i, which has required
sacrifices by console manufacturers right up to the current
digitization of the gaming image from 2003 onward. For the game
produced to generate 480 lines of visual information to fit on a
television showing 576 lines, two elements were introduced, which
retrospectively have had a number of effects on the gaming culture in
Australia (and other PAL-standard countries.)

First, black bars were introduced at the top and bottom of the game
image so that the 480 lines could be shown together and not
interspersed with black lines. This brute force cinematisation
squashed the image into place, meaning a significant difference in the
visual image between Europe, America and Australia. The second, and
perhaps more radical consequence, was that many games until 1993 were
not reprogrammed for the  PAL standard and were merely converted to
run at a stable rate of play – which required them to literally run
17.5 percent slower.

The Australian experience of playing slower games may have impacted
the taste and styles of gameplay of gamers growing up in the medium's
specific technical quirks. An adolescence steeped in obsolescences.
What these quirks do collectively is fracture the idea of the 'ideal
gaming image', that players are experiencing the same text. The
relationship that film has to its apparatus has, in a sense, a
referent to which it can apply an adjudication; the quality of film
itself. Digital technologies such as DVD and the more recent Blu-Ray
technology sell themselves on a diminishing relationship to a film
image, becoming closer and closer to an originary, despite the fact
that cinema itself is producing larger and larger scale images due to
the concurrent growth in the digital film apparatus. Yet games do not
have a referent situation; they chase nothing in the same way. There
is however, still a very strong sense of the 'ideal gaming image'.
This is the assumption that all copies of the game are experienced in
the same way, precisely because they are played and experienced.

This assumption, and ones it generates, is at the centre of gaming's
sensory status; and perhaps that is where game curatorship is (or
perhaps) isn't at its most tested, its most needed. The differences in
technical and material apparatus matter greatly to the virtualities
that we then presume to decode.


---The Death of Games
---------------------------------

A few years ago, being interesting in thought experiments and
abstractions, I presumed to rewrite Paolo Cherchi Usai's short
materialist manifesto for film archivists, 'The Death of Cinema', and
replaced all the medium-specific terms with those of games to produce
un-engagable, incoherent non sequitur text.
So that the first passage, which reads as:

"1. Cinema is the Art of Moving Image Destruction: Without the images
of drama, adventure, comedy, natural and artificial events imprinted
on motion picture film, there would be no cinema; there would be
nothing to make history out of; filmology would have nowhere to go. In
its place would either be still images (photography) or fleeting ones
(electronics).  The point is confirmed by video; a civilization that
is prey to the nightmare of its visual memory has no further need of
cinema. For cinema is the art of of destroying moving images."

..became:

1. Gaming Is The Art of Computer and Videogame Destruction: Without
the technologically-determined genre games of puzzle platformers,
first person shooters, real time strategy being imprinted on
cartridges and discs, there would be no gameplay; game history would
have nowhere to go. It its place would either be flowing images
(cinema) or static ones (electronics). The point is confirmed by
software: a civilisation that is prey to its code memory has no
further need of games. For gameplay is the art of computer game
destruction."

The original book is where I took the idea of the 'ideal image' from,
and I still find it as useful as any theory reference work - poetic as
it is, I really enjoy the implications.

Anyway, back to Moscow arcades.....

Christian McCrea
----
saccharinmetric at gmail.com