MAKING SENSE OF SOFTWARE:
Computer Games and Interactive Textuality

by Ted Friedman




Included in Community in Cyberspace, ed. Steve Jones (Sage Publications, 1994). Introduction





Contemporary theories of literature and film have worked hard to "liberate the reader" from the shackles of authorial intent and textual determinism (See, for example, Fish, 1980; Tompkins, 1980; Freund, 1987; Allen, 1992). Today, it practically goes without saying within the discourse of cultural theory that no text exists until it is engaged by a subject - that textuality is always an interactive, creative process.

But while critics in the humanities have grown more and more bold in proclaiming the reader's power over the images on a printed page or celluloid strip, few have paid much attention to the emergence of new media which call into question the very categories of author, reader, and text. (An important exception is the pioneering work of David Myers, to which I shall refer throughout this essay.) Interactive software - computer games, hypertext, even "desktop" programs and databases - connect the oppositions of "reader" and "text," of "reading" and "writing," together in feedback loops that make it impossible to distinguish precisely where one begins and the other ends. Recognizing a reader's changing expectations and reactions as a linear text unfolds is one thing; but how do we talk about textual interactions in which every response provokes instantaneous changes in the text itself, leading to a new response, and so on? The answer is, not very clearly, yet. While the humanities have theoretical accounts to explain the workings of literature, film, and television, as yet there is no "software theory." Hypertext: A Limited Paradigm

The one form of interactive computer texts that has been explored in some depth by cultural theorists is hypertext (See, for example, Landow, 1992; Delany and Landow, 1991; Barrett, 1989). Hypertext is software which allows many different texts to be linked, so that simply clicking a mouse on a key word brings up a new related document. It can be used to create fiction with myriad forking paths, or to organize concordances and footnotes which don't simply supply page numbers, but instantaneously call up whole documents, each of which in turn can be linked to other documents.

But emphasizing hypertext as the model for interactive computer texts traps software theory in traditional notions of textuality. The hypertext reader simply navigates through a network of choices, like a person flipping around in a book by consulting the index. Certainly, the possibility that this book may be thousands of pages, and part of a series of thousands of volumes, opens up incredible opportunities. But however great the database, the hypertext reader's choices are still limited by the finite number of links created by the hypertext author or authors. The constant feedback between player and computer in a computer game is a far more complex interaction than this simple networking model. And computers' graphics and sound capabilities, along with joystick and point-and-click interfaces, make reading an even more tenuous analogy. While in one stage of development computer games like Infocom's Zork series may have simply been "interactive fiction" in which players read sentences and typed responses, computer games today often need little or no written text at all.

This does not mean that computer game-playing is a transparent activity - far from it, as any hapless Nintendo novice can attest. Rather, like becoming teleliterate, learning how to play computer games is a process of learning a distinct semiotic structure. To some extent, this language, like that of Classical Hollywood narrative, carries over from one text to the next; initiates can finish one game and comfortably move on to the next one, particularly if they remain in the same genre. But in some ways, every new computer game is its own world, a distinct semiotic system, and it is the very process of learning (or conquering) that system which drives interest in the game. Every game typically requires a "learning curve" while the user grows familiar to the new interface and the logic of the program. It is when the game's processes appear transparent, when the player can easily win the game, that the game loses its appeal.

Hypertext seems to me a transitional genre particularly appealing to literary academia because it dresses up traditional literary study with postmodern multimedia flash. Concentrating on an account of hypertext to explain interactive computer texts is like basing film studies on the genre of screenplays, without looking at the movies themselves; what is needed is an analysis rooted in the distinct qualities of this new kind of interaction between viewer and text. Computer Games

If we wish to move beyond familiar paradigms and look at software which has developed truly new forms of reader-text interaction, it seems clear to me the place to start is computer games.

Playing games on computers was first made possible by the introduction of minicomputers in the late 1950s. Freed from the IBM punch card bureaucracy, programmers for the first time were able to explore the possibilities opened up by hands-on interaction with computers. Games were among the first programs attempted by the original "hackers," undergraduate members of MIT's Tech Model Railroad Club. The result, in 1962, was the collaborative development of the first computer game: Spacewar, a basic version of what would become the Asteroids arcade game, played on a $120,000 DEC PDP-1. (Levy, 1984; Wilson, 1992; Laurel, 1993) Computer designer Brenda Laurel points out this early recognition of the centrality of computer games as models of human-computer interaction: Why was Spacewar the "natural" thing to build with this new technology? Why not a pie chart or an automated kaleidoscope or a desktop? Its designers identified action as the key ingredient and conceived Spacewar as a game that could provide a good balance between thinking and doing for its players. They regarded the computer as a machine naturally suited for representing things that you could see, control, and play with. Its interesting potential lay not in its ability to perform calculations but in its capacity to represent action in which humans could participate (Laurel, 1993, p. 1).

As computers became more accessible to university researchers through the 1960s, several genres of computer games emerged. Chess programs sophisticated enough to defeat humans were developed. The first computer role-playing game, Adventure, was written at Stanford in the 1960s: by typing short phrases, the player could communicate commands to the computer in order to manipulate a character through various settings and solve puzzles. And in 1970 Scientific American columnist Martin Gardner introduced Americans to LIFE, a simulation of cellular growth patterns written by British mathematician John Conway which became the first "software toy," an addictively open-ended model of systemic development designed to be endlessly tinkered with and enjoyed (Levy, 1984; Wilson, 1992).

The 1970s, of course, saw the birth of the video arcade, the home video game system, and the personal computer. By the early 1980s, computer game software production had become an industry (Wilson, 1992). And in the past ten years, as personal computers' capacities have rapidly expanded, computer games have continued to develop, offering increasingly detailed graphics and sounds, growing opportunities for multiple-player interaction via modems and on-line services, and ever-more sophisticated simulation algorithms.

According to Computer Gaming World, as of 1992, "about 4000 computer games have been published over the last 10 years," not to mention thousands more public domain games (Wilson, 1992). These products range from arcade-style games emphasizing hand-eye coordination, to role-playing games adding graphics and sound to the Adventure formula, to simulation games in which players oversee the growth and development of systems ranging from cities to galaxies to alternate life-forms. In all, CGW divides the contemporary field into seven genres: action/arcade, adventure, role-playing adventure, simulation, sports, strategy, and war. Within these categories, of course, there remains much overlap. An empire- building game like Civilization, for example, rests somewhere between a wargame and a simulation, while many adventure games contain arcade-style interludes. (See Myers, 1989, for a more extensive discussion of computer game genres.) The Computer Gaming Subculture

Or course, academia's neglect of computer games hardly means that games have gone untheorized. Among the people who design and play computer games, the poetics and possibilities of computer games have been a subject of continuous discussion. The magazine Computer Gaming World is the self-conscious organ of the computer game industry and subculture, publishing game previews, reviews, strategy tips, and periodic essays on the state of computer games. It takes its role at the connection between the hard-core computer game market and the computer game industry very seriously. It thoroughly covers the computer game industry, and publishes abstracts from technical programming essays in the Journal of Computer Game Design. Every issue also ranks the Top 100 current games and Top 10 in each genre, based on continuous reader polling (each issue contains a ballot card). This interaction with readers continues not only through the mail, but on-line as well. The Prodigy service runs a daily column by the editors of Computer Gaming World, and the editors regularly scan the gaming forum and respond to bulletins posted there.

The intense dialogue fostered by Computer Gaming World and other forums within the computer gaming industry and subculture has led to the formulation of a computer game canon (a Hall of Fame printed in every issue of CGW and archived on Prodigy) and several provisional theories of computer gaming. These discussions are to my mind the most successful theorizations to date of interactive computer texts. Computer Games as "Interactive Cinema"

One prominent strand of thought within the computer gaming subculture is to describe the computer game industry as "The New Hollywood."1 This analogy has its roots in the changing economics of entertainment production. Over the last few years, Hollywood studios have flocked to Silicon Valley to gain access to the latest computer- generated special-effects techniques, and to position themselves to be able to produce the kind of interactive entertainment to come in the 500-channel future.

The "New Hollywood" analogy serves as a helpful model for understanding the process of computer game design. Although in the industry's infancy it was possible for one programmer to write and market a game single-handedly, today computer game production is a complex collaborative process among many specialists. The introduction screens for contemporary games read like movie credits, listing producers, programmers, artists, musicians, and even, in the newer games with digitized images and recorded dialogue, actors. At the top of the credits are the designers, the equivalent to movie directors. In the computer gaming world, designers like Ultima's Lord British, King's Quest's Roberta Williams, and SimCity's Will Wright are respected as artists with unique personal visions.

The difference between the New Hollywood and the Old, according to the analogy, is that computer games are "interactive cinema," in which the game player takes on the role of the protagonist. This model particularly fits adventure games such as Sierra On-Line's Leisure Suit Larry and King's Quest series. And with the development of CD-ROM technology, the fit seems even closer: much more data can now be stored on disk than ever before, so that what the game player sees and hears approaches movie-quality. The newest CD-ROM games replace the text that used to appear on the screen with audio dialogue, often recorded by well-known actors. On the CD-ROM version of Star Trek: The 25th Anniversary, for example, the dialogue is spoken by the actual Star Trek cast. It isn't impossible to imagine the day when a computer game might look indistinguishable from a film.

But while production values may have vastly improved since the days of text-based "interactive fiction," the problem designers of contemporary "interactive cinema" face remains the same: how to define "interactive"? How can one give the player a sense of "control" over the game, while still propelling the player through a compelling narrative? The solution, dating back to Adventure and Zork, has always been to set up the game as a series of puzzles. The player must muddle through the universe of the game - exploring the settings, talking to the characters, acquiring and using objects - until she or he has accomplished everything necessary to trigger the next stage of the plot. In the process, the player is expected to regularly make mistakes, die, and restart the game in a previously saved position. (The film Groundhog Day perfectly captures this "oh no, not again" exasperation.) Out of the flaws in this system, a whole cottage industry of hint books, 900-numbers, and bulletin boards has developed, to help players stuck halfway through their adventures.

The idea of computer "role-playing" emphasizes the opportunity for the gamer to identify with the character on the screen - the fantasy is that rather than just watching the protagonist, one can actually be her or him. But while classical Hollywood cinema is designed in every way to allow one to "lose oneself" in the fantasy onscreen, the stop-and-go nature of the puzzle-solving paradigm makes it very hard to establish the same level of psychic investment. While adventure games can be a lot of fun, even the best of them can't really deliver what they promise. As Computer Gaming World's adventure/role playing game columnist Scorpia complained in 1992, There is an increasing undercurrent of dissatisfaction among game- players. Yes, the pictures are beautiful, the music is orchestral- quality, the interface simple and easy to use, but when the game is finished, there isn't so much feeling of satisfaction with it. Rather, one has the impression that the game was only a vehicle for displaying the virtuosity of artists and composers (p. 56).

A second option in designing "interactive cinema" is to make the game more like hypertext: rather than railroading the player through a predetermined story line, the game could simply present a series of choices, each branching out into new possibilities, like the children's book series Choose Your Own Adventure. Up until now, this approach has been rarely attempted in computer games, probably for economic reasons: it didn't seem practical to create scenes and characters the player may never get around to seeing. (A notable exception was Infocom's unsuccessful late-1980s Infocomics series (Wilson, 1992).) Now that CD-ROMs open up the opportunity for far more data to be available in a game, however, it appears that this possibility is beginning to be explored again. The publicity for the most recent edition in the King's Quest series, King's Quest VI, emphasizes that "every choice you make affects your future options and the attitudes and actions of characters you encounter. Depending on your skills and the decisions you make, your adventure can follow dozens of different storylines, with nearly half of the possible events optional" (Interaction, 1993).

But a hypertext model of "interactive cinema" still does little to give the player a sense of real autonomy; the choices remain a limited set of pre-defined options.2 This certainly increases the complexity of the game: the linear narrative becomes a web, giving the gamer the opportunity to explore the ramifications of various options and map out the game's network of forking paths. But whether a single plot or a network of choices, the world of the game remains as predetermined as that of any film or novel.

All of this is not to say that computer gaming is inherently a more distanced, alienating form of interaction than watching a movie; far from it, as we shall see. But, ironically, those games modeled upon cinema are likely to be the least involving. Hamstrung by the demands of traditional narrative, these games operate under a limited model of computer interaction as a series of distinct decisions. As a result, they don't begin to take advantage of the opportunities for constant interaction and feedback between player and computer the way other forms of computer games can. As science fiction writer and computer game critic Orson Scott Card argues, . . . what every good game author eventually has to learn . . . is that computers are a completely different medium, and great computer artworks will only come about when we stop judging computer games by standards developed for other media. . . . You want to do the rebuilding of Atlanta after the war? SimCity does it better than either the book or the movie of Gone With the Wind. . . . [What the computer] does well, it does better than any other medium that ever existed (Card, February 1991, p. 54). SimCity: The "Software Toy" Ideal

The game to which Card refers, SimCity, is a simulation which allows the player to orchestrate the building and development of a city. The success of SimCity demonstrates the surprisingly compelling power of a particular kind of human-computer interaction very different from either hypertext or "interactive cinema."

SimCity actually didn't start off as a simulation game. As the game's creator, Will Wright, explains, SimCity evolved from Raid on Bungling Bay, where the basic premise was that you flew around and bombed islands. The game included an island generator, and I noticed after a while that I was having more fun building islands than blowing them up. About the same time, I also came across the work of Jay Forrester, one of the first people to ever model a city on a computer for social-sciences purposes. Using his theories, I adapted and expanded the Bungling Bay island generator, and SimCity evolved from there (Wright, quoted in Reeder, 1992, p. 26). Nervous that the product Wright came up with would appear too "educational," distributors Broderbund took extra steps on SimCity's release in 1987 to make sure it would be perceived as a game, adding "disaster" options and prepackaged scenarios - earthquakes, nuclear meltdowns, even an attack from Godzilla. But as a 1989 Newsweek article on the game points out, "these are excess baggage" (Barol, p. 64). What turned SimCity into a giant software hit, spawning numerous bootlegs, imitations, and spin-offs (including SimEarth, SimAnt, SimLife, SimFarm, SimHealth, and most recently the sequel/update SimCity 2000), was the pleasure Wright discovered in the simulation process itself.

Here's a description of the original game from a Maxis catalog: SimCity makes you Mayor and City Planner, and dares you to design and build the city of your dreams. . . . Depending on your choices and design skills, Simulated Citizens (Sims) will move in and build homes, hospitals, churches, stores and factories, or move out in search of a better life elsewhere (Maxis Software Toys Catalog, 1992, p. 4). Beginning (in the basic scenario) with an undeveloped patch of land and an initial development fund, the player constructs a city by choosing where and what kind of power plants to build, zoning industrial, commercial, and residential areas, laying down roads, mass transit, and power lines, and building police stations, fire departments, and eventually airports, seaports, and stadiums. And so on; while playing the game eventually comes to feel entirely intuitive, the system is quite complex, and the sequel SimCity 2000 offers even more options.. Every action is assigned a price, and the player can only spend as much money as he or she has in the city treasury. The treasury begins at a base amount, then can be replenished yearly by taxes, the rate of which is determined by the player. As the player becomes more familiar with the system, she or he gradually develops strategies to encourage economic growth, build up the population of the city, and score a higher "approval rating" from the Sims. Which of these or other goals the player chooses to pursue, however, is up to the individual; Maxis likes to refer to its products as "Software Toys" rather than games, and insists, when you play with our toys, you set your own goals and decide for yourself when you've reached them. The fun and challenge of playing with our toys lies in exploring the worlds you create out of your own imagination. You're rewarded for creativity, experimentation, and understanding, with a healthy, thriving universe to call your own (Maxis Software Toys Catalog, p. 10)

Expanding on the "Software Toy" ideal, Orson Scott Card argues that the best computer games are those which provide the most open-ended frameworks to allow players the opportunity to create their own worlds: Someone at every game design company should have a full-time job of saying, "Why aren't we letting the player decide that?" . . . When [designers] let . . . unnecessary limitations creep into a game, gamewrights reveal that they don't yet understand their own art. They've chosen to work with the most liberating of media- and yet they snatch back with their left hand the freedom they offered us with their right. Remember, gamewrights, the power and beauty of the art of gamemaking is that you and the player collaborate to create the final story. Every freedom that you can give to the player is an artistic victory. And every needless boundary in your game should feel to you like failure (Card, March 1991, p. 58). Computer Gaming as Demystification

Of course, however much "freedom" computer game designers grant players, any simulation will be rooted in a set of baseline assumptions. SimCity has been criticized from both the left and right for its economic model. It assumes that low taxes will encourage growth while high taxes will hasten recessions. It discourages nuclear power, while rewarding investment in mass transit. And most fundamentally, it rests on the empiricist, technophilic fantasy that the complex dynamics of city development can be abstracted, quantified, simulated, and micromanaged.3

These are not flaws in the game - they are its founding principles. They can be engaged and debated, and other computer games can be written following different principles. But there could never be an "objective" simulation free from "bias;" computer programs, like all texts, will always be ideological constructions.

The fear of some computer game critics, though, is that technology may mask the constructedness of any simulation. Science fiction writer and Byte magazine columnist Jerry Pournelle argues: The simulation is pretty convincing -- and that's the problem, because . . . it's a simulation of the designer's theories, not of reality. . . . [M]y point is not to condemn these programs. Instead, I want to warn against their misuse. For all too many, computers retain an air of mystery, and there's a strong temptation to believe what the little machines tell us. ''But that's what the computer says'' is a pretty strong argument in some circles. The fact is, though, the computer doesn't say anything at all. It merely tells you what the programmers told it to tell you. Simulation programs and games can be valuable tools to better understanding, but we'd better be aware of their limits (Pournelle, 1990).

While Pournelle's warnings are well taken, I think he overestimates the mystifying power of technophilia. In fact, I would argue that computer games reveal their own constructedness to a much greater extent than more traditional texts. Pournelle asks that designers open up their programs, so that gamers can "know what the inner relationships are." But this is exactly what the process of computer game playing reveals. Learning and winning (or, in the case of a non-competitive "software toy," "reaching one's goals at") a computer game is a process of demystification: one succeeds by discovering how the software is put together. The player molds her or his strategy through trial-and-error experimentation to see "what works" - which actions are rewarded and which are punished. Likewise, the extensive discourse on game strategy in manuals, magazines, bulletin boards, and guides like The Official SimCity Planning Commission Handbook and The SimEarth Bible does exactly what Pournelle asks, exposing the "inner relationships" of the simulation to help players succeed more fully.

Unlike a book or film which one is likely to encounter only once, a computer game is usually played over and over. The moment it is no longer interesting is the moment when all its secrets have been discovered, its limitations exposed. Game designer and author Chris Crawford describes the hermeneutics of computer games as fundamentally a process of deconstruction rather than simple interpretation. David Myers observes, [A]ccording to Crawford, the best measure of the success of a game is that the player learns the principles behind that game "while discovering inevitable flaws in its design . . . A game should lift the player up to higher levels of understanding" (Myers, 1990, p. 27. Quote from Crawford, 1986, p. 16). Simulation and Subjectivity

Playing SimCity is a very different experience from playing an adventure game like King's Quest. The interaction between human and computer is constant and intense. Gameplaying is a continuous flow - it can be very hard to stop, because the player's always in the middle of dozens of different projects: nurturing a new residential zone in one corner of the map, building an airport in another, saving up money to buy a new power plant, monitoring the crime rate in a particularly troubled neighborhood, and so on. Meanwhile, the city is continually changing, as the simulation inexorably chugs forward from one month to the next (unless the player puts the game on pause to handle a crisis). By the time the player has made a complete pass through the city, a whole new batch of problems and opportunities have developed. If the pace of the city's development is moving too fast to keep up with, the simulation can be slowed down (i.e., it'll wait longer in real-time to move from one month to the next); if the player's waiting around for things to happen, the simulation can be speeded up.

As a result, it's easy slide into a routine with absolutely no down-time, no interruptions from complete communion with the computer. The game can grow so absorbing, in fact, that players' subjective sense of time is distorted (See Myers, 1992). Myers writes, "from personal experience and interviews with other players, I can say it is very common to play these games for eight or more hours without pause, usually through the entire first night of purchase" (Myers, 1991, p. 343). You look up, and all of a sudden it's morning.

It's very hard to describe what it feels like when one is "lost" inside a computer game, precisely because at that moment one's sense of self has been fundamentally transformed. Flowing through a continuous series of decisions made almost automatically, hardly aware of the passage of time, the player forms a symbiotic circuit with the computer, a version of the cyborgian consciousness described by Donna Harraway in her influential "Manifesto for Cyborgs" (1985). The computer comes to feel like an organic extension of one's consciousness, and the player may feel like an extension of the computer itself.

This isn't exactly the way the SimCity user's manual puts it. The manual describes the player's role as a "combination Mayor and City Planner." In Civilization, the player is referred to as "Chief," "Warlord," "Prince," "King," or "Emperor" (depending on the skill level), and can adopt the names of various historical leaders - Abraham Lincoln when playing the Americans, Genghis Khan when leading the Mongols, and so on. But while these titles suggest that the gamer imagines her or himself playing a specific "role" along the lines of the "interactive cinema" model, the structures of identification in simulation games are much more complex. Closer to the truth is the setup in Populous, where the player is simply God - omnipotent (within the rules of the game), omniscient, and omnipresent. While in some simulations explicitly about politics, like Hidden Agenda and Crisis in the Kremlin, the player's power and perspective is limited to that of a chief of state, in games like SimCity the player is personally responsible for far more than any one leader - or even an entire government - could ever manage. The player directly controls the city's budget, economic and residential growth, transportation, police and fire services, zoning, and even entertainment (the "Sims" eventually get mad if you don't build them a stadium). While each function is putatively within the province of government control, the game structure makes the player identify as much with the roles of industrialist, merchant, real estate agent, and citizen, as with those of Mayor or City Planner.

For example, in SimCity, the way a new area of town is developed is to "zone" it. The player decides whether each parcel of land should be marked for residential, industrial, or commercial use. The player can't make the zones develop into thriving homes or businesses; that's determined by the simulation, on the basis of a range of interconnected factors including crime rate, pollution, economic conditions, power supply, and the accessibility of other zones. If the player has set up conditions right, an empty residential zone will quickly blossom into a high-rise apartment complex, raising land values, adding tax money to the city's coffers, and increasing the population of the city. If the zone isn't well-integrated into the city, it may stay undeveloped, or degenerate into a crime-ridden slum.

But while the player cannot control the behavior putatively assigned to the residents of the city - "the Sims" - the identification process at the moment the player zones the city goes beyond simply seeing oneself as "the Mayor," or even as the collective zoning commission. The cost of zoning eats up a substantial portion of a city's budget - much more than it would cost a real city. This is structurally necessary to limit the player's ability to develop the city, so that building the city is a gradual, challenging process (something close to a narrative, in fact). The effect on gameplay is to see the process less as "zoning" than as buying the land. Not to say that the gamer considers every SimCity building to be owned by the government. But at the moment of zoning, the gamer is playing the role not of mayor, but of someone else - homeowner, landlord, or real estate developer, perhaps, in the case of a residential zone.

We could see playing SimCity, then, as a constant shifting of identificatory positions, depending on whether one is buying land, organizing the police force, paving the roads, or whatever. This, I think, is part of what's going on. But this model suggests a level of disjunction - jumping back and forth from one role to the next - belied by the smooth, almost trance-like state of gameplay.

Overarching these functional shifts, I think, is a more general state of identification: with the city as a whole, as a single organism. Even putting it this way, though, doesn't go to the root of the process, because "the city" in question is a very different object from, say, the city of New York. Except for those cases when gamers choose to recreate real cities, no outside referent exists for the world on the computer screen. And while the game visuals are cleverly iconic - tiny little houses, factories, and mini-malls - they hardly evoke any "real" space the way a movie set or even a written passage can. It is unlikely, I think, that the player in the thick of the game takes the time to look at a residential district and imagine a "real-life" city block.

Rather, for the gamer, the city exists in its own right, a substitute for nothing else - a quintessentially postmodern "simulation" in Baudrillard's sense, as "real" as any other representation, and divorced from any need for a "real-world" referent (See Baudrillard, 1983). In this case, attempting to map "roles" onto the player's on-screen identification misses the point. When a player "zones" a land area, she or he is less identifying less with a "role" - Mayor, industrialist, or whatever - than with a process. And the reason that the decision, and the continuous series of decisions the gamer makes, can be made so quickly and intuitively, is that the gamer has internalized the logic of the program, so that the gamer is always able to anticipate the results of her or his actions. "Losing oneself" in a computer game means, in a sense, identifying with the simulation itself. Simulation as Cognitive Mapping

In The Condition of Postmodernity David Harvey argues for the primacy of spatialization in constructing cognitive frameworks: We learn our ways of thinking and conceptualizing from active grappling with the spatializations of the written word, the study and production of maps, graphs, diagrams, photographs, models, paintings, mathematical symbols, and the like (Harvey, 1989, p. 206). He then points out the dilemma of making sense of space under late capitalism: How adequate are such modes of thought and such conceptions in the face of the flow of human experience and strong processes of social change? On the other side of the coin, how can spatializations in general . . . represent flux and change . . . ? (p. 206) Representing flux and change is exactly what a simulation can do, by replacing the stasis of 2- or 3- dimensional spatial models with a map that shifts over time to reflect change. And this change is not simply the one-way communication of a series of still images, but a continually interactive process. Computer simulations bring the tools of narrative to mapmaking, allowing the individual not simply to observe structures, but to become experientially immersed in their logic.

Simulations may be our best opportunity to create what Fredric Jameson calls "an aesthetic of cognitive mapping: a pedagogical political culture which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system" (Jameson, 1991, p. 54) Playing a simulation means becoming engrossed in a systemic logic which connects a myriad array of causes and effects. The simulation acts as a kind of map-in-time, visually and viscerally (as the player internalizes the game's logic) demonstrating the repercussions and interrelatedness of many different social decisions. Escaping the prison-house of language which seems so inadequate for holding together the disparate strands that construct postmodern subjectivity, computer simulations provide a radically new quasi-narrative form through which to communicate structures of interconnection.

Sergei Eisenstein hoped that the technology of montage could make it possible to film Das Kapital. But the narrative techniques of Hollywood cinema developed in a way which directs the viewer to respond to individuals rather than abstract concepts. A computer game based on Das Kapital, on the other hand, is easy to imagine. As Chris Crawford notes, (paraphrased by David Myers), "game personalities are not as important as game processes - 'You can interact with a process . . . Ultimately, you can learn about it'" (Myers, 1990, p. 27. Quote from Crawford, 1986, p. 15). The Future: From Interactive Textuality to CMC

One criticism often made of simulation games like SimCity is that they're solipsistic "power trips," gratifying the gamer's desire to play God. This is to some degree unfair - simulations are often played in groups, particularly in educational settings. (SimCity is used as a pedagogical tool in many Urban Studies classes.) But it is true that the absorbing interaction between human and computer in simulation gaming tends to discourage collaborative play.

Adventure games, by comparison, have always been more conducive to collaborative playing, because of the stop-and-go nature of the gameplay. When you can't get any further in a game until you solve a puzzle, the more minds the better. Nonetheless, even the computer "role-playing" adventures spun off from the Dungeons & Dragons universe have always been designed primarily for solitaire play. (Theoretically, up to six players could each control a different character, but in practice there's very little for individual characters to do.) In part this has been to take advantage of the particular power of human-computer interaction to substitute for interpersonal interaction - if you can't find anyone to play D&D with, the computer may be the next best thing. But it has also been the result of technical limitations. The bottom line has always been that when there's only one keyboard and one mouse, only one player can actually interact with the computer at a time. Only arcade games have actually developed interfaces to allow simultaneous play on a single set.

With the proliferation of modems and the growth of the Internet and other on-line services, all this is beginning to change. Sierra's ImagiNation, for example, allows players from across the country to join together to play both traditional games like chess and bridge, and a D&D-style role-playing adventure, The Shadow of Yserbius. How online interactivity will affect computer game development is hard to tell. Will the accessibility of human opponents make computer-generated opponents obsolete? Could it be possible to design an online simulation game which transcends the solitaire model, combining intense human-computer interactivity with computer-mediated collaboration? Or is playing a simulation, like reading a book, just something that has to be done alone?

These questions about a bunch of games may seem peripheral to the Big Issues rolling down the Information Highway. But we should remember that the first program the MIT hackers wrote on their new PDP-1 was Spacewar. Today, as we experiment with ways to better communicate on the Internet, many of the tropes of adventure gaming are being borrowed by new virtual spaces. The first "MUD," short for "Multi-User Dungeon," was invented in 1979 as an open-ended online fantasy world which role-players could not only explore, but help build by creating new objects and rooms (Rheingold, 1993, p. 151). Today, MUDs include not only Tolkeinesque lands and Star Trek-based galaxies, but also communities like MediaMOO, a virtual version of MIT's Media Laboratory where media researchers can get together for "virtual drinks," or attend panels in virtual ballrooms. The basic commands invented for text-based adventures - "move," "look," "talk," "ask," "get," and so on - provide visitors with a range of interactive opportunities. And the computer game traditions of thick textual description, playful role-playing, and persistent exploration remain powerful imaginative tools at MediaMOO for opening up computer- mediated communication beyond simply "chatting" in real-time.

As data capacities increase and text-based virtual communities expand to include sound and graphics, it's likely that computer games will continue to have things to teach us about interacting both with software and each other. Computer games, after all, are where we go to play with the future.4

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Biographical:

Ted Friedman is a doctoral student in the Graduate Program in Literature and Literary Theory at Duke University and a contributing writer for Details and Vibe magazines. He also once worked as Deputy Commissioner for the Prodigy service's Baseball Manager game.

Notes


1. This widely-quoted phrase was coined by Electronic Arts exective Trip Hawkins in the early 1980s (Wilson, 1992).

2. This version of "interactive cinema" is the most obvious possible application of computer gaming to Hollywood product as new interactive cable technology is introduced. It's the logical extension of the practice of filming multiple endings to show to test audiences. What better way to please everybody than to give each viewer the choice of a "happy" or "sad" ending? But again, to limit our notions of interactivity to this fixed-choice model - one that computers merely facilitate rather than make possible - is to fail to recognize the unique possibilities for interaction offered by computers. Perhaps a more exciting variation on the Hollywood scenario would be to give the viewer access to all the shot footage of a program, so that the viewer her or himself (with the facilitation of a computer interface) could choose how to edit it into a narrative. In this way, rather than being limited to a predetermined set of choices, the viewer could have a sense of creative control.

3. Complaining about the pro-government "bias" of SimHealth, a new game simulating the economics of health care reform, one critic speculates, "maybe what we really need is an economic simulator called SimAdam Smith: You turn it on and just leave it alone" (Moss, 1993). As we shall see, however, it's not a simple step to equate the gamer with the hand of government, even if she or he is putatively designated "SimMayor."

4. I would like to thank Robert Allen, Joseba Gabilondo, Kevin Jon Heller, Norman Holland, Fredric Jameson, Henry Jenkins, Kate Lewis, Ann Maderer, Janet Murray, and Janice Radway for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.