When reading through Kline’s chapter on the origins of the video game industry, one of the biggest claims that stuck out to me was about the necessity of literature and culture to shape the realm of the industry as we now know it. “Here we confront a little-understood aspect of the circuitry of technological innovation, especially within the digital disciplines: the role of cultural contexts and subcultural practices in the dynamics of innovation and design” (Kline 88). I could not agree more with his assessment, not only for the origins of the video game industry but continuing on even to today. Kline mentions Asimov’s 1950’s science fiction writing as well as Orwell’s 1984 and their depictions of futuristic societies, but I’d say go back even further to E.M. Forster’s short story, The Machine Stops. Published in 1909, Forster, writes about humanity enclosed off in rooms controlled almost entirely by a central, all-seeing machine. He predicts the use of social video messaging and conferences with almost frightening accuracy. Yet furthermore, when I first read that short story, I could not help but think of the many gamers who practically lock themselves down in their basement and play their video games for countless amount of hours at a time, or as Kline mentions, going back to the origins of RPG’s with Dungeons and Dragons (89) (of which the movie depiction shows when things that can get out of control in its own sense). In another example we see William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), a novel portraying (ironically) hackers who “jack into” a virtual reality in cyberspace (it was Gibson who coined the term “Matrix” as it is now used). That novel had a huge impact not only on the newly formed cyberpunk genre in literature, but on the video game industry of whom is constantly looking to expand to the latest and greatest ideas in technology. Needless to say, video games are and always will be wrapped around the culture and literature, particularly of the science fiction genre, that we read and encounter on a daily basis.
Tag Archives: Kline
Back to Narratives: From the Beginning
Contrary to the perspectives of Aarseth and Eskelinen, Kline shows (whether purposefully or no) that video games have always carried narratives in some form. The Spacewar game/simulation was drawn from ideas surrounding the space race and the then new fear of nuclear war with Soviet Russia. The later game Space Invaders was drawn from a similar idea of fighting in space–though this time focused on an extra-terrestrial invasion of our civilization. Game designer Chris Crawford commented on the need to develop the theory of computer games with ideas like “rewards”, “proving oneself”, and “sculpting the ‘play value'” into games. But these ideas do not fundamentally alter why you make and play video games, they simply help you make video games better. The real reason we play games has to do with something far deeper and far more subtle — namely the narrative associated with them.
Video games, through their narratives, are an expression of our lives and experiences and we experience aspects of life through them. They express our fears and vision for the future as in Spacewar, but also our fantasies as in the many games that grant super-human abilities to the player. In a similar manner to cockfights being symbolic for larger issues in the culture, video games are a picture of our lives in the world. As Crawford saw, the need to design games with player interactions reflective of reality are “the central art of the game designer”. It is interesting to note that given the user-oriented feedback loops in game development and increases in computer technology, the overall direction of successful video games has been towards a story-telling style, and not a simply high-tech tetris or pac-man (though, of course, those games are not necessarily devoid of narrative). This trend illustrates the reason we as a society are really interested in video games: their ability to express our lives in ways we couldn’t before.