When we were first given this assignment, to spend hours of our time playing online computer games, I was a bit giddy. Not to say the assignment, and these games, weren’t one of the more enjoyable assignments I’ve had, there was definitely an element of frustration that came with the fun times to be had playing these games.
Echoing some of my classmates comments, the distractions were abounding in these games and at times they seemed almost impossible to see around. In the past few weeks, in reading HoL and People of Paper the topic of visual barriers in literature was something I focused in on and something that became easy to notice in these games as well. It became clear to me early on that I think Jason Nelson was almost more concerned with stuffing these games with every bit of audio and visual art he felt inclined to than he was about the way the game actually played (jam-packed with artistic devices sounds a bit like MZD, doesn’t it?). The fact that these games served the artist as much as the gamer became even more clear to me when I realized that in all of the games it was impossible to die. If you ran into a noxious object or fell off of a cliff, you simply started at the beginning of that level. This was a substantial divergence from my previous gaming experience which is usually “play for hours, get stuck, get frustrated and give up.” Usually, games are meant to be challenging. We heard in the “Get Lamp” documentary that early Interactive Fiction gamers spent weeks or months trying to solve the challenging puzzles in those games. There weren’t really any puzzles in these games that inhibited the players ability to complete the game. The only puzzle or real challenge was trying to make sense of it.
One of the few “games” we played where I felt relatively comfortable offering an explanation for was the Weather Visualizer. I wrote “games” because for me, it was difficult to label the Weather Visualizer a game, at least in the popular sense of the word. Certainly it is interactive, but it reminded me a lot of “We Feel Fine.,” which I never really saw as a game. I think Weather Visualizer was a database just like it. I think there’s a reason it was the last in our list of “games” to explore this week and was separate from the rest of the group. Unlike the rest of the games, with the arguable exception of Sydney’s Siberia, this game didn’t involve navigating levels, jumping over objects and traversing a course. Rather, it took data and allowed you to make decisions on how to visualize it, offering an opportunity to blend visual artistry with raw data. I think the data element set it apart from the rest of the games we played.
Would anyone pose an argument that Weather Visualizer was a game, much like the rest we played? I’d be interested to hear it.