Category: experimental writings

Some thoughts from the Bad Games Panel I participated in at the DiGRA conference last month. My co-panelists were Jason Begy, who presented We’ll get through this together: Bad Games and Social Settings and Matthew Weise who presented on Bad Games – Just Like Bad Movies. An Example of Paracinematic Practice in Game Culture.

The Possibility of Paragaming

In the panel, we discussed the possibility of enjoying games that are considered “bad”, or low quality according to whatever criteria we use. We could call this paragaming, following the idea of paracinema discussed below. (The films of Ed Wood are probably the best known examples of paracinema.) Paragaming, on the other hand, has gained little recognition, but it does exist once you start looking.

We chose two quite straightforward starting points:

1) Susan Sontag’s classic 1964 essay Notes on ‘Camp’, in which she identifies camp:

“Not only is there a Camp vision, a Camp way of looking at things. Camp is as well a quality discoverable in objects and the behavior of persons. There are “campy” movies, clothes, furniture, popular songs, novels, people, buildings. . . .“

<- This is a Tiffany Lamp, which Sontag says is part of the Camp canon.

2) Jeffrey Sconce’s 1996 article ‘Trashing’ the academy: taste, excess, and an emerging politics of cinematic style in which he discusses (among other things) paracinema, a kind of (alleged) subversive inversion of the taste hierarchy of film. In which he writes about the paracinematic audience:

“… this audience would be more inclined to watch a bootlegged McDonald’s training film than Man with a Movie Camera, although, significantly, many in the paracinematic community would no doubt be familiar with this more respectable member of the avant-garde canon.”

Choosing the Flawed Clone over the Perfect Original

With that, the questions become:

1. How can we enjoy games that we consider “bad” according to a given taste?
2. What is the taste against which we can rebel by playing games hitherto considered unworthy of playing?

An example: China Miner, above, is a ridiculously hard 1984 Commodore 64 game. Hard to the point where it is certain that nobody every completed the game’s 40 levels without resorting to some sort of cheat mechanism. In fact, I find it unlikely that anybody even completed the first five levels without using cheats. (The game didn’t come with cheat codes – cheats had to be created by disassembling and modifying the game, which I personally spent a good deal of time doing.)

If you haven’t heard of China Miner before, it’s probably because it is a low-quality clone of the classic game Manic Miner. Manic Miner revolutionized the platform game with its zany British humor and intricate level design. Manic Miner is clearly a good game, by any standard. You would then be likely to think that Manic Miner was more enjoyable than China Miner… but it isn’t. Playing Manic Miner is drudgery, a game that falls neatly within the boundaries that it has set for itself.

China Miner, on the other hand, is exhilarating, a game that creates wow moment after wow moment. I have had much more enjoyment playing China Miner than I have had playing Manic Miner. Where Manic Miner is perfect at what it tries to do, China Miner is a radically flawed copy. But its flaws makes it interesting, open to discussion, it makes you want to find yet another incredibly bad game design decision, to show the game to new people who haven’t seen it. I much prefer this flawed clone to the perfect original.

What is there to Rebel Against?

This elaboration of the enjoyable qualities of China Miner is an example of such paragaming: The game fails by a number of the criteria that we tend to take for granted, but that is exactly why it is so enjoyable. Here is a list of quality criteria that the game fails to live up to:

• Don’t break control conventions without reason [possible the only game ever where jumping requires pressing up and pressing fire].
• Don’t kill player within the first few seconds.
• Have sound [only sound is a looping rendition of a ragtime tune].
• Difficulty curve should be a rising slope. [Some subsequent levels easier than level 1].
• Save expert moves for later levels.
• Don’t let players make early mistakes that are only apparent much later.
• It should be possible to complete a game.

So what I have done here is to rebel against the taste of Good Game Design. Here, then, is what a short manifesto of paragaming could look like:

We all know that games should have reasonable interfaces, good learning curves, worlds that make sense on some level, player feedback, and so on. But you know what, screw that! Give me unreasonable games that don’t work, that defy conventions, that require me to squint at horrible graphics, to cringe at looping music, to fight against illogical interfaces, and to seriously consider what I am doing: real games, really bad games.

[This is #2 in a series of experimental writings: I am trying to write with styles and arugments that I would not normally use. Here, I take on Wittgenstein’s famous argument that “games” cannot be defined.]

[66.] Consider for example the objects we call ‘food”. I mean pork roast, waffles, pasta, lamb casseroles, and so on. What is common to them all? Don’t say, ‘There must be something common, or else they would not be all called “food”‘, but look and see whether there is anything common to all. For if you look at them you will not see something that is common to them all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that. To repeat: don’t think, but look! Look, for example, at pork roasts, with their multifarious relationships. Now pass to waffles, here you will find many correspondences with the first group, but many common features drop out, and others appear. When we pass next to pasta, much that is common is retained, but much is lost. Are they all ‘nutritious’? Compare pig’s stomach [Saumage] with Creme Brulee. Or is there always an appetizer and a main course, or even a swallowing of the food? Think of chewing gum. In breakfast cereal there is the process of eating and the feeling of being full afterwards, but when a child throws his potato mash into the air, this feature has disappeared. Look now at the parts played by spices, and at the difference between chili in in Kashmir Lamb and chili in Tom Yum Soup. Think now of cafeteria food; here is the social element of eating, but now many other characteristic features have disappeared. And we can go through the many, many other groups of food in the same way, and we can see how similarities crop up and disappear.
And the result of this examination is this: we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing, sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail.
[67.] I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than ‘family resemblances’, for the various resemblances among members of the same family: build, features, color of eyes, walk, temperament, etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way. And I shall say, food forms a family.’
(Wittgenstein 1958, segment 66-67.)

[I am working on my book manuscript. To prevent myself from simply writing like I always do, I am going to do a series of experimental game writings. In these, it is not strictly “me” speaking – they are rather explorations of possible directions in which to work.]

4 Japanese children are playing. As far as I can see, these are the rules: One child (“the guesser”) walks away and closes his/her eyes. The remaining three perform a clapping sequences and chooses between them who is “it”. The child who walked away returns and has to guess who is “it”.
The guesser can guess as many times as he/she wants.

This is a game according to my definition.
There are rules, quantifiable outcome, valorization of outcomes, player effort, player attachment to outcome, and “negotiable consequences” of the outcome.

But this does not explain why the game would be enjoyable.
There are many things of course:
-The shared ritual.
-The rhythm.
-Playing with distinguishing between people.
-The thrill of being special.
-The relation between individuality and arbitrary distinctions.
-Exploring your emotions towards the other players.
-Examining the signals and expressions of the other players.
-Trying to conceal the signals that you send.

The consequences assigned to the game are rather weak. Also in the sense that there is no winner of a game, only an individual performance, but that the game is played multiple times. It would be possible to play 15 games and write down the performance of each player and pick a winner. However, this is not done. Overall performance rating is therefore rather imprecise. This is not a bug, it’s a feature.
The game also contains strong chance element, making the skill of the individual less important.

As we can see, the formal setup of the game means a lot for how it can be used socially and what pleasures can be derived from it. But the other aspect of the setup, that the game is being played many times without the children keeping a score, also makes it a special kind of not-that-competitive game.

The game is designed collectively by human children, who pass specific rules on because they enjoy the experiences that they get from playing with them.

Why can’t we play this game as adults? Discuss.