Eric Zimmerman : I founded Flat a year and a half
ago with Tsia Carson and Doug Lloyd. Flat is one of the many new media
companies here in
FS: Do you do the programming yourself? Can you
describe to us what exactly a game designer does?
EZ: I am not a programmer. I studied programming
briefly in graduate school, but I really don't do any programming. My role in
the company is to help generate ideas and lead the design and production effort
among the team. In both game design and interactive design, you are essentially
designing an experience. Because that experience is not wholly predetermined in
advance, you are actually designing a set of possibilities that play out in
expected or unexpected ways. As a game designer, one of the most satisfying
moments for me is when a player uses one of my games in ways I never expected.
One of the things that drove me away from painting
alone in a studio and towards new media is that it is a radically
interdisciplinary field. Similar to filmmaking, creating games requires people
with totally divergent skills: programmers, character designers, animators,
graphic designers, musicians, writers, and others collaborating together to
create a product. The role of the game designer is to manage the way these
elements intersect to create the final experience.
Game design is also a set of skills which really
goes outside the specific practice of new media and can be applied to games as
a whole: sports, card games, board games, computer games and any other kinds of
games. I teach at
Game design is very difficult compared to other
kinds of interactive design. Let’s say you are creating a medical database that
doctors will use to access the records of their patients. There is interactive design in that. In other
words, in addition to the technical aspects of managing the raw information,
the experience of someone walking up to that terminal, sitting down and
interacting with that database, is a designed experience. However, as long as someone is able to go to
that database and in some perfunctory way get the information that they need,
then the task is fulfilled, even if it is not as ergonomic or elegantly
designed as it could be. But in a game, there is no practical need compelling
the participant to continue interacting with the game. It is up to the game designer to manage the
desire of the player at every moment of the game experience. It is very difficult. How do you create a game that players will
return to again and again, that becomes truly meaningful? These are the
challenges of game design.
LB: Are there any particular ethical challenges in
game design? You are planning experiences for players, and in that sense you
are acting upon the social field. Do you feel any responsibilities in that
regard, or is a game nothing else than a product to be enjoyed ? We all know
that games have been invented to frame and form social habits. For example,
games have been used to teach war. What are your positions regarding these
questions?
EZ : I have a number of positions on those
topics. One is that the essence of games
is conflict. Usually, the conflict is
modeled on an economic or military conflict of some kind. Classical board games
like Chess and Go are about gaining territory, which is a way of modeling
military conflict. Other games, like Monopoly or Bridge, are about gaining and
losing points, modeling economic conflicts.
So games create conflict. But at its best, that conflict is productive.
Because insofar as games are inherently competitive they are also inherently
cooperative. In agreeing to submit their
behavior to the rules of the game, players all have to learn to speak the same
language, the rules and discourse of the game.
Through this stylization of their behavior, the productive conflict of
play results. This game-interaction is one
of the distinctive ways that games act upon the social field, as you put it.
However I would also say that games certainly are
a representational medium and they traffic in larger social and cultural
codes. Games are radically
metaphorical. Computer games are
especially metaphorical because ultimately everything the player experiences is
stored as computer code, numbers and letters, ones and zeroes. Everything that happens in a computer game is
derived from those ones and zeroes.
Insofar as games are representations it is extremely important for
designers to be aware that they are proliferating cultural codes through the
games they design. But the politics of
representation is never a simple business.
American culture has a tendency towards a monkey-see monkey-do attitude
about representation. For example, Flat is currently having to revise the
content of an educational game because one of the characters is smoking. The publisher’s message to us is that kids
aren't supposed to know that people smoke. It’s a strange neurosis.
But all of that is just about the visual spectacle
of a game. There’s more. There is a difference between passive media
and media which is interactive. People
do not just have a visual relationship to a game - they have a systemic relationship to it. By entering
a game you enter into a set of dynamic relationships. And this complicates the representations that
a game produces.
For example, take Tomb Raider. Lara Croft, the character that you play in
the game, has a ridiculously exaggerated anatomy - an impossibly thin waist and
huge breasts. And she’s exploring caves
and shooting enemies in a pair of hot pants.
The easiest reading of Lara Croft is that she is a pin-up sexual fantasy
for adolescent male culture. Yet the game has a disproportionately high number
of female players. Why is that? Well, there’s more to Lara than just her
image. You have a double consciousness
when you play her because the character is both an object and a subject. Yes, Lara Croft is a sexualized object on the
screen, but within the context of a game, she is also a subject that is inhabited. She acts both as a tool for you to win at the
game and also as an identity upon which you project yourself in order to take
action within the world of the game.
What does this means for a male player?
A guy playing Lara is essentially dressing up in drag. These are the kinds of complex
representational situations unique to games and other interactive media.
LB: There is an artist who works with video games.
He recently made a video loop of scenes where Lara Croft gets killed. He sees his role as an artist to emphasize
certain codes. Would you as a game designer, or could you, work in the same
kind of direction?
EZ: That’s a good question. Before I answer you directly, let me talk to
you about my general approach. My own
aesthetic of game design, and this is something that I share with my partners
at Flat, is a kind of structural, systemic approach to games, an artificial
life approach to games that emphasizes emergent complexity. Artificial life is an approach to academic
research that attempts to model biological systems, ecosystems, and other
complex dynamic systems. There has been
some commercial entertainment products along these lines, from Tamagochi to
software products like Creatures, Galapagos and Dogz. Flat is not interested in
these kinds of virtual pets - they ultimately replicate the kind of work that
has already happened within research contexts.
However, there is another way of thinking about
artificial life, apart from the simulation of biological systems. Artificial life is also a programming
strategy. Without getting too detailed, in artificial life, there are a lot of
local interactions between simple units which add up to emergent patterns of
unexpected behavior and complexity. That is a “bottom-up” approach as opposed
to the classical “top-down” approach of artificial intelligence, which attempts
to create logical systems and simulate rational thought.
My interest is in using these formal structures to
create systems that produce unexpected behaviors on the level of representation
or social experience. Flat's email games are predicated on this sort of
structure. Email takes advantage of the viral nature of the Internet. Our hope
is that the games can spread as a cultural phenomenon through the medium of
email.
FS: [Interrupting]
You’re not really answering our question.
LB: Let me rephrase it in another way: there are
artists, who are not game designers, who take cultural products and deconstruct
their codes, reveal their underlying ideological agendas. For example, Miltos
Manetas emphasizes scenes where Lara Croft dies, showing that an important part
of the pleasure derived from playing the game is to kill her.
EZ: In other words, can games take part in
post-structuralist strategies of cultural production such as appropriation? The
answer is yes, absolutely. But it is a challenging problem. The class I teach
on game design with Frank Lantz at NYU illustrates the tricky position that I
am in. We frame games in three ways: as rules,
which is what the designer creates, as play
which is the experience resulting from those rules, and as culture because games are situated within the larger field of
culture.
Now there is no doubt that games are a proper
subject for fields such as anthropology or sociology, and are ripe to be
deconstructed by artists. In our class we acknowledge throughout that games are
cultural artifacts. Yet at the same time, the basics of game design are still
so unexplored that we take a largely formalist approach in our class and try to
discover and explore the fundamental, intrinsic aspects of games and game
design. Game design does not have a
history of theoretical work like graphic design or architecture and at this
point in my teaching, writing and research I am trying to establish what
amounts to a modernist, formalist, structural approach to game design. At the
same time I would like nothing more to see my own work expand to incorporate
post-structuralist strategies of cultural analysis and production.
FS: Wasn't the "Arm The Homeless
Coalition" project already moving in that direction?
EZ: The Arm the Homeless Coalition was a project I
completed with my partners at Flat and the artist Paul Badger when we were all
in graduate school. We created a fictitious organization called the Arm the
Homeless Coalition whose purpose was to distribute firearms and firearms safety
training to the homeless of
Now that project wasn't a game, it was a prank.
Games are inherently insular. They
require a completely artificial context. When you decide to submit your
behavior to the rules of a game, you cross what the Dutch historian and
philosopher Huizinga calls the "magic circle" of a game. Every aspect of a game is totally
codified. If there is a space on a
Monopoly board that is not explained in the rules, you can't play the game. The
rule system has to be known and commonly understood by all of the players, who
all agree to utilize the same discourse to play the game.
Now a prank like Arm the Homeless Coalition gains
its very identity and interest as culture because it is playing at the boundary
between fiction and reality. It is a fiction that convinces people that it is
real.
FS: Can't that boundary become voluntarily blurred
in certain games, such as in role-playing games ?
EZ: Well, often when you blur that boundary, what
you are playing with is no longer a game.
In their book The Study of Games, Hill & Sutton-Smith give a
definition of a game as: "an exercise of voluntary control systems in
which there is a contest between powers, constrained by rules, in order to
produce a disequilibrial outcome". A disequilibrial
outcome. Either you won or you lost,
everyone won or lost together, or you achieved a quantifiable score. There is an understandable outcome to a game.
There is an ostensible goal to a game. That is often what distinguishes games
from other game-like activities. Look at Caillois' four categories of play: agon, which is competitive or
skill-based, alea, which is chance, mimicry, which has to do with simulation
and make-believe, and ilinx or bodily
sensation. He includes theater in the mimicry category, merry-go-rounds in the
illinx category. But those aren't games. Games are a subset of play. Many art
practices can be seen as forms of play but not necessarily as games.
Your questions relating to contemporary critical
art practices are a tremendous challenge to me.
The issue is: can a bonafide game perform that kind of critical
role? I’m trying to juggle theoretical
and practical concerns in answering you.
On a strictly economic level, it is hard to say. The computer game industry is a cut-throat
and competitive field. It is extremely
difficult to convince publishers to expand beyond the established, codified
genres of games: shooters, sports games, real time strategy games, platform
jumpers, driving games, etcetera. As far
as the content and the look of the games are concerned, their potential
subversive or critical recuperation might not be really possible, or in fact
even useful to a publisher.
Compare computer and video games to pop
music. There is corporate sponsored
rock-n-roll, but at the same time there are all kinds of underground venues for
more experimental forms of music, from clubs to college radio to small record
labels. It is an extremely vibrant and diversified cultural field. This is not
about to happen with computerized entertainment anytime soon. On the one hand
it’s a question of pure economics: the number of people who have access to
computers is still relatively low and the cost needed to produce a game is
relatively high. The typical Playstation game now costs between two and ten
million dollars to produce and twelve to twenty-four months to create. And on
top of that, the retail channels are
incredibly crowded.
FS. Is this why you have in the past collaborated
with artists for art galleries, completely outside of these distribution
networks?
EZ: Absolutely.
My interest in games is not limited to digital technology. My first
published board game will appear in 1999 in a book called Flesh Eating
Technologies published by Semiotext(e) Press and
LB: One could see a relationship here with the
work of Oulipo.
EZ : My teaching collaborator Frank Lantz turned
me on to Oulipo and I find their work very inspiring. Many of their ideas about recombinability, as
in the work 1100 Poèmes by Queneau, embody bottom-up complexity: a limited set
of recombinable parts that create unexpected complexity. It is incredibly
forward-thinking work. On the other hand, there is often something unbelievably
dry about their work and it often loses all sense of play in its linguistic
thoroughness.
Wow! I am
really enjoying addressing your questions about games as situated within
contemporary art practice. Let me tell
you about a game that does work as a
critical cultural object. Parappa the
Rapper is a game for the Sony Playstation.
The American artist Rodney Allan Greenblat collaborated on this project
with Masaya Matsura who is a Japanese composer turned game designer. Parappa
the Rapper was first released in
The player takes the role of Parappa, a young dog
learning how to rap. It uses a simple but quite innovative game mechanic where
you imitate other characters through button presses as you learn to rap. As you play, you are acquiring cultural
skills, the ability to rap, which is an American genre of music redesigned in
the game through a Japanese cultural filter.
Rodney Allen Greenblat’s characters borrow heavily
from Anime aesthetics, which is a
curious mix of Japanese and Western modes of representation. Frederick Shodt in Manga!Manga!
describes Anime as Japanese
self-representation through a Caucasian set of features. At the same time Anime represents
So another way in which games are entering culture
in a meaningful way is that they are entering global systems of trans-national
cultural exchange and representation as hybrid
pop culture objects. By hybrid I
mean an object which is the source and subject of effects of culture rather
than an object created by an artist for contemplation.
FS : Meaning that these objects interact with
culture at large in a more productive way?
EZ : Well, what do you mean by “productive?” If it makes money, that is productive. I look
for formal innovation in a game. That is productive. There are many ways to be
productive. And many competing interests.
Take the scramble among game publishers to corner
the market on “games for girls.” There
are some strange bedfellows in this race, all trying to be “productive” in
different ways. Publishers want to reach
those markets because it is an untapped source of capital. Feminists want to bring games to girls because
they see it as interventionary. They
want to encourage girls to be more comfortable with technology, implying that
they will become more empowered and have more impact within the culture at
large when they become adults.
LB : What kind of impact? Games follow rules which
pre-determine behaviors. When I play fighting games, for example, I always pick
the female characters but that is basically the only freedom I can play with.
Besides that, all I do is kill lots of people and enjoy it, which eventually
causes me to have severe digestive problems.
EZ: So, let's talk about fighting games. It's
incredibly interesting. But first, let
me try and summarize my point about Parappa the Rapper. We've identified three different strategies
in which games can be considered post-structuralist cultural objects. One is as
prank-like deconstructions of contemporary culture (like Arm the Homeless),
another is as deconstructions of semiotic systems (like 130 Words), and another
is as inherently hybrid cultural objects (like Parappa the Rapper). Is my own
current work doing any of those things? I would say not enough.
OK. I am
going to try and answer your question, I promise. You mentioned that the constraints of a game
make you uncomfortable. Well, there is a certain relationship between games and
S&M, almost in the D&G sense of the term - I mean Deleuze and Guattari
(laughter). What's so funny? You don't know that slang? Not Dolce and Gabbana,
although I always wanted to see the two of them with Dolce & Gabana bags That would be a great image.
Where was I?
There is a curious relationship between constraint and productivity.
Games are sets of constraints. The
incredible thing is that out of the fixed, rigid, almost fascistic set of
rules, play emerges. And play is the
opposite of rules. Once the rules are
set in motion by human participants, the creative, improvisational,
unpredictable experience of play emerges. This particular relationship between
rules and play is unique to games and continually fascinates me as a game
designer.
So let's look at fighting games. A game is constituted by constraints. And it's those constraints which cause the
game, as a machine of desire, to move forward.
In a well-designed fighting game, I would argue that what happens is a
kind of linguistic interaction between the participants. Once you learn its
system of language and representation, a good fighting game becomes incredibly
meaningful. In other words, meaning in
games is generated out of choices that players make. It's possible to consider
a game as spectacle, as animation appearing on the screen, but that's not
looking at a game in a way that is most intrinsic and unique to games. It is ultimately impossible in a game to
consider the visual elements apart from the systemic. What I mean by systemic is that a game is a
collection of parts, but much like Saussure's idea of language, those parts
gain their meaning by virtue of their relationships to the other parts. I don't
know if it's their differance from
the other parts, but as in a Wittgenstein language game, there is a structure
that is holding itself together by virtue of the relationships between parts.
LB: Yes but in one case you have arbitrary signs,
and in the other you have pre-formed representations, and these representations
are loaded with values that I'm not always comfortable with. Like in the game I
played, the girl was blonde and she was assaulted by tough guys, and maybe the
bad characters were not black, but it was still awful.
EZ: Yes, I agree with you that there is certainly
a kind of adolescent narrative to most fighting games. But as interactive systems, as linguistic
systems, they are incredibly sophisticated.
Fighting games allow the two participants to combine and recombine small
units of interaction, which are button pushes and slight movements of the
joystick. The significance of the combination of those elements is dependent
upon the context of their utterance, such as the relationship between the two
characters at the time, their inherent characteristics, their dynamic health or
energy stats, and what happened immediately before. After you’ve become fluent in the language of
interaction, you can begin to express a personal style with an individual
character.
Now, as spectacle, not as interactive/linguistic
system, there are few games as horribly racist as games like Street Fighter II,
in which there are characters like an Indian “swami,” or the “representative”
from South America that's not even human but a lizard-like monster. These
systems of representation traffic in the same problematic tropes as, say,
mainstream American comic books or action films.
But, as I've said before, you can't read your
relationship to the character of a video game simply as a flat visual
representation. In fighting games, as
with Lara Croft, a character is both a subject and an object of interaction.
Games are self-deconstructing in a way.
I believe that, because you influence the way a game iterates out, a
player's experience within a game is always predicated on an understanding of
how the mechanism of the game works. Games are not immersive. They're not illusionistic. You never lose
your sense of self and actually believe that you are this fighting character.
You always have a double consciousness - both immersed in and aware of the fiction.
This is the way all narrative functions, books, film, etcetera, if you
espouse contemporary ideas about narrative.
But in any case, games certainly are inherently
systemic. That is why you can't simply read the visual spectacle of the game as
an image which is either good or bad. And in addition, in a fighting game you
choose a character. Now it’s true that
you choose from a limited set of options.
But even that choice serves to deconstruct a conventional idea of
identity and subjectivity in your relationship to the game. Again the game is
revealing itself as a system, as a tool.
Now, to answer your question directly, I am of two
minds. On the one hand, games sort of
deconstruct their own identity as systems. The artist and writer Lev Manovich
describes computer aesthetics as simultaneously creating illusionistic space
and breaking it down. Because a game is
a dynamic system, a set of parts that interrelate to form a whole, playing a
game means understanding in some way how those parts interrelate over and above
the representation which is an effect of those parts. So critiquing the spectacular narrative is in
that respect misguided.
However, at the same time I absolutely agree with
you. generally speaking, the kinds of
narratives that are embedded within video games are in dreadful need of
revision. This is partially why the field is so ripe for innovation. Computer
games are very much mired in adolescent male popular culture. Creating games
that are able to take on contemporary strategies of cultural production is very
important. However, it's not just about removing demeaning visual stereotypes
from games. It's about looking at the
mechanistic qualities of a game, the relationship between one's interaction and
the sets of linguistic and other types of possibilities within a game. It's
about how those systemic elements are literally hard-wired to the aesthetics of
the game. That's where the investigation has to take place. That's why I teach
games in a sort of formalist way, because in trying to reinvent the discipline
of game design, there are certain kinds of material
knowledge that have to be explored.
Since the spectacular emerges out of and in concert with the systemic,
to recuperate games into more interesting realms of representation games need
to be considered as the uniquely dynamic structural/cultural machines that they
are. These are really tough
problems. They’re not yet fully
understood, certainly not by me.
LB: Do you think that these notions can be
understood beyond the classroom, in the actual production of mainstream games?
EZ: Well, mainstream is a problematic word,
because it implies that there is already a certain acquiescence to mainstream
tropes. This is what I feel: that the audience for games will grow, the
diversity of the audience will expand, and there will be markets that extend
beyond the existing markets. Certainly
not everyone plays games, just as not everyone played board games or card games
before computer games existed. There's a whole generation of people who are now
graduating from college. They have used computers all through college, they use
email, they're wired at home and at work, and they want to play fun games on
their computer. So they're asking themselves when they walk into a software
store why they have to be a wizard or an elf or a civil war general or an alien
monster. What is up with that? What I’m talking
about is based on market research by my business partner Tsia Carson but it’s
becoming common knowledge within the game industry that there will eventually be
bigger and more diverse markets.
But, on the other hand, to break out into culture
at large, games have to shed their stigma.
There is a tendency to devalue games as merely adolescent fantasy
culture. There is an incredibly rich
history to the field and some amazing work is being done, but it is a
surprisingly insular field. In my opinion, there is no genre of consumer
software that is as demanding to design and create as games. There is no other
genre of consumer software that taxes a computer's processing capabilities as much
as games. Games are easily the most
sophisticated type of consumer software.
As technology inculcates leisure as a dominant activity for the
contemporary wired civilization, games become an incredibly important venue of
popular culture, and of the future of culture at large.
LB: From
Guy Debord's point of view, in respect to the all-pervasive leisure society you
are inscribing your production into, what you advocate could be construed as a
fake experience.
EZ: Well, that’s where I part company with
Debord. I'm not nostalgic for some kind
of lost, genuine experience that supposedly existed before "fake
experience." Tell me, what isn't a "fake experience?"
FS: In regards to this differentiation, between
"real" and "fake" experiences, you seem to be describing
some form of hard-wiring that goes directly to the brain, a sort of direct physiological
interaction.
EZ: Again, I'm of two minds on this. Brian
Moriarty, who is a very well known game designer, uses the term entrain to mean the experience of
bringing the individual into the experiential patterns of a game, into the
rhythm of a game. According to Moriarty,
The Wave, the simple game which is played by crowds in sporting arenas, is the
most successful massively multi-player game.
Game designers design experience. Creating experience means designing
patterns of repetition - Moriarty’s entrainment.
There's a lot in games dependent upon repetition, and you could look at
narrative theory about repetition in the epic and serial forms, which are
related to games, too.
In terms of the idea of "hardwiring the
brain," I don't think that games do this any more than other experiences
do: when you look at an image, visual imagery bounces off your retina, which
travels to your optic nerve, etcetera.
Sure, there are certain activities in a game that are wired into the
brain, but all activity is wired into
the brain in some way. I don't use biology as a sort of design resource for
making games. I think that would be
silly.
LB: I once saw a very interesting artwork which, I
think, is very clear about the statement it makes. It's a famous Atari game
called Space Invaders, and the installation is simply the game set up for play
in a museum. The sound is amplified, so you bother everyone in the room. I had
the feeling that this went further than many of the other games are going,
because it confronted me with an experience that pushed me into a realm that
was more intense than simply playing the game in an arcade.
EZ: So, what you're saying is that it comments
upon the act of playing a game?
LB: It's not just a commentary. It is something
that was thoroughly interactive and
experiential. I had never had this type of experience before. I played arcade
games when I was a teenager, and when I played this game I realized I was on
another level.
FS. It's not just a question of commentary, this
piece creates a model of the very experience of playing.
EZ: It is contextualizing the act of playing a
game, right?
LB: Yes, it also does that. But playing this game
was an indication to me that we are still waiting for some very interesting
games that will offer very different experiences.
EZ: My decision to move from the realm of art to
the realm of commercial games was a complicated decision. When I was making paintings, I was always very
interested in the relationships between the viewer, the work, and the author of
the work. With games I'm designing those
relationships to the exclusion of all else. So to me, are and games art very
similar - they’re both about designing social experiences.
Now, to your question about the Space Invaders
piece, I'd like to say that games are inherently insular. Games have a closed formal system. In the case
of computer games, it's the code, the actual program code and the way it iterates
out. In the case of a board game it's the rules and the materials conditioned
by those rules. This formal structure is eminently portable, in other words,
when two people anywhere around the world play tic-tac-toe, they use the same
rules. They might not speak the same language, but they can play the game together.
There is a Platonic way in which the rules of a game constitute a formal system
that is removed from any of the particular instances of that game around the
world. That's what I mean when I say that games are inherently insular and
structural.
What the installation is doing is taking an
instance of Space Invaders and then contextualizing the way that it's playing
out. One way of framing it is that at the heart of this experience is the game
Space Invaders, which may be identical in terms of the program code to what you
played when you were younger, but it's being recontextualized. It becomes a performance. In fact I find it interesting that the
additional constraint of playing the game in the stultifying context of a
gallery enriched the experience for you.
It proves my point that constraints are what make a game meaningful.
I would love to design a computer game that blurs
the distinction between what's within the game and what's outside the game.
Here, I'll give you guys an example. There's a game I made called Suspicion. It
is a card game that I designed for an office environment to take place during a
week of real time. At the time, I worked
in a company of about a hundred people and about twenty of them decided to
play. Those people were divided into groups, called sects and leagues. Everyone belonged to two groups. But you didn't know who in the office was playing
the game and who wasn't (I secretly distributed the materials). The goal for each group was to collect cards
from other people. The cards themselves were used in a simple dueling game. All of the sects and leagues communicated with
code words and code gestures. But you
only knew the codes for your group. So the first step was just trying to find
out who was in the game and who was not, then who was in your group and who was
not. And then you could accuse someone of being in a certain group or sect and
try and take their cards.
Suspicion was a game that situated itself at the
boundary between the real world and the world of the game. My interest was in
blurring that distinction. People became very self conscious of the words and
the gestures they were using in a way they normally are not. The game was very
successful. People enjoyed it very much
but there was an unbelievable amount of deceit and deception. People got in arguments. People were in tears. But, the game held solid. Suspicion is not
commenting historically on the cultural context of a particular object the way
the art installation was. However, it does situate itself at boundaries where
experience can begin to comment on the game as it's being played.
LB: There is something I would call an aesthetic
of perception, meaning that the object is designed to extend and diversify the
types of perception you can have of a cultural product. There are plenty of
works of art that you can relate to this. Like for example, a Carl Andre piece.
It expands your perception of a work of art because you experience it with your
body, beyond your body, via gravity and other respects. I think that games have
immense potential for doing that. It's basically what they were designed for.
EZ: Do the giant chess games in the park in
LB: Yes.
EZ: But, as a spectator.
LB: No, as a player.
EZ: And tabletop versions of chess don’t do that?
You see, for me it's a continuum. Everything falls into the category of meaningful
experience, to greater or lesser degrees.
LB: Maybe, but I still have some serious problems
with the set of possibilities video games offer in terms of experience. This remains my main problem. Many works of
art are really articulate in this way, because they take distance into
consideration. The viewer sees him or herself interacting with the piece and it
becomes a new experience. It's just that I am still waiting for a game, like
Suspicion, maybe, that extends one's experience. Something that changes one's
relational habits.
EZ: Well, game playing isn't necessarily just the
experience of playing a game once. It can be about the experience of playing it
over many years. Do you two know the game Go? It’s a board game which in
LB: What about role-playing games? Isn't the set of characters that define you in
relation to the others extremely limited and puerile? You've got a very
schematized character that you play every day for a few years. This is
frightening stuff!
EZ: I do play role-playing games. This is
good. We’re coming back to this basic question
again. In games there is a relationship
between rules and play. They have an ultimately unknowable relationship to each
other that can only be discovered through experimentation and practice. Much of
what you're saying indicates that you see existing games as ultimately limiting. But this doesn’t have to be the case. Games can also become open-ended play. I mean by open-ended that through the play of
the game, the play influences your perception, your self-perception, your sense
of self, your cultural self. And this is what you would like to see occur
within the text of a game, which I think is a beautiful idea. At their best,
games are more like tools than they are like novels. Games represent
possibility. They are open-ended systems of parts that hopefully can be
configured and reconfigured in ways that are unexpected and insightful.
Deconstruction says that every text does this, but in games, this literally
happens on a material level. Yes, that’s
what I aspire to create. We had this
idea at Flat for a dueling game where the players used the ingredients on candy
bar wrappers as the linguistic elements of the game. There are other models and
paradigms for games that we are just beginning to discover.
You know it's funny because I thought I was
escaping the art world to enter the much more provocative world of popular
culture, but in a lot of ways, I've retrenched back into a very modernist and
formalist way of thinking. It’s just that I've found out that so much work
still needs to be done, you know? Wish
me luck.