Ian & Stuart's Australian Mac: Not for Sale/Another.not.for.sale (Australia).iso/hold me in your arms/ES Cyberama/Friedman-Making Sense of SW

Text File | 1993-09-28 | 46KB | 956 lines

MAKING SENSE OF SOFTWARE

by Ted Friedman, Copyright (c) 1993


This essay is a work-in-progress which I intend to eventually
publish in an academic journal. I would greatly appreciate any
feeback.


E-Mail: [e-mail]

Phone: [phone]

Address: 910 Constitution Dr. #1102

Durham, NC  27705


Introduction: The Need for Software Theory,
and SimCity as a Place to Start

     When students today study individuals' relations to texts,
they discuss literature, film, maybe television or radio. When
they get back from class, however, their primary form of
textual interaction is likely to be with a different medium: the
computer screen. They do research through computerized
databases, write papers with Microsoft Word, and even take
breaks by playing Tetris. In the past three years, in fact, I've
probably spent as much time in front of computer monitors as I
have watching TV or reading print.
     Students, of course, are just one segment of the
population whose lives have been changed by the new forms of
textual interaction made possible by the computing revolution.
And everyone from Bill Clinton to Timothy Leary agrees that
American life will only get more and more high-tech. Yet
despite the very different ways these new kinds of texts
operate, the humanities have yet to respond with any sort of
coherent attempt to account for those differences - a "computer
theory" (or perhaps "software theory") to complement literary
theory, film theory, and television theory.
     One reason for this lack of response is the breadth of the
field of study - everything from the Macintosh "desktop" to
Lotus 1-2-3 to Super Mario Brothers to America Online. Rather
than tackle all these genres at once, most observers have chosen
specific types of software as the crucial sites of study. Literary
theorists have begun to look at the new possibilities of reading
opened up by hypertext software. Cyberpunks have elaborated
on the utopian potential of virtual reality technology. And
psychologists have attempted to study the effects of Nintendo-
playing on children. One area that has received scant attention
from cultural theorists, however, offers particularly fertile
ground for inquiry: the world of computer games.
     This paper will begin with a discussion of the limitations
of the other perspectives on computer culture described above,
to explain why I feel computer games are the best place to
locate a "screen theory" of the computer monitor. Then, it will
turn to the rich subculture of computer gaming, to ground its
analysis in the thinking that has already been going on in the
pages of Computer Gaming World  and Compute , and on
computer bulletin boards around the country. With this context
in place, I will offer my own contribution to the project of
theorizing computer games, by introducing the language of
postmodernism to investigate what makes playing a game like
SimCity such a distinct, engrossing, and perhaps empowering
experience.

I. The Limitations of Current Theories of Software

Hypertext

     The one corner of this universe of new possibilities that
has been explored in some depth by at least a few cultural
theorists is hypertext.1 Hypertext is software which allows
many different texts to be linked to each other, 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. Reading in this system becomes an active form of
networking. George P. Landow in Hypertext: The Convergence of
Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology  interestingly
compares this process to the accounts of reading as a
decentered, intertextual process formulated by poststructuralist
critics such as Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida.2
     But to emphasize hypertext as the model for interactive
computer texts is to remain shackled to an atavistic notion of
"literature." Limiting his discussion to the linking of batches of
words to each other, Landow can simply explain these new
textual interactions through an updated account of reading as a
profusion of choices. But 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 use no written language at all. (In
fact, international game developers often design games in which
all information is presented in icons, so that the software need
not be translated into different languages.)3
     Hypertext seems to me a transitional genre particularly
appealing to literary academia because it gussies 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, just as film studies rightly focuses on
the distinctive cinematic experience.

Cyberpunk/Virtual Reality

     A useful corrective to the limited imagination of the
hypertext literary theorists is the cyberpunk Utopianism
associated with the magazine Mondo 2000. The Mondo writers,
many of whom are computer programmers themselves, are less
interested in the current state of interactive texts than they are
in the long-term potential to create "virtual reality" technologies
which could engulf participants in total simulations of sensory
experience.4 The problem with working from this model for
interactive computer texts, however, is that in positing an
ultimate goal of total transparency - the perfect virtual reality
would in theory be indistinguishable from the "real world" - it
once again loses sight of the specific language of simulation. To
the degree to which computer games do not perfectly
correspond to the world beyond the screen, they entail specific
metaphorics - an icon represents a city block, a squiggly line
represents a river, a stick figure represents the player. It is the
associative distance travelled between these images and what
they seek to represent, and how these representative processes
in turn transform our notions about the "real world," which a
semiotics of computer games can help us explain and examine.
A virtual reality model, on the other hand, would see these
distances as imperfections along the path to a perfect
simulation.

Nintendo

     A limitation which both the literary hypertext theorists
and the cyberpunks share is their lack of grounding in popular
practices; both concentrate on the avant-garde and highbrow
potential of computer technology, while ignoring how
interactive texts have actually developed and are currently
being experienced in popular culture. The most pervasive form
of interactive computer technology, of course, is the Nintendo-
style video game. Discussions of interactive computer texts from
this angle have mostly come from psychologists interested in
the "effects" of Nintendo-playing on children. But this
quantative research is as limited as the number-crunching
which passed for an analysis of television in the '50s; it does
nothing to explain the structure of the relationship between the
viewer/player and text/games.5
     Marsha Kinder offers a more sophisticated analysis of
Nintendo rooted in feminist psychoanalytic film theory in
Playing With Power in Movies Television, and Video Games , but
she too has trouble accounting for Nintendo games as distinct
kinds of texts. Instead, she repeatedly explains the games
through the analysis of other cultural forms. Thus, she discusses
a film about video games called The Wizard  and an episode of
the Super Mario Brothers  cartoon show, but has disappointingly
little to say about games in their own right.6

Why Computer Games

     It's not hard to see why Kinder has trouble discussing
Nintendo directly; there seems to be a limited amount of textual
analysis that can be done on arcade-style games so completely
dependent on reflex skills rather than more contemplative
forms of interaction. Most Nintendo games, while offering
complex interactive experiences, cannot explore the full
opportunities of their medium the way more strategy-oriented
games for adults can. As Sara Reeder points out in an article on
educational software for Computer Gaming World,


disk-based computer games are the computer equivalent of art
films. Although they appeal to a much smaller audience than
mass-market movies and they won't ever make billions, they're
the crucial testing ground on which almost all the artistic and
technological breakthroughs are made; breakthroughs that will
have a profound influence on the next generation of mass
market offerings. Unlike their predecessors, the 16-bit SNES and
Genesis decks can handle more complex games with higher
production values, enabling them to take better advantage of
the advances made in the "real" computer world.7

I don't mean for this distinction to replicate the avant-gardism I
criticized both the hypertext theorists and the cyberpunks for.
The most successful computer games sell hundreds of thousands
of copies, and are pirated by untold hundreds of thousands of
other users. SimCity has been written up by Newsweek  and
most major newspapers, has been integrated into many
educational and business training programs, and now in fact is
available for the Super Nintendo system. Concentrating on
computer strategy games such as SimCity, then, allows us to
move beyond the limitations of kid culture while remaining
grounded not in speculation over the possible future potential
of interactive computer texts, but in a discussion of their
present effects on millions of lives.
     At the same time, what games like SimCity share with
Nintendo is their engrossing appeal. Fans and foes of the
medium alike refer to the "addiction" of computer game-
playing. As the most compelling form of computer texts -
software not thrust upon workers or students out of
professional necessity, but actively chosen by individuals for
pleasure - computer games seem the perfect place to begin to
explore the distinct power and possibilities of the interactive
texts made possible by computers.

Why SimCity

     I want to focus my discussion on the specific example of
the game SimCity, because it is both the most widely played and
the most widely imitated game of its kind. Civilization, for
example, the most popular computer game of the past year, is
often described as "SimCity-meets-wargaming." First released in
1987, SimCity made designer Will Wright a star in the game-
designing community, and has spawned numerous sequels from
its parent software company, Maxis, including SimEarth,
SimAnt, and SimLife. Here's a description of the 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.8

The player constructs the city by choosing where to establish
power plants, set up Industrial, Commercial, and Residential
zones, build roads, mass transit, and power lines, Police Stations,
airports, and so on. 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
Toyst" 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."9
     As this quite analytic ad copy demonstrates, the general
lack of academic attention (at least from the field of cultural
theory - many urban planning classes have incorporated the
game in their syllabi) to these types of games does not mean
that they have gone uninterpreted. The Users Manual to the
game goes much further, extensively describing how the
simulator works and was developed, and concludes with a brief
"History of Cities and City Planning" and a bibliography. The
mechanisms of SimCity are further detailed in several books
that have been published about the game, including The SimCity
Planning Commission Handbook, SimCity Strategies and Secrets,
and Master SimCity/SimEarth. The success of SimCity has also
lead to many articles on the game in the popular press. And its
use in pedagogical settings has also led to discussions of the
game in education publications like The Computing Teacher .

II. Theories of Software from the Computer Gaming Subculture

     The most interesting criticism of SimCity-style computer
games, however, has come from a different source: the
computer game subculture. The magazine Computer Gaming
World  is the self-conscious organ of this audience; along with
printing game previews, reviews, and strategy tips, it publishes
very thoughtful 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. It also prints a ranking of the Top 100
Computer Games, along with a Hall of Fame, based on
continuous reader polling; every issue includes a response card
for readers to cast their ballots. This interaction with readers
continues not only through the mail, but through online modem
networks. The Prodigy service, in particular, 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/subculture has led to the formulation of a computer
game canon (the Hall of Fame printed in every issue of CGW ;
SimCity is one of the 27 present members) and several
provisional theories of computer gaming. These discussions are
to my mind the most successful attempts to create a theory of
interactive computer texts, and provide the best starting-off
point for my own attempts to make sense of SimCity. I will
focus on what I find to be the three primary debates going on in
computer game criticism: the validity of the model of computer
games as "interactive cinema;" the relative significance of the
game designer and game player in the interactive experience;
and the relationship between simulation and reality.

Computer Games as "Interactive Cinema"

     One strand of criticism within the computer gaming
subculture describes the computer game industry as "The New
Hollywood." This analogy has its roots in structural economic
relations, as several of the major software companies, such as
Lucasfilms, are in fact owned by Hollywood studios, and the
computer-generated graphics techniques of recent films like
Terminator II  and The Lawnmower Man  demonstrate the
increasing interpenetration between computer programming
and filmmaking. It serves as a helpful model for understanding
the process of computer game design, which is now typically a
collaborative process among many specialists. Some recent
game ads in CGW, in fact, list game credits movie-poster style.
     The difference between the New Hollywood and the Old,
according to this analogy, is that computer games are
"interactive cinema," in which the game player takes the role of
the protagonist. This notion does seem to help describe certain
types of computer games, such as Sierra's Leisure Suit Larry
series, in which the player navigates the character through a
series of encounters. At this point, however, it seems to me that
the analogy, like that of hypertext to reading, begins to
circumscribe the opportunities of the medium. While many of
the Sierra games are enjoyable, they really aren't much more
than the old text-based Infocom format with sound and
graphics added. As such, they don't begin to take advantage of
the opportunities for constant interaction and feedback between
player and computer the way a game such as SimCity does;
there is usually just one way of playing the game, and
"interaction" consists of trial-and-error until the player gets the
actions right. And because of the limitations of computer
memory, Sierra games can't begin to compete with movies as
audiovisual experiences. The improvements of CD-ROM
technology do allow much more information to be stored on a
disk, so that the new CD-ROM version of King's Quest VI
replaces typed dialogue with actual recorded voices.
Nonetheless, the experience is still a long way from even a
decent TV show; the much-vaunted "soundtrack," for example,
is just one programmed synthesizer. Perhaps eventually
improvements in speed and storage will allow computer games
to fully replicate classical Hollywood cinema style in an
"interactive" setting, but the result seems more likely to be the
transformation of the cinematic experience, rather than the
fulfillment of what computer games as a distinct medium can
accomplish. 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. The computer 'don't know nothin' 'bout birthin'
babies,' but what it does well, it does better than any other
medium that ever existed.10

The Roles of Designer and Player

     Under the "New Hollywood" explanation for the division
of labor in computer game creation, the game designer is the
director. Computer game critics are divided over how much
authority to grant the designer as the source of meaning in the
text. Chris Crawford, designer of the pioneering wargames
Easter Front and Legionnaire, is computer games' staunchest
auteurist. As founder of the Journal of Computer Game Design,
author of The Art of Computer Game Design, moderator of the
Game Designer's Forum on America Online, and frequent
contributor to Computer Gaming World  and other computer
game magazine, Crawford is one of the primary ideologues of
computer gaming. Crawford views game designing as "an
intensely personal statement."11 In his Balance of Power, there
is only one winning strategy, and winning the game means
discovering Crawford's pacifist moral. Crawford's directions to
prospective computer game designers are the antithesis of
Maxis' vision of the open-ended "software toy":  "The game
must have a clearly defined goal . . . This is your opportunity to
express yourself; choose a goal in which you believe, a goal that
expresses your sense of aesthetics, your world view."12
     On the other extreme from Crawford's cult of the author
is Card's aesthetic of empowerment, an elaboration of the
"software toy" ideal.  For Card, the best computer games are
those which provide frameworks which give 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.13

     The tension between these two visions of textual
interaction - one that privileges the designer/author, the other
the player/reader - runs throughout the discussion of computer
games. Obviously, they must remain in some sort of dialectic
relationship; the perfectly open-ended game, after all, would
simply be one programmed by the player from scratch, while
the ultimate author-centered text would simply be a movie on a
computer screen.

The Relation Between Simulation and Reality: The Question of
"Designer Bias"

     What concerns many writers sympathetic to the ideal of
open-endedness is the way the most convincing computer
simulations may hide their human origins. Even the most
glowing accounts of SimCity invariably bring up the supposed
flaw of "designer bias." Science fiction writer and Byte
magazine columnist Jerry Pournelle makes the typical
objections:

The simulation is pretty convincing -- and that's the problem,
because . . . it's a simulation of the designer's theories, not of
reality. Case in point: the designer prefers rail transportation to
automobiles. It's costly, but it doesn't pollute. In fact, you can
design a whole city with nothing but rail transport, not a single
road in the place. In the real world, such a city would soon
strangle in garbage. . . . [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. One of the best things such programs could do would be
to let the students know what the inner relationships are. I
don't know of any programs that let you fiddle with the
equations inside the model, but I think that might be one heck
of an educational tool. 14

Pournelle's request for more information on the game
mechanism seems somewhat unfair, given that the SimCity User
Documentation thoroughly runs down what factors affect city
development, and The SimCity Planning Commission Handbook
goes into even greater detail. Pournelle's final suggestion,
though, seems to have been taken to heart by Wright. His
follow-up to SimCity, SimEarth, allows players to fiddle with
such factors as rate of population growth, frequency of
mutation, and reflectivity of cloud albedo.
     A more basic problem with the "bias" critique is the
assumption that there is something called "reality" which game
designers could "objectively" simulate. Computer games, like all
other texts, will always be ideological constructions. Simulations
which seek to explain "how the world works," in fact, would
seem to have the honesty of announcing their ideological status;
the natural question almost every SimCity player with a low
score is likely to ask is, "according to whom?" While the sheen
of technology may initially obscure a simulation's
constructedness, 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
investigating 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. 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. Even auterist 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."15

III. SimCity as a Postmodern Text

     Having laid out what is already being said about
computer games, I now want to add to the dialogue. Specifically,
I think the language of postmodernism can be helpful in making
sense of the new kind of experiences offered by games like
SimCity.

SimCity 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.16

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 . . . ?17

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.
     SimCity may be the best existing example in popular
culture of what Frederick Jameson in Postmodernism, or the
Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism  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."18 He derives the idea of cognitive
mapping from Kevin Lynch's The Image of the City, which,
Jameson writes,

taught us that the alienated city is above all a space in which
people are unable to map (in their minds) either their own
positions or the urban totality in which they find themselves . . .
. Disalienation in the traditional city, then, involves the practical
reconquest of a sense of place and the construction or
reconstruction of an articulated ensemble which can be retained
in memory and which the individual subject can map and
remap along the moments of mobil, alternative trajectories.19

While clearly not politically radical, SimCity is a powerful tool
for making this "reconquest of a sense of place." Playing the
game 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 - to teach, in fact, as SimCity is now often used as
a pedagogical tool - structures of interconnection. After a player
has played SimCity, the map connecting the various points of
power in city life is more than "retained in memory;" it is
overlaid as a grid structuring the individual's reaction to the
world around her or him. When one walks down the street, one
is more likely to see not just isolated houses, but a zone of
development; and the recognition of this zone calls up not
simply an isolated image, but a confluence of citywide
interrelationships.

SimCity as a Self-Deconstructing Map

     At the same time, SimCity escapes the totalizing logic of
Enlightenment forms of spacialization. Harvey, summarizing de
Certeau, describes the effect of the traditional rhetoric of
mapping:

It 'eliminates little by little' all traces of 'the practices that
produce it.' . . . Since any system of representation is itself a
fixed spatial construct, it automatically converts the fluid,
confused, but nonetheless objective spaces and time of work
and social reproduction into a fixed schema."20

Learning to "beat" a simulation, on the contrary, is the gradual
process of exposing "the practices that produce it," as I have
already discussed. In addition, computer games' cult of the
game designer means that simulations are not seen as the
authorless expressions of objective fact that traditional maps
are. (This constructedness is often intentionally underlined in
games' documentation, which frequently contain short
introductions by the game designer about how and why the
software was written.) And not only are simulations fluid rather
than "fixed," but they also acknowledge the partiality of any
system of representation by always remaining somewhat
unpredictable, incorporating random numbers into their
calculations so that no two games can ever come out the same.

SimCity and Post-Individualistic Subjectivity

     One way in which the logic of SimCity differs from
Jameson's aesthetic of cognitive mapping is in its positioning of
the individual. Jameson calls for

a situational representation on the part of the individual subject
to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is
the ensemble of society's structures as a whole. . . . [C]ognitive
mapping . . . comes to require the coordination of existential
data (the empirical position of the subject) with unlived,
abstract conceptions of the geographical totality.21

Rather than coordinating the position of the individual subject,
computer game simulations allow one to live  those "abstract
conceptions of the geographical totality." The SimCity owner's
manual describes the player's role as a "combination Mayor and
City Planner." But in playing SimCity one doesn't identify with a
specific character so much as with the city as a whole. One
thinks of oneself less as a "mover-and-shaker" giving orders
from on high than as an extension of the logic of the system.
     Eisenstein thought that the technology of montage  could
allow one to make a movie of Das Kapital. But the reigning
structures of classical Hollywood style direct the viewer to
identify with individuals rather than with abstract concepts. In
computer games, however, 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.'"22
     I should point out that my analysis of the subjectivity
created by SimCity differs from that of most writers on
computer games. Many articles on SimCity discuss the pleasures
of pretending to be Mayor, bossing the "Sims" around, etc. I
believe, however, that these accounts are to some extent after-
the-fact attempts to interpret a new kind of experience with
familiar language, rather than accurate descriptions of the
experience itself. 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. The powerful state of suspended disbelief created
by computer games, during which a player may spend hours
glued to the screen without noticing the passage of time,23 is a
symbiotic lock between player and computer. One makes
choices, types in commands, etc., without conscious recognition
of each step. One loses one's sense of oneself as an isolated
individual, and comes to think of one's self as an organic
extension of the software, and the software as an extension of
one's consciousness.24 But it's hard to even conceptualize the
notion of identifying with "processes" from the standpoint of
traditional Enlightenment individualistic subjectivity.
     Computer games, then, mark a fundamental challenge to
familiar conceptions of individual autonomy - notions which in
many ways have served to obscure the degree to which
individuals are shaped, limited, and ideologically interpellated
by the currents of power in capitalist society. Harvey describes
the central role of the rhetoric of mapping developed during the
Renaissance in constructing the contemporary sense of self:

Perspectivism conceives of the world from the standpoint of the
'seeing eye' of the individual.  . . . The connection between
individualism and perspectivism is important. It provided an
effective material foundation for the Cartesian principles of
rationality that became integrated into the Enlightenment
project.  . . . The rational ordering of space in the renaissance
maps of England played an important role in affirming the
position of individuals in relation to territory.  . . . [A]ll
Enlightenment projects had in common a relatively unified
common-sense of what space and time were about and why
their rational ordering was important. This common basis in
part depended on . . . the capacity to diffuse cartographic
knowledge . . . . But it also rested upon the link between
Renaissance perspectivism and a conception of the individual as
the ultimate source and container of social power, albeit
assimilated within the nation state as a collective system of
authority.25

In playing SimCity, in contrast, one does not just locate oneself
as a point on the map, but becomes  the map itself. Thus, once
the game is over, SimCity leaves the player with the
opportunity to view herself or himself not simply as an isolated
individual, but as a member of mass society - a particular
intersection of interpenetrating, interdependent social forces.


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Notes

1. I should acknowledge one other strand of related cultural
criticism: the cultural studies approach represented by the
collection _Technoculture_, edited by Constance Penley and
Andrew Ross (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1991). But while individual essays in the collection, and in
Ross's Strange Weather  (New York: Verso, 1991), illuminate
important aspects of high-tech society, nobody in cultural
studies to my knowledge has yet directly engaged the semiotics
of software.

2. See George P. Landow, Hypertext: The Convergence of
Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology  (Baltimore: The
Hohns Hopkins University Press, 1992). See also Paul Delany
and George P. Landow, eds., Hypermedia and Literary Studies
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991).

3. 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 finish one game and can comfortably start to play on a
new one. 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.

4. For more on cyberpunk and virtual reality, see Rudy Rucker,
R.U. Sirius, and Queen Mu, Mondo 2000: A User's Guide to the
New Edge. (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1992). See also
Howard Rheingold, Virtual Reality  (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1991), Benjamin Wooley, Virtual Worlds  (Cambridge,
MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1992), and individual issues of
Mondo 2000.

5. For a critical summary of the literature on video games and
computer games in general, see David Myers, "A Q-Study of
Game Player Aesthetics," Simulation & Gaming, December 1990,
21, 375-396. Myers, a Communications scholar, is one of the
very few academics to write about the aesthetics and semiotics
of computer games. His work synthesizes the anthropological
field of "play theory" with semiotics and quantitative
communications research. While his writing avoids the pitfalls
of "uses and gratifications" oversimplification, its emphasis on
quantative and symbolic analysis at the expense of critical
exegesis makes it of limited use for those outside the social
sciences. (See also Myers, "Computer Game Semiotics," Play and
Culture, 1991, 4, 334-346, and Myers, "Time, Symbol
Transformations, and Computer Games," Play and Culture, 1992,
5, 441-457.) When Myers isn't in number-crunching mode, he
does provide a useful account of computer game aesthetics and
the computer gamer subculture, although his theoretical
framework remains disappointingly underdeveloped, slipping
into vague invocations of "the . . . profound and ineffable
mystery of simple human truths" (Myers, "Chris Crawford and
Computer Game Aesthetics," Journal of Popular Culture, 1990,
24(2), 29. See also Myers, "Computer Game Genres," Play and
Culture, 1990, 3, 286-301,  and Myers, "The Patters on Player-
Game Relationships: A Study of Computer Game Players,"
Simulations & Games, June 1984, 159-185.)

6. See Marsha Kinder, Playing with Power in Movies, Television,
and Video Games  (Berkeley: University of Berkeley Press,
1991). To some extent, Kinder's reliance on non-computer texts
to explain Nintendo is justified by her conscious focus on the
intertextuality of mass-produced childrens' culture. But given
her own acknowledgement that Nintendo games are more
important to many children than TV or movies, looking for
meanings in those peripheral texts only begs the most
important questions about kids' relations to contemporary
media.

7. Sara Reeder, "Silly Parent, Carts are for Kids!," Computer
Gaming World, November 1992, p. 130

8. "Maxis Software Toys Catalog" (Orinda, CA: Maxis, 1992), p. 4.

9. "Maxis Software Toys Catalog," p. 10.

10. Orson Scott Card, "Gameplay," Compute , February, 1991, p.
54.

11. Chris Crawford, Balance of Power: International Politics as
the Ultimate Global Game, 1986, p. 191, quoted in Myers, "Chris
Crawford and Computer Game Aesthetics," 27.

12. Chris Crawford, The Art of Computer Game Design, 1984, p.
60, quoted in Myers, "Chris Crawford and Computer Game
Aesthetics," 33.

13.  Card, "Gameplay," Compute, March 1991, p. 58.

14. Pournelle, Jerry, Untitled column, Byte, February, 1990.

15. Myers, "Chris Crawford and Computer Game Aesthetics," 27.
Quote from Crawford, Balance of Power, p. 16.

16. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity  (Cambridge,
MA: Basil Blackwell, 1989), p. 206.

17. Harvey, p. 206.

18. Fredrick Jameson, Postmodernism: or, the Cultural Logic of
Late Capitalism  (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 54.

19. Jameson, p. 51.

20. Jameson, p. 253.

21. Jameson, pp. 51-52.

22. Myers, "Chris Crawford and Computer Game Aesthetics," 27.
Quote from Crawford, Balance of Power, p. 15.

23. This phenomenon is almost universally noted by those
writing about computer games. As Myers writes, "from personal
experience and interviews with other players, I can say it is
very  common to play these games for 8 or more hours without
pause, usually through the entire first night of purchase"
(Myers, "Computer Game Semiotics," 343).

24. This experience strikes me as a postmodern variant of what
Mark Seltzer in Bodies and Machines  describes as the
emergence at the turn of the century of the "body-machine
complex" - an account of subjectivity viewing the self as an
extension of the machine, and the machine as a prosthetic
extension of the self. SimCity seems an example of an emergent
"body-computer complex," in which the pleasure of decision-
making lies in one's sense of being an organic extension of the
computer's processing of information. See Mark Seltzer, Bodies
and Machines  (New York: Routledge, 1992).

25. Harvey, pp. 245, 246 (caption), 258-259.