Gameplay Mode: War, Simulation, and Technoculture

Introduction: Technology, War, and Simulation

Maxis’s 2008 computer game Spore (Electronic Arts) offers a world of interactive play that tells us much about the world in which it jostles for position among competing digital entertainments. Designed by Will Wright, legendary designer of video game classics Sim City (Maxis, 1989) and The Sims (Maxis, 2000), it is a game of many modes. Single-player play (including first-person, tactical, realtime, and turn-based strategy), asynchronous interactivity,user-generatedcontentcreation,andpublishingareallbuiltinto the downloadable or packaged commodity. The player controls the development of a species from its beginnings as a single cell organism through stages of biological, then sentient, socioeconomic development up to and beyond global technocultural forms. The final phase is one of space exploration and colonization. Players compete against game- or user-created species, first to achieve phase victories and ultimately to make one of the gamewinning moves: be first to reach a star in the center of the galaxy, or to defeat the cyborg species defending it. The game package encourages players to spend time on creating new species. The developers run Web sites supporting user communities for sharing, testing, and celebrating creatures and for developing new applications around these activities. Key elements of today’s digital media technoculture are immediately readable in Spore’s release and the buzz of both enthusiastic and annoyed user responses to the game. A virtual world and virtual history simulator, its xi Introduction Technology, War, and Simulation xii introduction ambit was global in the way that Western media conglomerates envisage the globe. It was released internationally in September 2008 and was then available globally for download from the publisher, Electronic Arts, one of the largest multinational game publisher-distributors. Although essentially a single-player game, it sought to compete with multiplayer virtual gameworlds by building in user creation and sharing of content, managed by EA and the developer, Maxis. This immediately brought angry responses from buyers because the game’s digital rights management software lodged itself unannounced on their computer registries and restricted their ability to play the game online from more than one registered computer. This led to a rights management hack version of the game becoming the record peer-to-peer download in the months after the game release before EA modified the copy protection software to better match the online usage the developers wanted to encourage. Global solicitation of player-consumers in simulated virtual environments , problematic appropriation of user creativity, copyrighting and negotiation of intellectual property, ever-expanding packages targeting player participatory and community involvement—these themes have all attracted attention in digital media studies. From a more specifically games studies perspective, Spore also offers its grand mobilization of artificial life and procedural generation software as significant developments in game design and animation technology. What is not recognizable in Spore when approached from the perspective of digital media and games studies is its adoption of the military technoscientific legacy forged in the face of total war and the nuclear age inaugurated by the cold war. This has nonetheless had a profound impact on the development of computer games. It is there in the permanent warring across biological and sociocultural phases of Spore gameplay, in the routine terms for these modes (tactical realtime strategy), and in the game victory conditions (win the race to an objective or defeat the ultimate enemy). It is also to be found in less explicit ways, inhabiting the technological lineages of digital computing,visualdisplaysandinteractivity,virtualspacesimulation,andsoftware development. It is there in the teleological tweaking of evolutionary principles that inform the key game dynamic of competitive creature evolution : game goals dictate the direction and prerogatives of evolution, whereas introduction xiii in biological theory, evolution is not teleological. Something deeply embedded in the cold war development of simulational technologies, at the center of which was the digital computer, is playfully explored in Spore: the impulse to model phenomena by hypothetically extending and extrapolating its future to see how that future may be predicted, modified, and controlled. This book is about this military technoscientific legacy and its shadow in contemporary technoculture. It may be better to think of contemporary technoculture as the shadow. This is closer to the perspective I take in the chapters that follow, but I look at many of the ways in which other futures for technocultural becoming are sought and experimented with in adopting this weighty legacy. I examine this theme through computer games because they and the practices...