How to Do Things with Videogames

10. Snapshots

10 Snapshots In the late nineteenth century, photographs were primarily made on huge plate-film cameras with bellows and expensive handground lenses. Their operation was nontrivial and required professional expertise. The relative youth of photography as a medium madethatexpertise much morescarcethan it is today. All that changed when Kodak introduced the Brownie Camera in 1900. The Brownie was different. It was about as simple as cameras get: a cardboard box with a fixed-focus lens and a film spool at the back. It took two-and-a-quarter-inch-square photos on 117 roll film, which George Eastman had first used a decade earlier. The simplicity of Brownie cameras made them reliable, and their low cost (around $25 in today’sdollarswhen introduced in 1900) made them a low-risk purchase for families or even children. Millions were sold through the 1960s. Both camera and film were cheap enough to make photography viable. Easy development without a darkroom made prints possible for everyone. The Brownie, and later the 35 mm camera that replaced it, didn’t just simplify the process of making pictures ; they also ushered in a new kind of picture: the snapshot. Snapshots value ease of capture and personal value of photographs over artistic or social value. The Brownie brought photography to the people, but not without some help. The snapshot concept was borrowed from a hunting term for shooting from the hip, but Eastman contextualized the act for the masses. For its advertising, Kodak coined the “Kodak moment” and encouraged photographers to “celebrate snApshots the moments of your life,” as they still do today. Eastman’s promise was “You press the button and we do the rest.” More than a century after Eastman’s simple roll cameras, today ’scomputerculturevaluesasimilarstrainof creativepopulism. Websitesandsoftwareprovidetoolsthatpromiseto“democratize” the creative process. Cheaper, more powerful hardware and inexpensive , easy-to-use software have made professional video editing and DVD production available to everyone. No-investment on-demand printing has made CD and T-shirt manufacturing a snap. Blogs and one-off book printing services have madewritten publication easy. Following this trend, several companies have attempted to do for videogames what the Brownie did for photography. Big players like Microsoft (Popfly Game Creator) and Electronic Arts (Sims Carnival) have gotten into the game-maker game, as have start-ups like Metaplace, Gamebrix, WildPockets, PlayCrafter, and Mockingbird. While many of these products have since been shuttered or changed direction, each offers a slightly different perspective on simplifying game creation.1 Sims Carnival offers three methods: a wizard, an image customizer, and a downloadablevisual -scripting tool. PlayCrafter relies on physics, Gamebrix on behaviors, Mockingbird on goals. Popfly uses templates. Asplatforms,eachtool reliesontheformal propertiesof different sorts of games. Some differences are obvious: Sims Carnival’s Wizard and Swapper tools let people create games easily by changing variables and uploading new art, while PlayCrafter automates physical interactions. Formal distinctions are a common way to simplify the creation of games. Long before Sims Carnival and its brethren, desktopgame-creation softwareused genreconventionsas the formal model foradd-assets-and-script type tools: GameMaker fashions tile-based action/arcade games; Adventure Game Studio makes graphical adventures; RPGMaker outputs role-playing games.2 A focus on formal constraints—character statistics or genre snApshots distinctions like moving from screen to screen—makes sense from a tool developer’s perspective: different sorts of games require different kinds of programmatic infrastructures. But from the lay creator’s perspective, genre is a less useful starting point than topic. “I want to make a game about my cat” is a different sentiment than “I want to make a graphical adventure game.” Photography doesn’t make such a distinction; a camera can just as easily take a landscape as a portrait. A fundamental difference between Eastman’s Brownie and today ’s DIYgame tools emerges: there’s novideogame equivalent to the camera. Game creation can never become a fully automated affair. Taking a photograph is easy partly because so much of the process goes on without us. After you “press the button,” to use Eastman’s words, light bends through a lens onto the emulsion of a film or the light-sensitive surface of a charge-coupled device (CCD). Film development can be outsourced to Wal-Mart, and digital images are ready for immediate printing or posting. Video is similar; editing, titles, and sound are all optional but easily added with tools thatcomewithevery moderncomputer. Writing isn’t as automated as...