Gameplay Mode: War, Simulation, and Technoculture

2 Select Gameplay Mode: Simulation, Criticality, and the Chance of Video Games

Alternative reality games (ARGs) have grown in popularity since the turn of the most recent century. Players are engaged to uncover some mystery or puzzle by searching for clues in documents, on Web sites, via communication with other players or game-created automatic agents (“bots”), and so forth. The multimodal means by which ARGs are played is key to their appeal: the games are played not on a screen like a video game, but in and among the spaces and routines of everyday life. By mapping a game over the real space of normal activity, alternative reality games virtualize reality for the players who play the game where their everyday nongame lives usually take place. While they can be established and played through Internet access at fixed locations—home, office, Internet café—the possibilities offered by more recent locative media (mobile Internet and geographical positioning communications) are especially felicitous for the design and play of these kinds of multimodal games. In a manner symmetrical to how persistent virtual worlds such as Second Life (Linden Labs, 2003) pose the question of the reality of the virtual online life, alternative reality games pose the question of the virtuality of the real world. In the tradition of the treasure hunt and the domestic murder mystery game, they convert real life for a time into a space for play, suspending its normal character as milieu of the player’s serious activities. In the words of T. L. Taylor and Beth E. Kolko’s account of a 2001 game, Majestic (Electronic Arts, 2 Select Gameplay Mode Simulation, Criticality, and the Chance of Video Games 19 20 select gameplay mode 2001), the “boundary work” required by a technocultural milieu increasingly negotiated by means of digital informational and simulational forms is exemplified in alternative reality games.1 Alternative reality games are a further instance, and indeed a further complication , of the uncertain status of computer games today. Within the field of digital games studies, efforts to define the essential characteristics of video games have not ceased after more than a decade of research. This is despite efforts to move on from the major debate about the core of the video game object of study between theorists approaching games as continuous with existing media forms (sharing narrative, iconographic elements, and appeal) and those seeking a more game-centered approach to the significance of video games in their specificity. What alternative reality games raise, arguably more explicitly than games played on a console or on stationary computer screens, is the relation between simulated game space, and game time, and the apparently real space and time that they seem to suspend , relativize, and render less real as a function of their taking place. This chapter asks what video games are and why they are important factors in our shifting sense of space and time in the contemporary digital age. I want to explain how my framing of the object under consideration responds to existing theories of technoculture and technocultural forms. The analysis and interpretation of video games from a cultural and media studies perspective is a relatively recent enterprise. I thus hope to contribute something to games studies’ ongoing groundwork of defining its object among those other emerging media phenomena of digital technoculture. At the same time, as I demonstrated in the previous chapter, video games continue and transform technoscientific and technocultural developments going back to the early post–World War II period. Beyond that, games themselves have a much longer backstory; indeed, some claim that game playing goes right back to before the conjectural origins of human being as such. Definitions and theoretical approaches to the topic in question are always selective and must decide where they will begin tracing the origins of the phenomenon and what for them is most significant to include in the analysis . They are part of the argument rather than a neutral gesture of delineating a preexisting object for consideration. As I situate video games in theoretical and contextual terms, it is important to keep in mind that this is done select gameplay mode 21 vis-à-vis other positionings. I will speak of the ambition and the stakes of these efforts to name video games and delineate the field of pertinence for describing, interpreting, developing, and using them. Simulation and Postmodern Critical Thought I approach video games as computer simulational forms, emphasizing their historical pedigree in postwar military technoscientific research and development...