rise-of-the-videogame-zinesters
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Excerpt: Rise of the Videogame Zinesters
Anna Anthropy's forthcoming book Rise of the Videogame Zinesters is about the personal potential of games -- how simple tools allow all kinds of people to tell their own stories interactively. But it's also a clever, thoughtful examination on game design, and why the medium is important and interesting. In this excerpt from chapter three, "What is it Good For?," Anthropy examines games as "performances" and discusses the advantages computerized chance gives.THE WORLD'S A STAGE AND WE ARE PLAYERSOften, games -- particularly digital games, with their use of video and audio -- are compared to film, probably because the videogame publishing industry strongly resembles the Hollywood studio system. But I don think this comparison is particularly constructive, in that it gives us little insight into what the game, as a form, is capable of. Film tells a static story; what exciting about the game is that it allows the audience to interact with a set of rules. This doesn't mean the game can't tell a story: in the role-playing genre, the players aren't merely watching a story but playing the roles of the characters within the story.A better comparison than film is theater, which is where a lot of our game vocabulary ("the player," "stages," "set pieces," "scripting") comes from. A play defines the roles, events, and scenes of a story. An individual performance of those roles and scenes will always be different: different actors will perform the same role in different ways. Every performance and interpretation of a particular play is different -- sometimes in minute ways, sometimes in radical ways -- but we consider the play itself and the scene itself to be the same.
