Michael Workman

Hit Play
It's a typical night in the Temple of Retribution. About twenty-four people have gathered and a few are "camping," or waiting in hidden spots beside walls or along stairwells, their crosshairs firmly planted on a frozen opponent. He's a "corpsicle," a player who has been tagged in this armed version of the childhood game of the same name, and he can't play again until somebody frees him from his current state of arrest. The campers are waiting for one of his teammates to walk up and stand next to him. It's how you "unfreeze" those who've been "tagged." But there are plenty of "noobs" in tonight who haven't learned how to play yet--willing victims, the lot. One of them, a red-teamer, is standing motionless atop a plinth next to a roaring fire above the lava pit, where a blue-teamer has spotted him from the portal room beneath the lava bridge. It's an easy shot. But just as the blue-teamer takes aim, another red-teamer goes sailing in a "rail-jump" over the lava pit and in mid-parabola sends a beam of energy from his railgun flashing downward, nailing a solid headshot. It's Rayden, a legendary player in the world of "Quake III: Team Arena" and co-leader of clan Onu. A pack of six blue-teamers storm the Red Armor room where the lava pit is located and seconds later, Rayden has taken them all before they can even draw a bead. One player makes a recording of Rayden's attack as he's shot, a short digital movie known as a "machinima."

"Quake," an online multiplayer first-person shooter (FPS) game developed by id software in Texas, revolutionized online gameplay. It's one of the games cited in "Game On: The History, Culture and Future of Video Games," a new exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry. Originally developed by London's Barbican Gallery together with the new National Museums of Scotland, on its way here the exhibition opened at the Tilburg Art Foundation in the Netherlands, the Helsinki City Art Museum in Finland and the Lille European Capital of Culture 2004 in France. At these other stops, the exhibition included many of the M-rated (equivalent to an "R") games that have been sanitized out of the United States version of this show. It's a shame, especially given how those omitted games help establish the historical parallels for the future of the media, a future located somewhere at the nexus of video games, art and cinema.

Checkers to Chess
It's no surprise that this exhibition has its origins in a congerie of art galleries and museums. Video games as we understand them today may have their visual roots in a mode known as installation art--a term coined in the 1960s--and with "art environments," with which installation art has a shared history extending back into the 1930s, when the term first appeared in writings by Kandinsky and the Futurists. But "Game On" starts with a treatment of the two-dimensional variety of video games, and divides up subsequent areas into several sections or "levels," each of which encapsulate the introduction of a different genre or technological advance in the history of the media. In "Early Arcade Games," patrons encounter many of the early staples, such as a wall-projection of a tabletop "Pac-Man" and arcade versions of "Asteroids," "Pong" and "Space Invaders;" this section also includes the Milton Bradley-manufactured "Space War" from 1983. These games, first presented as arcade machines, were the first to make the jump to game cartridges when home-playable consoles entered the marketplace.

The advent of take-home cartridges marked a break with the cultural gathering-places of public arcades and transformed gaming into a mostly isolated enterprise. Video gaming has struggled ever since against the stereotype of a lone gamer locked away in his living room for days on end, working through the levels of a "Mario Bros." or the boxing rounds in "Mike Tyson's Punch-Out." In this section sits a sample of the Atari 2600, with its faux wood-grain panel and TV-type switch for "color or black and white TVs," a system listed in a wall text as the "best-selling console during the early 1980's." Also among those to first cross over from the silver screen to home-console gaming systems is "Raiders of the Lost Ark" (not included in this exhibition), a game that required players to use both joysticks--one to move his Indiana Jones character across the screen and a second to manipulate a dropdown menu of portable items, including a shovel, parachute and artifacts. This type of gaming helped open the door to programs whose central purpose was the representation of real-life situations.

Arguably, the very first "simulation" game was invented by J.H. Conway, a British mathematician at Gonville and Caius College in England, who developed the "Game of Life" in an effort to experiment with cellular automaton as a generalization of the generative processes of cellular life. A high point in the "simulation" game genre was "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" from 1984, a totally text-driven life-simulation game made by Infocom for the PC. Based on the popular science-fiction novel by Douglas Adams, the objective of the game was to help the main character, Arthur Dent, prevent bulldozers from demolishing his house. "The Hitchhiker's Guide" was modeled on games that a generation of kids had grown up playing, a series of totally text-based, tabletop "paper-and-pencil" or "PnP" "role-playing games," also known as "RPGs." These included the popular "Dungeons and Dragons" series of story adventures known as "modules." These "PnP" games hit a peak in popularity among gamers with the release in 1977 of the "Advanced Dungeons and Dragons" game system of books played using a twenty-sided die, a system which came to be known as the d20 system. In these, a group of players are sent on a quest in which they encounter obstacles along the way such as dragons, orcs and an entire host of otherworldly, often gruesome creatures (fastidiously documented in the AD&D "Monster Manual") that in combat deplete a total number of "hit points" each player has--until they arrive at zero hit points, when the player is treated as dead.

Inspired by D&D games, two students at Essex University, Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle, created the first "Multi-User Dungeon" or MUD, in 1978. These interactive online gaming environments functioned on the same principles as "PnP" gaming modules, themselves based on the "Choose Your Own Adventure" paperback storybooks in which readers, following a hero through a genre-appropriate adventure, were given the option of turning to different pages in a book; the choice of storylines affected the ultimate outcome of the novel. MUD software technologies rapidly evolved into "multi-user dimensions" used for various types of text-based gaming, skyrocketing in popularity at a time when home computers were becoming more affordable and the baud rate on modems was reaching 300 and then 1200, allowing for faster rates of data transfer and thus faster game play. Games such as "Hitchhiker's Guide," even though fully text-based, mark the first moves toward a foundation for a workable graphics-based virtual "environment." Decades earlier, similar reinterpretations of lived space had actively revolutionized art. Kurt Schwitter's "Merzbau," subtitled the "Cathedral of Erotic Misery," serves as a prime case-in-point. Built between 1919 and 1937 in most every room of his Hanover, Germany home, "Merzbau" serves as an earliest example of "enchantment" or "filled-space installation," composed of wood and plaster forms often rectilinear or biomorphic in shape, found objects and stuff given the artist by friends. Schwitters hoped his installation would give viewers a way to free themselves from "life, from all things that disturb mankind." It was also a way for visitors to "inhabit" the creative space of the artist's own mind, a way of viewing reality through engagement with an imagined perceptual space. "Merzbau," however, will not be seen again: it was bombed along with the artist's home during the air raids of World War II.

Enter the Dragon
"The Making and Marketing of Games" gives museum visitors a glimpse into the artistic sources, design and programming of games. "Dragon's Lair," the first American cinematic video game, was unique in the history of the medium for its use of a Laserdisc player as the source for animated motion-picture sequences scattered throughout the game. Invented by Rich Dyer, "Dragon's Lair" was animated by Don Bluth, a former animator for Disney. Having an experienced animator as part of the design team brought Hollywood expertise to the manufacture of video games, with twenty-two minutes of film-quality animation used to tell the story of Dirk the Daring, a fumblebum knight on a mission to save the alluring Princess Daphne from the clutches of a kidnapping, cartoonish green dragon. Sections of the laserdisc were accessed and played as determined by player commands, though it's significant that, rather than strictly controlling Dirk, the player merely directs him what to do when confronted with nearly a thousand different life-and-death situations.

Though the success of "Dragon's Lair" and the Laserdisc game market was short-lived, it most significantly established a future crossover potential in its treatment as animated cinema. It was a potential that remained dormant until the release of "Wolfenstein 3D" in 1992. The first title designed by the fledgling id Software, "Wolfenstein 3D" was published by Apogee Software, a then-leading company known for its shareware, or free, releases. "Wolfenstein," among one of the most remarkable developments in the history of video games, while referenced in wall texts and ancillary documentation on the exhibit, is not available to the general public for play.

It's not clear why. In it, the player takes the first-person perspective of a soldier who has infiltrated and must shoot his way out of an eponymous Nazi facility. Its "3D" environment was created using a new variety of graphic rendering called "ray tracing" that creates perspectival depths against which player and opponents are buffered or limited in movement. It also included very realistic violence: the bark of SS commanders was often jarring, and blood splattered freely as the soldier mowed down his Nazi enemies using pistols, rocket-launchers and high-powered chain guns. "Wolfenstein" was credited with starting the first-person-shooter craze among gamers that continues to this day. In 1993, id released a next-generation game called "Doom" using similar ray-tracing software, in which the player takes on the character of a space marine transported to Mars after assaulting a superior officer who has commanded him to kill innocent civilians. A company on Mars accidentally opens a dimensional portal and hordes of demons start pouring through the teleporters and turning workers into zombies.

Among the major innovations represented by the release of "Doom" was its user-expansion technology, known as WADs (which may mean "Where's All the Data?" though nobody knows for sure). These allow users to customize even the most mundane and detailed elements of game play. A version of the game called "Marine Doom," designed by Lt. Scott Barnett, was even used by the United States Marine Corps to train its soldiers the value of "teamwork, decision-making and coordination" (check out www.dodgamecommunity.com for other games used by the Department of Defense in its personnel training).

The popularity of "Doom" was surpassed only by the 1996 release of its successor, also an id Software title, called "Quake." Picking up on the space-marine storyline of its predecessor, the character in "Quake" has been sent on a mission into a portal to prevent the most powerful demons from coming through and transforming our reality into a version of their home in Hell. Much of the altered dimension in which the player fights is based on the stories of H.P. Lovecraft and the final enemy which must be slain is the infamous "Shub-Niggurath," also known as "The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young," a character stolen from Lovecraft's "Cthulhu Mythos." "Quake" also took the WAD technology introduced in "Doom" a step further, allowing players to create "mods," capable of a higher degree of customizability. Added to this was the ability of users to play over local area networks or LANs (computers connected using an Ethernet cable in an office, for instance) or the Internet. Internet-connected players used a "server-client" architecture: by loading the main gaming software onto a public server, other players known as "clients" could log in using a telephone connection. And, of course, another feature that made "Quake" popular among gamers was the fact that the soundtrack had been written and recorded by Trent Reznor of then-peaking band Nine Inch Nails.

In 2000, a version of "Quake" dedicated to multiplayer first-person shooter "deathmatches" was released called "Quake III Arena," with music composed by Sonic Mayhem and Front Line Assembly. In it, individual or teams of players engage in a "tag" tournament using an array of weapons from the original game until all opposing players have either been eliminated or until the time of play hits an arbitrary limit. "Quake III Arena" presaged the coming of "massively multiplayer online games" (or MMOGs), which would come to define huge swathes of popular American culture and lead to the development of a multibillion dollar video-game industry capable of rivaling the financial and cultural dominance of that dream machine known as Hollywood.

People-Powered
Multiplayer gaming environments have evolved even further since the id Software revolution, and now hundreds of thousands of people can play online in the same game simultaneously. One major difference from earlier multiplayer games is the persistence of the gaming environment: these games maintain themselves without human interference, never needing to be reset. What a player builds or "earns" in the game environment one day will be there when he logs in the next. Most MMOGs were originally designed for desktop computer systems and are only now making the transition to consoles such as the popular Playstation 2. However, much of what makes MMOGs relevant to the advancement of video games as an art form has yet to evolve in any meaningful way beyond including the highest number of players online at any given time. It's significant that the most recent developments have occurred in a mostly single-player game series known as "Grand Theft Auto" (or "GTA"), first released by Rockstar North (originally DMA Design) in 1997. "GTA" allows the player an amazing amount of freedom within the game "environment" to either play or not. While "story levels" exist that can be played by taking orders from crime-world figures that allow the player to rise through the underworld ranks and eventually achieve criminal dominance, players may also choose to roam the game environment and never initiate a story level of play at all. Added to this system, with the release of "GTA III," was a unique third-person perspective that adapted the game to a more typically cinematic viewpoint.

Also unique about the "GTA" series is its use of a long list of name-brand voice actors such as, in "GTA: Vice City," Ray Liotta, Dennis Hopper, Gary Busey, Burt Reynolds and Debbie Harry; in the recently released "GTA: San Andreas," the list includes Samuel L. Jackson, Peter Fonda, James Woods and Ice T. The "GTA" series has also licensed a wide array of American Top-40 and hit music for its soundtrack, including a huge playlist that includes nostalgic titles by such bands as Guns N' Roses and Mr. Mister.

Video games, having far surpassed the level of mainstream acceptance of installation art, are at the cusp of a cultural breakthrough. Installation art failed when it fizzled in its original utopian ideal of closing the gap between art and life, and is now mitigated by museum admission costs and security guards. Incorporating a virtual framework with a fully cinematic perspective similar to that of the "GTA" series into a workable massively multiplayer online "environment" may well hold the key to its eventual cultural legitimization as an art form. But what "Game On" makes clear is that video games are restricted by a cultural stigma that's a persistent barrier to what many fans hope and dream video games will someday become: films that we can walk into, a virtual reality interchangeable with our own. A chance to control the ever-present camera that transforms ours into a humiliating, gratuitous ideological clockwork of reality-based obsession with clothing choices, body weight and the endless trivia of a society that has lost the ability to step outside itself.

It's a possible future that may be difficult for viewers to distinguish in "Game On," useful as a survey of various entertainment technologies. But as a reduction of the history, culture and future of video games, it may well prove a missed opportunity. Not willing to taint our gaze with the images of violence and depravity present in so many other art forms--from rap music to the paintings of Goya, for instance, or the films of Kubrick to the Armageddons of our Scriptures, we may well miss our chance to grasp that which elevates our culture overall and us as individuals to something better and finer than the sum of our many parts.

(2005-03-08)

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