Playtime: Game Mythologies
Since March 2012, the Maison d’Ailleurs Museum in Switzerland has hosted Playtime: Videogame Mythologies, an exhibition I curated dealing with the creative, historical and social foundations of videogames, and with the cultural space they occupy today. The Maison (also known as the Museum of Science Fiction, Utopia and Extraordinary Journeys) is really an unique environment; his former director, Patrick Gyger, was gracious enough not only to commision the project but also to allow me to try something different, discarding the approach of previous “art and games” or “history of games” shows.
The exhibition is still open until December 9, featuring brilliant artists and game designers like Julian Oliver, Tale of Tales, Jason Rohrer, Arturo Castro, Dominique Cunin, Ryota Kuwakubo or Sheldon Brown, among many others. To celebrate the final days of the show I’m posting my essay for the exhibition catalogue; it features Tati’s Playtime, Spacewar, a history of videogames in museums and how to construct a mythology of videogames.
If you are close to French-speaking Switzerland, the Maison d’Ailleurs in Yverdon-les-Bains is definitely worthy of a trip.
01
In 1964, the popular french film director and actor Jaques Tati started the production process of his fourth film. It was going to be a long and difficult journey that culminated three years later with puzzling, unexpected results. Depending on how you look at it, it was a catastrophical failure with the audience that left Tati seriously indebted, or a spectacular creative achievement. it definitely holds to this day a special place of its own in the history of Film. It’s no wonder really that audiences didn’t know what to make of Playtime, because Tati had never made a film like that. In fact, no one had.
Playtime is a film with no real story, dialogues or very much of a plot. It loosely follows Monsieur Hulot, Tati’s signature character, as he wanders around a modernist, futurist version of Paris made of steel and glass. It’s the city that is the most prominent character in the film; the architecture, spare and geometric, defines very strongly what characters get to do in every scene. In order to produce the spatial qualities that he was looking for, Tati embarked in building up one of the most elaborate, complex film sets ever conceived. It was so monumental it deserved having a name of its own: Tativille.
Making Tativille a reality took a hundred constructions workers, almost 12000 square feet of glass and half a million square feet of concrete. The set had it’s own power plant, roads, electrical grid, and even fully working elevators. Once Tativille was standing the director was going to dream up Playtime there, get the film to arise out those streets, offices and restaurants. However, the shooting was anything but easy. Catastrophic Storms, constant budget problems and overruns extended the shooting throughout three long years.
In 2012 we know that Playtime was a catastrophic box office failure that ruined Tati; we know that critics appreciated it since it was projected for the first time, and that it is universally recognized as a classic. We know it has always been considered something of an anomaly; Truffaut famously said that Playtime was “a film that comes from another planet, where they make films differently”, and legendary northamerican critic Roger Ebert wrote that “it ocuppies no genre and does not create a new one”.
In 2012, there are many attributes of Playtime that call our attention. Attributes that were less noticeable in 1967. (If you have not seen the film, this would be a good moment to buy or rent it, and come back once you are done).
As you sit down to watch Tati’s masterpiece in 2012, the first thing that one finds interesting is what you could anacronically call the “low resolution” of the film. In many sequences there are so few colors on screen, you can almost count them (Tati said he wanted to make it look as a black and white film that had been shot in color). The action takes place in rooms and buildings characterized by pure lines, spare empty spaces, blocky elements. It’s an extremely synthetic world.
And then, we are never too close to Hulot, our hero - the shots are framed so that we usually contemplate a full room, corridor, or gallery, with all the elements that make up the environment. Hulot is there in the middle, trying to make sense of his surroundings and find his way towards the next room. Some of the most clasic sequences of the film follow an almost isometric reading of space, the method of representing three dimensional objects or spaces in a two dimensional medium.
When the film starts, both the viewer and the main character are dropped in this world with little explanation. Since there are no central conflicts, no obvious big idea moving the plot forward, the main narrative device is exploration; getting Hulot from one point to another. But in order to do this, he must understand the rules of every space, its properties and possibilities. In one specially memorable sequence, he paces around a waiting room, paying attention to the few objects in the environment, inspecting them with curiosity to understand what is it that they do, what can they be used for.
As the film goes forward, we get to visit new places, each more complicated and puzzling than the previous one. In fact, the film is structured around the sequence of architectures: the airport, the offices, the trade exhibition, the apartments, the restaurant, and the final carrousel of cars. It’s interesting to see how we only move forward, and once we leave one place we never go back to it (with the exception of the brief closing scene at the airport, providing closure and circularity to the whole picture). We are quite literally, jumping from level to level.
As films go, Playtime is undeniably special. But one cannot help feeling that what Tati was aiming for was something that film couldn’t completely do for him. It is as if he was looking for a medium that, more than telling stories, would allow him to create full fledged worlds. Playtime is an exercise in creating a territory in the imagination full of surprises, joyful challenges and small delightful rewards. More than spectators, he wants us to be explorers gathering the treasures he has planted all over his synthetic city.
02
In 1961, just as Tati was starting work on the idea of Playtime, on the other side of the Atlantic a team of students in their early twenties at the Masssachussets Institute of Technology were playing with a state of the art mainframe computer, a PDP-1. Recently installed at the so-called “kludge room” of the Department of Electrical Engineering, the group (made up by Steve “Slug” Russell, Alan Kotok, Peter Samson and Dan Edwards) was looking for ideas about how to showcase the capabilities of the machine, specially of its Cathodic Ray Tube display, capable of showing -extremely primitive, by our current standards- figures and shapes in movement.
Excited by the possibilities but with little more ambition than producing what in essence was just a technical demonstration, they imagined that spaceships were a good starting point. This was the beginning of Spacewar, the first interactive computer game in history.
In Spacewar, two players face each other in a galactic battle made up of two basic ships and tiny missiles. To control your rocket you can rotate left or right, an move forward with the thrust. A third player in the game is the “deadly sun” at the center of the screen, pulling the spaceships towards it. And that was basically it.
Two notable things happened then. First, what was basically a demonstration of the processing and graphic capacities of the PDP-1 was actually engaging and fun enough on its own, so that people wanted to play it. Thus, Spacewar left the Department of Electrical Engineering at MIT and spread througout mainframes in other research centres and universities all over the United States. In the words of interaction design legend Alan Kay -quoted in a historical piece that cyberculture pioneer Steward Brand wrote for Rolling Stone in 1972-, “The game of Spacewar blossoms spontaneously wherever there is a graphics display connected to a computer”.
But as Spacewar became progressively more popular, remaining so for the following years, it would not be seen as a static, finished invention. Different hackers and coders would find an exciting challenge in making the game more interesting and hard by adding new rules, other elements and features. Some versions would allow more than two ships, while others would incorporate new kinds of weapons. The first computer game gave way relatively soon to the first computer game designers, and to the conversation about what elements make a game interesting, exciting, or even sensual and beautiful.
If you want to play Spacewar exactly as programmed by Steve Russell, you can head to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, and try to convince the staff to let you have a go at their PDP-1 unit, still functional. It may be more practical though to try the online simulation that you can find here, adapted from the original code written in 1962.
It may be argued, though, that the most important thing about Spacewar is not in Spacewar, although it is undoubtly a charmingly elegant game. Spacewar’s DNA is present in every contemporary game that wants to create a world using a set of rules, creating challenges and obstacles and appealing to our sense of exploration and discovery. Spacewar was just the beginning of a long path.
03
After Spacewar, to produce something as culturally sofisticated as Tati’s Playtime the computer game industry would still require several decades, a good number of technological breakthroughs, and the careers of thousands of designers and programmers. Many, of course, will still defend this has not actually happened yet; the same Roger Ebert that loves Playtime started one of the most enduring (and in the end unproductive) online polemics ever through an article about the metaphysical impossibility of a videogame ever being a work of art. But no one would actually dispute the cultural relevance and historical significance of videogames. At least, not cultural institutions, not at this point in time.
In the last ten years, an important number of cultural centers and museums all over the world have devoted projects to the language, the aesthetics and the cultural impact of videogames. This process has taken place in paralel to the rise of the digital entertainment Industry as one of the premier new shaping forces in culture, and as a recognition of the social impact and legacy of videogames, exactly fifty years after Spacewar was programmed at MIT.
Many exhibition projects have intended to trace the evolution and history of videogames from their humble beginnings as a low tech curiosity and innocent form of leisure, to their current status as a technologically advanced multi million global industry. Important examples of these include the Game On Exhibition at Barbican, London, -probably the first ambitious case of a major cultural institution addressing videogames-, the ComputerSpiele Museum in Berlin, the GameWorld Exhibition at LABoral in Gijón, Spain, the Art of Videogames at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington or Game Story at the Grand Palais in Paris.
Additionally, many other exhibitions have addressed the relationship between videogames and art, exploring the work of contemporary and new media artists that have been strongly influenced by the aesthetics of videogames and their impact in pop culture. These exhibitions have mostly focused of the work of a specific generation of artists that shaped what has been called the GameArt movement. Gameart introduced subjectivity, cultural commentary and political issues in the world of videogames, and subverted and denounced many of the ideological bases of mainstream commercial titles. Some of the most known examples include exhibitions like Space Invaders: Art and the videogame Environment, at FACT, Liverpool, or the seminal Computer Games by Artists at Hartware Medien Kunst Verein, Dortmund, in 2003.
More recently, festivals and conferences all over the world have focused on the emergence of a new kind of more mature, innovative and productive set of strategies going beyond the frequent perception of videogames as “mindless entertainment”. These include new genres like Serious Games (games with educative and editorial goals), Political Games, Urban Games that take public space and the city as their creative territory, or “Indie” Games and experimental games that intend to expand the themes and forms of the genre, introducing more abstract, adult, and innovative design approaches that make the case of how Game Design can be an innovative and relevant form of cultural production.
This stage in the introduction of games in the space of cultural institutions was conditioned in a way by the novelty of the premise. The idea that videogames and their history deserve to be taken seriously, and that artists could find them interesting and be influenced by them was relatively surprising and new. Not anymore.
04
It is common that any conventional, lineal narrative of videogames usually starts with Spacewar. (there are other pseudo-digital games that are actually older, but let’s not get lost in technicalities). The problem with this is that it presumes that, somehow, the only history that we can tell is the history of videogame technology, and that computer games came out of nowhere, with no links to previous cultural artifacts.
The exhibition “Playtime: Game Mythologies” at Maison d’Ailleurs wants to look at the history of games from a different vantage point, one that would connect videogames with a series of previous manifestations and artifacts. For instance, that of utopian spaces of play, environments created for joyful exploration designed to inspire a sense of wonder. In this sense, the cultural space of videogames is related to previous events and objects like architectural follies, fun houses, exotic gardens, attraction park, theme parks and world fairs.
In a similar way, the emergence of computer games as a historical force is located in a very specific intellectual context. It is tempting and in a way very comfortable to try to approach games from other stabished forms of cultural production, specially the most popular narrative mediums like literature or film. In the last 50 years though, Information Theory, Cybernetics, Network Theory and Chaos Theory have shown us that in order to describe accurately our reality we need to recognize we live in an age of rising complexity, where political, economic and social processes evolve through the non-linear interactions of multiple agents. Videogames may be the first popular form of culture that reflects this.
In addition, previous exhibitions have presented gaming as a self-enclosed language, and videogame practice as the quintaessential form of escapism, with no connection to the outide world. But play is not an innocent activity that only children engage in; play, simulation and enactment are present in multiple dimensions of society. From this perspective, the connection between reality and game is more ambigous and blurred than what we have traditionally thought. From War Games and military simulacra to the simulation of finantial markets, or the use of Serious Games in management processes, the power of taking decisions through playing strategies is increasingly finding strength in multiple domains.
Playtime: Game Mythologies is thus not a collection of historical milestones of the computer game medium, nor an art exhibition exploring the critical readings of games in contemporary creative practices, although it contains examples of both. By using historically significant games, contemporary art practices, independent and experimental game design, and examples of emerging technologies, we hope to outline several possible pathways through the rich and captivating iconographies and philosophies of the game form.
By highlighting and identifying themes like rules and systems, architectures and spaces, identity and the body and the distance between fiction and reality, the show presents a possible catalogue of cultural building blocks, a syntax of the elements that pulsate under the dazzling polygons of the videogame phenomenon.
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