WHY AM I IN
VIETNAM ?
A COMPUTER GAME
CASE STUDY
‘AESTHETICS OF
PLAY’
1. mixing the yellow with the pink
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(requires Windows Media Player 9 or later)
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How did this game come to be in the world?
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What pressures determined that it would be as it is?
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What kind of passions sustained the creative effort that goes into the production
of any computer game?
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How are my gameplay pleasures already structured by the decisions of the
producers?
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Pivotal Games’ Production case study Winter2003/4.
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Pivotal – medium size studio (70 designers) – Bath UK.
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Four days workplace observations
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Ten, one hour long interviews with a cross section of the production team from
game testers to the Managing Director.
Political economy and the margins of choice
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Most producers, most of the time, in most cultural industries have very little
margin of choice about what they make.
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There is in fact very little space to exercise creative freedom in the decisions
about what kind of products they work on.
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The determinations of the market, financing your product and bringing it to
consumers, exercise a powerful logic that takes its own particular shape in each
studio.
POLITICAL ECONOMY
Pivotal Technical Director
“Even if you have got a million pounds in the bank and that is very
rare, you quite simply just can’t function. We used to create games
with just sort of seven or ten people and now it genuinely is thirty
to forty people plus and I don’t think we are particularly big. But
the cost of the games hasn’t gone up by anything like the same
amount, arguably it has gone down.
POLITICAL ECONOMY
Playstation 1 games used to cost thirty, forty pounds and that is what
they cost today, ten years on. So the retailers are pretty much
making the same margins as they used to. The publishers have got
greater overheads,the market place has got bigger, it is more
international, you have to distribute, sub-contract, so their costs have
gone up.
POLITICAL ECONOMY
So I really see it as being the developer that is being squeezed. So
costs have gone up, number of people have gone up, cost to the
consumer hasn’t gone up, something has got to give and it has been
giving and that is why there has been an awful lot of consolidation in
industries, a lot of companies going under.”
Tastes and Technicities
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BUT … Knowing that a studio has to ship a million units and keep a staff of 70 on
the payroll does not explain how it comes to produce a squad based military
shooter set in Vietnam, as opposed to a racing game or a fantasy role play.
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There is then still a space for an auteur’s input, for the generation of ideas that will
fit the market but which are driven by designer’s pleasures and passions.
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At Pivotal these tastes, pleasures and passions have originated with the Managing
Director, the visionary and driving force who has pushed the studio forward from its
earliest days.
2. Lancelot
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TASTES AND TECHNICITIES
A dominant ‘semiotic nexus’ around ‘war, conquest and combat’
which ‘focuses gaming culture on the subject-positions and
discourses of what we term “militarized masculinities”.’
(Kline et al 2003:254)
‘This situation … tracks back to the military origins of interactive
play. The game industry conjured into being by technologically
adept and culturally militarized men, made games reflecting the
interests of is creators.’
(2003:257)
TASTES AND TECHNICITIES
“The MD is very, very war orientated, to make a game about
something you need to know about that subject. It is easy to make
something about fantasy because you can create your fantasy world.
He has a very, very good background knowledge on military war
through the ages, so therefore lets use that knowledge, that is
certainly one of the elements which have pushed for it to be a semirealistic environment.” (Conflict Vietnam: Producer)
Technicity (Dovey & Kennedy)
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The significant aspect of our appropriation of the term ‘technicity’ is to
encapsulate within it the connections between an identity based on certain types
of attitude, practices, tastes and the deployment of technology and a
technological ‘edge’ in the construction of that identity.
To be subjects within the privileged twenty-first century first world is to be
increasingly caught up in a network of technically and mechanically mediated
relationships with others who share the same attitude/tastes, pleasures and
preferences.
...Technicity therefore becomes the expression of particular tastes and
affiliations through technological engagement.
The senior designers in our study did not become ‘technologically adept or
culturally militarized’ through the ‘military origins of interactive play’.
Four of the ten respondents – significantly all senior figures within the company
both in age and authority - expressed strong childhood and adolescent
attachment to paper gaming, to the mathematically systematised past time of
role play gaming, fantasy and Dungeons and Dragons.
TASTES & TECHNICITIES
“I was about nine when I started playing Dungeons and Dragons. I
mean I had been into fantasy stuff for quite a while which I think
stemmed from the fact that both my parents were quite into Lord of
the Rings and I used to get read The Hobbit as a bedtime story by
my mum, …. so I’d always been really interested in that whole
fantasy thing, and had you know, fantasy toys and soldiers and
that. …I was really quite hooked on that sort of thing and
absolutely loved it.
TASTES & TECHNICITIES
Then I discovered the War Hammer stuff a bit later, probably when
I was about twelve or thirteen and again got really into that, which
some of my earliest ever attempts to write serious rule systems
was for War Hammer Forty Thousand, which I sent into Games
Workshop and they liked enough to send back release forms to say
well we might use this, so sign the copyright over to us…. I read a
lot of the Dungeons and Dragons sort of novels, a lot of the fantasy
stuff.
TASTES & TECHNICITIES
I used to read enormous amounts of comics, whatever I could
get my hands on, Batman, Daredevil,, the Star Wars films, the
usual. I was very into Battlestar Galactica and all that, all that
kind of pop culture sci-fi and things like that I would read. But I
was also, and I think it stems from my dad being in the army, I
was very into sort of military stuff as well, very interested in
military history, so I read an awful lot of that kind of thing as
well.”
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But, the boys who stayed at home reading fantasy literature and playing D&D
weren’t the same guys who were on the football team, or who were out jacking
cars, pulling birds or doing any other supposedly normal alpha male behaviours.
Trying to play games like this with guys like that was always a nightmare, their
physical energy always won out over their powers of concentration and the
tabletop would finish up on the floor or else the game would spin off into some
real world pursuit.
No, this sensibility, these games, are actually the virtual revenge of the nerds on
the jocks.
This is a place where bright boys with imagination and technical prowess get to
design worlds where they don’t get sand kicked in their faces anymore, a world
in which they can be in control and can kick ass for once (see eg Pargman 2003
for discussion of ‘controllable worlds’).
3. dad is stuck in a game
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TASTES & TECHNICITIES
“The fundamental mechanic is all down to numbers and
probabilities, percentage chances of hitting and missing; all our
vehicles are just a bunch of numbers, there is a 3D model there
and there are 3D surfaces set, as a number value, hit point value
and then something that says what happens when you penetrate
and destroy that, is it catastrophic damage? That is stuff I played
with for years, just on table tops or role playing and ditto with
characters, movement speeds, hit points, actions you can do and it
is all number based.”
Pivotal MD
4. something we don’t have to explain
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5. my movie set
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Clip 6: not allowed
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BRANDING
WAR ZONE (1999)
CONFLICT DESERT STORM (2001)
CONFLICT DESERT STORM 2 (2003)
CONFLICT VIETNAM (2004)
7. so what’s your story?
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Storyworlds become franchises
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‘If Star Wars was a country, its $20bn would place it 70th in the World Bank’s
rankings of countries according to Gross Domestic product.’ (Total revenue
attributed to Star Wars products - British ‘Observer’ newspaper, Smith 2005).
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Game Spy web site lists 21 PC games set in Vietnam, with three each for the
PS2 (apart from Conflict, ShellShock: Nam '67 Eidos 2004 and Vietnam: The
Tet Offensive Oxygen Interactive 2004) and three on the Xbox consoles.
(Conflict plus Men of Valor Vivendi 2004 and ShellShock: Nam '67 Eidos 2004).
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Vietnam becomes neither historical event nor media franchise but an intermedial
setting for actions amenable to game play adaptation.
HISTORY AS STORYWORLD
“This is where you are kind of aware of your market in the sense
that, you know, …I would love to do a game set in the Spanish
Civil War, but not many people know anything about the Spanish
Civil War. So, there is no saying that a game set in the Spanish
Civil War couldn’t be a hit, but you have got a lot more people to
persuade…there are an inordinate number of wars that have
happened in the world, but picking a war that the American market
is going to be aware of then becomes the question. And I think
really there are three wars that they, the majority, the industry
considers they are aware of, World War 2 which is done a lot, the
Vietnam event, which I think is a slightly more trickier setting for a
game, and then the Gulf War, the two of them, because they
happened most recently.” (Pivotal Level Designer 2003)
Henry Jenkins on Intermediality.
‘economic trends encouraging the flow of
images, ideas, and narratives across multiple
media channels and demanding more active
modes of spectatorship.’ .. altering ‘the way
media consumers relate to each other,to media
texts, and to media producers’. (Jenkins 2003)
8. we thought we were pretty safe
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What is it about ‘authenticity’ represented by particular in- game details that
appeals to what kinds of player?
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What does this order of ‘realism’ signify?
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Do such games simply reflect and reinforce the pleasures of ‘militarized
masculinity’?
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There are ‘an inordinate number of wars in the world’ , however the post baby
boomer generation of men in the West are probably one of the first generations
of men ever for whom the threat of war has not been immediate.
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Nevertheless, ‘Everyone rather fancies the idea that you know, if push came to
shove they could get in there and take out the enemies with their gun.’ These
games are ‘escapism’ , ‘role play’.
THE TROUBLE WITH AUTHENTICITY
“Part of the appeal of the Conflict games is there is a degree of
realism in it, you know they are not using laser guns, they are using
M16’s, and I think because for us as developers it is important to
get some of that right, there is obviously a degree within our
audience that appreciate the effort that has gone to make that
slightly more realistic.“
Level Designer Pivotal Games.
THE TROUBLE WITH AUTHENTICITY
“I think because the industry is still very male dominated there is a
huge element, of it is still toy soldiers and people love the fact that it
is soldiers. Everyone rather fancies the idea that, if push came to
shove they could get in there and take out the enemies with their
gun. Reality is completely different of course but people like doing
that and it is role play, escapism and role play. People like
contemporary settings because it is not too far away. It is
conceivably close and they can kind of rather fancy themselves in
that setting, whereas space setting, fantasy setting, the leap to
imagine yourself there is not practical.” Pivotal Technical Director
“Play enables the exploration of that tissue
boundary between fantasy and reality, between the
real and imagined, between the self and the other.
In play we have license to explore, both our selves
and our society. In play we investigate culture, but
we also create it.” (Silverstone 1999:64)
9: frustration blasting
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