Y’know what I get nostalgic about? The past. Like my childhood for example, a time when things were so much simpler. Hours could be spent running happily around playgrounds, lost in fantasies of soldiers and racing cars or trying to catch a glimpse of Naomi Kenning’s pants. Yet, with adulthood came weighty responsibilities and an upsetting decline in the number of girls’ pants I was allowed to see. Happily, however, I still play; I play like an adult – I play computer games.
It’s odd that all the waffle about computer games eating kids’ brains, being anti-social and generally bad for you has actually managed to propagate. Sure, it’s gradually becoming accepted as a cultural medium but there is undeniably a stigma still attached. Until I beat him to death, my housemate would often contemptuously enquire: ‘been playing your games again?’. ‘Oh my poor fool’, I perhaps should have calmly responded, ‘Gaming, you see – the act of playing – is fundamental to our social heritage.’ We’ve been playing since earliest man danced around a fire to the time we decided to play act in amphitheatres. Things have become a little quiet in modern times with fewer people attending events of live performance like the theatre and religious ceremonies, but one thing is going to reignite the natural human desire to play with each other: multiplayer gaming. To demonstrate this to you, (re: you = the reader) don your academic diving suits for we will now delve into the exciting and fluid world of Performance Studies. 3. 2. 1. DELVE!!
Hi, Performance.
Oh good, you made it. Now this may get a little tricky so I’ll do my best to be an entertaining and lucid guide and I promise there’ll be a big computer games related payoff so stick it out. Principally, Performance Studies is an academic tool for studying the innumerable ways that humans interact. It comprises almost anything you’d care to think of where humans do stuff with one another from lectures to church services, theatrical performances, dancing or chatting over an instant messenger. Pretty vague, huh? Yeah, that’s what everyone thought, so to tighten down the definition and attempt to give it some form, certain ‘paradigms’ were suggested to embody what PS is all about. A guy called Richard Schechner was key in establishing two specific activities, ritual and theatre, to act as these paradigms.
This was decided because, without getting too pedantic, ritual and theatre possess the following key characteristics which reflect upon PS at large:
- LIMINALITY: An odd word, by god, but all it means is the inherent ‘outside-ness’ of these activities. They take place in a space removed from everyday life, where normal behaviour is put on hold – literally: a threshold. Basically, in a theatre a guy can stab his girlfriend’s dad through a curtain and no one will call the police.
- MEDIATED PLAY: Play that occurs between two or more parties, with mediating structures or rules: the priest offering you a wafer at communion for example. You’re both agreeing to the wafer being the body of Christ (even though it isn’t, it’s a UFO).
- DISCURSIVE STATEMENTS: The activities reflect upon/resist/subvert the ‘discourses’ of everyday life in some way; this could be The Day of the Dead festival; political theatre is an obvious example, or more abstractly it could be a performance artist who sits in a box for a hundred days to comment on the ‘nightmare’ of suburban living, or something.
- MULTI-DISCIPLINARY: They are able to span numerous practices and disciplines: art, law, technology, sociology, design; you name it.
Ritual and theatre have been swirled around and spat out by numerous academics in PS and related fields and it is now generally accepted that they have evolved to integrate performance art, which isn’t a grand leap from theatre really. (You can read more about this in Jon McKenzie’s Perform: Or Else). I’m now going to do something radical. I’m going to suggest a brand new paradigm: multiplayer gaming.
Thank The Many Gods, He’s Finally Talking About Games.
Allow your eye to drift back up that list. It seems to me that multiplayer gaming ticks off every single point. It’s a cultural activity at the threshold of society (the, slowly eroding, stigma); it takes place in a space outside of everyday behaviour; the games have their own mediating structures/rules/objectives; their content – and the activities of those playing – reflect sociological discourses; they encompass all manner of disciplines (art, technology, design, language, sociology, etc).
I may get a little pretentious now in my sweaty efforts to highlight just how apt multiplayer gaming is as a new Performance paradigm to connect to ritual, theatre and our anthropological heritage. For, you see, multiplayer gaming ticks all those boxes… and then ticks them again, in the microcosm of the gaming world itself. It’s a magnifying glass held over a magnifying glass, an exponent of an exponent, a wheel within a wheel, a – ok, ok, come back, I’ll stop.
In an attempt to clear up this hastily spewed theoretical ejaculate, let’s look at a few specific examples.
Those Cheeky Second Life Griefers.
Read more here.
Second Life gives you a world in which to build, socialize, earn money and do whatever you like while adhering to its terms and conditions and ‘community standard’. The griefers don’t play this game, however. They play their own game which subverts the rules and expected discourses in an overtly performative way; griefers need someone to perform to. And lo, people are exposed to showers of Mario heads or bouncing pink phalluses. The point is the Second Life is itself a subversion of reality, yet there are those who want to subvert its laws still further.
Gameplague – WoW’s Corrupted Blood Incident.
This is another example of gamers not wanting to play by the rules but this time ultimately reshaping the structure of the game itself. The Corrupted Blood plague escaped the isolated zone in which it was supposed to occur, by helpful intervention of some WoW players, and hilariously infected the entire world.
The event spookily evoked real world viral infections and transmissions, with players helping and some hindering with quarantine zones wilfully ignored. It was an illicit new toy which existed outside of the game proper and reminiscent of a Happening in itself; WoW’s citizens gleefully set about playing with it and pushing it to its extremes. The game offered a means to experiment in a scenario with mass social implications, yet completely removed from real consequence.
DeLappedated – America’s Army.
As I’m sure many of you know, America’s Army is an online FPS and creepy virtualized recruiting tool for the US army. Players must learn supplanted real world knowledge like field medicine and squad tactics in order to succeed within the game. AA has become the site of an ongoing project by artist Joseph Delappe. He enters the game and simply types the names of soldiers killed in Iraq into the chat system. Here, we can explicitly see multiplayer gaming as a site of cultural resistance, despite the limited mediating structures of the FPS itself.
Yeah, and?
‘Well, that’s all very delicious and sexy’, I hear you say, ‘but what’s your point? Sure multiplayer games imitate life in various ways and offer some kind of social interaction. So what?’ Yes, I suppose I really need a smart conclusion to draw all this babble to some kind of satisfactory close, don’t I?
Multiplayer gaming can offer unique ways to investigate and experiment with human behaviour on a large scale. When we consider multiplayer gaming as a Performance Studies paradigm it is easy to see its connection to theatre and ritual, deep-seated sociological behaviours. Considering that it’s far more popular than theatre and developing followers at a faster rate than any religion, it is possible to foresee a near future where cultural performance and play via multiplayer gaming is a widely practiced phenomenon bringing with it the resurgence of play and performance via a mass social act. Contemporary society has precluded performance as a mainstream activity; multiplayer gaming is helping to reintroduce it.
