To provide a choice is to exclude all other choices. To provide a way to win is to provide infinite other ways to lose. A system that values some choices and behaviors will necessarily devalue others. A system might offer all sorts of pleasant choices to some, but for other participants, there will be no choices that do not oppress or do violence to them. Certainly struggle for meaning and value is possible in such a system, but that doesn't change the fact that a system can be an instrument of hate and violence. A system is not a dialogue. In fact, it can by an instrument that specifically removes the possibility for dialogue (though thankfully, the opposite is also true).
Ah, I've stopped talking about video games.
This is starting to sound almost exactly like a discussion of how cultural and societal systems constrain human beings into binaries of sexuality and gender and race. Well, of course it is. And this is part of the reason why I find systems of all kinds so fascinating, beautiful, terrible, and worth talking about. The systems that govern game worlds are not unlike the systems that rule our everyday lives. I believe that this is a key area in which game designers, engineers, can learn a great deal from the way that social justice, feminism, and queer theory have examined the systems that govern our everyday lives. Study of these systems has a long and rich history. The rules of society are not inherently different from the rules of a game; understand how human social, cultural, and political systems function, and you will understand how they function in games much better. It is very difficult to come away from even a cursory survey of these fields with the belief that systems are not restrictive and oppressive.
I know that at this point emergent gameplay arises to overthrow the claim that designers control everything about their games, the sort of holy grail by which we are able to break out of constraining systems. I think this power is real, just as there are real ways to express and find an identity in a system designed to quash it. But that doesn't mean that systems aren't still restrictive, don't have agendas, aren't political, just because it's possible to struggle against them. Ian Bogost's article on Shit Crayons sort of sums up my feelings on this. Should I celebrate our culture’s horrifically repressive notions of gender and sexuality just because they allowed for emergent queerness? Or should we see the system as a consciously flawed and limited one, with horrifically prejudiced claims that took centuries of struggle to overthrow?
If Raph feels like games like Train, Dys4ia, and Howling Dogs are playing him, I must answer: every single game I have ever played feels like it’s been playing me. I believe a game can have a dialogue with itself; just as any creative work might reflect the complexity of an author's unresolved or contradictory feelings. I believe that as a reader or player, my personal response to struggling within a system or reading a book can certainly be the other side of the dialogue. But it is necessary that I express my response outside of a game, because within that game, I am ruled by your system. You wish for me to have a dialogue with you? How can I, within a system of dialogue whose every term was decided by you?
Certainly rules change; games get sequels, MMOs get patched, governments pass new laws. This does not absolve any of these systems for the claims that they initially made, nor does their potential to change mean that they any individual snapshot of a game does not make inflexible claims. Perhaps games will change in response to social pressure; this makes them exactly the same as all other forms of media.
Train, Dys4ia, Howling Dogs: these games have not "given up" on whether rules can accomplish their goals, because they are clearly accomplishing their goals with rules. And certainly, this is not a one time trick to be used once and moved past, due to the very fact that so many games using it exist. Games are able to use the same trick effectively in new and fresh ways. I am sure, from reading Raph's post on how each genre of game is really only one game, that he would agree that an endless amount of work can be done through the medium of a single system. I am as excited as he is for the discovery and creation of new systems, but if an old and tried system can get the same job done, I don’t care at all.
A lot of the research into systems supports this. When I see analytics used to discuss and predict player behavior, I tend to also see a host of marketing professionals eager to use this data to make players behave in ways that they want. Certainly I'm not a huge fan of this particular application, just as I am no fan of manipulative writing, but I am a huge fan of uses words and systems to convey meaning to other people. I want people to feel things, I guess, so I have spent a lot of time looking for ways that I can do that. Normally I use words, and now that I've spent so much time learning about and making games, I want to use systems to do the same. I would like to create systems that might, for example, make more free and open statements about identity than the ones that we currently live under. Or I might like to make a system that emphasizes those oppressive features in order to indicate what life is like living under a system that feels as restrictive as it is.
I believe systems are statements. Not always restrictive or exploitative of hateful, but always statements. Statements about what choices are allowed. Statements about the limits of freedom. Statements about what categories exist, and what it means to belong to them.
Andrew Vanden Bossche is freelance writer and cutie evangelist. Read his unsystemic emotionsy hipster ramblings at mammon-machine.com and experience an endless stream of his anime brattiness on twitter @mammonmachine.
