Fun Inc.: Why Gaming Will Dominate the Twenty-First Century by Tom Chatfield

Author:Tom Chatfield [Chatfield, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781605982090
Google: JRtbBAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2010-11-15T08:00:00+00:00

At the other end of the scale, there are different ways in which games are pushing at – and redefining – the limits of their potential as a creative medium. The sector is usually referred to as ‘hard-core’ gaming and includes those titles whose challenges and mechanics are designed to appeal to those with literally thousands of hours of gaming experience under their belts. This can just be a question of unforgiving difficulty, or frenetic action of the most unreflective kind. But it can also be something rather more elaborate – and can, especially in the online world, test the potential of video games not only as artistic creations in their own right, but as mechanisms via which players themselves create and take part in a kind of art.

If Flower and Passage are the poetry of the game world, the massively multiplayer game EVE Online is the Finnegans Wake of video gaming, requiring many hundreds of hours of effort if you wish even to begin to grasp its intricacies, and typically demanding a good fifty hours of input before you can start to work out what the true focus and dynamics of the game are. EVE is a game of space exploration and trading, and is currently played by over 300,000 people, all of whom inhabit the same virtual galaxy, a place located in the distant future that contains over 7,500 star systems, each with their own planets, moons and space stations.

The basics of the game are a complex matter of learning to fly and equip a spaceship, performing a variety of missions for cash and reputation, gaining wealth and raw materials, exploration, and so on. All these must be mastered before the game’s true heart can be glimpsed: the political and economic manoeuvrings that take place between the vast shifting alliances of players within the game. Much of EVE’s richness – and its almost absurd complexity – lies in the twisting history of betrayals, wars, blood feuds and communitarian endeavours that comprise the history of players’ actions over the course of the seven years that the EVE galaxy has existed.

If EVE is art, the genre it’s most closely aligned to is performance art, with the emergent behaviours and narratives that players themselves have created over time providing a far richer context than any script. One incident that’s still talked about to this day is a ‘heist’ in 2005 in which, over a period of twelve months, one specialist alliance of covert assassins, the Guiding Hand Social Club, infiltrated every level of one of the game’s most powerful player-run corporations, the Ubiqua Seraph. The corporation CEO herself flew an ultra-rare ship of which only two known examples existed in the EVE universe, while it controlled a staggering quantity of in-game assets valued at tens of thousands of real-world dollars. The signal was given, and a deadly coordinated attack by the infiltrators wiped out within a matter of hours the CEO herself, her ship, and over $15,000 worth of corporate assets.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.