Computer games as utopias of utopia
Even those who have never experienced computer games contributes to the Utopia. Both deal more with potential than with really. Utopia usually sketches a special possible condition very concretely to measure reality on it or both to put in any other relationship. But what do computer games?
Today, they do not do any more only what they did before a decade ago. For a long time, they gave their players to the goals to be achieved. Whether an enemy spaceship was defeated, as in 1962 in "Spacewar!", or a Konigreich had to be saved as in almost all episodes of role-playing "Ultima" since 1979, — always the player had to export the right movements at the right time, to say his game character the right records or to use certain objects. It was therefore above all to learn the laws of the game, then in accordance with these efficiently efficiently performed the right actions in order to achieve the objectives set by the game.
Anarchy online
That’s different today. Many games no longer give a goal before the beginning, do not require a final action from the player, yes often do not even have a goal that at the same time has the end of the game and must be achieved by the player through certain patterns of action and must. Rather, many new games are experimental arrangements that are repeatedly rebuilt and played by the player. It lies her stimulus: the player rehearses again and again new behaviors under changed starting conditions.
It becomes very clear at the beginning of the online rolling game "Anarchy online": The player spends a lot of time to create his game character. And in the actual word: in a laboratory he bakes his game character. Because the game world of "Anarchy online" is located in a 30000-year-away future, it does not surprise rough, intelligence, strong or eye color of the game character with a mouse click. This creation process is an integral part of the game, no action upset as an external role-games. Even in the gameplay it is possible to charge some qualities of social character. However, the goal of this effort must determine the player himself, there are in "Anarchy online" No plot, which is alone alone, because he shares the game world with some thousand other people.
Civilization 3
After a similar principle, the strategy game published in 2001 also runs "Civilization 3" away. Here is the player in contrast to online rolling games alone with his game world, he also has one — compared to online rolling games — relatively concrete goal: the development of civilization. The charm of "Civilization 3" However, makes the infinite repeatability of the game: The player can vary outgoing conditions such as water distribution, continent waste or climate unlimited. The gameplay then influence the very different "Personalities" equipped artificial intelligence that controls the development of the incurable civilizations. So many variables influence the gameplay that a player’s action efficiency according to the pattern, in crucial moments the right actions are impossible. Instead, the player’s decisions enter into a rough process from which the game progresses. Each game is therefore different, game task does not arise by the one-time successful completion of the game with one of the numerous variants (diplomacy, colonization of space, cultural hegemony, military dominance). On the contrary, the oler is repeated the game, the more spab makes it because the player sees slowly understand the process that leads to the end, but without ever controlling it completely.
Unlike utopias, computer games work like "Anarchy online" or "Civilization 3" So not with possible, but with possibilities of the possible. They do not design a concrete state, which is then set in relation to reality and thus defines an externally or not to be desired target. These computer games never present an absolutely steady state that the player has to experience, rather, they bind him as an additional variable in the formation of a constantly changeable state. This is the essential difference between classic utopias and computer games: the classic utopias demonstrate the individual and proclaim totalitar a state that should be more desirable and should be striven by all. The described computer games, on the other hand, refrain from the concrete description of such, but also do not give the player the total control over the development of the game. Rather, the targeted goals as well as the paths there are there in an emergent process.
Computer Games — The best example of these are online port — avoiding those mistakes that have discredited utopian thinking just in the twentieth century. They replace central planning and control by a process in which a high order is created from many small interactions between players and programs.
Computer games can therefore afford much more than just produce new pronouncements of utopias. You can experience a utopia of utopia experiencing playable. Some already do it. If you want to see a future of utopian thinking, you should get involved in the computer games of the present.
A world is not enough
If the word utopia is not already called what we mean by it, it would be a wonderful substitute for the auxiliary term "Online". Because Utopie as "the place that is nowhere", Naturally does not mean nothing, but something that occurs only or especially in the pots of people. Self-resistant to use online rolls somewhere on servers as a static mutating code. Only it is the on the Internet connected player in front of your computers that can be mutated the code.
20 hours a week spends a player of the online rolling game "Everquest" According to his operator company verant on average in the game world. With a non-representative survey of economist Edward Castranova, even a third of respondents gave more time for "Everquest" As for their profession. No wonder that online role-playing games on the Internet is one of the more successful business models. There was 20 games in 2002, about twice the number has been developed. How successfully these business models are difficult to say, as the fear of fear, so that the competition can hardly pay about their subscribers. Corrections according to "Lineage" with about 2.7 million players, most of which live in Sudkorea and Taiwan. Behind it probably come "Everquest" with more than 400,000 subscribers and "Ultima online" With about 230000 paying customers. According to economic analysts, in 2004, the revenue from the monthly transactions for online games is 2.3 billion dollars.
Everquest
Why are people investing so much money and attention in online rolling games? Maybe because you are a biggest staging of everyday life. In almost all online rolls, there are places that are created alone for young game characters and new players. There you can explore a small part of the game world relatively safely, collect food, hunt animals and earn some money. Banalitats, certainly. Enthusiastically talk about players Newlingen in "Everquest", How to get two cobwebs and one "Coarse" Silk can make. Because players and play it will honor it will be put into the staging, it is barely doubted. It creates a community in which every player and any game character is needed in which every work has and can be convinced by the meaning of his actions. The author J.G. Ballard has already in his novels at the end of the nineties "Cocaine Nights" and "Super Cannes" The emergence of such communities described: people whose work is no longer needed, which no longer need to work to live, or who no longer cancel their work, create their own world in which they are required and needed.
But if you want to look at online trolling games as a light of a new utopian thinking, instead of these results, you have to look at the process of closely that you produce. He also explains the success of the online rolling games.
The special thing about online rolling games is that here the game is created by the interaction of up to a few thousand players. Who, for example, the world of "Lineage" enters, very soon, what that means: For Central European lunchtime, one becomes, or its own game character, with "good Morning" Coveted because it is at the Eastern Custe of the United States just seven o’clock. At the same moment, another game character says goodbye to "Goodnight", Because in Seoul it is ten o’clock in the evening.
In such events, it becomes clear from which complex interrelations here the game arises: the players first relate elements of the ale world. They live their game characters after the time zones of the earth, they ask teammates in which countries they sit, tell telling their hobbies or Arger in the job. For the second, the players align their actions at the conditions of the game world. There are many talks that commit yourself with the game world: players in "Lineage" For example, praise the priority of dogs as a companion. In the woods, the animals are said to be wild, the simplest Beagles are to tame, the hardest the Dobermanner. As the third, the expectations of the teammates are added to certain game characters that are anticipated by players.
In "Lineage" one can between four so-called "Character classes" Elections and then acts as a magician, camphor, eleven or noble through the game world. It is often observed that the players react to expectations that are directed to their game character. A magician rarely stumbles in struggle, rather hold in the background to think about effective strategies. Even more banal: He is tapping messages to his teammates around a chosen expressive passes. Here, OnlinePolling Games, of course, acknowledge all other communities, with a substantial difference: the player can create a new game character at any time due to the anonymity of the game world, at which only very little ejector of foreign expectations are directed, since nobody knows him.
The game world in online rolling games is thus created in an emergent process whose variables can be reduced here more than outlined. The gaming experience is equal from the expectations of the players to the game world, whose predetermined circumstances, the interaction of the game characters and players are determined. But none of these factors determines them alone, it is impossible to centrally plan the gaming experience. Even the coarse repayments of the game worlds, for example, "Anarchy online" or "Lineage", In which the future of whole continents is decided, not only of the play operators are available to the material with which the game characters work, they are themselves product of this work. Just as the gross payment of the intersubjective reality is created only by ever-increasing updating of meaning in interpersonal communication, the highlights of the online rolling games on the Internet are created from the interacting small repayments of the players and game characters.
Un centrally controlled developments resulting from a momentum of the game are often observed in online rolling games. In "Ultima online" For example, a player who wants to have a tailor as a game character must actually be simply near that some time. As a bow maker you can earn good money, unless one day the market is surprised, because several players have discovered the lucrative of this profession. Because tailors and bowing builds some players do not seem to a prospective hero, there was just in the early days of "Ultima online" Numerous outlaws specializing in the dead and robows of other player characters. Thus, a separate payment developed: Bundisans against the marauders originated, a culture of guilds and bundles between self-government and self-judiciary was born. Many guild organize themselves in the network with their own pages and forums as loose communities. There are repayments of the large gluttes of their own guild, screenshots of the guild house in the game world, Codexe, which can view interested in membership.
Nobody has planned these features of the guilds concretely, they followed from an emergent process. ONLINE ROLL GAMES Do not have a given goal and no more end, there is no central planning and no all-encompassing statements about goal and way. Here a new thinking of utopia is experienced, the emergence accepted as a form of order.
Emergency
Emergence have been able to observe people for centuries before the development of the first computer. In every antical colony, a collective intelligent behavior can be observed, which is neither a central instance nor on a planning divided by all ants. It results from individuals, only for a very limited decision horizon effective legislators. The same principle is sometimes observed in the development of bads or social groups and of course at evolution.
But the computer is the ideal tool to deliberately use emergence as a construction principle. Computers are designed to manage many different legality statements with closely limited validity and numerous variables. Script recognition programs are perhaps the most vivid exam of the conscious application of emergent processes. No matter if you now enter an appointment in his palm or record the text of a print side with the program omnipage — it always works a similar basic principle.
The wrist recognition works ultimately as a competition of many small, specialized program modules, so-called agents. For example, write a "D", So maybe an agent that recognizes vertical lines will report that one is present here. Similarly, a state-of-circled agent could react. This information is processed by a second category of modules: one for the letter "D" Statient agent can plan based on the existing information for the letter to be recognized "D" is. Maybe a for "B’s" Responsible agent just asparagus. Of the "C"-Agent is leaving, since when includes "C" vertical lines? The experience already collected in the case of similar decisions will then be a Urganized program instance of the judgments separated by the agents to a decision. In no of the individual program steps, the letter was actually recognized, as a whole, such a decision is made — and almost always correct.
These special possibilities of the computer also use the social sciences. In recent years, the so-called soconics have emerged, a field of research between sociology and computer science, which produces artificial societies in computer simulations. Very well-known was the artificial society in the mid-nineties "Sugarscape" The researcher Joshua Epstein and Robert Axtell from the Washington Brookings Institute. The agents of the world of "Sugarscape" custom food.
Based on this basic given, Epstein and Axtell have tested different economic policies by, for example, the starting conditions changed that trade in "Sugarscape" liked. In addition to the staple food sugar then a rooted in the world of "Sugarscape". The agents need both fabrics, but in different quantities. If agents meet, you can swap sugar and roots to always recalculated conditions. First of all were at "Sugarscape"-Model The consequences of this trade on the macro level positive. Companies, with widely used disabilities or metabolic problems of agents, could be stable by trade. However, the population groove soon began to fluctuate between overpowering and strong rints. In addition, the price fluctuated for sugar strong. According to Epstein and Axtell, these results show that economic policy laissez-faire does not necessarily mean a fair and stable distribution of resources. It turned out that the consequences of emergent processes are not absolutely planable.
Quite similar "Sugarscape" Also work many game worlds. The difference is that man does not observers here, but players, ie variable in the running emergent process. Basically, in computer games, which have a certain emergence, two groups have two groups from each other: On the one hand, those who use emergence only as a tool, ie, for example, in artificial intelligence, which suggest an organic game world to the player. On the other hand, those games in which emergent processes are the basic game principle. The pragmatic can be distinguished both types of play, whether they pretend to the player a goal determined in advance or make him a certain freedom here, to determine goals only in the course of the game itself.
The artificial intelligence in the game "Black White" From 2001, both aspects united. The goal of the player in "Black White" First of all, is relatively clear. He is a god and can do everything on an island whose inhabitants do it, transport wood to help people build people rubbing and planting, with bales and stones, people to farmers, foresters and similar occupations. As God, he is to him, of course, to have many credes — whether this is achieved by the fear of a lending or by recognition for a helping God, the player can decide.
After a short sense of play, a significant aspect is added: the player is set to a so-called creature aside, a beings that can be carrier in the game world and can act as a tool of the God. Can, does not have to. Because the player has to educate his creature. A variety of variables affects the behavior of the creature: With the help of so-called leashes, the player can reject their specific behaviors as good or bad. If the creature watches the pleasantly fluffy leash an action, it is more ready to imitate this. Even random observations of the player behavior can stimulate the creature for unprecedented. This is made of some predetermined basic expiration, to which it also likes to please your teacher.
In the gameplay, the creature learns which acts satisfy what needs, it apparently also dares the meaning of certain needs, the effectiveness of certain behaviors and the players’ reactions to ever new hierarchies. There are many pages on the internet on which players are beamed and tagged their experiences with the learning creature telling. So it is called "Creature Stories Archive" for example: "I brought my creature how to throw the rain magic on cereals and tree. When he finally managed it, he threw the spell for five times a row on the same bush. Then I tore the bush out of the ground and threw him in the store in the village. My armchair hit his forehead with hand and shook his head as if he had done everything for nothing".
Obviously irritating "Black White" not so much the allmaking fantasy than God perfectly control a world, but rather the interaction with variables that can not be controlled. Also in "SIM City 3000", A city planning game from 1999, something comparable to watch. At first glance, the player seems to build a total power over the city in the game world. According to his will, he can draw strain through housing estates, including industrial plants between schools and similar. But this control seems only omacty, because the zones designed by the player develop only indirectly from him. He can not force the inhabitants of the game world to live and work in certain areas, this development calculates the computer, of course, involving the actions of the player.
Also in "Civilization 3" suggests the perspective that looks the player’s score on the top of the game world, everybody, obviousness, planibility. Printing also the graphics that develops developments such as alphabet and legal text in unique, linear continuity. In the game, however, the connections are not so clear, the player, of course, engages all-religious processes, but the result of these interventions is decided in an emergent process.
This differentiates these games from others such as "Max Payne" or "Metal Gear Solid 2", in which emergence is used only as a principle to offer the player a potential exciting or pleasant experience. In "Max Payne" For example, an artificial intelligence automatically adjusts the degree of difficulty of the game to the skills of the player. In "Metal Gear Solid 2" Tracking the opponents controlled by an artificial intelligence in the game, in fact, the footprints of the player’s character to a hiding place, call a scan and then reach it, possibly from an ambush. In these games, the central element is discovering the game world and your requirements for the player.
Newer games like "Black White" or "The Sims" On the other hand, there is a different focus: In them, the player does not have to discover and follow the laws of the game world, but experiment with them, test new behaviors and build relationships with the world of play. This in-relationship setting makes emergence experiencing, the player becomes part of the process.
Emergence think
The experience of the players with "Black White", "Civilization 3" or "The Sims" Help him to accept supposed chaos as a form of order, which can only be perceived as a whole. Development is no longer intended in these games as a top-down process, but as a process running from the bottom upwards, which produces a higher order without central control. Here are computer games against the classic idea of progress and utopia. For example, Francis Bacon searched in "New Atlantis" A method of programming all future scientific discoveries to make progress independently of chance. This ideal of a central order is an integral part of classic utopias.
But it was no longer contemporary in the twentieth century. The utopia criticism in works such as Jewgenij Samjatin’s novel "we" Dragging positive utopias in negative on their principle back, the society as a whole has priority before the autonomous reason of the individual.
But if utopia and above all the position of the individual can no longer be defined by predefined guides, values, standards and structures, this must provide a new form. Against this background, the turnover of social sciences to emergent processes can be seen in the models used by socionics. Computer games make this kind of thinking experienceable.
The player
The crucial objection to computer games as a light of a new thinking of utopia is the role of technology in the gaming experience. In classic utopias technology and science are not only driving moment, but above all a means of enforcing totalitarian designs of the community. Technology helps in the steering of the company to the central goal of utopia as well as the design of the desired condition. While the power of technology is used for a different purpose, today the new, interactive technologies promise the development of their users today promise today. This promise must be undergraded because who controls whom in computer games is a crucial criterion for their good as utopia of utopia.
Of course, computer games require an episis of the player. Keyboard and mouse combinations must be learned to run certain acts. The player must act quickly, avoid any unnecessary movement. Sometimes small episodes for learning the control are sometimes the actual game, such as in "Max Payne". Especially in games like this, in which the game character moves at a very high speed through space, the player sometimes in a self-forgotten noise state, he goes up in the process, the handles run automatically, the connection between the hand and the eye does not seem to the connection between the hand and the eye To take away from the brain, one fails with the hardware and software to become a unit, a human machine system. Such experiences also make programmers or graphic designers at hours of work on the computer. Maybe this is a very concrete state of that action, the Alvin Toffler with "prosming" designated.
But this rushful experience is by no means a submission of the legality and requirements of the computer. On the contrary: the game, or the mixture of producing and consuming arises from an interaction of equal parties. Neither the game and his technique dominates the player, nor did it underverse. The player is the constituent expansion of the game. Complex element arises in computer games by the fact that output always becomes a new input that the program processes after a variety of existing legislators. And man, or his play, is the ultimate input. David Cronenberg has that in his movie "existence" shown very concretely: People Technify their body by means of artificial connections in the backmark to experience computer games on these interfaces, while gambling computers are manufactured by marmally made of artificial meat.
It is becoming increasingly important in computer games to cooperate with artificial intelligences, rely on them to educate them to see through them. "Black and white", or "Civilization 3" are examples of this development. That technique, and such as technique depends on man, is the soothing and exciting message of this computer games. That man sometimes appears only as an equal variable in the game is a considerable value.
Utopia of utopia
Computer games use the just as important technology in the same way in the same way as classical utopias. The players’ decisions will no longer be subject to a given game target and predetermined ways today in many computer games. The arrival in the rules of the game is in computer games like "Black White" and rather with online rolling games, a means of creating something new, unstoppable planned.
The mistake of classic utopias was to either look for emergent processes or to evaporate as a storm act. Computer simulations of artificial societies in the social sciences have shown that emergent processes make community. So if utopias want to meet your topic, just the design of the community, you must use emergent processes instead of neglecting them through central planning and the ideal of perfect state order.
Some computer games — in the past five years, it has become more and more — for these new experiences. Literature and film are technically unable to make Emergenz experienced. That’s why you can not accuse you that you do not try to re-think over Utopia. In popular culture today computer games create the only utopias of utopia. Some of them even pretty convincing, in any case, but notify.
In computer games, more and more people are investing a multiple of time, which was spent in the cinema, comics or bookers. They do it because computer games show that and how the future is still conceivable today. Games promise the possibility of utopian thinking — how could they bind so much time and attention?