Video Games // Net.Art WEEK 13 Greg Lewis, Dehacked, 1994
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// Video Games // Net.Art WEEK 13 Greg Lewis, DeHackEd, 1994. DOS-based editor for doom.exe Justin Fischer, AlienTC, 1994. Modification of Doom (idSoftware, 1993). The “Half-Life Mod Expo”, Thursday, 29th July, 1999. Hosted by Clubi cyber café, San Francisco. Photo: Rublin Starset, Flickr. Team Fortress 2 at the ’99 Half-Life Mod Expo, Thursday, 29th July 1999. Photo: Rublin Starset, Flickr. Minh Le and Jess Cliffe, Counterstrike 1.6, 1999. Dave Johnston, de_dust, 1999. Modification of Valve Software, Half-Life, 1998. Map for Counterstricke 1.6 beta, 1999. H3LLR@Z3R, “Counter-Strike: 1.6 : Mouse Acceleration and Settings”, June 5th, 2006. (https://web.archive.org/web/20080311002 303/http://h3llrz3r.wordpress.com/2006/06/ 03/counter-strike-16-mouse-acceleration- and-settings/) empezar, “Beginner / pro config setups in nQuake”, QuakeWorld forum post, 2012. (https://web.archive.org/web/20121022155129/http://www.quakeworld.nu/forum/topic/5633/beginner -pro-config-setups-in) Ben Morris, Worldcraft level editor for Quake 2, 1996. Bought by Valve and released with Half-Life, 1998. Later renamed the Hammer editor. (https://web.archive.org/web/19970617154501/http://www.planetquake.com/worldcraft/tutorial/index.shtm) von Bluthund, “r_speeds und ihre Optimierung”, 2005-2016. (https://web.archive.org/web/20050222031551/http://thewall.de/content/half-life:tutorials:r_speeds) “While the countercinema described by Wollen existed largely outside Hollywood’s commercial machine, game mods are actually promoted by the commercial sector. This is what Brody Condon calls ‘industry-sanctioned hacking’.” (2006, p. 111) “[Anne-Marrie Schleiner]: In 1994 ID software released the source code for Doom… players of Doom got their hands on this source code and created editors for making custom Doom levels or what were called ‘wads’ [becasue they are made of .wad files: standing for “Where’s All The Data” because the The “Half-Life Mod Expo”, Thursday, 29th July, 1999. .wad only interacts with the parts of Doom released by Hosted by Clubi cyber café, San Francisco. Photo: Rublin Starset, Flickr. idSoftware; it’s not the engine itself]... ((2006, p. 111-112) “...The games engine is a type of abstract core technology that, while it may exert its own personality through telltale traces of its various abilities and features... is mostly unlinked from gameplay layered within it. The game, like all other digital objects, is but a vast clustering of variables, ready to be altered and modified. Visual design and gameplay are variables like any other. The gaming industry has recognized this as a key characteristic of gaming.” (2006, p. 112) Minh Le and Jess Cliffe, Counterstrike 1.6, 1999. Anne-Marie Schleiner, Cracking the Maze, online ex. Cat., July 16, 1999. (http://switch.sjsu.edu/CrackingtheMaze/patches.html) Sonya Roberts, “Female Skin Pack Excerpts”, 1999, for idSoftware Quake, 1996. (http://switch.sjsu.edu/CrackingtheMaze/sonya.html) rtmark, “SimCopter Hack”, 1996. From Cracking the Maze, 1999. (https://web.archive.org/web/19990208010051/http://rtmark.com/) JODI, SOD, 1999. Modification of id Software, Wofenstein 3D, 1993. Corey Archangle, Super Mario Clouds, 2002. Left: Cartridge with visible ROM hack. Right: Installation view, Whitney Museum of American Art. “With SOD Jodi in 1999, Jodi established the standard for today’s artist’s game mod. …untitled game [or SOD for that matter] foregrounds the gaming apparatus both throuhg the use of visual material and through code.” (2006, p. 115) “Conventional gamic form relies on a notion of purposeful interactivity based on a coherent set of game rules. Narrative and form are smoothly joined. But countergaming often has no interactive narrative at all and little gameplay supported by few JODI, SOD, 1999. Modification of id Software, game rules, if any. In this sense, countergaming replaces play Wofenstein 3D, 1993. with aesthetics, or perhaps something like the play of signification.” “A common outcome of having no gameplay is ahving no explicit narrative. Mods like...Super Mario Clouds, and most of Jodi’s work follow this tendency—Pit Schultz refers to this as ‘aestheticizing techincal error’. ...the game engine persists... But it is repurposed to to serve the same sort of modernist formal experiments that the avant-garde has pursued for decades” (2006, p. 118) Corey Archangle, Super Mario Clouds, 2002. Anne-Marie Schleiner, Brody Condon, Joan Leandre, Velvet Strike webpage, 2002. (http://www.opensorcery.net/velvet-strike/sprays.html) Counterstrike 1.6 sprays from the Velvet Strike project, 2001-2002. Anne-Marie Schleiner, et al., Velvet Strike webpage, 2002. Counterstrike 1.6 sprays from the Velvet Strike project, 2001-2002. ”A slightly different approach to the use of unintended narratives is seen in Velvet Strike (Anne-Marie Schleiner, Brody Condon, and Joan Leandre), or in Condon’s in-game performance titled Worship. While not technically mods, these works still attack conventional gamic form by creating unintended scenarios and narratives inside the game. They create conditions of estrangement and unpleasure, to use Wollen’s terminology.” (2006, p. 118) “…the ‘profiles’ and avatars they create to literally embody themselves in disembodied spaces becomes less about performing a cross-gendered or cross-racial alternative or ‘passing’ self to deploy in public communities and more about expressing diasporic, ambivalent, intersectional selves to use within closed communities.” (Nakamura, 2008, p. 47). “[This chapters investigates the] claim that social and entertainment contexts are part of a struggle for ‘citizenship in cyberspace’ … [and the] notion that these are perhaps fruitful places to look for subversive data images that are more ‘owned’ by their users than those available in commercial, governmental, and corporate spaces...” (2008, p.37) Stephen Kromer, Synspace, online ex. cat. 27-31 May, 1999. (http://synworld.t0.or.at/nojava.htm) Mongrel, Blacklash, 1999. Josh On/Futurefarmers, Antiwargame, 2002. (http://www.antiwargame.org/) “Today games like Grand Turismo…are all based on real-world maps with high-degrees of verisimilitude. Gaming’s use of reality [as in Antiwargame or Blacklash] is entirely different from Godard’s use of reality. It doesn’t have the same political import, a subject I explore in chapter 3 [through a reading of an RTS, like Antiwargame, namely Civilization III].” (2006, p. 123) “…the point is not whether the Civilization algorithm embodies a specific ideology of ‘soft’ racism [or, racism as algorithmically embedded racial essentialism, i.e. Hard coded behaviorla Josh On/Futurefarmers, Antiwargame, 2002. (http://www.antiwargame.org/) tendancies for different racial types], ...but whether it embodies the logic of informatic control itself. ... The construction of identity in Civilization gains momentum from offline racial typing, to be sure, but then moves further to a specifically informatic mode of cybernetic typing: capture, transcoding, statistical analysis, quantitative profiling (behavioral or biological), keying attributes to specific numeric variables, and so on. This is similar to what Manovich calls the logic of selection—or what Lisa Nakamura calls “menu driven identities”—only now Manovich’s pick-and-choose, window shopper logic of graphical interfaces governs a rather distinct set of human identity attributes.” (2006, Ch. 3, p. 102) Mongrel, Blacklash, 1999. "Looking at this list, one may conclude that there exists no true avantgarde of gamic action today. In other words, countergaming is essentially progressive in visual form but reactionary in actional form. It serves to hinder gameplay, not advance it. It eclipses the game as a game and rewrites it as a sort of primitive animation lacking any of the virtues of game design. This is essentially the reason why Jodi’s work is apolitical, while Godard’s was hyperpolitical: Jodi aims to create better abstraction, not to create better (or different) gameplay.” (2006, p. 125) JODI, SOD, 1999. Modification of id Software, Wofenstein 3D, 1993. “His Fischer’s] custom campaign roughly mirrors the structure of the film Aliens, with a masterfully paced first level called “Landing Pads” that contains no monsters whatsoever and exists only to setup tension and tell a story — you just move through the level, with no “challenges” whatsoever, then push the exit button. That is: this skillfully hacked piece of game design, the first level of the first mod of the first explosively successful, bonified first- person shooter… was a highly experimental, non-industry- affiliated, functional equivalent of Dear Esther, designed back in 1994.” (Robert Yang, “A People’s History of the FPS”, n.p.) Justin Fischer, AlienTC, 1994. Modification of Doom (idSoftware, 1993). Palm Pilot (1997) games by Sun Flat (SF Cave, 1998) games and Atelier (SimCity Classic, licensed from Maxis, 1999). (https://web.archive.org/web/19991128124559/http://www.atelier.tm/pa lm/scc.html) NEC, “NEC N343i”, running i-mode service in the UK, 2005. i-mode games by George Norton and Ruud Helderman, 2007-2009. Open i-area mobile application, for i-mode mobile internet from Do-Co-Mo, 1999. “By triangulating waves, mobile phones can not only transmit voice, but also be located. The ability to locate mobile phones as what the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) took advantage of when, in 1997, it required that all mobile phones in the United States be locatable for emergency calls, that is, if somebody called 911, their wireless carrier should provide emergency services with the mobile phone’s number and the cell Open i-area mobile application, for i-mode mobile internet site or base station transmitting the call.” (2012, p. 87). from Do-Co-Mo, 1999. “The i-mode service…was launched by NTT DoCoMo in 1999, and the Japenese were therefore one of the first people in the world to use their mobile phones for more than voice and text messages. ...As ealy as 2001, the Japenese were already using i-mode-based LBS [location-based service] that allowed user to find retsuarants and shops. The i-area service, for example, delivered location specifc weather, traffic, and dining information to users all over NEC, “NEC N343i”, Japan.