Homebrew and the Social Construction of Gaming Community, Creativity, and Legal Context of Amateur Game Boy Advance Development by Brett Bennett Camper B.A. Comparative History of Ideas University of Washington, 2002 SUBMITTED TO THE COMPARATIVE MEDIA STUDIES PROGRAM IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF SCIENCE IN COMPARATIVE MEDIA STUDIES AT THE MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY JUNE 2005 © 2005 Brett Bennett Camper. All rights reserved. The author hereby grants to MIT permission to reproduce and to distribute publicly paper and electronic copies of this thesis document in whole or in part. Signature of Author: ......................................... Comparati 4 Media Studies Program May 10, 2005 C ertified by: .......................................................... ...... .................. Henry Jenkins Professor and Co-Director, Comparative Media Studies IA h / Thesis Supervisor A ccepted by: ..................... V .... ........................................... 4 ......................................... William Uricchio Professor and Co-Director, Comparative Media Studies SACHUSETTS INSTIWE MAFOF TEOHNOLOGY OCT 1;7 2007 ARCHVES LIBRARIES Homebrew and the Social Construction of Gaming Community, Creativity, and Legal Context of Amateur Game Boy Advance Development by Brett Bennett Camper Submitted to the Comparative Media Studies Program on May 10, 2005 in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Comparative Media Studies ABSTRACT This thesis challenges the common social construction of game development, which perceives the activity only within its commercial, corporate realm. As an exemplar of the many thriving amateur development communities, the self-identified "homebrew" Nintendo Game Boy Advance (GBA) development community is analyzed in-depth. This unique community is brought to the attention of scholars as an important intersection of game studies and amateur media studies, challenging the focus of game studies on commercial production. The GBA homebrew community is studied from the personal motivational level to the social dynamics of the group. The analysis considers the blend of technological and cultural motivations brought to bear on the production and the content of the amateur games, and how amateur development facilitates skill acquisition outside of canonical academic structure, and opens access to professional mobility. The case study advances both historical and contemporary comparisons to other independent media communities. The thesis also examines discussions in the community around peer-judged competitions as a form of vernacular theory. The content of homebrew GBA games released into the community are further analyzed, with the construction of useful categories spanning genre, fan games, remakes, remixes, and tech demos. Nostalgia and parody in relation to game history are especially considered, as are demonstrations of technical skill ("tech demos") as a uniquely amateur practice. The legal context of amateur GBA development is also examined. Nintendo maintains the GBA as a closed, proprietary system, and thus for homebrew developers access to information and legitimacy is blocked. Comparisons are advanced to historical examples of intellectual property enforcement in the emergence of corporate media in the 20th century. Amateur practice is found to be tangential to corporate interests, ignored both by the disinterest of corporations, and in blanket policies targeting piracy. Historical cases that legitimate reverse engineering of software are discussed for context. Thesis concludes that one cannot cleanly construct categories of amateur and professional as separate practices, and remarks upon the constant renewal and shifts in amateur development communities as new game platforms are released in the commercial market. Thesis Supervisor: Henry Jenkins Title: Professor and Co-Director, Comparative Media Studies Start Amateur Game Development and the Game Boy Advance Homebrew Scene What comes to mind when someone mentions video games? A likely image is the current generation of home systems played on a television; at the time of this writing, the Sony PlayStation 2, the Microsoft Xbox, and Nintendo GameCube - but brands are more or less guaranteed to roll over every three to five years as the industry "progresses" and offers a new slew of products to purchase. Or you might think of game franchises like Grand Theft Auto and Splinter Cell. Or, maybe you've heard about, or played, those increasingly popular "massively multiplayer" online games like World of Warcraft. If you don't identify strongly as a "gamer," you may play titles with mainstream and gender-balanced appeal, like The Sims series, or downshifting technologically, casual web games, like Snood. There are many other subgenres and modes of: dancing games, military simulations, sports, and so on. What probably won't come to mind are games made by hobbyists, outside of the commercial industry. Games made for fun, and not profit, distributed among a group of like-minded amateur developers. You might be vaguely aware of someone you know who is making a game: a friend from college, your child, or the kid down the street. Maybe you're a professional software developer who dabbled with programming games as a kid but abandoned the hobby (or, like one former aspiring child developer I recently met, you work as a reviewer of literature and poetry for the Unitarian church). Making video games is still a highly specialized technical activity. Yet it is also more widespread today than ever before. Games have become increasingly commercialized - for multiple years running, sales of video games have already outstripped Hollywood box-office sales. But from the first video game, created by MIT graduate students forty years ago, to the big business dominance of today, there has been a continual through-line of hobbyist development. Games, in short, have been socially constructed as a commercial medium. It's taken for granted that the "real" games are those made by the companies with the most recognizable names, for the systems advertised online, on television, and in magazines. This has largely been true not only in the public view, but also within the gaming community. There are some encouraging exceptions: aggregator blogs like Slashdot Games cover stories involving amateur development one or two times a week, and events like the annual industry-sponsored Independent Games Festival help raise the profile of work by students, hobbyists, and unconventional start-ups. That doesn't mean hardcore gamers are always oriented towards the newest franchises. As successive generations of game platforms launch and fade, "retro" game nostalgia for systems from the Atari 2600 of the early 1980s to the Super Nintendo Entertainment System of the 90s is increasingly prominent in game culture in the form of inter-game allusions, t-shirt logos, cover bands, and journalistic references. But overall, gamers do tend to remain focused on the field of commercial production, old or new. A Gap, a Wedge: Making Way for Amateur Game Studies The limited social construction of video games described above has so far extended also to academia. Amateur game development is a doubly neglected topic of inquiry, caught in a gap between two fields which themselves have yet to transcend niche status: game studies on the one hand, amateur media studies on the other. My research aims to intersect these fields by studying in depth at one case study - the community of hobbyists who create "homebrew" games for the Game Boy Advance (GBA) handheld platform produced by Nintendo. By understanding the motivations, methods, industry interrelations, and cultural reservoirs of these game makers, we can learn more not only about how and why hobby-based game development functions, but also how alternative media production communities form in relation to and in the shadow of established commercial industries. In this sense the economic backbone of the medium is certainly not to be forgotten; indeed, mainstream game platforms like the Game Boy Advance, dominated by major electronics conglomerates, provide fruitful historical comparisons to the rise of other creative media industries, particularly radio and film. If the rapidly emerging area of game studies is newly coalescing, its disciplinary identities, and therefore the implicit assumptions driving subject matter and methodology, remain uncertain. Like film studies in the latter half of the 20th century, which was able to legitimate itself within the academy by finding a home under the wings of English and comparative literature departments, game studies has faced the institutional challenges of visibility, respectability, and funding. Its home bases are disparate, but two prominent approaches include the formalism of ludology, seeking to map a set of analytical building blocks unique to the interactivity of games (not just digital games), and cultural studies that interpret personal and social meaning in acts of gameplay.1 Both of these approaches 1For representative samples of work in ludology grounded, see Markku Eskelinen's "Towards Computer Game Studies" and Espen Aarseth's "Computer Game Studies, Year One"; a hallmark of this work is its focus on the underlying elements of games, such as quantifiable rules and feedback loops generated by player interaction. In cultural studies, Henry Jenkins' "Game Design as Narrative Architecture" is an example of an attempt to