Chapter 5
Go Make a Game!
Games and Gamers
Gaming is somewhat different from other fandoms. There’s no way even a casual gamer can be an entirely passive consumer, unlike a TV viewer. Playing the simplest game requires the player to do something. To some extent, every gamer is an engaged fan. But some gamers choose to enter more fully into active game fandom. This chapter will focus on video and role-playing games, but fans of board, card, and other games participate as well.
Finalists face off in the Street Fighter V tournament at the 2016 Evolution Championship Series event in Las Vegas, Nevada. More than fourteen thousand fans competed in tournaments for nine different player-versus-player games.
Who plays games? Specific numbers on role-playing games are hard to pin down. A 2011 study reported that 91 percent of people aged two to seventeen play video games. A 2015 study found that 49 percent of American adults report playing video games with some regularity. Though both men and women assume that more men are gamers, the same number of men and women play video games. However, men are twice as likely to call themselves gamers.
Pop-culture writer Jonathan Malcolm Lampley commented on the widespread appeal of gaming, “Even the stereotypical high school ‘jock’ of the 21st century is computer literate and likely plays video games; for that matter, the Internet has given rise to ‘fantasy football’ and other hypothetical sports games that strike me as far weirder pastimes than collecting action figures or learning the [Star Trek] Klingon language could ever be.” But gaming’s popularity is nothing new.
Game fans, of course, make all the fanworks discussed in earlier chapters. They write fic. In 2015, on AO3, fic based on the game Dragon Age came in second only to fic from the Supernatural megafandom. Game fans make vids, cosplay, and art. Engaged gamers film and upload gaming vlogs (video blogs), game commentary, and reviews. Chat rooms and forums host game discussions. Fans also make their own models and game pieces for tabletop games. They create new games from the ground up, and they modify existing games and game characters.
Games—particularly video games—are a kind of pop art, according to game writer and critic Tom Bissell. In a 2013 interview, Bissell said, “The generation coming of age right now is taking it for granted that the things they watch and read have some type of input/output aspect to them.” And the line between fan and commercial producers is fuzzier in games than in other fan activities. Indie—independent or alternative—designers, for instance, make games that may get commercial release or may be shared directly, for free.
Games may be highly mathematical or pure fantasy. In first-person shooter games, the player sees the gameplay from behind a gun. Gamers play fitness games, such as Wii Fit, and life-simulation games, such as the Sims series. Puzzle games include Tetris and Candy Crush. Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), such as World of Warcraft, are the electronic offspring of tabletop role-playing games (RPGs) and live-action role-playing (LARP). LARPers meet in person, too; in a mix of fanfiction, cosplay, and gaming, role-players become their characters, or avatars.
From Pawns to Pixels
Humans have been designing games since ancient times. Four-sided ankle bones from animals served as dice in amusements, games, and divination for thousands of years. The modern children’s game of jacks, also called knucklebones, is a descendant.
A complete history of gaming would be far too long for this book. But we can follow one game, chess, from its start in sixth-century India all the way to the beginning of modern video games, and beyond. Merchants carried chess sets from country to country during the Middle Ages, and it became known as a refined pastime that improved players’ knowledge of military strategy. Powerful rulers commissioned luxurious chess sets made of precious materials, played long-distance games via correspondence, and even had the game included in their portraits. As the centuries passed, fans produced books and magazines to discuss chess, as well as boards and pieces ranging from tiny and portable to nearly life-sized.
This game board and pieces, possibly for an early ancestor of chess, were found at Mohenjo-daro, an archaeological site in what is now Pakistan. This ancient city, one of the largest in the Indus Valley Civilization, was built around 2500 BCE.
With its simple rules and infinitely complex strategies, chess was one of the first games to be translated into computer language. And the first computer game designers were mathematicians. In 1936 British mathematician Alan Turing came up with an idea for a Turing machine, a computer that could follow any algorithm, or set of rules. In 1948 he created a chess-playing algorithm called Turochamp for such a machine to follow. However, the machine didn’t actually exist, so Turing played the role of the computer by doing the calculations by hand. It took him thirty minutes to calculate each of the computer’s moves. A computer scientist in the United States played for the humans. The computer lost. In 1957 IBM researcher Alex Bernstein created the first computer chess program that could play an entire game by itself. The IBM 704 computer, which filled an entire room, took eight minutes per move.
Inspired by these early efforts, computer scientists developed versions of tic-tac-toe, tennis, and other games for computers as well. In 1962 a group of student and staff computer scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) wrote a hack, or unauthorized program, called Spacewar! This space combat game was developed on the new PDP-1 mainframe computer, one of the first to have a cathode-ray tube display, like a TV screen. Steve Russell, one of the creators of Spacewar!, later told Rolling Stone magazine how he and four friends decided to design a flashier way to show off the computer’s features. “Here was this display that could do all sorts of good things!” Russell said. “We decided that probably you could make a two-dimensional maneuvering sort of thing, and decided that naturally the obvious thing to do was spaceships.” Within weeks Spacewar! spread to other PDP-1 computers at research centers around the country. The program encouraged users to refine it, and students and staff alike eagerly added new features. The 1972 Rolling Stone article described Spacewar! as “a flawless crystal ball of things to come in computer science and computer use.”
The same article quoted a definition of these new computer programmers, called hackers, from Xerox researcher Alan Kay. “A true hacker is not a group person,” said Kay. “He’s a person who loves to stay up all night, he and the machine in a love-hate relationship. . . . [Hackers] tended to be brilliant but not very interested in conventional goals. And computing is just a fabulous place for that.” The term hacker did not have connotations of illegal activities at the time. Rather, it referred to people so passionate about computer programming that they did it for fun, possibly using institutional computers without permission.
Arcades and Living Rooms
For moving images, bright colors, and sound effects, gamers went to video arcades to play games on machines throughout the 1980s. The gameplay didn’t allow for much narrative storytelling. Classics from this era include the maze-chase game Pac-Man, shooter game Space Invaders, and platform game Mario Bros. Time magazine reported that fans spent almost $5 billion on arcade games in 1981, one quarter at a time. That was almost twice what the US film industry earned that year.
With the advent of personal computers, you didn’t have to be a computer scientist to play electronic games, but you did need patience to program them on your computer. Dawn Foran started gaming in the early 1980s, when she was five years old. Foran’s father would enter pure machine code into their Commodore 64 (C64), a boxy keyboard that hooked up to the Forans’ black-and-white TV. Coding this way was a tedious and error-prone typing task. It looks like this: 169 1 160 0 153 0 128 153 0 129 153 130 153 0 131 200 208 241 96. This string of code tells the computer to print the letter A one thousand times on the screen.
Because there wasn’t much room in the computer’s memory, the Forans saved their games on audio cassette tapes. To play these early text games, you typed instructions in response to prompts, displayed as text on the TV screen. Foran said, “We’d take turns playing games in which you were an @ symbol, wander around maps fighting monsters which looked like * and ! Terribly exciting.”
In the early 1990s, wider Internet availability spurred the growth of computer games. Fans have played “correspondence” chess by mail for centuries, so naturally the Internet Chess Club started the Internet Chess Server (ICS) in 1992. It was the first time chess players could play via the Internet. ICS displayed the games as text or as ASCII graphics––pictures made of slashes, brackets, and other symbols on a computer keyboard. (ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange.) For example, ASCII pawns look like this:
Role-Playing Games
While video games were moving from computer labs to living rooms, another kind of game was making waves. First released in 1974, Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) is a tabletop RPG in which players take on the roles of imaginary characters who engage in adventures. Anne Jamison, who writes about fanfiction, compares RPGs to fanfic. “Players already work to develop their characters just to play the game,” she said. “The game provides the world and its rules, but the fanfic can kind of weave in and out with the gameplay, so both the story and its source are interactive.” Besides creating their own characters, players could invent entirely new settings for the game. (In fact, creators Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson developed the idea out of modifications they made to historical tabletop wargames, similar to Risk, in which armies compete to control the world.) D&D games inspired players to sketch portraits of their characters and create maps of their new worlds, and a surge of fanworks followed.
Dungeons & Dragons players use rule books, dice, and miniature figures (many of them hand-painted) to track their adventures.
Most early D&D players met in person, creating bonds that led to lifelong friendships and helped forge a gamer community. Mithen, a gamer who played D&D in high school, recalled how her friends Craig and Scott spotted a fellow gamer when a new kid joined their class: “As the teacher droned on, the kid pointed at the teacher and whispered [a D&D spell] ‘Magic missile.’ At which point Craig and Scott knew they’d found a new friend and started talking to him right then and there. Being interested in D&D was kind of like a badge at the time, a statement that you were a deliberate outsider.” But D&D went on to become one of the most popular RPGs of all time and inspired dozens of similar games. It influenced not just fantasy games but the development of open-world video games, in which players can wander freely.
Role-players who wanted to be even closer to the action created a new subculture in the gaming world, live-action role-playing. Instead of playing on a board, like D&D, or online, as in World of Warcraft, LARPers meet in person to participate in a story world, often using game rules with roots in tabletop RPGs. Some are based on established media sources, such as the Lord of the Rings books or films, while others are set in LARP-specific worlds. It’s like participating in a real-life video game or movie that the players cocreate as they go along. As in other areas of fan culture, LARPers seize the opportunity to engage with a story, incorporate art, costumes, and props, and build community.
Patches and Mods
Like the computer hackers who continued to develop and add to Spacewar!, modern gamers patch (alter or modify) games. Often this is encouraged by game developers, who release software allowing fans to design or modify (mod) the skins, or appearance, of their game characters, known as avatars. Developer id Software, for instance, included software to create skins when they released the shooter game Quake in 1996. The company had designed only one avatar for the game: a big-muscled, stereotypically male-looking model. Playable female characters were almost unheard of at the time, and id didn’t anticipate that players would want to play a female-looking avatar. Using the customization tools, Quake fans of all genders developed and shared female skins for the muscular avatars. Their enthusiasm made an impression, and the next versions of Quake included a female avatar.
Like fic writers, online game fans exist in a gift economy, freely sharing their game add-ons. A gamer who shared skins online wrote, “Here on this page I shall have some links and some skins that I have made as well as an occasional sampling of my traditional art work. . . . I’m sure you’ll find my skins very unique. . . . DOWNLOAD THEM!”
Beyond avatars, gamers may also revise the games themselves. They may modify the game engine, the basic program that controls the game’s sound, lighting effects, and other visuals, and the player’s movement and navigation through the game world. Quake fans, for example, created and shared new levels and even versions of the game with completely different rules.
A patch is an add-on to an existing game program. It changes the original code of a computer game. A patch may fix a problem in a game, add new graphics and sounds, or even completely rework the game. Josephine Starrs and Leon Cmielewski created the game patch Bio Tek Kitchen in 1999. It replaced all the weapons in the game Marathon with kitchen utensils. Instead of guns, players are armed with dishcloths, blenders, and spatulas to defend themselves against mutant vegetables running amok in the kitchen lab of a genetic designer.
Gamers enjoy crossovers with other media sources too. Ultimate Simpsons Doom is a mod of the first-person shooter video game Doom. Modders Myk Friedman and Walter Stabosz replaced the game’s monsters with the family, neighbors, and coworkers of Homer Simpson from the cartoon show The Simpsons. The gamer plays as Homer, who is armed with the usual Doom weapons but wins Simpsons-specific items such as doughnuts or bowling balls as health-restoring items and bonuses.
In an entirely low-tech way of modding a game character, fan-crafter Nichole knitted tiny Pokémon characters and hid them outside at Pokéstops in Dallas, Texas, where she lives. Pokéstops are locations where players of the mobile game Pokémon GO expect to find and catch the digital pocket monsters. She attached tags with her contact info to her knitted monsters, and a parent contacted her to say thank you on behalf of their young daughter, who found a knitted Poliwag. “She was so excited to find a Pokémon at the park,” the parent wrote, adding, “My favorite thing, however, is that this experience has motivated [my daughter] to leave ‘treasure’ at other parks for people as well.” Nichole makes her knitting patterns for Pokémon available free online at the fiber-art site Ravelry.com, which hosts many fannish patterns.
By Gamers, for Gamers . . . and the World
Game fans mix and match other kinds of fanworks, bringing their perspectives as gamers to the fandom community. In 1998 Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, friends who had played D&D (and other games) together in high school, began drawing an online comic strip, or webcomic, called Penny Arcade. It followed two guys named Gabe and Tycho who hung around playing and talking about video games. Within two years, it was so popular they quit their jobs to run the comic and associated blog full-time.
When Holkins and Krahulik were growing up, the larger culture stereotyped gamers as oddballs who lived in their parents’ basements. Unhappy with the persistent ideas of gamers as uncaring losers and all games as violent, the two gamers founded Child’s Play in 2003. The charity organizes gamers to donate children’s video games to hospitals and shelters. It also publishes a list of therapeutic video games recommended to help distract children who are in pain, entertain young patients stuck in bed, and relieve kids’ sadness, stress, and anxiety. The first year, the organizers planned to collect donations in their garages and distribute them at Christmas. They ended up having to rent a warehouse. After that, supporters donated money instead or ordered games online and shipped them to the charity. In its first fourteen years, Child’s Play raised more than $40 million. Krahulik and Holkins were named among Time’s 100 Most Influential People in America in 2010. They’re credited with fostering a sense of community among geeks and gamers.
Some gamers also design and play games for the greater good. Players of Foldit, an online, multiplayer, 3-D puzzle game, are working on solutions to cancer and other diseases. Designed by the Center for Game Science at the University of Washington, the game challenges gamers to tackle the problem of protein folding. Proteins fold up into unique shapes. Discovering their structure is one of the hardest and costliest problems biologists face. It matters because protein folding plays a role in many diseases and also their cures. Since the game’s release in 2008, more than 460,000 players from all backgrounds have performed better than the best known computer methods.
In 2011 Foldit gamers solved a puzzle that had stumped scientists for fifteen years. They generated a model of a protein that plays a role in the deadly disease AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome). The scientific journal Nature published the results, giving credit to the gamers. The Foldit blog said, “This is [a] truly amazing accomplishment. All Foldit players should be proud.”
Streaming Gameplay
From the beginning of electronic games, gamers have recorded themselves playing games, whether to offer strategy and tips or just provide entertainment. Let’s Plays (LPs) are videos of one or more people playing and commenting on a video game for the fun of it. They started in 2005 as a series of screenshots with running game commentary on the comedic website Something Awful and then moved to YouTube and other video-sharing sites. In video LPs, most of the screen is the gameplay. In a small inset is the gamer playing and commenting on it—usually in a humorous way. Trey Parker, cocreator of South Park, said, “I know it might seem weird, especially to those of us from an older generation, that people would spend so much time watching someone else play video games. But I choose to see it as the birth of a new art form.”
NoHandsKen is the username of Ken Worrall, a quadriplegic gamer paralyzed from the neck down. He plays with a jouse, a mouth-controlled device that works like a mouse. Worrall plays Diablo, World of Warcraft, and StarCraft on Twitch, a live-streaming video platform for the gaming community. Live-streaming allows viewers to interact with the player, bringing a potentially solitary game experience into a larger community. In a YouTube video called “My Name Is Ken,” Worrall credited learning to game with opening up his life after a devastating accident. He wrote on his Twitch, “All the incredible people I’ve met, talked and played with have had a massive impact on me in a very good way. You guys are amazing.”
Fans also record their gameplay and remix it to make new works. Machinima mixes patching and vidding to make a video using the graphics engine of a game. When World of Warcraft, for instance, included an option to make characters dance in the game, fans used it to create machinima of the characters dancing to popular music. More unexpectedly, machinima-maker Olanov modified and animated police officers from the violent shooter game Grand Theft Auto V. He set them dancing to the cheerful earworm “Happy,” a song by Pharrell Williams. In a roundup of machinima made from their games, Rockstar Games featured Olanov’s vid, which got more than sixty thousand views on YouTube.
Embrace Your Weird
Donovan Beltz started gaming when he was very young. He doodled and designed his own game characters on paper, encouraged by his mother and grandmother, who gave him books on how to draw people and anime characters. He recalls, “I started creating characters because it allowed me to use my creative thought process and express myself through digital artwork. It was also a way for me to escape the pain of being bullied, but also allowed me to ‘fight back’ against the bullies in my imagination [and] to create characters and heroes that I wish I could be, who had courage that I wish I had.”
At twenty-four years old, Beltz uses both paper and digital tools, such as Adobe Illustrator and Blender (a 3-D computer graphics program), to design games. He explains, “I’d like to create games that can help kids who are on the autism spectrum (I have Asperger syndrome, a high-functioning form of autism) as well as be able to create games that can be used in everyday situations, such as schools, hospitals, job training, etc.”
Felicia Day knows something about being bullied. Day is the creator of the webseries The Guild, about a group of MMORPG players, and of the YouTube channel Geek & Sundry, which follows and creates pop and gamer culture. She became the target of cyberbullying during the 2014 Gamergate controversy. Gamergate was a mostly anonymous online harassment campaign organized primarily on Twitter. At their most polite, Gamergate supporters said they objected to growing feminist influence on gaming culture. At their worst, they threatened female gamers with rape and murder.
Day was afraid to speak out at first. In October 2014, however, she wrote a blog post, “The Only Thing I Have to Say about Gamergate.” Her peaceful message said, “Games are beautiful, they are creative, they are worlds to immerse yourself in. They are art. And they are worth fighting for, even if the atmosphere is ugly right now. . . . To myself and to everyone else who operates out of love not vengeance: Don’t abandon games. Don’t cross the street. Gaming needs you. To create, to play, to connect. To represent.”
Immediately after she posted this, Gamergate cyberbullies doxxed her, or publicly posted her home address (with the implied threat of personal violence). Day closed her comments section. But her message had already reached fans who wanted gaming to remain welcoming.
Former Minnesota Vikings football player Chris Kluwe also wrote an article calling out haters in Gamergate. “I grew up playing games,” Kluwe wrote. “I’m sick and tired of the misogynistic [women-hating] culture in today’s gaming community.” He called for recognition that the game industry has not included and welcomed everyone equally, and celebrated that it is changing. “When people think of ‘gamers,’” he said, “I want them to think of . . . athletes who play competitive League of Legends, and all the normalization we’ve accomplished over the years. I want them to think of feminism, and games as an art form — something more than mass entertainment.”
Meanwhile, Day stocked her online store with merchandise bearing the slogan Embrace Your Weird. Profits from the sale of the items went to an antibullying charity, Stomp Out Bullying. “Your weirdnesses are your super power,” Day said.
Fan-Created Games
The video gaming industry earns billions every year, but people can make games for free if they learn some basics. Self-taught game designer Jacob Janerka created prototypes for a game based on the TV show Stranger Things (2016– ), which follows a group of kids who search for a friend who has disappeared, seemingly into another dimension. The show’s 1980s setting inspired Janerka to mock up a retro-style Stranger Things game. He said, “Back then, adventure games were more like text adventures, but it’s still that pixel aesthetic that fits in with that kind of time era.” He created a few frames of a point-and-click adventure game and posted them as a GIF. The opening frame displays a room from the show. The menu icon looks like one of the walkie-talkies the characters use. The player scrolls a cursor over items in the room to click on options such as Take Pills or Pick up Hammer. Then the scene flickers to the spooky dimension the characters call the Upside Down. Janerka said he had no plans to develop the game.
Game designers don’t even need to know how to code to make games. Twine, for instance, is a free, online game-making tool for creating interactive stories and games, similar to choose-your-own-adventure games. The creator writes a passage in a box and then creates different links for the player to choose. The story branches in different directions depending on the player’s choices. At their most basic, Twines are all text, but their designers can also add formatting, graphics, and sound. Fans brought their favorites to the gaming table, producing Twines based on everything from the Odyssey to D&D, Doctor Who, and Marvel characters.
Twine is part of a cultural shift toward games that are more about personal experience and less about shooting and fighting. Anna Anthropy has been a champion of such games. In her book The Rise of the Videogame Zinesters, she compares Twines to zines, the self-publishing format that opened fandom to a wider audience and enabled its growth. A transgender woman, Anthropy said, “I feel like video games need more voices and more people creating them. . . . And so I absolutely think that queer people and people of color, and people who are outside the nerd status quo need to be involved in making games.” With new tools that make game design more accessible, gamers can more easily portray themselves—in their glorious variety—in the medium.
The increase in open-world games, in which players can choose what they want to do, even if it isn’t what the designers intended, makes it possible to invent a new game within an old one without any coding at all. In some versions of the super-violent game Grand Theft Auto (GTA), for instance, players can invent their own rules. On the Fansplaining podcast episode “Games and Fandom,” host Flourish Klink noted that in GTA, “you literally can just drive away and explore what else is in the world. There’s all these interesting YouTube videos of people who have, like, found a way to drive a car on top of a skyscraper.” She continued, “You can just choose to walk away from the things the game is sort of trying to make you do. And go explore the world. . . . And listen to the radio. Drive around the town, listening to the radio. And just have that be your game.”
Your Green Light
At the heart of fandom is a deep love of stories: hearing, sharing, and participating in them in many ways. Anime USA, an annual con in Washington, DC, describes its weekend-long LARP as “a celebration of fandom and nerdyness that allows you to get into the skin of your favorite character.” The 2016 LARP was set on an Earth on the brink of extinction. Alien enemies had banished all adults, and only children remained in the last surviving city. There, one powerful child gathered a resistance to fight for the future. The LARP instructions concluded, “This society of children is your base, your headquarters, and your backdrop. It is the only cradle you have left, the last bastion of hope on the planet. “Humanity! BATTLE STATIONS!”
Warriors clash in the five-day LARP event Battle for Vilegis in Italy. More than twelve hundred players from all over Europe participated in the 2017 event.
Novelist Doris Lessing described a surprisingly similar scenario in her acceptance speech for the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature. “Let us suppose our world is ravaged by war,” she said, “by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. . . . It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.”
Strategies and stories, battles and dreams, and humans at their most creative—that’s fandom. Fans who participate in fandom are storytellers. Fanfic writers use words. Cosplayers use fabric and fantasy, and visual artists use paint and pixels. Filmmakers and vidders tell stories in moving images. Gamers create, enter into, and share experiences. Even meta is basically a story about a story. Fans who don’t make their own fanworks are participants too, for every story needs someone to engage with it.
The 2016 study “Inclusion or Invisibility?” concluded that the entertainment industry needs more decision makers from diverse backgrounds. “It’s about who is greenlighting those decisions and who is giving the okay for certain stories to be told,” said Stacy L. Smith, one of the authors of the study. While changes at the top of the industry are crucial, fandom has one big advantage: it operates at the grassroots level, without relying on corporate greenlights. On the blog Black Girl Nerds, user Sharon recalled writing herself into the story when she was young. “As a Black girl,” she said, she wrote fanfiction “to combat the nameless feeling that came over me every time I fell in love with a story that took place in a world where people like me, apparently, didn’t exist—or worse, served only as the punchlines or background characters.”
Fandom is a world where “people like me” exist, whoever you are. If you can imagine it, write, film, sew, perform, draw, or otherwise participate in it, you can share it, whether online, in person at a con or other gathering, or in a game. Whoever you are and whatever you love, in fandom you are your own green light.