Reading these articles and presentations, I was reminded of the concept of “lock-in” as discussed by Jaron Lanier in his manifesto You Are Not a Gadget. Lanier describes “lock-in” as the idea that the flaws and biases of the inventor become encoded in the invention, and that once a piece of technology reaches critical mass of standardization/involvement in people’s everyday life, we’re essentially stuck with those biases. Furthermore, not only are we stuck with them, but they redefine reality. Growing up, for instance, in a media landscape of music that was almost exclusively produced using tools using the now-standard language of MIDI, a whole generation’s idea of what music can be now excludes by default all of the tones that can’t be played on a keyboard, since that was the only instrument MIDI was originally meant for. Like the subjects of Blakemore and Cooper’s experiments who never learned to perceive horizontal lines, perhaps humans who are only ever exposed to a limited definition of what’s possible in a medium lose the ability to perceive alternative possibilities.
It is with that in mind that I read things such as Tale of Tales’ Over Games presentation and feel a deep frustration with the tone that the current discourse around games has taken. So much effort is having to be taken in order not to step on fragile egos and unleash backlash from the mainstream gaming community; It’s like someone is trying to invent the violin, and gangs of keyboard players are attacking them on Twitter and sending swat teams to their house. While marginalized developers are having to delicately craft arguments explaining that they’re not trying to take anyone’s FPS away while they simply carve out space for themselves in a community, society at large falls further and further away from being able to remember that other definitions of “game” are possible. I have spoken to people whose opinions I otherwise trust about games like Dear Esther or Proteus and heard it said too many times that the games were “not successful.” It’s one thing for a game to not be of your personal taste, but when I hear the claim that something is not “successful,” I can’t help but wonder what dumbed-down ideas about what a game can be have already become too locked-in to our culture to reverse.
