Los videojuegos no han sido siempre la punta de lanza de la innovación. Durante mucho tiempo los avances se han basado principalmente en las mejoras de hardware que han permito incremntar el realismo de las imágenes, pero cambiando poco en el ámbito narrativo y de interacción social (entre personajes y/o jugadores). Esta fase de la evolución de los videojuegos estuvo asociada (y sigue estándolo en buena parte) a software propietario y desarrollos cerrados. Esta situación hace años que empezó a cambiar gracias, entre otros aspectos, el uso de estándares abiertos y de sistemas de creación colaborativa que han ayudado a incrementar radicalmente la innovación. Además de la propia creación de juegos, el modelo abierto ha permitido innovar en la forma de investigar el mundo de los videojuegos. Dentro de los proyectos abiertos y colaborativos he descubierto dos que resultan especialmente intersantes.
GAM3R 7H30RY es un proyecto de McKenzie Wark, un teórico de la comunicación y la cultura y profesor en la New School for Social Research en Nueva York (A Hacker Manifesto es uno de sus último libros). GAM3R 7H30RY es un libro que se va construyendo en Internet y en el que los lectores pueden colaborar con comentarios (uando un sistema similar a un blogque incluye RSS). En su bienvenida explica el proyecto:
Together with the Institute for the Future of the Book, I created this website as a way to think to about games. Games, as in computer games, are the subject of my next book, GAM3R 7H30RY. I am interested in two questions.
- can we explore games as allegories for the world we live in?
- can there be a critical theory of games?
I thought it would be interesting to share the book in its draft state to see if these questions are something other people might have ideas on or might want to pursue.
Please remember that this is only a draft, and that it is not meant to be an encyclopedia of all things game related. It’s a short book that explores a few ideas. Please have a look at the text before joining the discussion, so you have some idea of what we are and are not interested in here at the GAM3R 7H30RY site.
Este libro es uno de los proyectos de networked books de los editores Institute for the Future of Book donde exploran nuevas formas de producción de cultura “escrita” en un entorno en red donde autores y lectores pueden interactuar durante la creación de la obra. En el caso de GAM3R 7H30RY 1.1, aunque el libro está ya bastante desarrollado, es aún un trabajo en progreso que seguirá modificándose y creciendo por las aportaciones de los lectores. La propia estructura interna del ibro ha sido diseñada para el nuevo medio, aportando innovaciones que podrían ser muy útiles en los blogs (About this project):
The book is also formally inventive. McKenzie composed this draft in a highly modular structure — nine chapters of 25 paragraphs each — presenting us with a very distinct set of design challenges. We created a site that works intimately with this form, providing what we hope is a pleasing and intuitive reading environment for the text.
It was our goal from the beginning to place the book and its discussion on an equal footing. We’d been thinking a lot about the problem of fostering equitable discussion in blogs, where comments tend to flow beneath a parent post and conversation is presented as subordinate or supplementary to the initial entry.
What if you didn’t have to click on a “comments” link to see the discussion? What if the comment areas in the book lived directly beside their corresponding sections? We made several attempts at a design that would accomplish this, documenting the process on our blog. Most of these we ended up scrapping, but we took some pictures along the way.
We had the idea for the card-shuffle interface one day when McKenzie came over to our office in Brooklyn for another round of brainstorming. We started prototyping with a sheet of paper and index cards, but by some sideways luck we pulled out a deck of Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies cards, which suited our needs perfectly. This is the resulting paper prototype (photo w/ wireframe cues photoshop’d in).
In addition to the book interface, McKenzie wanted a free-fire discussion area where people could introduce their own topics — about the book, yes, but also about the specific games dealt with in the book and the experience of game play in general. It would also be a place where people could talk about GAM3R 7H30RY 1.1 as a networked book experiment — how it succeeds, how it fails, and how it might be improved — inevitably broaching meta-subjects like cybertextuality, the future of books, and the design of virtual spaces.
We also wanted the discussion board to be more compelling than just a plain old list of topics, so we started thinking about interesting ways that the discussion could be visualized. Early on, McKenzie had the idea of a graph in which topics float along axes of time and quantity, giving some sense of the shape of the discussion. We liked this idea very much. Then we realized that it wasn’t our idea at all, that in fact some clever folks at the University of Maine had developed something quite similar called The Pool for collaborating on art, code and texts.
Game Innovation Database (GIDb) es el otro proyecto innovador relacionado con los videojuegos, al que he llegado gracias a Business Innovation Insider (que a su vez enlaza con un artículo de BBC News). GIDb es básicamente un wiki abierto gestionado por el Entertainment Technology Center de la universidad Carnegie Mellon. Su objetivo es catalogar y clasificar la historia de las innovaciones en videojuegos.
Game Innovation n. The introduction of a new experience in a video game.
The goal of the GIDb is to classify and record every innovation in the entire history of computer and videogames. Because we could never complete this daunting task alone, we have made the GIDb an open wiki, allowing anyone to easily add innovation entries for the benefit of everyone who cares about the history, study, and practice of game innovation.
En una industria que evoluciona de un modo muy rápido, proyectos de este tipo permiten preservar elementos de su historia que serán básícos en el futuro para comprender la evolución de esta industria y cultura. El wiki incluye una "taxonomía de la innovación" que clasifica en estos momentos unas 180 innovaciones (desde el primer uso de la velocidad en un juego de acción hasta al primer uso de música interactiva). La taxonomía incluye como categorías: Game mechanic, Computation, Interface, Aesthetic, Story, Genre y Business. Merece la pena navegar entre las innovaciones descubriendo de un modo no lineal la evolución de los videojuegos.
