Punk Playthings

Provocations for 21st Century Game Makers

Sean Taylor, Chris Lowthorpe

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315350035
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Programming Games
• Index: Computer Science

Punk Playthings
Provocations for 21st Century Game Makers

"Punk was an attitude. It was never about having a Mohican haircut or wearing a ripped T-shirt. It was all about destruction, and the creative potential within that."

Malcolm Mclaren

Warning: If you want a silver bullet solution for efficient game making or a step-by-step guide to receiving Indie Game Dev hero worship, you're in the wrong place. Put the book back on the shelf.

Punk Playthings is an antidote to complacency and orthodoxy. Packed with probes and provocations that explore game making through fresh lenses for uncertain times, it challenges gaming monoculture by constructing a trading space for ideas and learning from across domains and cultures. Punk Playthings has zero respect for boundaries between mediums, industries, sectors, specialisms or disciplines. Instead, it challenges you to expand your cultural capital, think laterally and make new connections.

Punk Playthings advocates a truly independent mindset and DIY approach for creating playful experiences with cultural resonance. It proclaims creative entrepreneurship as the true legacy of punk.

Punk Playthings is not for everyone. But it might be for you.

Chapter 1

The Road Less Traveled

Abstract

There are exceptional games but there is nothing exceptional about games. As a medium, it is no better or worse than any other.

This chapter explores creative mavericks who rejected the conventional wisdom and subverted the orthodoxical practices of their chosen mediums and domains. It argues that game makers themselves must move beyond the ghetto of the gamer—and the nostalgic clichés of traditional game developmentéto become genuinely independent in their thoughts, intentions and actions. To invent the future, games must take the road less traveled.

No Gods, No Masters

“A man with no enemies is a man with no character.”

Paul Newman
(quoted in Verlhac and Dherbier 2006)

“Imagination is its own form of courage.”

Francis J Underwood
House of Cards (2015)

Eclectic Skeptics

We worry too much about what people think of us. And we accept too much of what we’re told. Now, this might sound rich coming from a book constantly telling you stuff. But that’s not what this book is about. What we’re doing is sharing provocations that will hopefully make you stop and think. What you do then, that’s totally up to you. Nobody is infallible; no one has a monopoly on truth, despite what snake oil sellers would have you believe. And that’s always worth remembering. Be an eclectic skeptic. Form your own character. Accept no gods, no masters. Look around, process and evaluate your context, assimilate information, then find new perspectives and imagine new realities. Leave the Kool-Aid on the shelf and resist restrictive silos. We don’t follow prescriptive rule books—why should you?

More than a Woman

“Men liked to put me down as the best woman painter. I think I’m one of the best painters.”

Georgia O’Keeffe
(quoted in Chadwick 1990)

Consider Georgia O’Keeffe. Today regarded as one of the great artists of the last century, O’Keefe spent much of her life resisting categorization. She lived uncompromisingly on her own terms and her work was equally resolute. In the 1920s she started to paint plants and flowers—nothing new you might think—but O’Keeffe had a different perspective. Instead of a traditional still-life viewpoint, she decided to paint flora as if viewed through a magnifying glass—up close and extremely personal. Works such as Black Iris garnered critical and public attention, helping establish O’Keeffe as one of America’s most innovative modernists (Messinger 2004). These paintings also led to critics making myriad associations with the female body, due mainly to the popularity of Sigmund Freud’s ideas at the time. Throughout the 1920s, her work was continually described in Freudian terms, labelled as “feminine” concerning perspective and method of expression. O’Keefe hated this. She viewed these interpretations as lazy ideological constructions that reinforced ideas of sexual difference, leading to more social and cultural segregation between genders (Chadwick 1990). In this construction, women painters were “feminine,” “emotional,” and “elementary,” subconsciously obsessed with their bodies and close to the earth, whereas men were “masculine,” “rational,” and “intellectual.” O’Keeffe never apologized for her gender—often exploring and celebrating her womanhood—but she believed such thinking only continued to marginalize female artists and reinforce patriarchy. It kept her firmly in the category of “great woman artist” but excluded her from being a “great artist.”

In 1929, O’Keeffe started to visit New Mexico and became enchanted by the landscape and iconography of the desert there. Again, she adopted a new perspective, juxtaposing skeletal objects with desert landscape imagery, playing with size and scale. These works were provocative and unsettling, surreal and often masculine in form, far from the perceived femininity of her earlier work. For the rest of her life she would continue to shift perspectives in her paintings, moving close-up and abstracting her favorite landscapes, reimagining clouds from above through an airplane window. O’Keeffe would live in the brutal, beautiful desert lampooning men who talked about the “Great American Adventure” but had “never crossed the Hudson” (Imagine 2016). She was an outsider prickly as a local cactus who ploughed her own idiosyncratic furrow. Fellow outsider Joan Didion argued O’Keeffe was “equipped early with an immutable sense of who she was and a fairly clear understanding she would be required to prove it” (1979, p.129). And this she did by remaining fluid, shifting perspectives by zooming in and out, resisting categorization and in the process, disrupting the patriarchal art world.

Today there are major retrospectives of O’Keeffe’s work in the most prestigious museums and galleries in the world. Her resolutely maverick life is the subject of biographies and documentaries. Georgia O’Keeffe is now described simply as “a pioneer of 20th-century art” (Tate 2016) or “American Painter” (Encyclopedia Britannica 2016); the words “female” or “woman” conspicuous by their increasing absence. Her continued resistance to being sidelined and categorized, her insistence on being judged solely on her work rather than her gender, finally paid off. Today Georgia O’Keeffe is simply one of the best painters.

An Englishman in New York

“We Sell—or else!”

David Ogilvy
Confessions of an Advertising Man (2013)

With David Ogilvy it’s often hard to separate the myth from the man; he was equally at home selling himself as he was selling his clients’ products. But that’s part of what makes him so fascinating. Born in England of Scots and Irish extraction, Ogilvy won a scholarship to Oxford to read history. By his own admission he “screwed up” his university education, leaving in 1931 to work as an apprentice chef in Paris (Tungate 2007). A year or so later, he took a job peddling Aga cooking stoves to French chefs in London restaurants. During this time as a door-to-door salesman, Ogilvy discovered and refined his talent for selling and closing a deal, becoming so successful his boss asked him to write a manual for the other salesmen. Decades later, this book was still being praised by Fortune magazine as an exemplar for sales manuals, at the time it led Ogilvy to his first job in advertising (Tungate 2007). But the lessons he learned on the streets of London never left him, granting Ogilvy a unique perspective that led him to become perhaps the most quoted and revered “ad man” ever. The tough streets were a world away from the glamour of advertising but closer to the customer. And it was here Ogilvy heuristically and memorably, realized that “the customer isn’t a moron, she is your wife” (2013, p.124). Long before advertisers started to think of people as individuals or even personas—these were the days of the masses “understood” by distant proxy—Ogilvy beat them to the punch by actually getting out and meeting people. Fancy that. He learned and never forgot that customers were more than abstractions or catch-all demographics—they were people too.

Ogilvy always maintained advertising was simply a sophisticated form of selling. No more, no less. Immersing himself in the industry during his early career, he spent time learning from New York’s most successful ad men. But Ogilvy was a natural skeptic. He evaluated learning and information, abandoning what didn’t resonate with him and adopting and synthesizing what did—before adding his unique twist. He rarely followed trends, preferring to formulate his own opinion and forge his own path.

At his height during the 1960s—advertising’s creative revolution—Ogilvy was skeptical of “creativity” as a silver bullet solution or an end in itself. He even banned the unthinking use of the word within his agency, describing it as “hideous” (Ogilvy 2013). Ogilvy valued creative people, but their value resided in an ability to sell products. He believed advertising needed to be entertaining but always in the service of being persuasive, famously quipping, “We make advertisements that people want to read. You can’t save souls in an empty church” (2013, p.125). But this razor-sharp focus on selling ran counter to the prevailing industry zeitgeist. At the time most agencies were focusing on making “clever” or “arty” ads. Ogilvy insisted a good advertisement didn’t need to be clever; it needed to sell a product without drawing too much attention to itself (2013, p.108). The salesman in him meant Ogilvy could never forget agencies existed, first and foremost, to sell products for their clients. For him, the best advertising was well researched, based on a “big idea” and able to sell a product by communicating its benefits in an engaging way. Simple as that.

David Ogilvy changed advertising in many ways—usually by running counter to prevailing orthodoxies or trends. He even believed the best way to win new clients was not to spend precious resources on speculative “creative” pitches but to do great work for existing clients. Imagine that. The company he founded still bears his name, adheres to many of his ideals and is one of the world’s most successful agencies. His desire to champion nonconformity, to pay well, to promote a positive corporate culture, to inspire people—plus his constant playful provocations in print—had a massive effect on the way advertisers thought about their work. Ogilvy reminded advertising of what it did and encouraged the industry to value itself for doing it. Advertisers weren’t artists; they were salesmen who put on an entertaining and engaging show. This unique perspective and healthy skepticism reminded the industry of its essence at a time many were losing sight of it: “We Sell—or else!”

Insert Coin

“The things I had learned about getting you to spend a quarter in one of my midway games, I put those sales pitches in my automated box.”

Nolan Bushnell
(quoted in Kent 2000)

Meet someone else who divides opinion. Meet Nolan Bushnell. Celebrated and criticized in almost equal measure, there’s one thing most people agree on: Nolan Bushnell pretty much invented the modern game industries. You’re reading this book, so you already know about Atari, the iconic company Bushnell formed in 1972. Atari developed the seminal Pong—the first commercially successful arcade video game—and quickly followed it with other canonical titles. Then the company released the hugely successful cartridge-based Atari 2600 console in 1977. This machine took video games into both the home and the mainstream. It also unintentionally kick-started independent development when disgruntled Atari employees left to found Activision—the first independent game development company. So far, so familiar. But what we want to discuss is how Atari came to happen in the first place. And yes, you guessed it. It’s about gaining a different perspective and imagining a new reality.

Nolan Bushnell loves ideas. At high school he loved philosophy, debating and playing imaginative pranks on friends. Nolan was a smart kid. And like many smart kids he enrolled to get a college education, joining the University of Utah in 1962 to major in engineering. Utah was one of the top schools in computer science—then a relatively new discipline—and Bushnell became fascinated by the subject. By befriending teaching assistants he gained regular access to the computer lab, where he played early computer games such as Spacewar!, taught himself to code and eventually made games of his own. His college education enabled Bushnell to understand computers and computer games. But he also attended another place of learning during this time.

The story goes that after losing his tuition money in a poker game, Bushnell was forced to take a job to earn money. He did this running arcade games at the Lagoon amusement park, just outside Salt Lake City. He started on the midway, working a stall where punters knocked down stacked milk bottles with a baseball at a quarter a shot. Bushnell soon realized the key to his job wasn’t to stack the bottles; it was to attract players and get them to part with their coins. So he became a “midway barker”—drumming up patronage from the passing public. After a while, he was moved to the pinball and electro-mechanical game arcade. Here he used his engineering knowledge to maintain the machinery, but all the time he was observing and learning how the games worked, honing his understanding of the business (Kent 2001, p.29). Bushnell immediately realized each coin-operated machine was fundamentally a stand-alone business. And he also discovered just how successful these mechanical businesses were, making as much as $200 ^* a week per machine (NPR 2017). Bushnell saw opportunity and decided to get an intimate understanding of the tactics and tricks pinball and other games used to attract patronage then keep patrons parting with their money. He observed how the machines put on a show through an “attract mode” designed to entice passersby, in just the way he’d been drumming up business by barking on the midway. This understanding would serve him well in the future. The amusement park would be Bushnell’s second education.

With his new perspectiv...