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Cultural Texts: Trafficking in Signs
In previous game design schemas, we explored the ways in which games, as both formal and experiential systems, have the capacity to represent. In the game of Mafia, for example, an assassin's silent hand gesture represents "kill!" and the act of closing one's eyes at nightfall marks a player as a "villager." These acts of representation take place within the artificial space of the game world, and although the representation may serve to simulate something in the real world, it only gains its primary value within the space of meaning created by the game itself. We framed games as being able to represent phenomena internally, as well as being representations as a whole.
Mafia internally represents Mafiosi, villagers, day and night, and death. As a whole, it is a stylized representation of a village struggling against hidden, shadowy mafia figures.
But what happens if we shift our perspective from looking at the capacity of games to represent or as representations, to games as forms of cultural representation? Such a shift requires us to regard the game from the outside, to consider ways we might read games as cultural objects in their own right, as objects that reflect their cultural contexts. When we view games in this way, we regard them as cultural texts.
As game designers, we can consider games as cultural texts in order to demonstrate how design contributes to their meaning. What in the design of Capcom's Mega Man, for example, fully embodies "boy culture" and its ethos? How do games designed by the New Games Movement represent community-based, socially utopian ideals? Game design can be used to represent cultural ideas and phenomena existing beyond the space of the game. Take Ms. Pac-man, for instance. From a perspective internal to the game, what does Ms. Pac-Man represent? We might say that she represents a dot-munching, ghost-busting avatar, or we might refer to the in-game backstory that tells the tale of Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man meeting and falling in love. But if we consider Ms. Pac-man from a cultural point of view external to the game, our reading of the character changes dramatically. We might see Ms. Pac-Man as a powerful and positive feminist icon, a superior successor to the original Pac-Man. Or we might view her as a very unfeminist symbol, a derivative character that equates lipstick and a hair bow with the female gender. We might see Ms. Pac-Man as a new kind of video game "celebrity"; as an ever-hungry symbol of capitalist consumption; or the marker of a historical moment when Japanese pop transformed global electronic culture. This process of interpreting games as symbolic objects, as cultural texts that reflect their contexts, is one way of understanding games as culture.
Framing games as cultural texts brings an additional perspective to our interrogation of the term culture. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz writes that "Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun…. I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretative one in search of meaning."[4] Geertz compares the methods of an anthropologist analyzing culture to those of a literary critic analyzing a text: "Sorting out the structures of signification… and determining their social ground and import…. Doing ethnography is like trying to read (in the sense of 'construct a reading of') a manuscript."[5]
This concept of "reading culture" comes from the social sciences, and in particular, from the discipline of cultural anthropology and its more recent cousin cultural studies. The practice of reading culture refers to the potential of objects, processes, and phenomena (such as subcultures) to be "read" as stories or narratives. These stories might tell the tale of political relations, as in the case of a game such as Diplomacy, or of ethics and morality, as in a game such as Black & White. The status of a cultural text can even be applied to the formal materials of games. Consider the design of a deck of cards. Popularized in Europe during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the four suits represent the four classes of medieval society: spades, the nobility; hearts, the clergy; diamonds, the merchants; and clubs, the peasants.[6] A deck of cards can thus be "read" as a representation of society at a particular point in history.
It is one of the tasks of social scientists and humanists to read these cultural texts and formulate frameworks that help game designers develop strategies for creating and analyzing games. Clifford Geertz's famous essay "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight," for example, richly describes how a culture is an ensemble of texts, of which games are an important part. Media scholar Henry Jenkins' work with video games and fan culture has led him to testify on Capitol Hill about the effects of media violence, countering many popular assumptions shaping current legislation. The work of designers and educators Amy Bruckman and Amy Jo Kim on MUDs and MOOs has given game developers new frameworks within which to consider the creation of online communities. Brenda Laurel's work, especially her recent book The Utopian Entrepreneur, continually challenges us to question our cultural assumptions about how we "read" computer games and other facets of computer culture. Although not all this research is written from a design perspective, it can offer tremendous insight into how the "meaning" of a game arises from the intersection of its formal, experiential, and cultural features. Being cognizant of how critics and scholars read game culture is part of being a game designer. If you can better understand your own game as a cultural text, you will be better equipped to design powerful experiences for players in whatever context they encounter your game.
[4]Clifford Geertz, "Emphasizing Interpretation." In The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1977), p. 4–5.
[5]Ibid., p. 5.
[6]E.M. Avedon and Brian Sutton Smith, The Study of Games (New York: Wiley, 1971), p. 240.
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