Eumemics/Dysmemics
I can't remember what I was reading the other day that provoked this, but, here goes:
if eugenics and dysgenics are the study/practice of the manipulation of genes towards features good or ill (perhaps sinisterly enough, the former is always assumed to be by human intervention while the later has natural decay as its implicit origin), then where are eumemics and dysmemics in our lexicon?
The concepts practically named themselves, and I got all trigger happy about using them when I remembered two things: first, rhetoric already exists, and second, that memes are a great popular notion, but lack a rigorous theoretical/observational background like genetics. But at the same time, the underpinnings of eumemics and dysmemics are present in our everyday world: pretty much any form of media or communication deals with the promotion of a thought, e.g. "buy Denham's Dentrifice" or "I haz a bukkit."
Any communicative art, can, to some degree be considered eumemic. That is to say, such arts are designed to promote/cultivate specific memes which are held to be desirable by their creators. Largely, as a culture, we accept the practice of positive eumemics, or the cultivation of new memes (advertising). However, we tend to frown upon negative eumemics (censorship), but that varies with the cultural climate. Dysmemics, the spread of undesirable memes, is largely a matter of taste. In a somewhat reflexive manner, cultural practices of negative eumemics can be considered dysmemic: censorship may be a bad thing, but that doesn't stop it from remaining a popular idea. Eugenics is a dysmemic idea, despite the fact that we eat foods which are the product of thousands of years of eugenic selection, the atrocities associated with the practice of negative eugenics on humans were so horrifying.
Up until this point, I've really just been having fun with words. But someone asked a question as to what videogames are actually communicating, and asked it over two years ago. I haven't been able to come up with a good answer to that question in the meantime: sure it was easy to waffle and talk about what games could deliver if we wanted them to, but Jenova wrote,
If you ignore the importance of the message, just want to focus on an addictive interactive system, please check out Vegas. Slaughter machine is not a media. Why are there millions of people look down at video games? What kind of messages have we been making in the past twenty years?Which really throws down the gauntlet as it were. The problem is when evaluating games as media, we're trying to establish the first principles behind what games are. More so than film, it seems to me that television has been rigorously examined in order to derive the effects of a media upon its message. I don't know how many hours a week the average person spends watching films (or in which formats, and all the other questions begged by that statement), but I bet they spend more time watching television. Anecdotally, you should know I'm not a total quitter-pants and googled for the answer to that question ("how many hours a week do you watch movies?"), but google immediately shot back with a page of results titled similar to "How many hours average a week [a day] do you [your child] watch TV?" At the bottom of the page was one result for playing World of Warcraft, and another for how many netflix movies do you watch in a month.
So when it comes to games, what sort of media games are matters. Are they eumemic or dysmemic engines? Do you learn more or less, or rather, do you learn positively or negatively while playing them? There are dozens upon hundreds of questions loaded into "what sort of media are games?" (Interactive Media!)
Games are a very different media from others like television or the web, primarily because of their interactivity. What makes a game a game is still an open debate, even though there are several good working definitions ("a series of meaningful choices," "a closed system of rules with one or more players, a goal or conflict, and a finite outcome"), they all seem to describe a facet of games rather than getting to the axiomatic nature of what a game is. Approaching from the facet of games as media, I'd like to propose that a game is a memetic engine which propogates further interaction with that system. That is to say, a game is a piece of media which provokes play. Eumemic games propagate the meme of their play successfully-- they continue to be played and get based on. We might even risk calling this fun, or a source of fun. Dysmemic games, games which encourage undesirable memes, or do a poor job of propagating themselves and their play. They aren't fun. Other media may require you to suspend your disbelief, but games require you to suspend your disbelief and keep pressing a button.
Thus, while it may be important to load a game with a message or emotional goal, it's important to do so through the game's system. It is, in fact, ok to focus on an addictive interactive system (Vegas baby!), Slaughter Machine IV, or Nuclear Train Strike II: Double Impact (you can actually play some of these now). If you can build a memetic engine which encourages its own play, then congratulations, you've done something I'd kill to be able to do as a designer.
This doesn't let designers off the hook when it comes to the content of their games, but it should give us a different approach to worrying about what game content actually is. Rather than worrying about how much blood their is in a game, we should be worried about the blood generating activity, and why we've been resorting to stabbing/shooting/exploding to create our simulated murder, rather than more sophisticated means.
A slot machine is a perfectly valid game, so long as we recognize the validity of "gambling" as a meme. The potency of gambling as a meme, and its real world ramifications, certainly leave a lot of room for worry: is a slot machine a dysmemic artifact, dispensing a harmful meme with every interaction? The potency of gambling may be the very point. Or is it a meme to be cultivated for profit?
The problem with designing games as memetic systems, as a media fundamentally different from other media, is that formal content must be weighed against dramatic content, and the cognizance of a game's formal system complicates the whole matter. I don't think games will ever escape their dramatic roots in things like Muppet Wedding vs. The Space Mutants , but games will have to escape their roots in terms of simplistic interactions. The future of games as media won't be predicated on trying to design content around a specific message or set of emotions, but trying to design the interaction between player and system as a message. The problem games have isn't that for the past 20 years we've been showing increasingly elaborate murders, races, explosions, and breasts, the pace at which we've complicated and improved all of those things (from ragdoll corpses to jiggle physics) has outstripped the pace we've elaborated on the interactive hows-and-whys behind including those things in our systems to begin with. We've done a poor job of tuning the lever and payout on the slot machine, even though we've made it a helluva lot flashier and exciting to drop quarter in.
I think I've got it wrong at this point. I think there's something more beneath that simplistic conclusion, but I'm not sure yet. Anyway, from fun with words, I'm left with the notion that games are extremely potent eumemic systems, perhaps more potent than the web.
