DiGRA and MODA kick-start Atlanta’s young gaming culture

• http://clatl.com/atlanta/ImageArchives?by=1223504
• This Centipede cabinet belongs to Joystick Gamebar, but they let MODA borrow it

Colleen Macklin can barely contain her excitement. “Games have been around since ancient times,” she happily declares. She’s speaking to me in the lobby of the ritzy Georgian Terrace hotel where she’s booked for DiGRA, the Digital Games Research Association. It’s a loose membership of scholars, writers and critics who spent the week in Atlanta to present papers and conduct discussions.

“We’ve been playing games longer than we’ve been reading books,” she said. “We’re highlighting a part of game history that a lot of people don’t really recognize.”

Macklin is the creator of “Re:Activism,” an in-real-life scavenger hunt game where teams of players travel around a city and earn points by recreating historical moments of activism. She hosted an Atlanta version last week that was affiliated with the Museum of Design Atlanta’s XYZ exhibit which presents games that originated from alternative perspectives. The main focus is video games made by women, but it also includes huge installation-style board games that can’t be contained by a screen or the living room. Macklin, with her unashamedly short hair and bursting energy, embodies that ethos. Her game has players actively jumping off the couch and venturing across the city to experience social progress first-hand.

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“I think it’s important for games to be in a museum to give us the opportunity to celebrate how diverse game history really is,” she said. “And to point out that we should continue to celebrate the people who make these games.”

This intersection of people in academia, feminism and gaming happened to occur in Atlanta, and that points to a promising sign: a greater interest in video game culture taking roots in the city. Last year Dragon Con finally started running a video game track, and since then the occurrence of cultural gaming events has noticeably risen.

DiGRA’s 200 guests (mostly game designers, scholars and writers) crowded the whitewashed walls of the MODA on Monday with an even greater amount of beards and glasses than the usual. Among them were folks like Eric Zimmerman, Brendan Keogh, and Mattie Brice. If you like reading about games more than actually playing them, then those are some big names.

“I don’t think that doing academics in games should be done with the first priority of making better games or making more innovative games. There’s more to it than that,” said Brendan Keogh.

The demand for academic-level game studies has increased alongside the popularity of video gaming itself. A growing circle of writers are tackling games as fragments of our society’s whole culture rather than individual technological or commercial products. While many of their scholarly works approach an abstract level of academic poetry (I know at least one Ph.D. candidate who can’t figure out what the hell is going on in Ian Bogost’s Unit Operations,) Keogh’s writings attempt to ride the line towards a more general audience.

Last year he wrote “Killing Is Harmless,” a long-form critical analysis of the first-person shooter game “Spec Ops: The Line.”

“It was kind of ‘zine’ish. It didn’t really have an editor or a thing like that, it was kind of sprawling. I played the game, then wrote this thing over a few months and just kind of vomited it out and stuck a cover on it,” he said.

“Spec Ops” is a hyper-violent shooter game that’s a scathing and self-aware critique of hyper-violent shooter games. It was ripe material for a deeper reading like this and the e-book’s quick success motivated Keogh to co-found a publishing label for other book-length game criticisms.

“With Press Select we want to do more of that but also with the rigor of editorial oversight... We want to read books about videogames ourselves. No one else is doing this,” he said. “They’re not academic books, we think they can help academia and we hope academic game critics can learn a lot from them, but it’s for a generalist audience.”

Another frequent topic of discussion during the evening was the concept of game play communicating complicated topics to players.

“Real-world systems that aren’t necessarily obvious to the eye can be represented. So like, systematic oppression,” said Keogh, giving an example. “Someone who’s, like, a straight white male like myself... can play a game like Mattie Brice’s ‘Mainichi’ or Merrit Kopas’ ‘Lim.’”

In “Lim” (which can be played for free here) players control a multi-colored square that must navigate a maze of differently-colored squares. The player must “blend in” to change the color of their square to that of the oppressively dominant square culture in order to move about safely.

“I can play them and see how I’m trapped in this system,” said Keogh. “I can see what’s not possible, what is possible and why I might act in a certain way.”

In “Mainichi” (which is exhibited at the MODA) the metaphor is even less subtle. Players control a pixilated version of the game’s creator and lead her through a day-to-day barrage of insults for daring to be transgendered in public. The story loops over and over again with a few choices teasing the player into trying things differently each time, perhaps in hopes of a happier ending. Spoiler alert: there is no happier ending.

“We don’t have a lot of games that are looking to talk about personal experiences in a meaningful way,” Mattie Brice told me. “I feel like I found a way to talk about a personal experience through game design which is not something that’s done very often.”

Brice’s game sits in a corner of MODA’s back room next to Anna Anthropy’s “dys4ia,” a fast-paced mini-game collection about her experiences with hormone replacement therapy. In an exhibit mostly about women in games these two projects highlight an even smaller and more challenged minority: transgendered people.

A small but passionate queer games scene (of which Brice and Anthropy are well-known figures) has been producing works that defy convention, mess with boundaries and confront authority. “Mainichi,” “dys4ia” and “Lim” use gameplay to evoke empathy or depict real-world prejudices, and their confrontational nature has spawned an inevitable backlash.

“In the past, things were just so assumed,” Brice said. “People would be looking at us and thinking ‘You are just ridiculously idealistic.” “But eventually, this argument became more and more convincing so that people were like ‘maybe there is actually a very valid argument here.’”

The marginalization of women in games has always been talked about, but the industry has only recently begun to take the steps needed to fix it. But as the Internet would have it, the rising exposure of feminist viewpoints also means the rise of counter-argumentative sentiments against feminist viewpoints.

“No matter what, we are dragging our culture into this direction. Because of that, people are thinking ‘Oh shit, this is going to happen unless I do something about it,’ and that’s where that backlash came from,” Brice said.

It’s a popular topic. Five hours of DiGRA conference programs have been allotted for discussing women in games, on top of it being the subject of MODA’s exhibit.

Celia Pearce is a Georgia Tech professor and a co-founder of IndieCade. She’s also one of the exhibit’s curators, and has found Atlanta both weirdly accommodating but also short-tempered when it comes to hosting game business.
“Honestly, I find it pretty easy to get stuff done here,” she says. “I think we ran over here in September pitching this project, less than a year. And within a year, we had the show.” According to her, that’s an unheard-of turnaround time for exhibits.

Compared to the West Coast cities where the game industry is more deeply rooted, Atlanta has a cheaper cost of living, a steady output of highly-educated tech workers and even a tax incentive program specifically for games. But according to Pearce, Atlanta’s game scene might be its own worst enemy. Most of her students working in games don’t stay in Atlanta simply because they’re getting a bad deal from the companies we have here. “I’m gonna say something possibly incendiary, but the game development studios here pay crap.”

Video games are entertainment, so the prospect of growing up to become a game maker falls into that classic trap of having a dream job and realizing that it’s a sausage factory. Developing them can be creatively fulfilling in certain roles, but nearly everyone who makes game has a technologically demanding, monotonous and stressful job ahead of them. In Pearce’s experience, she’s found that local employers can pretty easily take advantage of the passion of lifelong gamers.

“A lot of my students will go to work at these studios for a couple years, sometimes in-between an undergrad and a grad degree and they just get fed up. They get treated poorly, they get overworked and they don’t get paid well. So if you’re going to be overworked you at least want to get paid,” she said. “The problem is that people come from Zynga, Blizzard and EA to recruit our students and say ‘do you want to move to San Francisco and make a salary two to three times what an Atlanta studio will pay you?’ Who would say ‘no’ to that, right?”

Pearce’s IndieCade is an independent games festival held every year in Los Angeles, but her goal at Georgia Tech is to help her students cultivate more of an indie game scene in Atlanta. But she says that student loans are yet another roadblock, and without the independence or capital to fund new companies of their own, her students can’t afford to stay in Atlanta to found their own studios.

But the past year has seen the city make a lot of headway toward that direction. The arrival of DiGRA, the XYZ exhibit and the second-ever video gaming track of Dragon Con has turned this past month into a dizzying tidal wave of gaming events that reach up to national importance.