The creation of video games in amateur [Thesis].

Practice, development and sharing of the videogame flavor

Boom!"

2014. Unemployed people seek to reach the city center to lead the revolution. They are eliminated or hindered by armed turrets by the Belgian Federal Police and the National Employment Office (Onem).

Imagine these turrets provided by your own law enforcement and unemployment compensation authorities...

" Also progressively available are three special weapons, one of which consists of bombarding the city with forms from the Walloon Office for Vocational Training and Employment (Forem), which has the effect of slowing down the entire population. "

That year, "D'une certaine Gaieté", a Liège-based association that presents itself as a " counter-cultural home[...] incubator of minority discourses and practices " had organized a multimedia workshop around the theme of unemployment.

For several months, at the rate of three hours per week, the participants of the workshop had collectively " put into play " a critique of the institutional treatment of the unemployed: "Chômeurs blaster " (the blasting of the unemployed)!

The creation of amateur video games

Through this first experience in a workshop tasting strongly of derision and paradox, the author of the thesis, Pierre-Yves Hurel, has built his approach to the field of amateur video game creation.

Yet teeming with a multitude of resources, this one remains largely invisibilized as a stakeholder of the videogame culture. The aim of this work was to highlight the experience of its practitioners.

" The amateur video game [is]a weakly linked network of subfields structured into communities of practice. "

The method

This research through " grounded theorizing " is within the framework of pragmatic sociology, and theorizes from the empirical material.

For this, twenty-two comprehensive interviews were conducted with amateur video game creators, and additional participant observations on the occasion of the editions of " L'Apéro Jeu Vidéo " in Liège in particular.

The thesis does not unfold a gender analysis. It will be noted, however, that these interviews are overwhelmingly male (3 interviews are conducted with 2 women) and that the question of male/neutral bias remains, even if the thesis is nourished by other experiences and questionings that have brewed more diversity.

" How can I make a monster? "

In these groups of men, it is a matter of " bringing out the processes that govern the lived experience in a [...] situation "and crossing social and cultural phenomena from " a comprehensive approach to experience ".

The author is personally involved in video game practice. The thesis is punctuated by " interludes ", which are short, sensitive returns to his own experiences, related to the chapters they frame.

They allow us to access a finer, intuitive and sensory understanding of what he develops. To open a more immediate access to the experience told.

" The amateur creates as he plays: with love"

To play is to experience pleasure and to develop taste. To create is to prolong the game, to play differently with the game.

In the schematization of the passage from amateur-player to amateur-creator, the question of taste is located at every stage. To then move from playing to simulating, one will dream, extend the game, tinker and poach, store and assemble, and of course, again, invite and develop one's taste.

All in all, the author makes explicit the creative process of the video game, with " taste in action ":

The iterative dynamic of improvisation, which holds a central place in the experience:
"Video games propose to manage uncertainties presented as tasty."

The category " play ", in its double dimension

The address of creation: for oneself, and/or for others.

Creating is pushing blocks for Zelda

In the game " The Legend of Zelda ", the hero is invited to push one or more blocks to make a staircase appear, to open a door or trapdoor, to draw a path. The " block to be pushed " is a ludicle, a minimal unit of play, or the " minimal take of the game ".

In the amateur creative process, ludemes are reused, amplified, transformed, recreated, and assembled:

" The amateur then questions his taste, in an act of tasting that is itself uncertain: he asks himself whether the management of this uncertainty pleases him, whether it allows him to produce effects of pleasure and eventually to become attached to these particular forms. "

Working for oneself

In the dissertation, the question of work and leisure is posed in filigree: along with that of the amateur and the professional, but also of industry and craft and the freedom (privilege) to escape from a strictly accounting relationship to the world.

" Amateurism is a regime of experience in which the for-itself in the creative moment relegates all other forms of calculation to the background. "

Two major axes emerge from the watermark:

In the first chapter, polarized research is discussed between the convergent presence of the amateur and the industry (a " co-work " or hobby that can be financed by the amateur) and the cultural resistance of minorities who are regaining visibility and agency (with alternative, participatory, or non-existent funding directly).
In the conclusion, this issue is brought together with that of the take. This one confronts the industrial model - division of labor, mass production, lack of consideration of the taste practices of individuals - and the artisanal model - holistic relationship to the object made, " consumption and production in a single moment ", " favoring an approach to creation as an act of taste "

" A condition for the existence of amateurism is to be able to exercise one's grasp with a certain amount of freedom. "

" So if I want to make a flying carpet, it works as a projectile? "

Before closing this column, let's point out the pages that tell the story of the beginnings of computers, video games, and their early developments.

Here we can return to the first appearances of hackers, told somewhat like a mythological tale, a birth that could have been painted by Botticelli.

A tale with the giant computers of the 1960s, used in universities to perform complex calculations, and the first student hackers, who "prowled" at night and on weekends to explore the potential of the machines. They were tolerated as long as they did not interfere with the smooth running of the department and the machines.

After the first games made in the 1960s to demonstrate the capabilities of computers and driven by the Free Software philosophy, and the first mass-market video game in 1972 " Pong ", the 1980s saw the development of the video game industry, the author details the five creative tools still available:

Video game creation software(like RPG Maker, Construct).

The "homebrew"

The "modding"

The "ROM hacking"

Game creation and level editors, which allow you to create your own game level (annexed to the main game).

" But then, you can do anything!? "

So what do we do with it?

Illustration: slowowl from Pixabay.

To be read:

Pierre-Yves Hurel, The Amateur Video Game Creation Experience - Working on Your Taste for Uncertainty. Information and Communication. University of Liege, 2020.

Thesis available at: https://orbi.uliege.be/handle/2268/247377