[MUD-Dev] Interesting online game

[Brian Green]

Read this article on Salon last week.  Thought it might be interesting
to the developers here.

http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/04/27/sissyfight/index.html

In brief, "Sissyfighter" is an online, multiplayer, and quite social
game about girls bullying each other in a schoolground setting; it's a
spoof of typical violent video games.

I guess the question is, is it a MUD? :)

I played a bit of the game, found it rather interesting.  Nice, balanced
design.

BTW, Eric Zimmerman is the brains behind the re:play discussions
(http://www.eyebeam.org/replay/), which is also a good read for game
developers.

--
"And I now wait / to shake the hand of fate...."  -"Defender", Manowar
     Brian Green, brian at psychochild.org  aka  Psychochild
       |\      _,,,---,,_      *=* Morpheus, my kitten, says "Hi!" *=*
 ZZzz  /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_  
      |,4-  ) )-,_..;\ (  `'-'  "Ritalin Cures Next Picasso" 
     '---''(_/--'  `-'\_)               -The_Onion_, August 4th, 1999

-----------------------

For the archive: (pardon the formatting, it came that way...)

Sissyfighter 
Meet Eric Zimmerman, the brains behind the Net's nastiest little
game.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Russ Spencer 

April 27, 2000 |  You might be surprised to hear this, but the guy
behind the Web's nastiest and most notorious new interactive
game -- Sissyfight 2000 -- is a card-carrying academic brainiac.
Eric Zimmerman, a freelance game designer out of Manhattan, is
also an adjunct professor at the Parsons School of Design and
New York University. The 30-year-old intellectual/geek has
lectured at more than 30 universities about the aesthetics of video
games, writes scholarly papers on the social theories of play and
discusses his chosen field with a hybrid lyricism, mixing words like
"transgressive" and "butt-ugly" in the same sentence. Which, at
first, belies the fact that Zimmerman, along with the staff of
Word.com, helped create the meanest, most popular little
back-stabbing game on the Net. 

Six little cartoon girls enter a pastel playground
where playful music sets a nursery school tone.
That's where the niceties end. The goal of the
game is to reduce the other little schoolgirls, in
their little schoolgirl outfits, to whimpering
sissies. Through a barrage of scratching,
teasing, tattling and grabbing, players knock
each other out of the game by chipping away at
their opponents' self-esteem. There are various
defensive moves -- cowering or licking your
lollipop, for example -- but mostly this is a
game of pure childish cruelty and aggression.
Entertainment Weekly, which gave the game an "A" grade, says,
"Sissyfight brings forth a player's nasty, repressed child like no
other game -- except maybe fifth-grade dodgeball and corporate
retreats."

To take the playground metaphor even further, the girls who go
on to claim victory are the ones who succeed in creating a mob
mentality by ganging up on their weaker or less clever sisters. As
the game progresses, girls can talk to each other in little comic
strip bubbles and, using various catty strategies, plot and connive
to create powerful, esteem-destroying cliques that leave some
poor girls on the outs. 

And when things get real nasty, those bubbles often become filled
not with offers to team up, but with astoundingly creative bursts of
expletives and sexual and racial epithets. At times, in fact, the talk
degenerates into a series of gross-outs worthy of, well, a group of
kids who have gathered after class behind the portables. The
smartest little schoolgirls are careful, though, not to go too far. In
the game's strategy hints, designers warn players not to do
anything that might turn the others against them. "Try making a girl
with the name Jar Jar Binks and see how quickly you get snuffed
out," they warn.

The game was developed in a yearlong process with the staff of
one of the Web's most ancient (er, it's five years old) and most
respected online magazines, New York's Word.com. The site is
known for its ironic and smart essays and stories, but its savvy
editor, Marisa Bowe, says that she had had a hankering to
develop new ways to marry high and low art forms in an
interactive setting, to make the most of the Web's potential for
transdisciplinary opportunities. 

"I thought that if we could take the geekiest corner of
entertainment -- role-playing games -- and make a crossover hit
that would appeal to people who aren't hardcore gamer geeks,
then we would be onto something," Bowe says. "It seemed like a
good business idea that might turn out to be popular."

That it has. It has been mentioned in EW, Wired and the Village
Voice and become a selected link on the influential Shift. It has
also attracted more than 25,000 registered users. At last count, it
was bringing in a new registered user every minute. Its
maddeningly addictive qualities account for much of the popularity
-- the world record so far for continuously playing Sissyfight is 16
hours, 58 minutes and 20 seconds.

The key to the game's success, Zimmerman says, is that despite
its retro-1980s Atari-style graphics, it succeeds in emotionally
affecting players more deeply than games that realistically portray
horrible acts of graphic dismemberment. "People have very
emotional experiences playing Sissyfight," Zimmerman said,
talking from a cellular phone in San Francisco, where he was
speaking at a gaming conference. "People have said to me, 'I
have never been so traumatized online. I entered a game and
everybody realized I was the newbie. They jumped me --
grabbing, scratching and teasing me out of the game in a couple of
turns.'"

Not surprisingly, Word.com gets a lot of regular e-mail feedback
from its new flock of grabbing and scratching virtual schoolgirls:
"This game is awesome. It is the meanest game ever. It is so much
meaner than Quake or any of the games where you actually try
and kill each other." 

Another player effused, "It's great therapy and helps me get
revenge on all my childhood torturers. I've never laughed sooo
much while being sooo mean!" 

Zimmerman could not be more pleased. "For me that's a real
accomplishment," he says. To the Brooklyn resident, who gets
paid for lecturing at universities like the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology about the intricacies of gaming, "Every Sissyfight
game is a miniature society with dramatic struggles for power. An
aggressive player might emerge as a leader and direct the other
players, but might later be branded as a bully and be destroyed
by the mob. It's emergent complexity in action." And even though
the graphics are low-fi, he says, the emotions the game spurs are
high impact. "There are a lot of debates about so-called
immersion in gaming," Zimmerman says. "I take the stance that
immersion is not about the richness of the graphics, but about the
total relationship a player has with a game. Play engagement
occurs not just visually, but on strategic, social and cultural levels
as well.

"Sissyfight 2000 proves you don't need technological
extravaganzas of real-time 3-D graphics, reflection maps and
shadowing to get completely emotionally engaged with a game." 

The game has, of course, also attracted a certain amount of killjoy
finger wagging from the protect-the-children contingent.
Zimmerman suffered a few sticks and stones during an NPR
interview, slung by a listener who suggested that the schoolgirls
should be encouraged to support each other's self-esteem instead
of tearing it down. And Word.com has received a smattering of
e-mail attacks like this one: "This is the biggest waste of time and
bandwidth ever to have been devised to run on the Internet. Why
can't you use your time and ingenuity for a more productive idea,
losers." 

Aside from the hostility that this user expresses (which might be
better vented if he played more Sissyfight), he brings up a point all
video game designers have heard before -- that their work
encourages violent behavior. Not surprisingly, Zimmerman
disagrees.

"The human psyche does not work on a monkey-see, monkey-do
basis," Zimmerman says. "Sissyfight is radically metaphorical,
voluntarily entered into and satisfyingly transgressive. The idea
that play should be 'good for you' and turn you into a better
citizen of the state is something that I want to question."

The game's addictiveness has made it a hot topic of discussion on
other places besides Word.com. On the popular punkrock.net
bulletin boards, for example, there are endless entries about
Sissyfight from users who use such game names as Anna Bortion,
Pussyhoney, Bjgirl69 (who has been outed as a guy), BullDyke
and Vaginosis. A team of players who enter games and summarily
destroy their competition has taken to calling themselves "The
Pigtail Squad." One player had this to say: "I am supposed to
study all night for my midterm this afternoon; instead all I did was
play Sissyfight 2000 till 3 a.m." And then, in another entry: "I
decided to get up early to cram. What am I doing now? Playing
Sissyfight 2000."

To Zimmerman, success has come to Sissyfight because of a
carefully designed gaming recipe that blends the worst kind of
humiliating hostility with a lighthearted childhood innocence. 

"Sissyfight kind of encourages cruelty and that's why it makes the
social space so highly charged," Zimmerman says. "At the same
time I would say that it's aggressively playful too, in the music
played and the very stylized nature of the girl characters. Those
elements cut across the cruelty of the game in interesting ways."

Of course, Sissyfight, more than any other fantasy video game, is
not really a fantasy at all but based squarely on the very real
brutality and unfairness of childhood. As such, for many, it taps
into wounds that haven't been opened since the days of "Gilligan's
Island" reruns. And in the same way children are cruelly honest
and uncensored in their playing and fighting, Sissyfight comes to
computers across the world without having gone through any
PTA scrutiny or having been taken away by the recess monitor. 

And that's the way Zimmerman wants it. "Children's play
fascinates me because I think it is sort of utterly violent and
perverse and Sissyfight is too," he says. "And I think that pop
culture and art in general should challenge and be provocative,
and so there certainly is nothing wrong in creating a game that is
too."
salon.com | April 27, 2000



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