6:42 p.m.
BIG
GAME COUNTRY
Bigger than Hollywood, bigger than music, the video gaming industry is the behemoth of entertainment, and UT could be smack-dab in the middle of it by Tim Taliaferro
6:42 p.m. It’s a Monday night in Austin and I’m standing in line outside Stubb’s music venue waiting for the doors to open. The 22 people ahead of me are college students. They talk of roommates and research papers and free food. Some have come in packs or pairs, but most lean against the building’s stone exterior alone, hands in their pockets, eyes gazing at the laces of their Converse or the straps of their flip flops, or, occasionally, the front of the line. The black letters on the marquee read “CLASH OF THE HEROES.” Might sound like a battle of bands or maybe some rad, postmodern name of an actual band, but it’s neither. What I know from reading a flyer I found on the Texas Gaming Association’s Web site this morning is that the clash is indeed a competition, and the heroes are those in the queue with me. They are not musicians, though. They’re gamers. The $10.3 billion U.S. electronic gaming industry can count a healthy customer base among UT students. For years now, a common social event on campus has been what’s known as a “LAN party,” where a whole group of people play one game at the same time over a local area network (which on campus happens to be blisteringly fast). Thinking it could capitalize on the phenomenon, the Division of Housing and Food Service in 2005 converted the basement computer lab of Jester West into a gaming area and renamed it “The LAN Cave.” But because so many students already had game consoles or computers in their rooms and could play them there for free, the LAN Cave was virtually never used and so was converted back into a lab in 2006. That same year, the Global Gaming League ranked UT the No. 1 school on the planet for online gaming. Ever since the late 1970s, when they first began appearing next to pinball machines in the dark back rooms of family friendly restaurants, video games have become steadily more sophisticated and ubiquitous, in the same way that personal computers have, until today there are game consoles, computer games, portable game players, games on cell phones, and even Massively Multiplayer Online Games, where hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world play simultaneously over the Internet in elaborate online worlds. Gaming — an industry bigger than Hollywood, bigger than music — is now as much a part of the everyday lives of UT students as text messages and caffeine.
6:57 p.m. The event’s lead organizer, a spiky-haired blonde sporting brown Doc Martins and clutching a Red Bull, pulls up in front of Stubb’s, gets out of his car, and, addressing the crowd generally but no one in particular, asks, “How many of you are there?” and gets no response. A moment more of awkward waiting. Then it dawns on him that virtually nobody other than he and his co-organizers at TGA would know or care that there are now 67 of us in line. He turns back to his car, pulls from the back seat some what looks like posters and walks past the front of the line. Stubb’s might seem like a peculiar place to host a video game tournament, especially one that’s to be attended over-
whelmingly by minors, until you consider that they’ll be playing the cultural juggernaut that is “Guitar Hero II.” The point of the game is for the user to attempt to emulate as closely as possible the phalangic dexterity and hand-ear coordination of master guitarists. The game, complete with plastic guitar-shaped controller, aims to simulate the pulsepumping thrill of fingering an epic guitar riff. At its most elemental, GH2 is meant to make the user feel like a rock star. And where better to feel like a rock star than at the storied Stubb’s Bar-B-Que.
7:02 p.m. The guy who will eventually win the Best Show Award comes walking up the sidewalk from the south. He’s wearing a red headband à la Hendrix, a grungy black tee, and tightish purple pants. Clinging to his outstretched arms are three girls with matching red shirts that read: “We ♥ Our Guitar Heroes.” A couple of his friends trail behind. They walk past the whole line on their way to the back. Several heroes look up from their Cons. Eight minutes later the doors open, and the line begins to move. There’s a $10 cover charge/entry fee per contestant, but groupies get in free. IDs are checked.
The Global Gaming League ranked UT the No. 1 school on the planet for online gaming. Once inside, we descend into the basement, where the eight, male officers of TGA, wearing white shirts that read “game on,” man six Xbox360 playing stations spaced out around the room. Each game console is plugged into a flatscreen monitor set atop a cocktail table sporting the Red Bull logo. Red Bull has also supplied several bins stocked full of the silver-canned energy drink and fronted the venue fee. At the stations, two gamers at a time sling guitar straps over their shoulders and get set to play. To begin, each chooses a digital avatar or character who best resembles the image each has of his or her rock star self. The bank of avatars includes male and female incarnations of various rocker stereotypes: leather pants, tattoos, mohawks, face paint, bandannas, chains. Once both have selected an avatar and a guitar, they must choose a city where they’d like to have their concert. Austin’s on the list and, naturally, is selected without exception. The central appeal of video games is that they enable fantasies. Drive a race car, infiltrate an enemy compound, wage war on aliens, shoot par at Augusta National, or be a rock star, all without ever crawling into a racecar, breaking a sweat, working out that slice in your swing, or worrying September/October 2007 The Alcalde 59
about the troubles of mortality. When it comes to fantasy, anything is game. GH2 makes you a rocker without asking you to tune, sing, harmonize, or strum. The plastic “guitar” one uses to play GH2 has five buttons on the neck and a switch the length of a credit card that functions as proxy to the strings on ordinary guitars. Onscreen, your digital avatar stands onstage amid lights and smoke and fire. In the lower half of the screen there stretches what looks like a conveyor belt with five lines running vertically the length of it. They represent the strings on the neck of a guitar. Once the music starts, the belt begins to move and along toward the user come color-coded dots representing notes. When the dots pass beneath target areas at the front of the
More than 40 gaming companies have offices in town, employing better than 1,500 people and bringing
more than $400 million to the capital-area economy. belt, the gamer must press the button or combination of buttons on the plastic guitar neck at the precise time necessary to play the song as it sounds. Pressing too early, too late, or the wrong button earns a discordant bonking sound. As the difficulty level goes up, the number of buttons and the pace at which they approach increase, forcing users to perform increasingly demanding fingerwork. The goal is to play the song perfectly, with no mistakes, so that you hear the song exactly as it was recorded. The closer you get to perfect, the higher your score — and Zen.
7:25 p.m. The place is jammed. Mobs surround each playing station and only a sliver of room remains down the center of the performance hall for people to slide past each other on their way to size up the competition at a different station. Nearly everyone’s drinking Red Bull. Two heroes with red wristbands nurse Bud Lights. The crowd has swollen well above 150 people, and two TGA officers huddle behind a laptop to create a bracket that can accommodate 63 competitors, 23 more than had signed up in advance. The room as a whole looks vastly different from the usual concert arrangement. Rather than the normal formula of an act onstage and adoring fans looking on from the gallery, here the gallery holds both the action and the attention of the room. Semicircles surround the six stations, with two rockers playing at a time. But the spectators don’t focus on
60 The Alcalde September/October 2007
them either. They watch the screens. The result in the aggregate is 150-some people in the basement of Stubb’s staring at six flat-screen monitors. The hall rings with the dull cacophony of six different songs playing simultaneously, each punctuated by the frequent “bonk” when a gamer misses a note. Unlike at an air guitar contest, there’s very little showmanship from the gamers. What little there is manifests mostly in the clothes they wear. Most competitors appear to have taken some steps to look the part. Vintage tees are all the rage. One reads, “Cowbell Hero.” Another reads, “Calculus is for lovers.” A few people wear alt-style train conductor or Russian dogsledder or 1920s newspaperboy hats; one girl wears a top hat.
7:44 p.m. Checking the watch more frequently now. Still no action from the tournament organizers. Yet it seems no one else is concerned. Virtually everyone stares contentedly at the screen in front of them. Gaming get-togethers like the Clash are increasingly common in Austin, not just because lots of UT students play games but because Austin is something of a gaming mecca. It’s tied with Vancouver as the fourth-largest hub for game development in North America, behind Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle. More than 40 gaming companies have offices in town, employing better than 1,300 people and bringing more than $400 million to the capital-area economy. Sony Online Entertainment, Midway Games, and NCSoft represent a few of the local heavyweights, attracted by Austin’s quality of life and its supply of techies and artists. The most recent impact study commissioned by the city of Austin predicts that by 2010 the local gaming industry will grow by 250 percent. The Texas Gaming Festival, held in February, brings several hundred gamers and developers to town every year. So too does the South-by-Southwest Interactive ScreenBurn Festival and the Gaming Developers Conference. Industry legend and developer of the famous “Ultima” computer game series, Richard “Lord British” Garriott, who lives in Austin, started programming games as a student at UT in the late ’70s. “Invader Zed” was produced for a game-design course at UT, as was “Texanus Circus Maximus,” a satire of university life. In April the Center for American History announced that it was creating a massive video game archive at UT, one of the first archives of its kind in the nation. Though the University is closely tied to the gaming industry’s past, it’s currently absent to a large extent from gaming’s present. While a great portion of UT students play games, only a handful of major gaming companies recruit at UT because so few students come out with game-development skills. Much to the industry’s dismay, there is no gaming major at UT, only isolated classes scattered across colleges and departments. Many local game development companies would like to see UT funnel more students toward careers in gaming, and more broadly, digital entertainment.
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2 1) Gamers warm up before the competition starts. 2) One of six Xbox360 playing stations, provided by (unofficial sponsor) Red Bull. 3) Engineering freshman Richi Dewan. 4) The summary screen at the end of a song. 5) A Guitar Hero entourage: Melissa Lee, Alison Whitt, Sarah Meyers, Adrian Subrt, Jordan Harris, Jeff Kuo, Ross Hogan, and Shivan Pande. Photos by Tim Taliaferro.
5 One of those companies is Amaze Entertainment, whose executive studio director for Austin, Rodney Gibbs, MFA ’96, graduated in the first-ever class of Michener Fellows. His studio specializes in creating movie-based games for Nintendo NS, games like “X-Men,” “Lord of the Rings,” and “Harry Potter.” Gibbs says that every gaming company with offices in Austin is starved for young talent and looking to the University to provide the kind of steady pipeline that the West Coast cities get from California’s universities. Amaze wants to hire 10 entry-level people this year alone, and some of the bigger companies are looking to hire 40 or more in the same period. Representatives of the digital entertainment industry, which in addition to gaming includes areas like simulations, Web design, and interactive marketing, have begun making visits to the University to develop contacts in the departments of computer sciences, radio-TV-film, and engineering, creating internships and offering to open their studios to visits from whole classrooms. They also are working extremely hard to dispel the myth rampant in America that programming jobs are all going overseas. “That’s plainly false,” Gibbs says, yet his sense is that many parents advise their high school seniors to pursue medicine or engineering because of it. In return and in conjunction, Gibbs and his colleagues would like to see the University create gaming concentrations for its students, some that would, for example, teach
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4 only C++ programming, which is the language games are written in. Currently the Department of Computer Sciences teaches a variety of programming languages with the thought that making students multilingual, as it were, better prepares them for the workforce in general and enables them to learn “new” languages as they’re developed. For the most part, the University trains students in only one or sometimes two areas related to game development and even then indirectly. Many of the courses in computer sciences teach students skills that have to do with various aspects of game construction, but it currently offers only one undergraduate course explicitly in game design. Which makes sense when you consider that the scope of computer sciences is far wider than just gaming — it’s about the whole science of computing. In the same way, fine arts teaches its students to draw, and communications teaches still other students graphic design, but in terms of branding virtually nothing on campus caters specifically to skills needed by the gaming industry or calls itself the gaming track. UT has the opportunity to become a sort of turbo charger for the Texas gaming engine, to provide many of the programmers, graphic designers, artists, composers, writers, and computer engineers that gaming companies need for their development teams. If UT wants to be part of the gaming industry’s future, it’s going to have to show a little flexibility. “The 21st century,” says Undergraduate Studies dean Paul Woodruff, “is not going to be patient with the walls we build between departments.” September/October 2007 The Alcalde 61
7:50 p.m. Blake Ellison, the guy who out front had asked how many of us there were and who it turns out is the TGA president and a senior Plan II/Japanese studies major, jumps onstage and describes how the tournament will work. It will be double-elimination. The last few matches will be held on the actual stage, so the entire crowd can watch. The finalists will receive special prizes. And throughout the night, the TGA officers will be on the lookout for contestants who show special performance flair and will nominate them for a “show-off” competition onstage. The show boat will also earn a prize.
8:57 p.m. We’re now well into the tournament, and winners and losers brackets have formed. The initial excitement has given way to the round-robin doldrums. Increasingly the heroes hit the Red Bull bins. At a playing station nearby, a song comes to an end. The loser has lost badly, yet despite how lopsided it was, he turns to his opponent and fawns, “Awesome, dude.” The episode, I notice, is not uncharacteristic from earlier matches, and it reveals something distinctive about the way gamers for the most part appear to handle wins and losses. Unlike most athletes, for example, who typically feel only bitterness in a loss, these gamers are quick to applaud their competition’s success. What really codifies this impression is seeing contestants from different schools slap hands after a match. A fair number of heroes hail from St. Edward’s and Texas State. Daniel Juarez, a first-year mechanical engineering student, has driven in from UTSA to compete. He says there just aren’t any tournaments in San Antonio, and he found out about this one from scorehero.com, a Web site that tracks top scores of GH2 users around the world. Juarez, or Daniel 62 The Alcalde September/October 2007
9:55 p.m. TIM TALIAFERRO
7:54 p.m. Ellison’s speech ends. People shove their way toward the large monitor showing the bracket. A TGA officer stands on the stairs and calls out match-ups. The competition gets underway. Looking out at the scene as a whole, the Clash could seem rather dull. It’s once you get close to the action and can see the monitors that the real excitement begins. Despite being a video game about rockin’ and rollin’, GH2 possesses all the necessary elements to engage an audience in the same way that a sports game does. The two contestants play along to the same song at the same time and try to make fewer mistakes than each other. GH2 awards the users for each note that they hit. The longer a player goes without making an error, the more that each note counts, which means that even if a player starts off way ahead or way behind, the show’s not over. GH2 lends itself to dramatic runs, which when watched live, elicit the same kind of reactions from spectators as does a runner closing a gap down the last straight-away. People shout and cheer. Adrenaline levels soar. And for the life of you, you can’t tear your eyes away.
J as he’s listed on the bracket, has been ranked in the top 20. He is one of only a few contestants I meet who actually plays real guitar in addition to GH2. One of his rivals is Matt Furbush, a first-year RTF major at UT who has been practicing two to three hours a day for weeks leading up to the Clash. Furbush does not play real guitar. “I tried it once but sucked,” he says. At “Guitar Hero,” though, he’s a virtuoso.
9:55 p.m. In the first and only instance of a hero showing real performance flair, first-year student Shivan Pende (of the purple pants) pretty much guarantees himself a shot at the Best Show Award with some head-flailing and hip-gyrating that until now has been absent from the event. The dancing causes him to miss several notes in succession until he finally just stops looking at the screen altogether and turns to entertain the crowd that has amassed around him. For once the bystanders watch the hero rather than the monitor.
The University’s slowness to react to the needs of the gaming industry represents just one instance of a larger issue. The obstacles keeping cross-disciplinary majors like gaming from being developed at UT have mostly to do with turf. Colleges compete for students and are reluctant to lose any. Some deans worry that cross-college programs would lack standards and/or pillage their faculty. Their concerns are not unfounded, since colleges must always worry about accreditation, and there’s never enough faculty to go around. But in the meantime employers are heading to Georgia Tech and Carnegie Mellon and Cal Berkeley to hire.
Carnegie Mellon happens to be one of the leading schools in preparing students for careers in gaming and creative technology. Its Entertainment Techno-logy Center in Pittsburgh is run by Andrew Davidson, PhD ’01. Davidson says that the ETC offers a master’s in entertainment technology degrees that have dual accreditation from the fine arts and computer sciences departments. “Our graduates achieve essentially 100 percent placement,” he says, with companies such as Walt Disney Imagineering, Pixar, Rockstar Studios, and Electronic Arts.
The obstacles keeping cross-disciplinary majors like
gaming from being developed at
UT have mostly to do with turf.
September/October 2007 The Alcalde 63
Before he came to Carnegie Mellon, Davidson started a gaming major at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and ran into the same sort of turf troubles that proponents of a gaming major at UT face. “Oh, the turf wars,” he says. “We were in communications, and art tried to claim ownership because of the drawing and design components, computer sciences weighed in based on the fundamental need for programming, and the business school felt they should be involved since it was an industry.” Indeed the problem of crossing colleges is not unique to UT, only the slowness in overcoming it. SMU recently created a gaming institute to help cut across its departments, and Gibbs would like to see UT create something similar — and soon. While UT may be a bit behind the curve, it’s not altogether out of the race. The Bridging Disciplines Program is UT’s most aggressive effort yet to teach interdisciplinary subjects. Its director, Jeanette Herman, explains that the nine BDPs that currently exist were developed to help students get into classes usually reserved for a particular college’s students only. One of those nine, the Digital Arts and Media Concentration, is the closest thing to a gaming major that currently exists on the campus. Started in 2005, the 19-credit hour certificate program requires its students to take classes in RTF, fine arts, and computer and social sciences, then do an internship and a final project. It’s supervised and certified by a faculty council, made up of professors of every academic color. According to its students’ application essays, a good many of the 41 of them intend to go into the gaming industry after graduation. Bruce Pennycook, a composer who holds dual appointments in the School of Music and RTF, chairs the Digital Arts and Media Program. He recognizes that UT’s a slow ship to turn, but he says there’s much willingness among faculty across the campus to work together. He says Greg Lavender in computer sciences has been receptive and enthusiastic toward developing courses in gaming, as has Dean Doug Dempster in the College of Fine Arts, Sharon Strover in RTF, and Brian Evans in engineering. Pennycook, for his part, considers it his mandate to get the Digital Arts and Media Program developed into a degree-issuing program, rather than one that merely offers a certificate. Gibbs, though, says that while UT is starting to steer some students toward gaming, the flow is more like a trickle than
the torrent they need to stop having to hire from out of state. The BDP, he says, is a great first step, but “it’s only collecting existing courses and threading them together under a loose heading.” A major with specific classes to craft strong, creative talent would do much more to appease the gaming community, he says. There are some signs that UT is starting to come around. The RTF department has convinced Warren Spector, MA ’80, founder of Junction Point Studios, an Austin-based gamedevelopment studio that Disney bought in July, to co-teach a class on gaming and digital media in the fall. Dean Woodruff says that his office is very much interested in fostering the development of college-bridging undergraduate degree programs. He says too many degree programs, such as international relations, environmental studies, and digital arts and gaming, have not been born yet merely because they are of a different mold. UT also plays host to summer camps for middle and high school gamers. A sort of crash course on game design, production, and development, the camps bring in professors and professionals to illustrate how games are conceived and marketed. Campers learn how to write the logic that make games work and the text that shows up onscreen. They also learn what’s known as “modding,” a process where people modify existing games by adding characters or levels. A California-based company has been running a camp at UT for seven summers now, and this year Austin-based GameCamp held its first camp at UT for students considering game development as a career. So some help may be on the way, just a couple of years out.
‘A major with specific classes to craft strong, creative talent would do much to appease the gaming community.’
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10:49 p.m. The field has been whittled down to 10. Ellison announces that the rest of the matches will take place onstage and orders the TGA officers to shut down the satellite playing stations. He takes the opportunity to inform the crowd what prizes are in store for the winners. Second place will win a case of Red Bull, some gear from Activision, and a custom GH2 “guitar.” The champion will also win the Red Bull, the gear, and a guitar, plus two tickets to Stubb’s Gospel Brunch, and a Microsoft Zune. The Style Award winner will score a case of Red Bull and some gear. The matches resume. It is here that I finally get to meet Ellison face-to-face and pepper him with questions. The TGA has a “loose membership,” he says, and the organization charges no dues. Their
Facebook group has 190 members, the majority of whom are console gamers, though a fair portion play computer games as well. For his part, Ellison got involved with the TGA as a first-year student. In high school he was a “competitive gamer,” participating in tournaments and monitoring his national ranking. When he arrived on campus he heard about a Super Smash Bros. tournament being held at Double Dave’s and decided to go. He’s played with TGA ever since. Ellison speaks comfortably about gaming and the five or so hours he spends each week playing. It turns out his Plan II thesis makes the case for more systematic and sophisticated academic study of video games. After he graduates, Ellison heads to Japan to teach English, but in the meantime he’s hard at work organizing a UT Counter-Strike Team to compete in online leagues and in LAN competitions in Texas. He intends to host tryouts so he can field “five starters and a bench of one or two players.” When I ask him what he thinks the appeal of gaming is and specifically the appeal of “Guitar Hero,” he answers, “It’s power fantasy, man. Anybody can pick up a guitar and be a rock star. Where else can you learn to play [Lynyrd Skynyrd’s] ‘Free Bird’ in a month?” The rhetorical answer to his rhetorical question is: nowhere. Yet even if one wanted to learn to play “Free Bird” on Guitar Hero in a month’s time, it would take a truly obsessive time commitment, but not one that gamers are necessarily unwilling to make — whether intentionally or not. Mental health professionals have started to see the flip side to gaming’s intoxicating appeal: the ease with which gamers can become addicted. In July two young parents in Reno were arrested for child neglect after their infant son and daughter were found severely malnourished and near death because their parents spent hours playing “Dungeons & Dragons” online. Students who get too caught up with gaming get sent to the Counseling and Mental Health Center, where they’re treated by a counselor the same way they’d be treated for an alcohol or drug addiction. Dr. Jane Bost, associate director of the Mental Health Center, says they’re seeing more and more students seeking help for gaming addiction. Because the field is so young, though, the center does not yet have an expert on gaming addiction. They hope to within six months.
11:06 p.m. Ellison calls up Shivan Pende and Chuck Yee, a kinesiology senior, to compete in a Show-off onstage. What follows is an excruciating 3-minute segment during which Yee takes off his shirt and plays the guitar between his legs while Pende head-bangs and makes faces of faux-exertion at the crowd. The whole thing comes off flat because neither candidate is actually producing music so their efforts to look like they are for once just seem wrong. In the end, Pende receives the bigger score on the applause-o-meter and wins the prize.
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11:15 p.m. By now, the TGA guys are feeling nervous, as they are supposed to have had everyone out of Stubb’s by 11. But we’re down to the final two contestants: Daniel J and St. Edwards senior Steve Zuehlke, known as “Steve Z.” They select “Beast and the Harlot” by Avenged Sevenfold from the highest difficulty level, Face-Melters. The song is a hailstorm of notes, and both heroes reveal impossible dexterity at keeping up. The competition is close and the lead swings back and forth, but with a final push amid cheers from the crowd, Daniel J prevails. The crowd demands a solo encore and somewhat to Ellison’s dismay he obliges. He selects “Killing in the Name” by Rage Against the Machine, and for the next four minutes plays along to the song as the whole crowd sings it. The episode turns out to be the most revealing of the night, as, for the first time, Stubb’s transforms back into something like a music venue: musician on stage, a singing crowd in the gallery, and music — loud, rock music. Here at the end of the night I think I finally understand what draws so many people to “Guitar Hero”: they’re fans. Even the game, itself based on mimicry rather than artistry, is essentially one giant tribute to the rockers themselves. As anyone who plays “Guitar Hero” will tell you, they are the true guitar heroes.
11:23 p.m. Steve Z and Daniel J are presented with their “guitars,” courtesy of Activision, Inc., publisher of “Guitar Hero.” Ellison thanks everyone for coming and makes his final plug for the TGA: “Visit our Web site at txgaming.com.”
11:25p.m. 11:25 p.m. The lights literally are turned off. Game over.