DiGRA '07 - Proceedings of the 2007 DiGRA International Conference: Situated Play
The University of Tokyo, September, 2007
Volume: 4
ISBN / ISNN: ISSN 2342-9666
This paper develops a theory of the game as a commodity form by looking at the unique practices of console hackers and videogame emulation comment gagner au keno communities. This theory argues for the necessity of understanding a game's system of rules in relation to the material conditions and constraints of the media within which it is constructed and distributed. After deriving the computer game-as-commodity from a combination of institutional and material restrictions and protections on the free-play of the execution of game rules, I provide an account of emulation and ROM-hacking communities as a cultural critique and playful resistance of such commodification within the rigid legal and technological infrastructures of autonomous, executable, and copyrighted machine code. Rather than asking whether videogame emulation is “right or wrong” in the abstract, I examine the legal, economic, and aesthetic implications of emulation practices, asking what the efforts of the emulation and ROM-hacking community have to contribute to the study of console videogames. Finally, I argue that analyzing and embracing the efforts of a variety of practices within the emulation and ROM-hacking communities is helpful and essential to both mapping past struggles and tracing future paradigms of the computer game's contradictory status as a commodity to be consumed and an algorithm to be uncovered.