[This is an email interview with Anne-Marie Schleiner by Jim McLellan of
the Guardian (January 1999). Schleiner organized the exhibition of game
patches and plugins called "Cracking the Maze"
(http://switch.sjsu.edu/web/CrackingtheMaze). She also works on the site
Opensorcery.net (http://www.opensorcery.net) which is a collection of
texts and projects related to the hacker-like strategies of network art
production, open source modes of computer game development at both code
and content levels, game hacking and modifications, gamer culture, game
avatar gender construction, female skins and patches, and female gamer
alliances. Some of the texts available for the first time on
Opensorcery.net include an expanded version of "Does Lara Croft wear
fake polygons?", rewritten for Leonardo, and "Parasitic Interventions:
Game Patches and Hacker Art", an article that includes discussion of
many of the artworks presented in the "Cracking the Maze" online
exhibit.]

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Jim McLellan: When did you get the idea for the exhibition? Are you a
gamer? Do you use patches yourself?

Anne-Marie Schleiner: I am a gamer and first encountered patches through
a friend with a similar interest in gaming. I am also an artist and I
created my first patch as an art piece that was intended to critique and
parody gender politics in computer gaming. The patch, called "Madame
Polly", was a parody of the recent genre of female action heroine games
like "Tomb Raider" where the player finds clues embedded in computer
terminals distributed throughout the game space that construct the
avatars own polymorphous and contradictory identity–heroine as boy toy,
heroine as drag queen, heroine as feminist role model, heroine as abject
pleasure tool for women–were some of the possible gender subjectivity
configurations.

I also wrote an article relating to gender and gaming for an issue of
Switch about cyberfeminism and appended a section onto the article which
I intended to be about feminist game patching activity. I discovered,
upon further investigation of home pages, that the patches I believed
where created by women were actually bearded computer geeks who happened
to have androgynous and feminine names. This nevertheless led me to the
idea that patches offer a means for alternative game scenarios to emerge
that challenge stereotypical notions of gender in computer gaming and
also potentially subvert other conventions of computer gaming such as
notions of game world space and subjectivity, politics of the other, and
game interactivity and gameplay.

Patching appears to function as a cheap form of conceptual beta-testing
for the gaming industry, which sometimes picks up on patching trends and
releases them as official games. For example, Lara Croft from "Tomb
Raider" appears to trace her most immediate genealogy to patches with
active female characters like Marathon's Amazons and Female Cyborg. It
occurred to me it would be interesting to organize a show that would
exhibit some of the more subversive and unique patches floating around
the web that have emerged as a sort of popular culture hacker art form
and to also to invite artist's who are not necessarily deeply immersed
in gaming culture to create game patches. Following in the wake of
artists like VNS Matrix and the hacktivists of the Electronic
Disturbance Theater, as a curator I am interested in the notion of art
as culture hacking, art with a critical agenda that seeps outside the
boundaries of prescribed art audiences and engages itself with a broader
public (i.e.. the gaming public). Art that finds cracks in the code and
hacks into foreign systems. I also want to invite a cross-pollination of
gaming and art strategies by providing artists with tools and techniques
developed by game hackers and exhibiting game patches created by gamers
as art.

So I posted a call for submissions for "Cracking the Maze: Game Plug-ins
and Patches as Hacker Art" (http://switch.sjsu.edu/web/CrackingtheMaze)
on the web and I am very happy with the results.

McLellan: What are the best game patches you've come across?

Schleiner: This is always changing. Game patching is not an art form
that lends itself to the selection of timeless awe-inspiring
masterpieces. Aesthetically game patching cannot compete with the
capital that goes into the graphic detail and ambience in commercial
games (although many young gamers continue to make valiant efforts and
the result is often a less resplendent replica of the original game).
The patches (add-ons, mods, skins, plug-ins, shapes, etc.) that I find
most interesting are those that offer a humorous twist on the familiar
tropes of gaming and create potential gaps where new gaming genres can
emerge. I think "Barney and his Minions" for Doom is a patch that is
darkly humorous and undermines the machismo associated with shooters by
replacing the standard tough guys with children's fantasy figures. Also,
I enjoy patches that are not necessarily subversive but operate as what
William Irwin Thompson calls "epistemological cartoons" garish
hyperboles that crystallize underlying cultural relationships. "Los
Disneys" is a patch that is offers a dystopian vision of the U.S. real
estate being taken over by Disney Corporation. Since Disney already owns
a retirement community in Florida and has entered the hearts and minds
of many Americans through the entertainment industry "Los Disneys"
strikes a resonant chord that is taken to the pitch of millennial
apocalyptic fever.

McLellan: How subversive are game patches really? Sure, the Carmageddon
patches made the censors in the UK look silly - but to what end? Indeed,
the most recent Carmageddon patches were actually released by the
company?

Schleiner: As I mentioned earlier, patches are cheap game concept beta-
testing for the gaming industry. They also are commercially appealing to
gamers interested in customizing their own game worlds. Game patches and
hacks range from the highly mundane and trivial to the subversive. Take
for instance, a web ring of "skinners" for Quake, mostly teenage to mid
20's boys who exchange monster outfits for pre made 3d monsters in Quake
with each other, a sort of paper doll dress-up for boys, roughly
equivalent in concept to one of the few computer games ever released for
girls, "Barbie Dress-up." Then, on the other hand, there is Rtmark's
illegal hack of SimCopter (which will be in the exhibit) where more
often than not Bikini Clad Boys are available for kissing instead the
game manufacturers intended girls in bikinis.

McLellan: What do you think people from the art world can bring to
computer games? People often say that computer games mix incredible
technological sophistication and innovation with adolescent aesthetics -
is that simplifying things too much? Or is it at the aesthetic level
that 'artists' can make their contribution?

Schleiner: I think artists can bring a critical and perhaps more diverse
agenda in terms of age, gender and politics to computer games. I also
think artists are adept in approaching cultural artifacts in a manner
that merges form and content with an attuned awareness to cultural
belief systems that are embedded in aesthetics and vice versa. For
example, an artist would probably be thinking of the connection between
Renaissance perspective, Cartesian identity and first person shooters.

McLellan: Patches - as in players customizing levels - is now part of
the marketing strategy for most games - it has been since Doom - it's an
obvious way of building player loyalty - players get to do their own
thing but within the limits set by the original developers. Given that,
how much scope is there for artists to subvert from within - however
clever their patches might be?

Schleiner: This dynamic on-line web culture is what makes infiltration
possible. The system is already in place and ripe for subversion from
within and without.

McLellan: Many within the games world are suspicious of artists - they
think that they don't understand how games work and don't have the
technological ability to make them work, that they pass off substandard
programming as "an attempt to rupture the realistic game space" or
whatever? What's your reaction to that?

Schleiner: It's true that most gaming companies are divided into
specialized programmers and "artists" who are actually graphic designers
which is quite different from your typical new media artist who has a
much broader and less specialized range of skills. Yet some of these new
media artists also make their living off their skills in the computer
industry. (I personally do and I know quite a few others.) This question
makes me think of all the depressed middle aged male C programmers who
attended a Java class I took recently. Intense technical specialization
can also lead to obsolescence which artists may be better equipped to
handle (well I guess artists get obsolete too for different reasons).

McLellan: Do artists need to address the nature of the gaming experience
at a deeper level - i.e. - not just think about using a patch to
remotivate/subvert the graphics but try to address the nature of the
interaction with the machine during gameplay - what you give to and get
back from the machine, where it takes you, the nature of immersion and
its psycho-social effects etc?

Schleiner: Yes, however I don't think the politics of representation in
regards to gender and race are more superficial than the gameplay. This
is the typical mechanistic world view of programmers and engineers that
sees the game engine as the underlying "Uhr Struktor". A number of the
game patches in "Cracking the Maze" address interactivity and immersion.
Benjamin Eakin's "Ada Lovelace vs. Donkey Kong" allows you to "interact
with the code itself" and Parangari Cutiri's "Epileptic Game Patch"
immerses the player in a world of shifting patterns designed to induce
fits of epilepsy in the information weary (taking the warning that
appears at the beginning of many computer games very seriously). Matthew
Shadbolt's emulator patch phase shifts between an '80's style
graphically abstract type of gameplay and world to the narrow corridors
of the 3d shooter.

McLellan: I've only started digging into this subject but I've found
lots of artists who seem to be hugely fascinated by games - for example
tomorrow, I'm going to interview Jake and Dinos Chapman - they say they
want to do a computer game and want to talk about the kind of game they
might do - I think it will probably be all talk but they seem genuinely
drawn to games. Have you noticed that too? Why are artists fascinated in
this way, do you think?

Schleiner: I think it's very exciting that this meme is on the loose and
I think there are a lot of reasons to be interested in gaming. It seems
almost as if while some new media artists had their heads in the clouds
of virtual reality during the early to mid 90's tough and dirty game
worlds developed under their noses which offered virtual and often
networked worlds to a mass public. However, these virtual worlds are
dripping with violence and interactivity is codified into very specific
genres of game play. Although I personally am a big fan of many existing
types of gaming (including mindless bloodlust) I think that gaming
culture is ripe for intervention from outside more diverse agents,
including artists.

I know of a great gaming art piece that is going to be shown in an
exhibit about Technoculture and Religion in Dusseldorf this summer by
artist Eddo Stern (tzlofach@sjmusart.org) where there is one giant
controller hooked up to three mice that control 3 characters in the
networked on-line RPG (Role playing game) Everquest. All three
characters perform the same actions in unison in the game world but in
different environments so for example, if one is fighting off an
attacker with a sword the other one is fighting with a ghost and the
third one is stuck in a corner.