Years ago, the science fiction editor Tappan King told me something I hadn't thought of before: That games are the democratization of fiction.

His point was that conventional fiction media (prose, film, theater, TV and the rest) are essentially aristocratic in nature: the Artist creates, the audience consumes. Games, contrariwise, allow individual players to participate in the creation of their fictional experience. The developers still shape and constrain that experience, to be sure, but there is no experience without the active engagement of the player; the player may well do something with the construct that the developers had not anticipated; and the ultimate experience is a collaboration in which both sides participate, not something handed down from On High by the Great Artiste. It is, in other words, the antithesis of aristocratic; games are a way for everyman to participate in creating his or her own narrative experience. Games are a democratic artform for a democratic age.

Mind you, some games are more 'democratic' than others; many, perhaps most, games are highly linear in nature, with players' freedom of action tightly constrained within individual nodes. But at the extremes--say, with a tabletop roleplaying game, or in a virtual world like Second Life--the player's experience is extraordinarly freeform. And even in a tightly constrained game, no player's experience will be identical to another's.

Thinking about this recently, and about what Manifesto is trying to do, it occurs to me that the video game industry has, in some ways, betrayed the democratic nature of the form it sells. The game industry, even if the product it promotes is democratic and interactive in nature, is structured virtually identically to entertainment media that predate it. Creators contract with publishers, who do their best to screw them financially; marketing is "top-down," broadcast-style, with a carefully crafted message disseminated via PR and advertising to consumers; publishers, console manufacturers, and retailers jointly act as gate-keepers to narrow consumer options; and gamers are viewed as little more than sheep to be fleeced, induced by a glut of advertising and manipulated press attention to go to the store and buy the next game in the franchise.

Now, let's think about this a little. There are essentially two groups in this value chain who love games: the people who create them, i.e., developers; and the people who consume them, i.e., gamers. Everyone in between is a necessary evil, a means of getting games from developers into the hands of gamers. But it's also everyone in between who basically doesn't give a rat's ass about games, and indeed, would probably be happier selling detergent, or working in film. For developers, and for gamers, games are something special; for the intermediaries, they're just another SKU in a packaged goods industry.

But... Maybe the Internet gives us the opportunity to change all that.

Just as games are essentially democratic in nature, perhaps the way in which games are sold should also be democratic. That is, gamers should be the gate-keepers and taste-makers, not intermediaries; and the two sides of the equation that actually love games should talk and communicate directly. Rather than the industry being structured in a broadcast, top-down model, it should be structured in a many-to-many, networked model.

Gamers should be able to "bubble up" cool stuff; developers should talk to their fans, and purposefully shape their development to respond to the enthusiasm of the people who love what they do.

Conventionally, retailers have contact with consumers, and understand their behavior best; they talk to publishers, and publishers decide what to commission on the basis of what they hear from retailers. Developers operate in the dark, trying to feel out what consumers want, in a bizarre game of blind-man's-buff, seeing what pitches get shot down by publishers and what do not. It's all--well, fucking insane, given the existence of the net. There's no need for this three-distance-removed signalling.

Gamers and developers need to find a way to talk--and to get the intermediaries who, when you get down to it, are useless and overpaid overhead, out of the equation.

Manifesto is, well, another intermediary, I guess; but part of our mission has got to be to facilitate that conversation, to provide a way for developers and gamers to connect. To that end, we'll be doing a number of things. For one, we won't be pretending that these are "our" games (the way publishers claim credit for everything they publish); we'll provide links to developers' sites, we'll list the top-level credits (lead designer, art director, tech lead, lead producer) for every game we carry. Player reviews and comments on almost everything on the site will be enabled; we'll provide forums (linked to individual game pages) for more detailed conversations. We'll have scheduled chats with developers and, down the road, hope to poll our customers regularly on new game ideas. Probably other ways of facilitating that dialog will occur to us down the pike--but still, that has to be our objective.

The most democratic of artforms deserves a democratic conversation between the groups who love it most. Developers and gamers are important, and anything that gets in the way of the connection between them should go away.

Manifesto expects to be in between them--and if we hope to survive (and prosper), it had better be by serving their needs, and facilitating their conversation--not by getting in the way, or trying to control the conversation.
posted by Greg at 5:12 PM 5 comments