My Life, or Something Like It

Hitting the “Motherlode”: Cheating/Modding in The Sims & World of Warcraft

I guarantee that no two User Interfaces in World of Warcraft will be quite the same. Both WoW and The Sims have notoriously supported modification to their videogames over the years, even going so far as to convert existing addons or mods into actual features of later gameplay. Where they differ greatly however, is their stance on cheating.

Screenshot 2018-07-09 at 1.45.33 AM — Straight from EA’s official *The Sims 4* website.

While it might be front and centre on their website now, The Sims franchise used to have its own share of community shared and pseudo-mythological cheating console commands in circulation. While they were never so obviously discussed by the developers, the existence of easy-to-remember codes like “rosebud,” “kaching,” or “motherlode” for more money, always seemed to suggest that they were ‘in the know’ in giving these tools to players. Further still, there are plenty of things that the early entries to the franchise required you to do via console command, such as stopping aging, that are now features in the normal ‘settings’ of The Sims 4.

Cheating is a big part of the game. Not only is it easy to access, but it’s even something we kinda, sorta, actually encourage. Strap in as we show you not only how to cheat in The Sims 4, but tell you a few of our favorites The Sims 4 cheat codes (EA, The Sims 4)

Can these kinds of cheat codes even be considered “cheating” if they’re considered an endorsed part of the gameplay? Rather than allowing for extra lives or level skips through an implicit playtesting model, EA has gone one step further and condoned the use of their cheats as an active alternative to play. By so doing, they are acknowledging a number of ways for players to consume their content, and allowing people to use it as a building or design sim, rather than just for playing house. Further still, the game doesn’t penalize you for using cheats of any kind, and achievements in the game continue to record as they would if you never typed the [`] key at all.

Their endorsement of cheating comes alongside their in-game promotion of modified Sims and Lots (houses/businesses/community, etc.) through the Community Gallery. Practically since its inception, The Sims generated a very active modding community. They’ve been the source of providing new hairstyles, clothing options, furniture, houses, meshes, and a whole load of features before the game developers themselves included them. For example, the modding community already had versions of cat and dog companions (within a very limited vein) before an official expansion was ever released to include them. What we have to consider alongside this seeming embracing of “cheating” and “mods” within the native client of The Sims 4, is that the company is attempting to exert control over its modding community.

When a mod system is detached from the game itself, any number of issues can arise, both for the company and for the player. The players could run themselves the risk of downloading harmful files or corrupting their game beyond repair. The developers on the other hand, may risk financial loss over user-created content that mimics things they’d otherwise charge you for. In the end, by including a community gallery within the game itself, EA encourages its players to pay for the game itself, and its expansions (the gallery is not available through pirated versions), as well as discouraging players from reaching beyond their borders for content, via sites like ModTheSims or TheSimsResource. Despite efforts to contain the modification of The Sims, sites like these continue to prosper, providing content to the community where EA and the gallery cannot.

If we go way back, this design philosophy has almost been with The Sims from the beginning, and it seems to me that these kinds of cheats are not really cheats at all. User driven content and world-spontaneity has always been a desired feature on The Sims‘ horizon. Back in 2001, the Game Studies journal conducted an interview with Will Wright at Maxis, aka the mind behind The Sims, SimCity, SimAnt, and more.

14079 — Only in 2002 could *The Sims Online* be taken seriously with Comic Sans as a default chat font.

While this interview was conducted before the failure that would-be The Sims Online, a sim-universe MMO, Wright shared some interesting insight into what his view of the future of the franchise would be.

I would much rather build a system where the players are in more in control of the story and the story possibilities are much wider. For me the size of the space is paramount. Even if it was between the player controlling it or it being random, I still would want larger space in either case…Because I think you could always make the possibility space larger at the expense of the plausibility or the dramatic potential, or the quality of the experience. There’s probably some relationship between the quality of the experience and the size of the possibility space. So we can make the possibility space huge, just by giving the player a thousand numbers. And “Here, you can make any one of these thousand numbers whatever you want it to be.” That’s a big space. It’s just not a very high quality experience. So we start wrapping graphics, sounds scenarios and events around those numbers, and we’re increasing the quality of the experience you have. It has more meaning to you. In some sense it becomes more evocative. You can start wrapping a mental model around that, as opposed to this pile of numbers (Pearce).

The Sims was never supposed to be just about what stories Maxis (and later EA) could tell you, but rather the stories you could tell yourself. Part of this meant allowing for as broad of a ‘possibility space’ as the code could provide, and where those borders could no longer contain the possibility, the community took over instead. In this way, The Sims in principle can never be modded or “cheated” too much to be considered failure. The inclusion of these things from the game’s very design philosophy presupposes that we might not even have a word for their use within the game’s system. As much as it’s hard to call endorsed “cheating” cheating, it can be equally hard to call inclusion of hairstyles, clothing, or furniture mods, when they fulfill the game’s ‘prime directive’ as it were: enhancing, or even ‘extending,’ the possibility space and user experience. Perhaps “extensions” is more appropriate in this case. “Players of The Sims 2, like players of the first version, have found that one of the most gratifying aspects of play is sharing unique objects with other players. For example, in just under four months (September 2004– February 2005), Sims 2 players created and uploaded more than 125,000 characters and houses to share with others” (Flanagan 50). If The Sims is just about playing house (Flanagan), the only limits ought to be those of your imagination, and as long as the community is willing and able to push those limits, all extensions and cheats are effectively working as intended.

In contrast to The Sims’ stance on cheating and modification, World of Warcraft and other similar MMOs have a much heavier hand. Mods in WoW toe a very fine line between acceptable usage and bannable offence. Generally over time, Blizzard Entertainment, developers of WoW, have taken strides to limit what mods can and cannot do to their game in order to limit how mods can help (or hinder) player experience. Where The Sims is about expanding one’s possibility space via cheats and community content, WoW is about delivering their content through a myriad of lenses, so long as it doesn’t give any one player any significant advantage.

As WoW is a web-based always-online game, with achievements, the need to control cheating is paramount and judged accordingly. Even if a mod ‘arguably’ only affects your experience, like hacking the visual skins of your characters on your game files alone, could be deemed a bannable offence (as happened to a guild member of mine back in The Burning Crusade expansion). Along these same lines, however, while there are no mods allowed that give a significant advantage to one player or another, the community (particularly in high-end raiding or PVP situations) has deemed a number of mods indispensible or effectively required in order to proceed through the “stock” client. Many of these ‘essential’ mods are aimed at modifying and improving user-experience for more difficult content. Mods like “Deadly Boss Mods” (DBM) or “BigWigs” give players access to boss timers, debuff and ability announcements, and often even player cooldown notifications while facing difficult foes in large groups. This kind of information is argued to be indispensable, and yet, is not something ‘truly’ included in the base files of the game. While bosses tend to give visual or audio clues to when they’re about to slam in front of them in a frontal cone, the average player believes they benefit from having DBM on their side to give them a 10 second heads-up.

WoWScrnShot_121416_232125 — Guild screenshot of “Hello Kitty Club” 10-year anniversary brawl.

Like The Sims, WoW‘s mods are user and community driven. But unlike The Sims, it is not the existence of the mods where the community ends its say, but rather in WoW, it is only the start. Alongside DBM, other mods for average user experience are often touted as being essential, features that change your action bars, your bag space, your interaction with Mission Tables, your party information panels…even your outfit management. While many of these mods have worked in concordance with WoW’s stock user interface, I have heard many player say that they struggle to play the native client without their mods. Even when Blizzard has incorporated a version of the mods “Outfitter” or “Grid” into the basic UI, there’s always something “off” about them, and it can be hard to acclimatize. When hearing that some players play with the stock UI, aside from ‘essentials’ like DBM, players often scoff and ask “if they still have auto-attack keybound as well.”

Installing mods in this way is observed by the community almost as a rite of passage, essential not only in what needs to be downloaded, but that something has to be downloaded at all. And unlike The Sims, all mods are governed outside of the Blizzard umbrella, currently governed primarily through Twitch (formerly Curse).

What the WoW example asks us, however, is how much of a game has to change before it ceases to be the original game? In this example, Blizzard limits what can be done with mods enough that the game is required to stay more or less the same in terms of narrative and basic interaction on the live client. What changes is how people interact with that world. It remains to be seen whether or not that qualifies as a different game for every version of a UI that players look into Azeroth with. Whereas The Sims retains its identity not by being scrutinous of how the game is changed, but rather that the game is changed at all. Although both modding and cheating exist within both games, neither one changes what the game is at its core, and thus, arguably, the game is “preserved” despite them.

As we will soon see however, this is not the case for all games and modifications. Onward to Bethesda, and the modvolution.

Academic References/Further Reading:

Flanagan, Mary. Critical Play (2009).
Pearce, Celia. “Sims, BattleBots, Cellular Automata God and Go: A Conversation with Will Wright.” Game Studies (2001)

Videogames: What makes us cheat?

Gone are the days of mythological cheat codes and glitches now that we constantly share and update gaming strategies through YouTube, GameFAQs, and more. Yet, the need to cheat was there at the beginning, and so does the trend seem to continue through our contemporary gaming market, even in the wake of leadership boards and achievements. Thus we return to the primary question of this post: why are we doing it?

Perhaps we can revisit the idea that original cheat codes were meant to help playtesters in their intentional bug-finding failures for an answer. Jesper Juul spends a good deal of time breaking down our relationship with failure and videogames in The Art of Failure. Juul (2013) comments that while we generally avoid failure in our daily lives, we often seek out games that ultimately provide some kind of failure, even though we would otherwise avoid it (33). “[E]ven though players appear to dislike failure, we tend to believe that games should make players fail, at least some of the time” (34, emphasis added). He continues on to liken videogame experiences of failure with art, and most importantly, that our videogame failures offer us compensation somehow (like the exhilaration of finally achieving a difficult task), and that we don’t always seek them out for pleasure. “The most important thing in life is not the triumph, but the fight; the essential thing is not to have won, but to have fought well” (The Olympic Creed, as quoted by Juul, 43).

Interestingly, we often fail to remember that cheating, modding, and hacking videogames can be either to make games easier or harder. Up and until this point, I have even focused on cheating as that which makes the game easier, but there are plenty of examples of the opposite, including ROM Hacks and code-changing to give games that extra edge gamers desire to really “prove” themselves. Arguably, in these cases, players are actively seeking the possibility and likelihood of failure, so that when they finally do succeed, it’s that more momentous. Some games even have this built-in, as Juul discusses later on. GLaDOS seems to take joy in taunting the player in their ‘ineptitude’ while progressing through the Portal series (50), particularly when she is a potato. These taunts push us to excel and to feel better despite this sanctioned kind of ‘abuse.’

Katherine Isbister explores how videogames work actively and intentionally on our emotions within her book How Games Move Us and might be able to help shed some insight here too:

To the human brain, playing a game is more like actually running a race than watching a film…When I run, I make a series of choices about actions I will take that might affect whether I win. I feel a sense of mastery or failure depending on whether I successfully execute the actions…My emotions ebb and flow as I make these choices and see what happens as a result. In the end, I am to blame for the outcomes, because they arise from my own actions (3).

Sound familiar? GLaDOS taunts the player forward so that the player continues, but also because it helps to convince the player to be emotionally invested. This emotion is derived not only from the content of the game, but also through its design (again, via Procedural Rhetoric). You are required to be the active agent that makes decisions and makes the game progress. Games that centre around this “flow” as Isbister calls it, “[t]he ability to choose and control your actions” that cause players to ‘get in the zone,’ “…time seems to melt away and personal problems disappear. Well-designed games, with the control they offer users over actions in a novel world, readily engage players in a flow state” (4). She goes on to cite the necessity of goals, action and awareness, challenging activities, loss of self-control, and altered sense of time as features of this flow. What’s interesting for our discussion of cheating and modding, is that in some cases, these features remain. The very act of modding, as we’ll see later with Skyrim and Fallout 4, can be as emotionally engaging as the game’s content itself.

So if cheating to make things harder follows Juul and Isbister, what can we say about when games are made easier through cheating and modification? What happens when the risk of failure is reduced, if not removed altogether?

Juul spends a great deal of time discussing the different types of failure we encounter when playing videogames. However, I would like to suggest that modding (of some kinds) and cheating to make things easier on the one hand makes failure nearly impossible in-game, but actually equates to “failing” in the real world. By neglecting to play the game “as intended,” you ultimately circumvent any real engagement with the content and ultimately fail before you even begin. While you may feel no guilt or remorse for cheating, you will always be aware that you cheated, even if it was only once. The entire experience of that game is now attached to your decision to cheat. It will never be “the same” as if you had progressed naturally. In this way, it becomes nearly impossible to avoid failure altogether when playing videogames, as when cheating to make things easier, you might only be cheating yourself out of an authentic experience.

But alas, things are never quite so simple. There are plenty of ways to cheat that can be legitimized–not all console commands are created equally. While this leads us into our upcoming discussion of The Sims and World of Warcraft, I will end off on my own anecdote about utilizing cheat codes at my disposal.

When I first started playing Skyrim on my Xbox 360 I got lost in the ‘flow’ and wasted a good number of hours in the woodland mountains. As I type now, I’m even listening to the world nighttime music of the game. I was seriously invested. After more hours than possible to reset, I encountered a game-breaking bug where I was unable to progress the main storyline of the faction I wanted to join. Vehement that I could not join the opposing faction, I found a way to port my save file to a USB before plugging it into my computer and converting it to a PC game file, and console-command progressing my character along the questline I needed, past the bug. I then reconverted the file to an Xbox 360 save, plugged it back into my system, and continued being the Dragonborn.

skyrim_special — “It got me thinking, maybe *I’m* the dragonborn and I just don’t know it yet” – Every Skyrim guard ever

Do I feel guilty about this? Does it taint my memories of the game? Well, no, not really, but I’ll always know I did it. While I felt justified in my reasoning behind progressing my save, and while my Xbox 360 achievements never blinked an eye, I was still saddened that it was something I was forced to do. While toying with Bethesda bugs is something the modding community is well-invested in (something else we’ll tackle in a later post), there’s something to be said for cheating justification in our gaming–and that’s not even something that’s just from the developers. What’s acceptable to modify or how one chooses to cheat within the gaming community is vastly different depending on what kind of game it is (solo vs. multiplayer, online vs. offline, to name a few). Even the pedigree and age of a game can affect how players see any sort of deviation from the scripted norm. There are countless and fascinating areas worth looking into and studying when dealing with this area, and I regret I’m only able to touch on so few.

The next few posts will look at cheating and modification in action as viewed through The Sims (series), World of Warcraft, Skyrim and Fallout 4. Buckle in, it ain’t over yet.

Academic References/Further Reading:

Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Video Games (2010)
Isbister, Katherine How Games Move Us (2016)
Juul, Jesper. The Art of Failure (2013)

The Legacy of Cheat Codes & The Game Genie

In order to truly understand the how and the why of cheating in videogames we need to look back at some of the earliest examples, namely the inclusion of cheat codes or inputs alongside off-brand cheating systems, like the Game Genie.

81hglu5s7ml-_sx342_ — The original console command system.

Perhaps one of the earlier, and most well-known of these sanctioned cheat codes created by developers was the Konami code, or the Contra code, first ‘discovered’ in the original NES Contra game. This code, ↑↑↓↓ ←→ ←→ B A START, was found not only within this title, but also within other Konami games, hence earning it’s primary title as the “konami” code. Later it later became a staple of ‘gamer’ culture, appearing in non-Konami games, on clothing, and other paraphernalia. How does a code, one that gave players a mere 30 extra lives, an official cheat-system, gain such a cultural traction? It wasn’t just Contra and Konami games either that featured cheat codes like these in the earlier days of console gaming. Sonic 2, featured a level-select option within the ‘sound test’ section of the options menu, among other choices like debug mode or unlimited lives. Even games like Disney’s Aladdin featured a level-select mode on its Option menu, mirroring the style of the Konami code: A, C, A, C, A, C, A, C, B(x4).

While cheat codes were primarily instituted by game developers for playtesting purposes (having unlimited lives is a really good idea if your job is to potentially find glitches via death in Sonic), they were clearly never taken out of a wide array of games. Alongside the question of the popularity of cheat codes, we can similarly ask why these were left in at all by the developers? In the case of games like Sonic 2 or Aladdin, level-select was a very useful option for players who had beat the game a number of times and didn’t want to “work their way through” again, only to get to their favourite level. Lacking a cartridge save option, something that would be later included with Sonic 3, it made sense for players to have access to these kinds of perks, after being “in the know” to find them. That being said, Sonic 3 continued the tradition of cheat codes and still had its fair share of cheats.

It also wasn’t just thanks to the great sleuthing of early videogame fans that we found out about these codes either, in the pre-launch and early years of the internet. Participating in cheat code culture in social circles, scribblings in the back of Blockbuster rental copy game books, and even licenced game magazines like Nintendo Power, or even strategy guides, often included these to help other gamers find them. Soon after, the pseudo-mythological state of the cheat code was born, and it felt like everyone was on the lookout for the next one they could share with their friends, or fellow rentee.

Official codes weren’t the only things that players found in efforts to modify their gaming experiences at this time. The discovery of glitches, exploits, and in-game skips were also common inclusions in this realm of “cheating” and modification. I can remember playing the original Pokemon Blue and learning about the different ways I could cheat the code and glitch it into giving me things like unlimited pokeballs or items, alongside even getting a Mew super early in the game. A lot of these kinds of glitches, the Mew nonwithstanding, required access to other Gameboys or different bits of technology to get them to work. Following clever-use-of-game-mechanics (as Blizzard loves to label it), players could flash-restart, controller switch, or cartridge remove-replace their way to a whole array of new things that were very much part of the original code, even if not used as intended.

pokemon-red-blue-yellow-mew — Fancy meeting mew here.

Unlike learning that Mario can skip a bunch of worlds by dropping behind a white block in Super Mario Bros. 3 and using some fancy flute play, these kinds of glitches were off the books, even if their inclusion in the game was somewhat ‘intentional.’ We can take this to the next level at this point, to consider once again the Game Genie, and perhaps it’s odd and sanctioned cousin, Sonic & Knuckles.

The Game Genie was a 3rd party development released for a number of the early consoles, including the NES, SNES, Gameboy, and Sega Genesis. The device came with a book of codes which allowed players to cheat their way through a variety of games through the Game Genie’s bypass system. Essentially, because the device acted as a mediator between player, console, and cartridge, it allowed for the system to read the game code emitting from the cartridge differently from its actual output, allowing for the player to reap the benefits. In addition to the codes that shipped with the device, players were able to create their own codes by random generation, or even could subscribe for updates via a paid service. It was quite an era for cheating. However, it should come as no surprise that Nintendo in particular fought back hard against the system, trying to claim it infringed on copyright. The legal case settled in Game Genie’s favour, however, and their ‘unsanctioned’ cheats were safe.

In contrast, Sega was in full support of the system, as long as it didn’t provide cheats for games which allowed for saving. Sega’s approach to software circumvention adds an interesting layer to an analysis of cheating in videogames, as it again suggests that cheat codes, even unsanctioned ones, were meant to help players bypass unwanted content when saving along the way was not an option. It’s unsurprising that they followed this ideology, as Sonic & Knuckles allowed for players to have a pseudo-sanctioned version of the Game Genie already. The cartridge had a slot on the top which was intended for players to insert only Sonic games into it, allowing Knuckles to join the fray of Sonic 2 and others. Instead, it also allowed for players to have randomly-generated Chaos Emerald stages in the Sonic 3 style based on the code of nearly any Sega game that was inserted.

aqg1dwlhj9sx — *Sonic & Knuckles* stacked with *Sonic 3* to create *Sonic 3 & Knuckles*

More commonly today, we see these kinds of cheats available through ROM-hacking emulators, console commands (PC), or unofficial patching/editing by the savvy game community. Further still, all of this so far has been related to software or “soft” cheating and modding of videogames, not even considering the hardware or “hard” modification, which requires going in and tweaking the actual hardware in order to run things you weren’t intended to. While there isn’t time to discuss this fully here, it’s interesting to consider again that by virtue of their design, videogames require an entirely different kind of systems for modification than their board game cousins. After all, it’s easy enough to make up your own pieces for a board game versus wanting to play N64 games on your Xbox 360. Yet again, there are also often more legal issues surrounding hardmodding, as we saw recently with Nintendo and modding chips.

While it’s becoming increasingly rare to see “official” cheat codes in video games (except in the case of games like The Sims, though more on that in a later blog), we do see the inclusion of console commands and the ability to modify games through “mods” available instead. We’ll look into this realm of modding and cheating later, but it highlights something within the gaming community: we can’t let games be. As soon as a game is released, especially for current systems, we are continually seeing them adapted, cracked, modified, and eviscerated by the community so that the original intended experience is no longer the only one we have access to. Why does there seem to be such an essential ‘need’ to cheat?

Academic References/Further Reading:

Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Video Games (2010)

(Video)Games: A Need to Cheat

Along with the idea of fairness comes its necessary complement: cheating. Cheating is what someone does to give him/herself a more than even chance to win. At least, that’s what we most often call cheating.

When I happen to notice you attempting to draw universal attention to my little cheat, I am aware that the motivation for your sudden intensity stems not as much from your concern that I have broken a rule as from your feeling that I have somehow deprived you of your opportunity to win…

It is obvious that your concern with my cheating is biased in your behalf. If I’m doing something wrong, even if I’m in flagrant violation of the rules of the game, as long as you perceive yourself as winning, everything’s cool (Koven 24-25).

To what lengths will you go to win, to succeed, to overcome the technical rules of whatever game you’re playing to get a little bit of an advantage? Would it make a difference if the game enabled you to accomplish this task via embedded cheat codes? What do we make of sanctioned cheating vs. unsanctioned cheating? What if you don’t even know you’re circumventing the rules-as-intended?

When playing board or card games with friends, we already know the routine. Often “house rules” need to be established alongside “legitimate” ones, because we seem to have a predisposition to change games as they’re presented to us. We demand that our friends and family reveal their house rules before a game even begins, lest we find out mid-way through that people are actually not on the same page. What happens when you land in free parking in Monopoly? I’m sure we’d be very divided on the answer. “Wait, that’s cheating!” we’d be inclined to say, when our peers reveal themselves to be playing an entirely different game than us, while all looking at the same board. Some strange parallel reality where someone jumps up and stops you from buying a house on your second pass of “GO” in Monopoly.

It’s not surprising that this was a heated conversation in the board games subreddit, and spawned at least one thread trying to spin the ‘positivity’ of house rules. These are things we usually only find in board and card games, because (without mods or hacking), in video games, the code simply doesn’t allow us these affordances. This is thanks to Procedural Rhetoric, where game philosophy and developer ideological visions are written into the very laws which govern how the game operates. For example, when playing UNO on the Xbox 360 (or other ports), the kinds of house rules faced by this unfortunate redditor would simply not be possible.

The code would prevent such frustrations from occuring in a the videogame version of this card classic. Even when “house rules” are allowed, they’re usually custom-made and allow only for people to enter into the game acknowledging them in advance, with no room for mid-game shifts in playstyle. Even custom games in more recent first-person shooter titles like Halo or Overwatch, lay all the custom rules upfront–people know what they’re getting into. At all stages of these custom maps or games, players are often required to choose from what the developers have already accepted as “sanctioned” deviations from the norm.

This idea of customizing game rules and house rules within board games and their video game companions brings us closer to the question of what it means to cheat in games. The implementation and adaptability of board and card game house rules are perhaps more complicated than a handful of blog entries can address, but, I think we can safely look at why and how we cheat in our games through looking at some specific videogame history and case-study-style examples via the following series:

Academic References/Further Reading from the Series:

Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Video Games (2010)
Flanagan, Mary. Critical Play (2009).
Isbister, Katherine How Games Move Us (2016)
Juul, Jesper. The Art of Failure (2013)
Koven, Bernard De. The Well-Played Game (2013)
Pearce, Celia. “Sims, BattleBots, Cellular Automata God and Go: A Conversation with Will Wright.” Game Studies (2001)

Phoning it In

It’s hard to believe that we’re already at the end of term and tying things up. It feels like we’ve barely scratched the surface of this content, and maybe that’s kind of the point? As I talked about last week, there’s so much potential with pulp magazines to uncover. Maybe that’s why my head is spinning. There’s so much I want to talk about, so much to explore. I am still incredibly curious about the ties between videogame representations of the pulp era (mostly in exaggeration) as compared to the real deal, especially with BioShock Infinite as a direct timestamp game, but also thematic futurism of Fallout 3 or Fallout 4. I’ve discussed BioShock Infinite, and to a lesser extend the BioShock series more broadly throughout this series, but I think there’s something to be said about either series as an extension of digitization and adaptation — something I’d like to explore, at least a little bit, at the end of my final paper.

However, for now, I think one of the lingering things sticking with me is just how much a study of pulp magazines continues to draw through to contemporary analyses — especially after surveying half of the class’s rough drafts last week. Pulp magazines are alive and well, in some way or another. While I focused on SF two weeks ago, many genres were adapted and created through pulp experimentation (although it is perhaps unsurprising that there were a great number of flops too *cough* looking at you Basketball Stories *cough*). In general, it was a really innovative time, seemingly filled with possibility and growth (which unfortunately would be burst through the Great Depression). New and exciting futures were on the horizon, or at least that was the message being sent. Sound like anything else you know?

In considering the start of pulp magazines, including its boom and its bubble burst, I can’t help but think of the early days of the internet.

Although we don’t refer to it as the “World Wide Web” anymore (at least, I don’t think we do), I remember when the internet was TheInternetTM. This hugely new and innovative medium, taking households by storm. Inspiring movies (You’ve Got Mail, anyone?), connecting people all over the world, spreading information, allowing for user-generated engagement…The more I talk about it, the more I wish I had written a paper comparing the history of pulp magazines with the history of the internet, up to and including a general lack of support and academic interest to its “low brow” elements. Oh well, another paper (or blog post) for another time. Suffice to say, once the parallel is made, it’s hard to shake off.

I remember being excited for our first dial-up connection. I was lucky that my parents were always particularly technologically advanced and I had ICQ from a very early time (I’m pretty sure circa 1998). I built webpages on GeoCities through code I learned from UW’s Arts Computer Camp (while stylishly pulling off my own play-performance of Sailor Venus at the end of the summer). I practically learned how to type (at least as fast as I do now) by spending far too many hours typing out conversations on Yahoo chatrooms and games. I mean, I was there, I was invested, and my life was forever changed because of it. I can only imagine, in some way, that this is how the boom of pulp magazines felt. A rush of new technology, new and readily available information, connection, engagement.

It’s all there (and now I wish I had chosen to write a pulp history story version of the dawn of the internet…so many ideas, so little course time left), and it’s astonishing. I’m sure even in some way, people felt like this at the early years of the telephone, the printing press–at all major technological changes. So I wonder how much of our study of pulp magazines is about the technology as well. Not that we haven’t discussed this in class, but I think it’s an area we haven’t explored as much as we could (again, only so many hours!). Even the act of digitization, of bringing pulps to the internet, is another link in that chain, tying it all together (brainblown.gif).

In the end I think, people just keep looking for a way to connect with one another. From cave paintings, to Snapchat, and everything in between. Pulp magazines were a way to convey culture, to control culture, and to express counter culture. They were what people made them to be. As the internet is now, and as something new and distant in the future will replace, they are equally important as part of human history and communication.

In archaeology we’ve come to learn to treat peoples of the past as just that, people. “People have always been people” as it were, and their cultural artifacts reflect the agency of once living and breathing people. If we take that to be important, as we take anything we do today to be important (except maybe fidget spinners), pulp magazine’s value should be clear.

Where there are artifacts, they are fossilized evidence of peoples’ action in trying to intervene in history…Artifacts are a testimony of context, not resolved social structures. (Wobst 47)

What will our legacy be? What will our cultural artifacts have to say about us? Maybe future scholars will academically analyze the importance of our memes. Or maybe, it’ll be something altogether different.

Either way, I’m left with a lot to think about.

Around and Back Again

How I usually feel about group work:

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However, this round has been rather spectacular. From the very beginning our group was quick to make decisions, to work together, and to adjust to each other’s strengths and weaknesses, including varying availability. Never did I feel like I was doing more work than my share, nor did I feel as though people weren’t available. But ultimately, it was quite a good experience. Most importantly, we learned from each other.

In preparing for our presentation, I was not only engaged with our magazine because of my own interests and foci, but also inspired by what my colleagues uncovered. I’m not sure if it helped that our magazine had a lot to go with it, or because I love Sci Fi so much, but it really helped me understand the magazine better too.

Equally, I found myself engaged with the other group’s presentations. It was clear to see where everyone’s passions lay, showcased by this project. Surprisingly, no one group or individual quite did the same thing, nor did anyone take the same angle on their pulp magazine, which was rather spectacular. It highlighted just how many ways that pulp magazines can be understood and interpreted from an academic perspective.

Best of all, the presentations left me inspired for my final paper for this course, which was an unexpected result.

Each group gave me a new reflection for my analysis of preservation practices in pulp magazines. Each one demonstrated the different ways in which approaching digitization holistically is crucially important.

While it’s a little early to go too in-depth (not to mention the idea is still forming), I was particularly inspired by the exploration of Snappy Stories and All Story Love Tales, for two very different reasons. All Story Love Tales because of how rare its digital issues are (or any issues at all for that matter), and Snappy Stories for its important and varying use of image accompaniment–and how those things change how one could read the magazine. Interesting stuff to be sure, and something I’ll be very eager to explore when I get down to writing more content for the paper.

One of my favourite things to hear, no matter how frequently, in my academic courses is the importance of taking in multiple perspectives on a given topic–something that rings very true when considering analyzing artifacts. I think my first exposure academically in a formal capacity was when we discussed “situated knowledges,” something I touched on back here. It’s a concept that also comes up through Kenneth Burke’s “terministic screens.” We each see a different perspective on the world, on our studies. It is ever more apparent the need for academia to take this on in their approach to research — something which is exemplified by our group projects as well. Each group was given the same basic guidelines, and each of us came up with very different versions of what that meant to uncover.

For me, it seems that this is even more important for the study of pulp magazines within English departments. As an outsider to the discipline, it’s hard to see the magazines, so fruitful in their potential cultural relevance, interpretations, etc. be dismissed as trivial “low culture” objects. While we’ve discussed the changes taking place in this regard, coming from my own academic background, it doesn’t make sense that they have been dismissed as such. While it doesn’t always require deep reading to get to the messages within, it doesn’t mean that there isn’t any less content to discover. If anything, I think pulp magazines are more interesting to discuss, not only because there are so few academic angles currently being explored, but also because of how close they were to everyday people. It’s the same reason I find Greco-Roman graffiti so entertaining. Somewhat perplexing however, is the fact that greco-roman graffiti has been treated with such high significance as compared to their pop-cousins in pulp magazines. Perhaps this is due to their age, but everything starts getting old somewhere. Perhaps it was only after the classicists ran out of other things to talk about that they finally turned to the “common man” remnants. No matter what the cause, it is interesting to consider that someday down the line a great many people will turn to a desire to study pulp magazines, and it will only be because of classes like ours, and other enthusiasts, that archives like the PMP will provide them content. It pains me to consider how many pulp magazines were lost, like so many cultural artifacts, because they were deemed useless or “not cultural enough.”

If we, as individuals, and as groups, can uncover so much to talk about, what have we missed discussing over the past century they’ve been around?

Sadly, even fidget spinners someday will be a cultural artifact. I wonder what future academics will say about their phenomenon? I just wish I could hear what “ritualized” purpose fidget spinners served when uncovered by some archaeologist a thousand years from now. Food for thought I suppose.

Generating Genre: The Legacy of Early Pulp SF

Before going too in-depth into my reflection on Sci-Fi and genre building, I just have to relay two facts: a) that there was a TV series in the mid-80s called Amazing Stories, created by Steven Spielberg, and b) that somehow I didn’t know this existed. In the same vein as the pulp magazine of the same name, the show apparently covered Fantasy, Horror, and Sci-Fi themes. It’s also apparently looking for a reboot. Crazy. Here I thought I was knowledgeable of these kinds of programs having watched The Twilight Zone (old and new) as well as The Outer Limits. Alas, I digress…

The creation of genre was not really something I had considered before this week’s class. Naturally I had considered that genres had origins — I have even studied the development of Greek and Roman theatre genres extensively — however, I have rarely considered that literary genres too, have origin stories. In particular, that there are more ‘recent’ genres like Sci-Fi that have a much longer legacy than what it feels like they should.

Perhaps it all comes down to definitions, however. We discussed this week how when Amazing Stories first published, the editor basically made it up as he went along. There were no established Sci-Fi pulps at this time, nor, apparently, had the genre been established as a literary area. Romances and Adventure stories are common throughout literary history, but Sci-Fi apparently presented something new. While I’d prefer not to quote Wikipedia, but the first few lines of “Science Fiction”‘s entry rings true, perhaps because they’re quoting Gernsback:

Science fiction is difficult to define, as it includes a wide range of subgenres and themes. Hugo Gernsback, who suggested the term “scientifiction” for his Amazing Stories magazine, wrote: “By ‘scientifiction’ I mean the Jules Verne, H. G. Wells and Edgar Allan Poe type of story—a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision… Not only do these amazing tales make tremendously interesting reading—they are always instructive. They supply knowledge… in a very palatable form… New adventures pictured for us in the scientifiction of today are not at all impossible of realization tomorrow… Many great science stories destined to be of historical interest are still to be written… Posterity will point to them as having blazed a new trail, not only in literature and fiction, but progress as well.”

To me it seems then, more that the development of SF as a genre was more about its kairos than its content. Alongside the development of advanced science and technology, we see something labeled accordingly. But even in the early days of writing (in terms of ancient plays), we see themes of instruction, knowledge transfer, and speculative/imaginative forms. While Gernsback cites Poe et al., we discussed in class the existence of Mary Shelley and other female authors before that also would fit into the SF genre (sadly calling again to those gender issues in scholarship and social acknowledgement). If these themes existed for longer than the existence of the genre, what else can we attribute the development of the genre to other than kairos? Someone surely could have “decided” to do so, as Gernsback did before Amazing Stories, and yet, no one did. Intentionality does not appear to be enough then, but rather, the timing not only of an increase in science and technology, but also the existence of pulp magazines themselves, that allowed for such a thing to develop.

blade-runner-2049-796x398 — *Blade Runner 2049*

Launching a new “genre” within literature would have been too risky. Books take a lot of time and finances in order to be successful, on top of necessary marketing and appeals to readership. Pulp magazines rose and fell seemingly at will — they were willing to take a chance, even if it meant failure — because they weren’t as expensive to produce. All of this explains why SF came when it did — easy to take a chance, lots of technology and science popping up everywhere…but it doesn’t account for all the reasons why they were successful…

I think the key here is the readership engagement. We’ll talk about this more during our presentation, or rather Sue will, but I think it’s worth spoiling a bit here on the subject. SF was successful as a genre due to its kairos as well as its ability to engage its audience. It’s quite a clever advertising move actually. The best way to establish yourself as a genre is to get people interested in your genre, to get them engaged in its development. People always love talking about themselves, and by extension, they love putting their mark on things. The actual amount of influence the readership had on Amazing Stories is up for debate, however, the magazine’s active push for any show of dialogue I think helped to make them boom as long as they did and really helped to engrain SF as a genre as a result.

One might argue that any genre could have been created in this way, which is true I suppose, but SF latched on at the exact right nexus of context to blossom into what it became–further evidenced by how much SF developed after Amazing Stories gave it a label. We see the first SF film Metropolis hit theatres as early as 1927. Then in 1938, Orson Wells converts his then-40 year old book The War of the Worlds into an infamous audio drama that briefly causes real panic and fear in the populace (The Smithsonian has a good piece on that and kairos/”an magnificent fluke” for the record). Meanwhile Astounding Stories kicks off in the 1930s as well. From this point forward, we see an increased basis for Futurism taking shape in art and design, especially leading through the 1950s and 1960s. Something we see revisited and taken to the extreme in the Fallout series.

In the end, I wonder what would have happened without this nexus of readership engagement and appropriate timing? Where would Sci Fi have started without pulp magazines? For how popular and how fast SF spread like wildfire in the last century, I feel fairly confident that simultaneous invention would have happened somehow, give or take a few years. But isn’t that all what SF is about anyway? Speculating the unknown?

Through the Looking Glass

Popular media often serve as a reflection through which we view culture. Like mirrors at a funhouse, they can distort as much as they can show true. We’ve talked about it in class, and I’ve otherwise previously discussed on this blog (here and here), how pulp magazines can be interpreted as presenting a certain way of enacting American life. A very particular way of being a ‘proper’ citizen. As much as the stories, characters, visuals, and advertisments served to train a population to see the world a certain way, so too did the stories, characters, visuals, and advertisments reflect aspects of the world that already existed.

This week, we read topics on gender and race depiction in pulp magazines. While we have discussed these themes throughout the course, this week they take primary focus.

1889n4og4e6c5jpg — A mural from *BioShock Infinite*, featuring racial stereotypes of ‘undesireables’ and ‘societal moochers,’ that “proper” citizens of the game’s flying city of Columbia are supposed to protect against. This echoes a general theme of racist representations throughout the game, associated with the dominant white and affluent citizen body.

Nathan Madison explores racism in pulp magazines thoroughly in Anti-Foreign Imagery in American Pulps and Comic Books, 1920-1960. In particular, we read about “The Yellow Peril,” or rather the representation of stereotypes and orientalism within the covers of 1919 and 1935’s pulp magazines. Some of the imagery and quotations are quite jarring and unfortunately illuminating, not only for the cultures of the time, but also how long-lasting the tropes were. Towards the end of the chapter, Madison revisits the political nature of anti-foreign (particularly Chinese) climate surrounding these magazines from 1882-1930s. Laws prohibiting inter-race marriage, revoking citizenship from American women who ‘dared’ marry a Chinese man, limits to Chinese immigration.

He states on page 83:

In such an atmosphere, what do the stories found in the pulp magazines of the 1920s and the 1930s tell us about Americans, and, specifically, about their views of Asians and foreigners in general? It is difficult, and rash, to simply assign racism to such a time period that differs from the current in so many ways. One reason for this difficulty, aside from the error of attempting to impose early twenty-first century political correctness upon those living in the early twentieth century, is the contradicting evidence of racial tolerance, and even racial acceptance, on the part of many Americans at the time. For every act of the federal government that attempted to impose immigration restrictions, there was an outcry from many denouncing the racial intolerance such acts legalized.

Continually we return to the complex nature of history and scholarship. It is not enough to simply see these works and stories as reflections of rampant racism at the time. However, as Madison points out, the tendancies were there. It is hard to judge the past based on the morals of the present, and yet in many cases, I would argue, we should. As much as it ‘was different’ in their time, it does not mean we should forgive and forget what happened. In many cases these very damaging stereotypes and racial beliefs created an indoctrinating effect on the populace which persists to this day in many, albiet sometimes more subtle, ways. Amongst the stories that perpetuated the “yellow peril” within the pulps, others did try to subvert it, even to the point of having Chinese protagonists, even if stories like these were more rare.

world-war-2-propaganda — World War II Propaganda Poster

What concerns me about this side of pulp magazines is the overt propagandan nature of “yellow peril” narratives. Madison ends the chapter discussing how the discussion of “yellow” versus “white” races changes leading into World War II, thanks in part to a shift in a percieved gobal villain. He notes, however, that the legacy of this time continues much longer after the fact. We see the effect of orientalism repeat through a variety of funhouse mirrors throughout history, as people from the psudo-mythological East are demonized or exoticised to promote the master-narrative, especially in the contemporary U.S.A. these days. Propaganda narratives like the “yellow peril” catch like wildfire in cultural memory and have damaging effects on the landscape. When everything around you, from the news, to advertisements, to the entertainment you consume, tells a different version of the same story, it becomes increasingly difficult to fight against it.

It’s insidious as hell, and exactly why diverse opinions and representations continue to be important in media, and in scholarship.

Today is International Women’s Day, and I cannot fathom closing out this post without briefly mentioning the looking glass mirrors of gender roles in pulp magazines. That being said, I’ll be brief, as I’ve talked about gender roles briefly before.

Much like racial tropes and stereotypes, the representation of gender roles and “types” of women are equally present within pulp magazines. While there are examples of women who break the mold, often women serve as narrative elements, part of the backdrop to serve the story’s progression. Object of affection, of scandal, of motherhood…representations of women in pulp magazines echo a much longer history of one dimensional or restricted depictions that women continue to fight against today. What I did find interesting in this week’s readings, however, was the fact that many of the writers and editors of the “girlie” pulp mags were in fact women themselves. While it is less shocking to read that women also made up a sizeable portion of the readership, I am curious as to the motivations of these women to participate in these kinds of narratives. I don’t care for the ‘morality’ of their involvement, but rather the desire to perpetuate stories of women they knew weren’t wholly true? Sex sells as they say, and I suppose writing as ‘an insider’ would provide that extra oompf that would rack in additional sales. Alas, as is pointed out, little about the authors and editors themselves is known, and tracking down any motivations for their involvement is unlikely.

All that being said, I get a kick out of the list of “do’s and don’t’s” for writing into Spicy Detective. “A nude female corpse is allowed, of course.” Naturally.

Screenshot 2018-03-09 at 12.46.35 AM — *Pulp Magazines Project –* “Birth of Girlie Pulps“

The sad part is, while things are changing in contemporary media, they haven’t changed all that much. Here’s hoping that as consumers of media, and as scholars, we can do better, with both race and gender.

Toying with Voyant

So over the weekend I ran a PDF version of our pulp magazine Amazing Stories through the Voyant Tools site. I’m a huge fan of word maps and it was pretty cool to see what kinds of words came up most frequently throughout our magazine in a graphic format.

Naturally, the leading character of a story gets a larger representation with “Calvert,” a term that’s used 177 times. That’s a pretty staggering figure, given the fact that the character only appears in one story in the middle. Much like my experiences with The Last Stand, it seems as though using names frequently is a commonplace feature of early 20th Century writing. Though I would be curious as to what a contemporary article or short story might show when run through Voyant.

Interestingly enough, “amazing” is only used 114 times vs. “stories” used 142 (next just after “Calvert”). I’m curious how many places amazing and stories appear. I couldn’t get the correlations tab to work to show me, but even still, it seems like a staggering amount of potential self-referential verbiage happening throughout the magazine. Similarly, by looking at this word map I would assume that either there’s a story about a doctor, or that Calvert himself is a doctor. In overlapping the frequencies of the words, this seemed to prove true.

While the frequency of “like” doesn’t surprise me all that much as the number one word, I am curious why “time” is the second most used word in the magazine. Ironically, “new” being the fifth-most used word I find rather hilarious, as it seems to be counter what ‘new’ would stand for. How many things could possibly be new within a single volume? Surely not 140 of them. What’s great is that “new” isn’t even concentrated at the beginning or the end, but rather has a few peaks and valleys throughout the magazine. Similarly, time is a constant (*laugh track*) throughout.

All in all, I think Voyant is a super interesting tool for tracking trends on the quick. If you can get past common words like “like”, and look for interesting ones like “don’t” (honestly, why is that showing up 104 times??), you can extrapolate some intriguing information. Similarly, if you uploaded a number of volumes of the same type of magazine, you might get some interesting linguistic trends across a magazine’s history, perhaps even track the rise and fall of terms. Overall a really neat tool.

It also creates some really entertaining mind poetry if you let your mind wander across the word map. Or perhaps I’m just struggling from too much cold medication.

New stories make amazing little good water;
Come doctor, feet people.
Man came days.
Joane eyes old know time.

Travel All of Space & Time – From Your Living Room

Stories have always been a way to travel without leaving your surrounds–gateways to another place, another time. Is this transportation affected by how we indulge in stories?

Over reading week I was tasked with a reading project, in efforts to recreate a modern take on reading aloud from a pulp magazine to a group. It was an enlightening experience.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Oig_j_sXmU

It was my logic that as some people in the class were setting out to read aloud in an in-person group setting, I would try to recreate the experience over the web. A pseudo-recreation of course, as the people I would be reading to, and interacting with, would not be in the room with me. I tried to adapt in advance to suit this need, showing the document on screen with a picture-in-picture display of my face and the text, in addition to some other features. As often happens with these things, I was unable to anticipate everything.

To start, I set the mood as it were, by playing a “Steamboat Willie” cartoon as my opener. Normally I would do a countdown, but I figured some sort of cartoon would be a cute way to get as close to the 1913 era of the pulp magazine serial as I could. Along the same lines, I queued up a playlist of big band/swing music to play in the background as I read. Part of this was my own fear of reading against silence while in ‘entertainment’ mode, but also in part because I imagined that radios and music would be commonplace enough in historical homes, possibly even through reading stories together. Either way, I set things up, started the stream, and began my very awkward read through of the last part of B.M. Bower’s The Last Stand.

While some in the class read from the original book, the version I read on stream was from the FlipBook version from the Pulp Magazine Project. This led to a number of problems, mainly an issue of readabilty. Partially due to linguistic conventions of the time, and partially due to the layout of the text, the document was fairly difficult to read. I was out of my element, and had not read aloud in a long time. While I had streamed countless times, this kind of entertainment was different. There were no pictures to distract my audience and many, including myself, found things hard to follow for the first while. Eventually things got a bit more melodical, and I was able to get into the rhythm of the narrative. While we discussed this week that the inclusion of full names were a status symbol for the characters, I have to say, that after reading them over out loud countless times, I’m through with people being referred to with their full three word names after the initial introduction.

There were a lot of similarities between the other read-aloud group and myself. Issues in legibility, reading comprehension, etc. I was surprised to learn that they had taken longer than me to read the entirety of the selection, including a ten-minute break as I started to lose my voice. Perhaps it was because they swapped who was reading back and forth, perhaps I read too quickly. Streaming did result in some interesting complications and improvements, however. I found that I was able to make commentary as it happened. I could voice my opinion about the story, the characters, or my fumblings and capture it candidly (as you can easily see in the above video). I was also able to pause at will and address the Twitch chat, or include their feedback into my commentary. Their voices were unobtrusive as the text cleanly popped up on the side. If we were in the same setting, their comments could have been lost or withheld, out of fear of interrupting. This way, they were perserved as they happened, and could be addressed when the timing was ‘right.’ Similarly, this method gave me no marker of my audience. Without facial reactions, I didn’t know if I was going too quickly, or too slowly, unless people spoke up about it. In-person you could gauge your audience and adjust accordingly.

Ultimately, this experience allowed me to reflect a lot on what it meant to read a pulp magazine, but also to read aloud in a group at that time. While I nearly lost my voice (and in truth my throat hurt the day after), I wondered if such a thing would have been passed around in a family setting to prevent such a thing, or if voices would have been accustomed to longer periods of reading at that time. Would pictures have made it more engaging for my audience? For any audience? How would have ‘city folk’ reading this story related to the tales of the wild west?

As we discussed in class, the serial in the pulp magazine, later a book, was one in a series of stories about “The Flying U” band of cowboys and their ranch. I imagine that contemporary readers of this publication would have been much more invested in their stories, and would have taken to binge-like behaviour to absorb more information about the fictional world. With more limited access to entertainment at the time, particularly affordable entertainment, I would wager the audience of the time would have been much more captivated as well.

Ultimately learning more about B.M. Bower also endeared me to her writing further. Like I discussed in Gendering History, an acknowledgement of female writers and of female participation in the Western genre has been sorely lacking, if not ignored, in scholarship. Learning that Bower fell victim to this in her own time was heartbreaking. She was successful after a period of personal strife, yes, but she could have been even more so, had there not been such a fear of being ‘outed’ as a female writer of Western stories. My change of heart, also highlights the importance of taking cultural contexts into consideration when doing academic work. It’s easy to dismiss something you don’t personally like or aren’t interested in, but when doing academic studies, it’s important to look at works holistically–to understand them from as many perspectives as possible.

I’m interested in giving her a second shot. Just because the last quarter of The Last Stand isn’t for me, doesn’t mean there isn’t something to be had in the Westerns of the time, particularly such a popular pulp writer as Bower. After all, I love me some Sci-Fi Westerns.

I may just have to avoid reading them aloud in the future…