"You know, he's gonna have to play it perfectly, he's at the hardest part of Donkey Kong, and it's not gonna get any easier. So we may have an exciting moment here, or you know, the pressure may get to him, one of those random elements might happen. Sounds like he just cleared another board, but we could have a wild barrel, or some aggressive fireballs. I thought I was gonna be the first FunSpot kill screen, and then I had three fireballs trap me, I had the hammer in my hand, they still got me. So anything can happen in Donkey Kong. So for someone else to be mean to the kill screen would be a letdown, but lets see what happens, maybe he'll crack under the pressure and maybe I'll get my chance to do it first."-Avid Donkey Kong player Brian Kuh in The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (2007).
There's a kill screen in Nintendo's Donkey Kong (1981)? After playing the Game Boy Advance copy of the game on a Nintendo DS for several hours, I had yet to advance past the second stage and, frustrated by my lack of progress, I could not help but ask myself if I was having a good time. However, my ill will towards the game was not as simplistic as it would seem. After all, I did not hate Donkey Kong; I just felt it did not fulfill one point of ludologist Jesper Juul's definition of a game, namely that "the player feels attached to the outcome." My own attachment to the outcome of Donkey Kong had devolved from setting out to conquer that damn dirty ape and his barrels to livid frustration with the game over screen to apathy each time I lost my three lives. My shifting relationship to the game's outcome led me to ask myself "What makes Donkey Kong fun?" Why do players like Brian Kuh keep returning to the title? While I assume there is a certain degree of nostalgia inherent it such a consideration, I would to apply the formal characteristics of DK to Henry Jenkins' article "Games, the New Lively Art" to better understand what makes retro gaming rewarding to players.
In the essay, Jenkins, utilizing the work of Gilbert Seldes, outlines several aesthetic characteristics that can be used to describe games as an art form. The three I would like to focus on are memorable moments, play as performance, and expressive amplification. The first characteristic, memorable moments, is not to be equated with spectacle. Jenkins writes, "Spectacle refers to something that stops you dead in your tracks, forces you to stand and look. Game play becomes memorable when it creates the opposite effect-when it makes you want to move, when it convinces you that you really are in charge of what's happening in the game, when the computer seems to be totally responsive." While this category may seem to run contrary to the fact that I was engaging with a game that is nearly thirty years old and whose graphics are elementary when compared to a contemporary title like Grand Theft Auto IV (2008), I did experience what Jenkins describes as memorable moments in DK. These moments came upon the unveiling of each new level. My memory of the game was based around images of iron girding, ladders, and an ape and princess at the top, which turned out to be an apt description of the first level except for the fact that I had forgotten about the almighty hammer. Yet, when I reached the second stage, I was amazed to find platforms that went up and down. I wasted a few thousand bonus points trying to mentally map the space before setting out onto the first elevating platform.
While I experienced what Jenkins would describe as a memorable moment in a game, the luster of the sensation was temporary. As I attempted to map the space, I came to the realization that I did not want to move because I was not in charge of what was happening in the game. In Brian Kuh's epigraph, he speaks of "random elements" in DK and, as the game progressed, I quickly grew frustrated with them because the memorable moment did not reveal some sort of logic to the game. For instance, does a barrel rolling down the platforms descend the first ladder it encounters? Not necessarily. Despite this illogical behavior on behalf of the barrels, I noticed as I played (and watched others do so as well) that to win at DK is to essentially condition yourself to a set rhythm via the game's reliance on time to trigger events. This struck me as being a fundamentally different mode of interaction than the majority of contemporary games employs. For instance, in a game such as Resident Evil 5 (2009), a player's spatial location will trigger an obstacle. If a zombie can see you, he will attack you. The obstacles of Resident Evil 5 are not triggered by a set time but are motivated by the player's action. With this noted, DK only partially fulfilled the aesthetic characteristic of a memorable moment for me. I felt a burst of interactive inspiration upon the reveal of each new stage but, as I progressed, I began to doubt my own capacity to affect the outcome due to the game's random elements.
Jenkins' second characteristic, play as performance, has two facets. First, the player needs to "feel as if they are in control of the situation at all times, even though their gameplay and emotional experience are significantly sculpted by the designer." I've already addressed this to a degree, but it should be noted that Jenkins speaks explicitly about DK game designer Shigeru Miyamoto as being a designer who "designs his games around verbs, that is, around the actions the game enables players to perform...he designs a playing space that both facilitates and thwarts our ability to carry out that action and thus creates a dramatic context in which the action takes aesthetic shape and narrative significance." While Miyamoto's use of random elements no doubt creates a dramatic context, my game play experience made me begin to question if, perhaps, random elements were too often employed. In fact, over Miyamoto's career, I would argue that he began to find a more fruitful mix of random elements and patterns that the player can recognize in games such as Super Mario Brothers (1985) and Super Mario Brothers 3 (1988). Within these particular games, timing and patterns became the essence of the game's formal logic, hence many of the YouTube videos where players are able to complete these games without losing any lives whatsoever. Once you recognize the pattern and perfect your knowledge, you can perfect your playing of the game.
Jenkins continues to describe play as performance as a means of rendering domestic space or arcade space into a performance space. While he writes that this is a characteristic of many "contemporary games" and explicitly references Dance Dance Revolution (1998), I would argue that this would apply to a DK as well. While my experiences in arcades during the 1990s did not include DK, the arcade atmosphere is most nurturing to this type of performance and almost begs the question: is it the game or the environment that makes a game performance based? I would argue that it is both, although I would tend to emphasize the environment. For instance, DK is a completely different game space and interface than Wii Sports (2006). In fact, DK would appear to go directly against the performance or, what my colleagues and I have called "gestural play," a form of play in which a player re-enacts physical gestures with the help of a proper interface as key part of game play or perhaps even the core mechanic (which would firmly fall within Jenkin's category of "play as performance"). The game play and interface of DK does not encourage gestural play. Players do not jump up and down as they grab a hammer or leap over a flaming barrel nor do they mimic climbing a ladder. While DK does not encourage gestural play, playing it in a proper venue would have the potential to turn play into performance. This form of performance is it does encourage a space for performance that is perhaps magnified by the "random elements" of the game play. Watching Steve Wiebe break the world's highest score in King of Kong may not be a physically impressive feat, as a player conquering the Guns-N-Roses song "Shackler's Revenge" on a hard difficulty on the Rock Band (2007) drum set might be, but it would be an impressive feat of the intellect, of response time, and mastery of a text. After all, why do television stations in South Korea feature programs of professionals playing Starcraft (1998)? I assure you it is not for the game's reliance on gesture.
The final category of Jenkins' essay I would like to grapple with in relation to DK intersects with this notion of play as performance, "expressive amplification." Drawing off David Bordwell's work on Hong Kong action films, Jenkins describes expressive amplification as the "various aesthetic devices [that] can intensify and exaggerate the impact of such actions, making them both more legible and more intense than their real-world counterparts." Jenkins notes how camera angles, sound effects, and other devices can be utilized by the programmer to turn an action from just an executable outcome to an element of style. While expressive amplification can inspire a kinesthetic response and perhaps a form of gestural play, the definition Jenkins proposes ties this spectator response to the aesthetics of game play, not the interface. This category becomes difficult to relate to DK for the obvious reason of technological limitation. Due to the technology available at the time, there is only one camera angle in DK: a static establishing shot of the entire platform structure that only tilts upwards upon the completion of each level. The music is more advanced, with the tempo forecasting the speed of the level and sound effects responding to the player's actions (jumping over a barrel, hitting a barrel with a hammer, and reaching Princess Peach at the top of the platform). How many aesthetic characteristics or to what intensity do they need to be programmed to provide the player with this sense of expressive amplification or a kinesthetic reaction? Judging from this formal analysis, DK would appear to get the player halfway there. The music and sound effects, responding to their individual actions, no doubt provides expressive amplification, but the aesthetic experience of DK as a whole does not provide enough to evoke a kinesthetic reaction. Again, DK is not a game that produces a performance space from the player's gestures but from their more intellectual capabilities.
This brings us back to the question begged at the beginning of this venture: "What makes Donkey Kong fun today?" I have tabled the issue of nostalgia because while it no doubt plays a factor in the appeal of the game, it becomes incredibly difficult to analyze. I will admit that I was not drawn to the game by a particular longing as it was not one of the games I regularly played growing up (Sonic the Hedgehog fulfills that nostalgia). Yet, there are gamers both old and young who are drawn to DK for the game itself and not the cultural capital it carries and it is no doubt fun to them. After all, applying the form of the game to Jenkins' three aesthetic categories, DK does provide memorable moments, play as a means of performance, and even a rudimentary form of expressive amplification. This said, DK seems unlike many contemporary titles, particularly on its strong reliance on random elements to provide a form of tension to the player. Most games today seem to make it easier and easier for a player to beat a game and feel fulfilled (via difficulty settings, saved games, continues, or even in the provision of more and more "health" items) whereas DK is much more of a one-size fits all type of game. What makes DK a miserable experience for me personally is this one-size fits all mentality. Perhaps the learning curve is too steep, perhaps contemporary design practices have softened my abilities, but more likely is the fact that I was unable to experience fully what Jenkins describes as a memorable moment from a form of game play that ties into what game designers Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman describe as "meaningful play." To Jenkins, Salen, and Zimmerman, a player will find a game rewarding when a player recognizes that "the relationships between actions and outcomes in a game are both discernable and integrated into the larger context of the game." The random elements of DK masked this relationship from me, kept the game from providing me with a feeling of meaningful play, and thus were not a fun or rewarding experience with regard to gaming, but my game play was fruitful as an intellectual pursuit.
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