Six little cartoon girls enter a pastel playground where playful music sets a nursery school tone. Nice? Not even close.
Welcome to Sissyfight 2000: the meanest, most popular little back-stabbing interactive game on the Net.
The goal is to reduce the other little schoolgirls, in their little schoolgirl outfits, to whimpering sissies. Through a barrage of scratching, teasing, tattling and grabbing, players knock each other out of the game by chipping away at their opponents' self-esteem.
Entertainment Weekly, which gave the game an "A" grade, says, "Sissyfight brings forth a player's nasty, repressed child like no other game -- except maybe fifth-grade dodge ball and corporate retreats."
The game (at http://www.sissyfight.com ) was developed in a year-long process with the staff of one of the Web's most ancient (er, it's five years old) and most respected on-line magazines, New York's Word.com. The site is known for its ironic and smart essays and stories, but its savvy editor, Marisa Bowe, says that she had had a hankering to develop new ways to marry high and low art forms in an interactive setting, to make the most of the Web's potential for transdisciplinary opportunities.
"I thought that if we could take the geekiest corner of entertainment -- role-playing games -- and make a crossover hit that would appeal to people who aren't hardcore gamer geeks, then we would be onto something," Bowe says. "It seemed like a good business idea that might turn out to be popular."
That it has. It has been mentioned in EW, Wired and the Village Voice and become a selected link on the influential Shift. It has also attracted more than 25,000 registered users. At last count, it was bringing in a new registered user every minute. Its maddeningly addictive qualities account for much of the popularity.
The guy behind Sissyfight is a card-carrying academic brainiac. Eric Zimmerman, a freelance game designer out of Manhattan, is an adjunct professor at the Parsons School of Design and New York University. The 30-year-old intellectual/geek has lectured at more than 30 universities about the aesthetics of video games, writes scholarly papers on the social theories of play and discusses his chosen field with a hybrid lyricism, mixing words such as "transgressive" and "butt-ugly" in the same sentence.
The key to Sissyfight's success, Zimmerman says, is that despite its retro-1980s Atari-style graphics, it succeeds in emotionally affecting players more deeply than games that realistically portray horrible acts of graphic dismemberment. "People have very emotional experiences playing Sissyfight," Zimmerman said, talking from a cellular phone in San Francisco, where he was speaking at a gaming conference. "People have said to me, 'I have never been so traumatized on-line. I entered a game and everybody realized I was the newbie. They jumped me -- grabbing, scratching and teasing me out of the game in a couple of turns.' "
Not surprisingly, Word.com gets a lot of regular e-mail feedback from its new flock of grabbing and scratching virtual schoolgirls: "This game is awesome. It is the meanest game ever. It is so much meaner than Quake or any of the games where you actually try and kill each other."
Another player effused: "It's great therapy and helps me get revenge on all my childhood torturers. I've never laughed sooo much while being sooo mean!"
Zimmerman could not be more pleased. "For me that's a real accomplishment," he says.
To the Brooklyn resident, who gets paid for lecturing at universities such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology about the intricacies of gaming, "every Sissyfight game is a miniature society with dramatic struggles for power. An aggressive player might emerge as a leader and direct the other players, but might later be branded as a bully and be destroyed by the mob. It's emergent complexity in action."
And even though the graphics are low-fi, he says, the emotions the game spurs are high impact. "There are a lot of debates about so-called immersion in gaming," Zimmerman says. "I take the stance that immersion is not about the richness of the graphics, but about the total relationship a player has with a game. Play engagement occurs not just visually, but on strategic, social and cultural levels as well.
"Sissyfight 2000 proves you don't need technological extravaganzas of real-time 3-D graphics, reflection maps and shadowing to get completely emotionally engaged with a game."
The game has, of course, also attracted a certain amount of killjoy finger wagging from the protect-the-children contingent. Zimmerman suffered a few sticks and stones during an NPR interview, slung by a listener who suggested that the schoolgirls should be encouraged to support each other's self-esteem instead of tearing it down. And Word.com has received a smattering of e-mail attacks like this one: "This is the biggest waste of time and bandwidth ever to have been devised to run on the Internet. Why can't you use your time and ingenuity for a more productive idea, losers."
Aside from the hostility that this user expresses (which might be better vented if he played more Sissyfight), he brings up a point all video-game designers have heard before -- that their work encourages violent behaviour. Not surprisingly, Zimmerman disagrees.
"The human psyche does not work on a monkey-see, monkey-do basis," Zimmerman says.
To Zimmerman, success has come to Sissyfight because of a carefully designed gaming recipe that blends the worst kind of humiliating hostility with a lighthearted childhood innocence.
"Sissyfight kind of encourages cruelty and that's why it makes the social space so highly charged," Zimmerman says. "At the same time I would say that it's aggressively playful too, in the music played and the very stylized nature of the girl characters. Those elements cut across the cruelty of the game in interesting ways."
Of course, Sissyfight, more than any other fantasy video game, is not really a fantasy at all but based squarely on the very real brutality and unfairness of childhood. As such, for many, it taps into wounds that haven't been opened since the days of Gilligan's Island reruns. And in the same way children are cruelly honest and uncensored in their playing and fighting, Sissyfight comes to computers across the world without having gone through any PTA scrutiny or having been taken away by the recess monitor.
And that's the way Zimmerman wants it. "Children's play fascinates me because I think it is sort of utterly violent and perverse and Sissyfight is too," he says. "And I think that pop culture and art in general should challenge and be provocative, and so there certainly is nothing wrong in creating a game that is too."