//    CRACKING THE MAZE
//   "Game Plug-ins and Patches as Hacker Art"
//    version 1.0 July 16, 1999


#include <curators_note.h> // curators note by Anne-Marie Schleiner
#include <game_patches.h> // the game patches
#include <article_huhtamo.h> // Game Patch - the Son of Scratch? by Erkki Huhtamo
#include <article_trippi.h> // Deep Patch by Laura Trippi
#include <switch.h> // the 'Art & Games' issue of Switch
#include <credits.h> // credits and contact information


//    Deep Patch                                       
//    by Laura Trippi                                                                                                                                 
// 
//    If you've spent time working in, say, Microsoft Office, or with any piece
//    of software that acts as if it knows what you want better than you do and
//    does it for you, hiding every trace of code through which you might be able
//    to set things right, you'll appreciate the can-do attitude embodied in game
//    patches. Where a "patch" is a piece of code inserted into a program to fix a 
//    bug, a game patch is an alteration or add-on to a computer game, usually
//    unsanctioned. Unlike ordinary software patches, game patches don't correct
//    code behind the scenes, smoothing over something broken. And unlike patches
//    of cloth, they don't just mend rips already made. No, the very concept of game
//    patches implies and includes the act of tearing open a finished program to 
//    get at the underlying code.
// 
//    How deep into the host games do patches go? Some, like Sonya Roberts' "Female
//    Skin Pack Excerpts," mapping female "skins" onto the muscled male figures of
//    "Quake," skim the surface look of the game (though looks can be deceiving).
//    Others, such as Jason Huddy's "Los Disneys," dig deep, appropriating the game
//    engine without the content, creating a new game of the hacker's own devising.
// 
//    But depth can also be measured in other ways.
// 
//    In her notes on the patches, curator Anne-Marie Schleiner calls RTMark's 
//    "SimCopter Hack," a "deeper level hack than your typical patch. . . ." Depth in this
//    case is not just a matter of structural relations, how far into the code and function
//    of the game a patch goes. It's also a matter of process, intervening at the level of 
//    production.  Created by the hacktivist collective RTMark in alliance with one of the 
//    game's programmers, this patch infiltrated the shrink-wrapped product as it was 
//    being made.
// 
//    Game patching in this sense, as a subculture, is deeply embedded in the host system, 
//    commercial computer games. Patches are produced to a large extent by game
//    programmers, or would be programmers, and game companies have been quick to 
//    harness the practice of patching as a marketing tool. The guest/host dynamic here 
//    is complex, twisted like a mobius strip.
// 
//    There are patches that have no apparent host at all or adopt a host from outside the
//    field of computer games, orphan hacks such as mongrel's "BlackLash" and Natalie
//    Bookchin's "The Intruder." These, clearly, are straight up culture hacks whose mere
//    existence underscores the viability of this subculture, its affinities with other
//    parasitico-critical practices, and the robustness of its freeware economy, a 
//    marketplace-bazaar for codes of all kinds.
// 
//    In this bazaar, today's guest is tomorrow's host, as can be seen in the case of Robert
//    Nideffer's "Tomb Raider I and II Patches," which Schleiner describes as "patched 
//    patches." That is, they are patches of the original "Nude Raider" patch, which is
//    rumored to have been released as a marketing ploy by the game's publisher.  Nideffer 
//    characterizes his patches as a Duchampian reappropriation, "hosting" one might say,
//    the false "guest" that "Nude Raider" seems to have been.
// 
//    What's reappropriated by Nideffer is the practice and culture of game patching -- as
//    a vehicle for creative and critical expression on the part of artists/programmers, as
//    a means of talking back to the industry and as well as amongst themselves, and as an
//    alternative gift economy flourishing in the crevices of the dominant consumerist
//    system.