The Following Phrases

The Global Game Jam Game Jam Game! (From GGJ 2009)

So, I’ve started a little enjoyable labor, blogging, for my job that starts next Fall at Miami University, where one side of my joint appointment will be in The Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies (AIMS). I posted today about Miami’s Global Game Jam event which starts tomorrow. I re-posted my thoughts below. I keep it kind of simple on the Miami site although I wrote more at length about the problem of “innovation” in indie game production in my dissertation. I think Global Game Jams are problematic, as I am sure many others do: forcing creativity and innovation, getting students ready for crunch time when they work in the actual games industry, and generally the valorization of the concept of innovation in general which becomes one paean of contemporary Capitalism (and indie game production). I tend to agree with Stephen Shaviro when he writes about innovation upon critiquing a text from Paolo Virno entitled Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation:

I think that Virno’s reference to Schumpeter is symptomatic, because it offers the clearest example of how he fumbles what seems to me to be one of the great issues of our age: which is, precisely, how to disarticulate notions of creativity and innovation and the New from their current hegemony in the business schools and in the ways that actually-existing capitalism actually functions. [...] I myself don’t claim by any means to have solved this problem — the fact that we can neither give up on innovation, creativity, and the New, nor accept the way that the relentless demand for them is precisely the motor that drives capitalism and blocks any other form of social and economic organization from being even minimally thinkable — but I feel that Virno fails to acknowledge it sufficiently as a problem.

GGJ events are not interested in the disarticulation that Shaviro talks about; they are about innovative production, not even broaching the concept of innovation itself (although it would seem like an ideal chance to invigorate  students, game designers, etc., to ponder the concept of innovation and how it operates with the game industry). Indeed, the GGJ FAQ state that the goal is to “rapidly prototype game designs and hopefully inject new ideas to help grow the game industry.” The growth of the industry, capital accumulation, etc., is the goal. In any event, you can read my post on Miami’s AIMS blog re-posed below, although my dissertation chapter “For Time Flows On: Innovation and Opposition in Video Games” approaches the concept of innovation in more depth…

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I returned from London a few days ago where I was attending the Digital Games Research Association Conference. It was a nice time, meeting new folks and sampling the current state of “Game Studies.” I presented a paper on Diner Dash and casual games–spending most of my time engaged in a close reading of the narrative/visual representations of the game as they apply to gameplay. I was pleasantly surprised to hear an excellent video presentation by Shira Chess on Diner Dash that investigated many similar issues as the dissertation chapter I have been working on! It’s exciting to see that other people are researching time management games such as Diner Dash from a feminist perspective, and especially in terms of (some) time management games emerging as a genre particularly addressed to women. Shira did a fantastic job of analyzing the relationship between productivity and the breakdown of the boundaries between work & play, especially concerning differences in leisure time between men and women and the “emotional labor” which is subtly (but not so subtly!) ingrained within the gameplay of Diner Dash. Anyway, lots to think about after seeing her presentation. Although I haven’t read her paper (and thus the following is only extracted from seeing her presentation), it seemed that we were interested in a similar dynamic contained within Diner Dash–where positive and progressive elements in the gametext are intermixed with more suspect elements which draw on conventional (and stereotypical) notions of women’s labor. In my chapter I examine the production of desire for social change within the game while analyzing the simultaneous management of such desire, channeling it back into the status quo where the “social change” is seemingly diffused. Such a strategy, of course, follows other examinations of popular culture, for example, in Jameson’s “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture” and then in the work of Tanya Modleski on romance novels, soap operas, etc.. In any event, I think the genre of time management games such as Diner Dash (and the unbelievable number of sequels and clones that game has helped generate) is an excellent source for analyzing the relationship between women and games. One benefit of discussing these games as an emergent women’s video game genre would be to focus on actual games that women like to play. As has been noted by some prominent feminist scholars of game studies, there seems to be a lack of textual and ethnographic analysis of games that women enjoy playing. Another benefit, I think, would be the ability to draw connections between these games and older genres such as television soap operas. There is a tendency in game studies–sometimes frustrating–to state that video games are completely different from film or television; or, to say that while there are similarities between the different media forms, game studies should be focused only on the differences (which are held up as the “most interesting” aspect of video games). While I agree that a focus on “medium specificity” can be fruitful and generative, I also think that we should not simply abandon an amazing amount of sophisticated work on media forms such as television and film. Of course, one must not simply and unreflectively port the older work into a new field, but ignoring the older work would be an unfortunate mistake. (Incidentally, this was a complaint in Richard Bartle’s keynote address where he expressed dismay that people working on virtual worlds and MMOs today were ignoring early research on the subject.) For example, in terms of Diner Dash and time management games, Tanya Modleski’s essay “The Rhythms of Reception: Daytime Television and Women’s Work” is a valuable resource for seeing how a previous televisual form (i.e. soap operas and game shows) coupled with the temporal form of women’s work within the home. Casual, time management games also enact a similar coupling in terms of the leisure time of many contemporary women; while soap operas address women in a particular spatial location (the home), casual games address individuals (especially women) in temporal locations. That is, casual games do not necessarily address people within particular spaces because they can be played in a variety of locations–at home, in the office, on the train or bus, in the park outside, etc.. Yet, the play of casual games is linked to the “temporal spaces” of fragmented leisure that are snatched from one’s busy day–thus fitting into the contemporary, temporal reality of many women. (Many studies have shown how women’s leisure time is more fragmented, harried, interrupted, etc. than men’s more uncontaminated leisure.) Anyway, my point being that this earlier work on soaps can help to illuminate the “Rhythms of Reception of Casual Games.” Here, media forms (video games, television, etc.) are conditioned by social forces; the structures of these forms are determined by larger economic/social forces which often extend forms of gendered domination. Unpacking both the gameplay and representational elements of time management games addressed to women will reveal how these games are navigating these social determinants.

Let me say upfront that I am mostly a fan of Alex Galloway’s work & I am particularly impressed by the political projects he and his collaborators produce. Yet, on the theoretical side (and especially in relation to video games) I hesitate when I read some of his positions and arguments.

One thing that has always nagged me was the dichotomy of ideology critique and what he calls informatic critique–the former occurring in a vertical, allegorical fashion based on a depth model of interpretation and the latter being horizontal, a process of scanning the surface of a text, and largely in relation to his previous work on the flexible structures of protocol through which control is asserted.

Of course, the attack on the depth model of interpretation is a primary facet of postmodernist thinking, but in (Marxist) authors such as Jameson, Eagleton, Perry Anderson, and even Linda Hutcheon (to some extent) the abandonment of ideology critique is a frightening symptom of critical thought. Indeed, part of Jameson’s critique of postmodernism is that signs are detached from reference, from “deep” history, where signifiers circulate unattached to anything “below” them such as signifieds, or god forbid, an anchor of reality. Thus, in postmodernism everything is upfront and out in the open; nothing is hidden; interpretation does not excavate deeper meanings let alone the political unconscious.

In terms of video games, this is exactly the approach Galloway takes to games in his chapter of Gaming called “Allegories of Control.” He will say things like, video games present their politics in “relatively unmediated form” (an abandonment of the key Marxist concept of mediation?); or,  games are “politically transparent;” or, a longer example:

“As I have alluded to in Jameson, the depth model in traditional allegorical interpretation is a sublimation of the separation felt by the viewer between his or her experience of consuming the media and the potentially liberating political value of that media. But video games abandon this dissatisfying model of deferral, epitomizing instead the flatness of the control allegory by unifying the act of playing the game with an immediate political experience. In other words, The Sims is a game that delivers its own political critique up front as part of the gameplay. There is no need for the critic to unpack the game later.”

Whereas Civilization for Galloway acts as a transparent surface display of the totality of informatic control – its interlocking algorithms, the flexibility of various paramaters that players can investigate, adjust, and change – The Sims is a direct display “of life lived as an algorithm.” It’s all there right before us in these games which act as indexes to the form of control and societal structures–postmodernist, post-industrial, informatic (call it what you will)–that exists around us. One doesn’t need to unpack how Civilization represents history, because it is right there in the mirror before us–as mathematical, informatic models which ultimately act as the erasure of history itself. One does not need to deeply interpret The Sims because it is right there before us as “an immediate political experience:” the revealing of our contemporary lives as insipid, repetitive, algorithmic tasks as we play the game itself.  I actually have no qualms with these analyses, they point back to the structures of control (stemming from Deleuze) that Galloway has extrapolated in his work on protocol. But this sense of immediacy of the political, a privileging of surface over depth, seems like a unnecessary (postmodern) annihilation of ideology and the work of interpretation needed to think through it, which, in my opinion, still remains an important political task. In fact, perhaps a task I am trying to do right now in seeing through how Galloway’s notion of “informatic critique” is working ideologically itself.

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