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’m posting here and there on the Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies blog before I start working at Miami University next Fall. Overshadowed by election day, the Supreme Court heard arguments this morning concerning Schwarzenegger v. Entertainment Merchants Association, a case concerning a California law from 2005 that would criminalize the sale of “deviant, violent video games” to minors. You can read my post over here.

A new issue of hyperrhiz came out recently, collecting a few papers and projects from the 2008 ELO Conference Visionary Landscapes. Daniel Howe and I have an article in the issue addressing questions of digital pedagogy and providing an analysis of digital writing workshops based on principles of generative literature–largely in relation to Daniel’s RiTa library for Processing. The article: “The Aesthetics of Generative Literature: Lessons from a Digital Writing Workshop.”

Abstract:

This paper explores a range of issues related to the pedagogy and practice of generative writing in programmable media. We begin with a brief description of the RiTa toolkit – a set of computational tools designed to facilitate the practice of generative writing. We then describe our experiences using these tools in a series of digital writing workshops at Brown University in 2007-2008. We discuss and theoretically examine a set of core issues raised by workshop participants — distributed authorship, the aesthetics of surprise, materiality, push-back, layering, and others — and attempt to situate them within the larger discourse of generative art and writing practice.

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.

Returned home a few days ago from a wonderful trip to Providence for the opening of the Inappropriate Covers exhibition I co-curated with Justin Katko. The opening was held on April 10th and a few days before we organized a film screening for The Magic Lantern at the Cable Car Cinema. The screening went quite well with films such as a selection from the Lossless series by Rebecca Baron and Doug Goodwin (we screened #3 and #5), Robert Arnold’s “Morphology of Desire,” Matthew Suib’s excellent work “COCKED,” and other videos. Here’s a description of the films we screened.

The opening for the exhibition was wonderful with Stephanie Syjuco giving an excellent and “appropriate” artist talk; we exhibited her piece “Body Double.” Other artists in attendance were L. Amelia Raley (showing “I should have never ever ever did those things”) and Ted Riederer (showing “The Resurrectionists”).

From the press release: “Inappropriate Covers includes multimedia works by 11 established and emerging artists, chosen for the aesthetic tensions they generate through acts of appropriation, reconfiguration, and erasure. Works in the exhibition range from the refined to the outrageous, according to JoAnn Conklin, director of the Bell Gallery. Jim Campbell’s elegant sculpture muses on memory and loss: the artist’s own heartbeat and breath sets the frequency of a layer of fog that appears on a glass, covering and uncovering photographs of his parents. At the other end of the spectrum is Kelly Heaton’s Live Pelt (The Surrogate). Heaton refers to the cloak, made from 64 used Tickle Me Elmo dolls purchased on E-bay, as her “substitute lover.”  In addition to Campbell and Heaton, artists participating in the exhibition are Brian Dettmer, Kenneth Goldsmith, Christian Marclay, L. Amelia Raley, Ted Riederer, Brian Kim Stefans, Stephanie Syjuco, John Oswald, and Mark Wallinger.”

Inappropriate Covers @ The David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University. Running until May 29, 2009:

A vlog about Inappropriate Covers made by Julie Levin-Russo for HASTAC:

Press Release from Brown University:

More Text, from The Brown Daily Herald & Yankee Magazine.

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A few weeks ago the second volume of Transformative Works and Cultures went online. The issue is called “Games as Transformative Works” and contains a short article of mine: “Intrinsic motivation: flOw, video games, and participatory culture.” The article was published in their “Symposium” section, a space intended for shorter pieces that address both the academic community and general public. The ideas in the piece stem from the first chapter of my dissertation which contains a larger examination of Csikszentmihalyi’s theory of flow in relation to video games (but also in relation to Raymond Williams’ concept of televisual flow). The chapter attempts to fill a gap in game scholarship which often mentions Csikszentmihalyi & flow, but rarely with a critical eye. The article in TWC doesn’t go into much depth in the theoretical discussion of “flow,” but instead attempts to draw a relationship between the (sometimes) intrinsic motivation of modding and Csikszentmihalyi’s notion of “intrinsic motivation” which is attached to flow activities such as, potentially, video games. The gist being that at some point – when the player reaches a skill level where the game is no longer (or less) challenging – modification might be a choice to continue the “flow experience” cultivated in the game; thus, the intrinsic motivation of playing the game overflows into the immaterial labor of work (often to the material profit of others, not necessarily the modder). Anyway, take a look if you’re interested. There’s a brief discussion of the game flOw in relation to World of Warcraft actually… The rest of the collection looks fascinating as well, though I have only been able to read a few articles as of yet.