The Following Phrases

A new issue of dichtung-digital edited by Patricia Tomaszek came out a few days ago. I have an article in the issue which analyzes Molleindustria’s game Every Day the Same Dream. I am still making my way through the other articles in the issue, but I am completely impressed by what I have read so far. Definitely worth checking out. Other contributors include Eduardo Navas, Davin Heckman, Roberto Simanowski, John M. Vincler, Scott Rettberg, Nele Lenze, Martina Pfeiler, and an elegant editorial introduction from Patricia.

Recently I attended a digital poetry event at Dartmouth organized by Aden Evans and Mary Flanagan. I had a delightful time participating in the event with Nick Montfort, Marjorie Luesebrink, and Stephanie Strickland. I had not seen Marjorie and Stephanie discuss and read from their work, which was truly a pleasure. Nor had I heard Nick read from some of his poetry generators such as the ppg256 poems. It was amazing to hear the pieces performed, so instead of simply watching the generators kick out lines of intriguing text on the screen, the remarkable sonic properties of the words and phrases came alive in vibrant colors. I often think generated text pieces are more interesting conceptually, but hearing Nick read brought them into their true poetic form, full of humor and remarkable rhythm and sometimes caustic flamboyance. But I think it was Stephanie and Nick’s collaborative piece “Sea and Spar Between” that truly moved me, this time conceptually more than audibly. Truly a work of the digital, poetic sublime which has not been so pronounced since Queneau’s “One hundred thousand billion poems.” If not a “must read” because of the sheer impossibility of doing so, often stripping the mind of language more than lyrically touching it, it is a must see and a must understand. One of the best pieces of digital literature created in the last few years…

For my part I presented on a 2D textual platformer that I am working on with Daniel Howe. We’re still in the development stages, but we’ll hopefully have some sort of prototype soonish. I am sure I will post more about the game, tentatively titled “Walkthru,” in the future. Here are a few screen caps…

Extinction Level Events

A few days ago I posted about the Miami Global Game Jam, before it began. After the jam I wrote up a review of the games produced during 48 hours in Oxford Ohio. You can read the original post at Miami’s blog here. I did not actually attend the jam since I will be at Miami in the Fall. Yet, being an outside observer (or player) was ideal for writing up the review. I have some distance from what was produced… Some of the games are more complete than others, but one can find some amazing ideas at work here. Reviewing the games makes me realize that the innovate creativity of Global Game Jams is certainly important. The model of innovation can produce fascinating ideas; it is beyond doubt. Yet, thinking through this model of innovation and its relation to dominant ideologies of the games industry is still important: indie game production, rapid-prototyping, etc., will still feed into the game industry more than challenge it. The production of innovative “game mechanics without politics” is fodder for the same-old, same-old of the game industry, even though what we witness is the absolute, interesting new. This is not to say that the games created at Miami are not amazing and astonishing in their own right. They are! I suppose I just want to take the criticality further. What would be a political, progressive model of the GGJ based on production models that do not feed dominate industries but subvert them? Brecht said that innovation is only renovation if it is not attached to true political motivations for change. It may be that GGJ are generators of (amazing) renovation, but not (dare I say) innovation. True innovation would require, as Brecht said, the “revolutionizing” a medium’s aesthetic production. But, of course, the methods of Brecht were eventually co-opted, as was the notion of “revolution” itself. So, it remains to be determined, both theoretically and practically, what “true innovation” would be…in the meantime…check out these rad games from Miami U!

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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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My original intent in starting this blog was to provide a public place for thinking through my dissertation, for providing a salvage yard of sorts where I could place some of my current thoughts–odds and ends which might prove useful or not for the dissertation. Hopefully they will also be useful for others interested in thinking critically and theoretically about video games. I plan on posting more regularly in the future.

So, with that said, this first post about games arises from a recent re-reading of Espen Aarseth’s “Genre Trouble“  a key text in the ludologist vs. narratologist debates (as they have unfortunately become to be known). In particular the following quote spurred my thoughts:

Games are not “textual” or at least not primarily textual: where is the text in chess? We might say that the rules of chess constitute its “text,” but there is no recitation of the rules during gameplay, so that would reduce the textuality of chess to a subtextuality or a paratextuality. A central “text” does not exist — merely context. Any game consists of three aspects: (1) rules, (2) a material/semiotic system (a gameworld), and (3) gameplay (the events resulting from application of the rules to the gameworld). Of these three, the semiotic system is the most coincidental to the game. As the Danish theorist and game designer Jesper Juul has pointed out (Juul 2001b), games are eminently themeable: you can play chess with some rocks in the mud, or with pieces that look like the Simpson family rather than kings and queens. It would still be the same game. The “royal” theme of the traditional pieces is all but irrelevant to our understanding of chess. Likewise, the dimensions of Lara Croft’s body, already analyzed to death by film theorists, are irrelevant to me as a player, because a different-looking body would not make me play differently. When I play, I don’t even see her body, but see through it and past it.

Thus, game studies would ideally focus on the rules and gameplay–though the latter would seemingly require some analysis of representation or the “semiotic system” given that gameplay emerges within the relationship between gameworld and rules. Though the example of Lara Croft is immediately intriguing (and has caught the eye of many others) what leap into my mind upon this rereading was the dismissal of semiotics and the use of the chess example, given that Ferdinand Saussure (founder of semiology) uses practically the same chess example to illustrate his rationale concerning the inauguration of semiotics. Of course, Aarseth’s use of the word “semiotic” is really a codeword for narratives and visual representations which frame the game system within a gameworld; less a reference to actual semiotics (and Saussure for that matter), the word is intended to indicate a certain brand of theory – perhaps of the poststructuralist flavor – and practitioners of this theory who mindlessly port their training (developed through the study of literature or media such as film and television) to the field of game studies. (Incidentally, Aarseth explicitly denies the privileged usefulness of semiotics proper to the study of electronic texts in his book Cybertexts). Nevertheless, Aarseth’s choice to frame the other of game studies as semiotics is intriguing given that the methods of the ludologists to create a stable foundation for game studies share traits with Ferdinand Saussure’s attempt to ground the field of semiology. Indeed, Saussure claims that “language must, to put it correctly, be studied in itself; heretofore language has almost always been studied in connection with something else, from other viewpoints.” If one replaces “language” with “games” one arrives at Aarseth’s basic qualms concerning the state of game studies and the unreflective porting of theories derived from literature & film to games. But, let’s look at the chess examples Saussure uses.

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