Video games in the English Department!?

Perhaps it's just the result of taking this seminar, or perhaps it's because I respect video games as a large part of American and especially international culture, but the idea of video games migrating into the English department doesn't phase me all that much. It seems only natural that the issues and forces at work within video games can easily be studied in terms of narratology, thematic representation, etc. In my critical theory class the other day, the topic of video games came up, and someone mentioned that they had heard of a video games course (this one) being offered. The class began to go wild with theorectical "insights" into why it was positive or negative to have video games as a part of the English department at Loyola University. One person, rather angrily and with a tone of resentment blurted out that they would "love to study wrestling for the narration and plot that stands behind it". Well...
http://cms.mit.edu/news/2007/04/mit_comparative_media_studies.php
eat your heart out! (Thanks for the link Dr. Jones)

But on a serious note, this is not anything new. We have talked about this debate in our class, and it even came up in my final project as a large part of what we talked about with Matt Kirschenbaum. I must admit, that I kept my mouth closed until the end because I was deeply interested in hearing just what it was that my fellow English majors thought constituted the pros and cons of this form of study. The problem that my classmates were interested in was similar to what we have addressed in class. One thing, was simply that they couldn't understand how it was that the study of video games pertained to anything within the English department. Some proponents of video game studies were quick to point out that video games for the most part comprise of largely narrated story lines, just like many novels and that they also offer their players a means by which to interact with the plot that they are immersed in. One classmate noted that playing some video games is very similar to reading one of those choose your own ending books. Another was quick to note that while that was true, video games offered a seemingly unending amount of interpretations of the narration of the plot itself simply by means of having some sort of agency in the form of the player holding the controller. It was an excellent discussion and I think in the end, most people were relatively open to the idea of video game studies as a form of study within some area of the college.

That was the other point that was made quite frequently. There seems to be a deep seated fear within the English major that it is being overtaken by cultural studies; that the emphasis is no longer on the literart canon per se, but rather on the way that literary works interact and involve culture. Harold Bloom is the author that we had read for the day and subsequently the cause of the discussion that ensued. Bloom embodies the fear of cultural studies in that he predicts that at some point, there will be English departments with close to no students, because they will all be sick and tired of the major because it will not have a defined canon to study. He says that the rate at which cultural studies and cultural criticism are moving into the field of English studies, they will overpopulate and force the canon out, "reduc[ing] the aesthetic to ideology, or at best metaphysics".

Terry Eagleton on the other hand argues a much different point concerning literature. He makes the interesting assertion that "value-judgements...seem to have a lot to do with what is judged literature and what is not". His most interesting assertion is that he wonders if there won't be a time when we discover "a great deal more about what ancient Greek tragedy actually meant to its original audiences" and "recogniz[ing] that these concerns were utterly remote from our own..began to read the palys again in the light of this deepened knowledge". He asserts that upon doing so "one result might be that we stopped enjoying them. We might come to see that we had enjoyed them previously because we were unwittingly reading them on the light of our own preocupations".

This idea really hits home with me. I was wondering just what it is that makes video games so unattractive to the English major given this idea. When we think about what it is that video games mean to us, now, in our present time, I think that it becomes clear that they are not all that divorced from the meanings that we can derive from ancient Greek tragedies. Not to mention the myriad of paratextual documentation that comes with each form of study... I think that the evidence for the validity of studying a topic such as video games in the English department is found in the quick paralells that many people easily draw between the narratives and the agency, as well as the issues of authorship and paratextuality that we have brought up in class this semester.


I figure that since I quoted some authors, it's probably best to have a works cited page...so here goes:

Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon. Modern Literary Theory. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Ed. Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh.

Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Modern Literary Theory. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Ed. Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh.

Spore

Just in viewing the Demos, and actually, right now finishing the walk through demo with Wright talking over it, I have to say that this game seems impressive (I know, and understatement to be sure). The level of detail that is involved in making this game work and simply controlling the world all around it is amazing. What really struck me was the "Editor" within the game. When it is time for the player to move onto the next stage of his spores life, the character lays an egg (in the early stages) and the player can click on it and begin to mold it into what he wants it to become.

I was more than impressed with the level of control that the player has over the building of these characters. He can change everything, from the skin, to the number of legs, even down to the exoskeleton of the character. Also, the game engine itself is designed to be able to determine the way that the character will walk and interact witht he environtment around him. The other thing that amazed me was the way that a player can develop what Wright calls "verbs". Verbs, obviously are actions, but you can create your own types of verbs by combining two pre-existant verbs. He shows this by selecting "bite" and "move" at the same time.

The way that the interface and the engine of the game are abel to create "meanings" within each of the characters that the player can create reminded me of the way that platform influences our ability to read texts and the ways that we interact with them. The analysis code that animates the characters that the player creates is made possible throught the usage of the platform.

The point system that he talks about is interesting as well. The main point (in order to level up) is to develop the brain, at which point the game style can change. This is another aspect that surprised me. When one levels up, they can change modes and in Wright's example, the way that this is made obvious to the player is that the game play changes. He shows the move from what he calls a "First Person Eater" to a Real Time Strategy game. Something that we talked about quickly in class was that he said that the many levels of the game are representative of pre-existent games and genres that are out there already.

More to come after tomorrow's talk. I'm really excited about this game though!

The Power Struggle

It always comes down to this, I'm not sure why. Perhaps it is because of the contemporary, post-modern society that we live in, but it seems to me as though a vast majority of discourses surrounding almost any topic in the humanities can be deconstructed into a simple struggle for power. Whether it be the sociological definitions of fear of the media and video games as nothing more than a misplaced feeling of loss of control over children, to the ideas of targeting and conquering that are inherent in many video games (even the driving sims), issues of how to gain and control power are rampant in the discourses that we deal with every day.

We talked about this for a bit in class, but I think that it is important to write about this, perhaps to not only develop some deeper individual ideas surrounding the topic, but also to simply "get it off my chest" as it were. I don't believe that the idea of power as a mediator is a new idea at all, but I think that it is always the 800 pound gorilla in the room, especially when it is paired with other topcis that no one wants to talk about such as death.

In games, one of the most appealing aspects is that you, the player, have control over outcomes. Indeed, there is always some form of linearity that you must follow but even that linearity is a reality of the overarching story of humanity. We all are born, we all must complete some task in life, and in the end the narrative of our existence, as it were, must come to an end. In games, much as in life, we are born into a set of pre-determined rules from within which we must "play". The character that we control, or the car that we drive (in racing sims) must be controlled or driven within the context of the gamespace that it exists within. This interactivity is where "the tasks" that we have to complete come into play.

In life, as in games, we are able to determine those tasks, the order in which they are completed, etc. In this way, we are re-interpreting the game each time we play it; taking a different path to the objective, taking a shortcut, or completing one task before the other are all ways in which we have agency over the occurrences of the narrative of the game. In certain games, the scope of our interpretation is limited, as I said before, by the overarching narrative that has been created for us. This is where I see the idea of re-interpretation taking a new meaning. In the form of game-development, the writers and programmers have to make a choice: what part of the experience do they want to convey. In a game such as Gran Turismo, the obvious choice was to simulate a true driving experience. Much time and effort went into deatiling the race tracks and perfecting the physics of the cars, the lines that must be taken, the apexes of the turns, the track elevations, etc. in order to simulate the most realistic (at least in terms of mechanics) form of gameplay possible. In a game such as Burnout, however, the focus is more on crashing, and as a result the developers tried to get the physics of a crash to be the most realistic aspect of the game. If you were to hit the barrier head-on, the hood would crumple, the car would collapse at certain points, and glass would shatter, etc. Each game represents a form of interpretation about a similar experience: one is about the "driving" of racing, while the other is about the "crashing" of racing.

Summing this up, is the culmination of each game. I suppose that driving games aren't the best example for this (FPS's and RPG's better sum up the idea of a linear story (well, some FPS's that is)), but they will suffice. In most driving games, there is some target that is always in flux. In Gran Turismo, that target may be first place, or an incredible lap time on Laguna Seca (I think my best is just over a minute, but don't quote me as I haven't played in more than a year), whereas in Burn-Out it might be a certain number of points, or a group of cars, etc. Overarching these internal goals of the game, is the ability to unlockk new cars, or to open up new levels. At some point all these unlocks can be attained, and the game becomes nothing more than a repetition of tracks, trying to get the best time, or more points. At this time, the narrative of a Sim is, for all intents and purposes, concluded. There is nothing more to target and the game has ended.

I'm not sure what this means given the philosophical-ish beginning to this entry, but I think that perhaps a quote from Ben Franklin will suffice: "were it offer'd to my Choice, I should have no Objection to a Repetition of the same Life from it's Beginning, only asking the Advantages Authors have in a second Edition to correct some Faults of the first" (Autobiography, 3). Perhaps this is the intention of authors and game developers: to take the same life, the same narrative, and develop different editions through differing interpretations of the same topics.

The Effect of the MUD and the MOO

http://www.computerpoweruser.com/Up until this class I had never heard about MUD's and MOO's. Interestingly enough (for me at least) this semester has been full of instances where information from one class seems to bleed over (for lack of a better term) into my other classes. We were just discussing paratextuality in my 375 Colonial Encounters class. Such is the way of a good liberal arts education I suppose, but this past week has been different in that I have begun to see terms from this class pervading my "paratextual" life, if you will (my life outside of school). In some spare time this past week I sat down to read a bit of my favorite magazine http://www.computerpoweruser.com/ and noticed that they had a follow up article from their "When Real & Virtual Economies Collide" article about the blurring of the lines between the virtual economy of Second Life and that of the real world. This follow up was actually an interview with Cory Ondrejka, the CTO of Linden Labs, the creators of Second Life. The opening question posed by CPU is whether or not Second Life had its roots in MUD's and MUSH's, to which Cory replies that "none of the founders of Linden Lab were active players in those games" (102, CPU), and goes on to talk about how Second Life developed, etc.

What really interested me about this article was that the reality of the development of discourses surrounding the game space are reminiscent of all ideas surrounding the development of any other tangible artifact. What I mean by this is that when something such as Second Life comes to fruition, it does so partially as a result of the pioneers that came before it. This is not to take away from the ingenuity of the creators of a game like second life, but rather calls into question the idea of historical paratextuality and how far back we can dig to discover the "roots" of that particular area of study. In this case, the influence of the MUD's and MOO's was there, it just wasn't obvious. The idea behind Second Life is pretty well known to those of us in the class, but the basic premise is that you can build a virtual life for youself, complete with a job and your own style of clothing. There are even people who design their own houses and develop their own properties. Within the gamespace of Second Life, the sky is really the limit.

Having some limited experience with the MOO, I can see how a game like Second Life would have borrowed very much so from the "building" structure of the MOO-type gamespace. Coming to this realization makes me wonder how many other aspects of my life are effected by this same concept; how much of our lives are built upon the now-forgotten past, and really, how much does the impact that this past has on our present really matter? I think that in some ways it must be the stance of the Ludologists that the history doesn't matter at all, that it is purely outside of the game itself and therefore doesn't really matter at all. I, however, believe that this aspect of the game, its history, etc. really does matter, that it is worth studying and understanding in order to better immerse ones self deeper into the game and experience it in a whole new way. One more analogy before signing off: anyone can go and see Rome, but it is really the history of the place that gives it most of its meaning. If one views the sights of Rome with an understanding of the history that lies behind each one (ala The Marble Faun), then I would argue that they are experiencing the sights on an unprecedented level of understanding and immersion. The goes hand in hand with the history behind games. A deeper immersion in the game itself is what many (if not all) gamers are looking for, and I believe that understanding the history of the game is one of the best ways to get that much deeper into it.

Does the Audience have Agency?

In thinking about Facade and more generally the issues that came up in class today, I have been struggling with what it means to define the game as a place where the players have agency. I think that the idea of having agency, or a certain defined way of interacting with the text, movie, play, etc. is an important distinction to make when defining what it is that comprises the separate spheres (if I may) of what is called the "Game" and what is not the "Game".

In thinking about agency as a way within which we can divorce the world of the game from the other, I become interested in exactly what it means then, to interact in a passive way. I can see that this needs explication; the very abstractness of the concept causes it to be almost indescribable linguistically, so I will have to rely on the examples given in class today. In developing the idea that agency is what separates the game from the other, the example was given of a play, where there is a fourth dimension, or curtain that separates the audience from the actors. The actors are supposed to play out their roles with the commonly held "understanding" that there is no audience, and that they are simply playing out a narrative that is concrete in the way that it will be depicted. There exists, to be sure, room for the actors to embellish upon their designated role, however the narrative itself cannot be strayed from. The audience, therefore, being believed to be separate from the ocurrence of the narrative, views the happenings on stage as dis-empowered beings, having no agency to create or change the plot in any way. The result of this "disempowerment" is that they are not really a part of the occurrences on stage and therefore stage play can be defined as the "other", or not a game.

Something within this idea just doesn't register completely within me. I can say it out loud, and write it in a way that makes sense to my logic, that is, I am firmly convinced that the idea is sound and correct, but something within me, perhaps stubborness begs to differ. I begin to look for ways in which these people could be interacting, or changing the occurrences on stage; that they are empowered with some sense of agency just because they are there, they are viewing these occurrences. So I want to investigate the idea, perhaps to confound it further in my own mind, or (more likely) to confuse myself further.

I want to think about the idea of viewership as not being divorced from agency per se, in two ways: the first is that the audience, by virtue of their attendence of a play, forces the players (actors) to "do the story right". What I mean by this is that the expectation of the audience at a play, forces the actors to be "true" to the expectations of that audience, and in this way, the audience is given agency. The second is that the audience of any action has a peritextual investment in that action, especially as it pertains to a play or game. In that way, again, the audience is inherently an actor, they have some sort of agency.

I wonder if either of these ideas hold any academic weight. They seem (because they are) purely speculative, and I hope to think more and write more about these ideas as we learn more in class.