Warcraft III and Victorian Technology?

Just kinda thinking out loud while I prepare to scramble through this first paper next week.

*My class? Victorian Telecommunications. (ZZZzzzz, right? I'm intrigued by the idea of revisioning Victorian technology as precursors to mass culture, but after 7 weeks covering the steam train and the telegraph I'm ready to claw my eyes out.)
*My task? To write a seminar paper for this CFP: A conference on Victorian networks, Connections, and technologies. My angle would be drawing some parallel between some 19th century tech and modern tech.
*My challenge then? To come up with some way of relating Victorian material production concerns and their epiphenomena with similar material production concerns in, say, Warcraft III or something similar (I'm open to other titles, but since I'm reading WC3 for my freshmen it seemed easiest).
*My main concern? That while I can do the mental acrobatics required to make this comparison, I'm having trouble imagining how to make the answers to my questions here - whatever either of those things ends up being - relevant. More to the point, my idea is probably specious (aren't they all!) and there may be some furious spin to get this contraption committed to paper.

My primary idea is to compare serialization in some Dickens novel (probably Great Expectations since I've actually read it) with story-telling in Warcraft III. My premise is that the epiphenomena of Dickens' serial publication - the harsh segmentation of the story, the flattening of characters, the episodic nature of the narrative, the complex legion of characters interwoven through each other, and the effect of the audience as a "floating spectator" that moves from character to character - are each reproduced in Warcraft III. The game is played through chapter-missions and for the most part each mission functions in the same episodic way that a serialized chunk of a Dickens novel does: by giving a small and cohesive story arc that nevertheless emanates from a grander metanarrative. This effect, along with the story switching back and forth between RTS combat and narrative cut-scenes, causes fragmentation of the story. The characters are also largely flattened in the same way a Dickens character is flattened: because the story is more plot-driven in Warcraft III, character development is not as rich as it might be and many characters are easily identified as stock character types and monodimensional plot devices. The game also "floats" from character to character the way a Dickens novel does. There are main characters, and the story in WC3 is ultimately about Arthas, but we as players drift from Arthas fairly frequently, moving to follow Jaina, Kel'Thuzad, Thrall, Tyrande, Malfurion, Illidan, Maiev, Anub'arak, Kael'thas... the list is pretty long. Not to mention the legion of minor characters woven in like Muradin, Mal'Ganis, Medivh, Varimathras, Uther, and so forth. The story of Warcraft III, though, begins and ends with Arthas.

The problem with this line of attack lies in the fact that I'm not sure I can sustain it for very long. The effects are similar and interesting to tease out, but the causes are very different. Dickensian novels are blocky and flat because they're being transmitted in chunks over a huge span of time in a monthly magazine. WC3 is delivered all at once, and its blocky flatness is derived from its primary purpose as a RTS game... Though perhaps this is where the two ideas really meet: in the realm of material production.

At the very basic level, both stories as narrative are controlled in no small part by how they are made: Great Expectations because it has to fit into monthly installments, and Warcraft III because it has to conform to the RTS game format that demands linear objectives. The stories are shaped by the way they exist as material objects then... And if I make that my thesis, my task would be to dip into close readings of each to discuss just how the story is being shaped by its material existence.

Still, the main problem is relevance. To what end am I making the comparison? What is the larger impact of this coincidence? Perhaps my thesis and my "relevance" are tied into one. Making the comparison allows me to broaden the horizon of literary consideration by taking non-literary texts like video games and comparing them to books (that is, after all, my primary goal in academia). More than that though, it forces a consideration of any text as a material object and troubles the idea that texts can be works of singular artistic genius divorced from the material concerns that give that art shape.

Warhammer Online

So I made the switch from World of Warcraft (which I felt compelled to joylessly write about and "play") to Warhammer Online, and I immediately embrace the change. Sure, my reasoning from a scholarly perspective wasn't entirely sincere, but I strongly suspect that I'm not alone in the Ivory Tower for taking the real taste-based reasons for enjoying a piece and pulling them like taffey until they sound like legitimate scholarly arguments. Is the reasoning specious? Perhaps. On the other hand, I think serious scholarly discussion flows much more freely from a product one enjoys (hence why we teach ENC1145 as "Writing About Whatever").

Plus, for all the influence of WoW, I find Warhammer easier to talk about from my perspective as a person trained in discussing literature because - lucky me! - the game fiction overlaps with other kinds of fiction: tabletop games, comic books, and novels. And not in the "cash in on the phenomenon" kind of way that WoW books and epiphenomena appear. Warhammer had books and such before becoming an online RPG. As such it allows one to discuss intertextuality between the novels and the game fictions, how audiences read and respond to each, and to draw conclusions about the power of games vs. print as cultural productions.

The drawback of discussing an MMO is, however, the incredible timesink that it represents. I haven't joined a raiding guild or anything, but even just splashing around in the virtual world to get my sea legs back I've spent an embarassingly long time this past weekend. It's not as time-devouring as in high school when my little brother and I played EverQuest in shifts so that our necromancer was online for like 56 hours (grinding Sister Island in the Ocean of Tears for experience and money), but I acquired only 2 levels (from 33 to 35) and 5 renown ranks (from 28 to 33) in Warhammer in the last week* and it'll only slow down from here on out because my bonus experience for returning to the game will have run out.

This practicle question of reading MMOs raises a criticism question for me that sort of overlaps an issue I've been discussing with my students who are playing through Diablo II for their papers. How important is it to be good within the game to "read" it? I told my students that I really only valued the plot of Diablo II for their own work and so they could cheat all the way through if they wanted so long as they gossipped with all the characters. The reality though is that a reading for someone who has no gaming skill is going to be very different from that of a power gamer. My reading of Warhammer from the early 30's and goofing off in battlegrounds is going to be very different from the lvl 40/80 guy with full raid gear who dominates the server rankings. The question is somewhat difficult to resolve inasmuch as both readings are legitimate but it's the 40/80 power gamer that guides the metanarrative about the game: that is, the community experience of the game is usually read through the prism of how those at the top are experiencing it.

Of course, perhaps this dynamic in itself is something that's begging for critique. Why does a gaming community see a game through the lense of the most powerful player?

*To put it in perspective, there are 40 possible levels and 80 possible renown ranks

Building A Critical Rationale for Avoiding WoW

I've been struggling recently with the idea that I should be playing an MMO - and I should, if I plan to write about it. Who can write about something they're not reading? (answer: me, but it's sort of dishonest, come to find out)

At the same time, though, I've struggled with the idea that I should not only be playing an MMO, but that it should be World of Warcraft. Millions play it, it's clearly dominating the platform and clearly influential, so it becomes the obvious choice for criticism, right? And yet, I don't really like World of Warcraft. (There; I said it. I know I've blasphemed against gaming culture, but I don't care.) And besides, my internal argument that I ought to be playing WoW because it's so popular rings pretty hollow compared to the pursuits of my academic peers. No one's building a scholarly CV on the writings of Virginia Woolf because Woolf is just so damn unavoidably popular. Quite the contrary; people make a name for themselves these days for reading obscurity more than popularity. There may be problems with that approach when dealing with popular culture - and thus gaming culture - but I can deal with those as they arise.

So if I ought to be playing an MMO to talk about MMOs, but I don't want to play World of Warcraft, it becomes incumbent upon me to generate a rationale for playing something else (and for that something else being contributive to a critical knowledge of the MMO and gaming culture).

* Firstly, WoW is waaaaay overdetermined. The discursive gravity of WoW is so great that any discussion of MMOs in general is drawn towards WoW. Blizzard sucks the oxygen out of the room, leaving everything else at the periphery even though WoW is not the only game in town.
* Secondly, it's difficult to discuss why WoW is successful or popular because Blizzard's hegemony renders those questions invisible. WoW's just popular. A way to find those questions, though, may lie in examining subordinated titles and finding out why they get less market penetration and what kinds of subcultures they are appealing to. Why EverQuest, for example, isn't WoW is probably a more insightful question than why WoW is WoW.
* Thirdly, conspicuously avoiding WoW allows me to indulge in the currently fashionable academic disdain for canonicity. If there is a game canon, Blizzard might as well be William Shakespeare. Apart from engaging in academic tribalism, though, discussing other more obscure titles would build a framework for visualizing games as being more than WoW the way we try to envision books as being more than Dickens and plays being more than Shakespeare.
* Finally, engaging games at the periphery may allow some critical distance to discuss commodification. WoW makes no resistance to commodity, and it might be illuminating to discuss how other games maintain without prostituting themselves to the Blizzard model.

That rationale having been created, I'm right now installing Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. At 300,000 subscribers it's somewhere at the periphery definitely, though not as much as EverQuest at 150,000. I think Warhammer is helpful for other intertextual and cross-media reasons as well. The title exists not just as an MMO, but also as an RTS game, a tabletop game, a literary universe, and a range of other contexts. Reading Warhammer across contexts as a popular culture device could be enlightening.

Girlie Vampires Don't Suck - Part 2

If the characterization and popularity of the Stephanie Meyer vampire is to be trusted, then women really, really like the "monster with a heart of gold" as their vampire (and have liked it since the Gothic Romance of the 19th century and before). This vampire is "dangerous" in a few ways - from being a murderous predator, to being physically powerful, to representing the mysterious possibilities of supernatural sexual encounters - and yet is also sensitive and caring and not really "threatening" even though he's "dangerous". The good boy and the bad boy rolled into one, it seems.

(As a side note, I'll say that my inclination is to try to avoid stereotyping and essentializing the tastes of women... though the reason for that inclination is more to do with my education in the liberalized West than with any objective Truth (or lack thereof) about women. We're sort of trained in the Humanities to avoid totalizing the ideas of certain groups to avoid perpetuating stereotypes about them. And yet, would it really be shocking to discover that women - as a class of persons - liked similar things? Especially in representations of men as objects of possible romantic/sexual interest? It's almost as if the entire project of the Humanities and gender scholarship has been to dismantle - or at least deny - what everyone kinda knows as common sense.)

This presentation of the vampire bears striking resemblances to dangerous anti-heroes through the history of the romance genre. The heroine in such romances, particularly Gothic romances, is both attracted and repulsed by a sexy villain whom she has the opportunity to tame with her womanly wiles.

This brings up two important questions, though, about the Stephanie Meyers vampire. 1) Why is the most powerful vampire image a romance instead of a horror? and 2) Is the vampire today really just an incidental palimpsest to the archetypical romance? The answer to number 1 for the paper I'm writing lies in the gendering of audiences that I highlight as the major difference between film/book vampires and game/comic vampires. Women as consumers have more control over film and literature, so those media will tend to cater to the collective (or at least most common) desires of women.

The answer to number 2 could very well be "yes", but I'm going to make an effort to argue otherwise. The vampire is a powerful image at the moment and I'd be disappointed to discover that its just coincidental to renewed Gothic romance fascination (though there is that as well). So since I want to avoid a "yes" here, some questions I'll have to ask myself are:

* How is the vampire materially different from a generic romance anti-hero?
* Could vampirism be extracted from the story without changing it?
* If the vampires were, say, zombies instead, would the story change?
* How is the story about vampires instead of about romance?

If it turns out that vampires are just a convenient kludge for spinning a tame bit of erotica, then I'm going to be pissed off haha.

___

Next up: The Video Game Vampire and audience perspective

Girlie Vampires Don't Suck - Part 1

So I'm writing this paper for a conference entitled “He Walks Again: The Digital Translation of the Man’s Vampire in Legacy of Kain”. (Side note: is it a rule somewhere that all papers need a subordinated title with a colon? I think there must be.)

The basic thrust of this paper is that video games that reproduce the vampire image are tending to create a certain kind of vampire. At the same time, TV, books, and movies (at least, culture-dominant ones) are producing a completely different kind of vampire. My argument is that these two vampires represent the two gendered audiences, and that the fact that they're being reproduced this way points to audience control over the chain of cultural production (contra certain Marxist theorists who insist on "producer" as the essential link in the chain), and that audiences are creating both content and meaning through their choices.

First the kinds of vampires.

The most powerful hegemonic vampire image at this moment is the Twilight vampire, also reproduced with some variations in The Vampire Diaries and True Blood inheriting a lot from such fang-less vampire tales as Angel. These are the most obvious examples, but a range of knockoff titles are propagating in the market and each producing essentially the Stephanie Meyer vampire. (Aside: I'll give True Blood a nod for breaking away from the crowd slightly with the comically oversexed characters, though I'd say that the Sookie Stackhouse vampires are enjoyed by audiences more for the ways in which they're like the Stephanie Meyer vampires than for how they're like the Anne Rice vampires). This vampire doesn't really like drinking blood, makes a big deal about having "a soul" and feelings, is usually conflicted about even being a vampire, and doesn't want to harm women: in fact, he's really only interested in being their bodyguard and having lots of emotionally fulfilling sex with them. This vampire is the prototypical Gothic Romance anti-hero; the Heathcliff of Wuthering Heights; the noble savage tamed by a woman's love (or sex, such as the case may be). Though Heathcliff may be a poor example now that I think about it... there's none of Heathcliff's rugged personage in the wan Edward Cullen.

Then there's the video game vampire, epitomized I'll say in Kain from Legacy of Kain, but also reproduced with variation in Castlevania, Vampire Savior, Bloodrayne, and in allegorical ways in Devil May Cry. Contrary to the Stephanie Meyer vampire, the video game vampire is practically sexless. Gone is the psychic and sexual mystique of the repulsing/alluring predator; replaced, it seems, by a somewhat stoic figure that boasts of no ties to anything... save, in some cases, revenge. In fact, the contrast of personalities between Kain and Edward Cullen or Angel is pretty stark: Kain loves being a vampire, loves drinking blood and killing people, loves doing violence to anyone and everyone, has a very clear sense of identity and where he's going in life, and is completely liberated from any kind of sexual tension, much less "affection", and very much less affection for a mortal.

The questions that arise from this comparison in my paper involve how the desires of each audience - the female audience determining the (re)presentation of the Twilight vampire, and the male audience determining the (re)presentation of the austere Legacy of Kain vampire - is reflected in the kind of vampire image they choose to consume. What does it say about the female audience that they want a reformed monster, defanged and practically groveling for sexual attention? (Related: what does it say that in these stories the woman rejects the perfectly acceptable non-monster to get to the sexually mysterious former-monster?) And what does it say about the male audience that their vampire is completely independent and perfectly happy as they are? Also, why the surprising lack of sexual energy from vampire images that males choose to consume?

Further, is it significant that in Legacy of Kain the vampire is you, but in Twilight the vampire is the other?

Bioware and the Politics of "Nature"

It occurred to me recently that Bioware's role playing games give an interesting insight into American culture that may not be immediately apparent from the brief discussion of their creative choices about possible sexual orientations. In fact, the sexual orientation discussion is of such social potency that I think highlighting it (at least in the terms we talk about the issue in popular discourse) sort of obscures a broader and to me more interesting revelation there.

What I mean to say is that whether or not the male Col. Shepard in Mass Effect 2 can have a male partner, or whether or not the female Shepard can be romantically involved with Miranda (why is the most attractive woman always off limits for Bioware?), the question could reveal something about what makes a character a politically "safe" choice to be bisexual in a mass market game, but combined with the nature of the game it also reveals much about what Bioware thinks about "Nature"... and perhaps about where American culture places human agency. I say that because it occurs to me that no matter what choices you make, Miranda is never going to become romantically involved with a female Shepard (and, of course, male Shepard has no male options at all), suggesting that in that facet at least her character is completely stable. Are we to believe that Miranda, a hard-edged, swashbuckling heroine from the libertine future is an absolute 0 on the Kinsey Scale? In contemporary culture, I was under the impression that it was fashionable to imagine that nobody was strictly a 0, no matter what they said to the contrary (in fact, protestations to the contrary tend to make the score go up, right?).

So Bioware presents us with a sprawling, nonlinear RPG and a woman, Miranda, who is 100% straight no matter what you say to her or do for her. Does this mean that Bioware is suggesting that her sexuality is completely stable? And if her sexuality is stable - if she is just born completely straight with no power over it, and no environmental changes are going to alter that sexuality - to what extent is Bioware reflecting American attitudes about "nature" here? That is, in our culture have we fallen on the "nature" side of the nature vs. nurture debate?

And if we have, who wins the political argument over "human nature"? On the one hand, the political left would seem to win a victory for sexual orientation activism if we've settled on "born that way" as the cause of completely immutable sexual orientations. At the same time, the political right would seem to win a victory for a range of issues from law and order to education to foreign policy: if sexual orientation is "just so" and immutable, how many other qualities from criminality to aptitude are similarly immutable and not worth engaging?

What RPGs like Bioware's Mass Effect and Dragon Age reflect for me though is a kind of fatalism that interacts with human agency in an interesting way that I think mirrors how American culture deals with destiny. In the modern RPG, from Mass Effect to World of Warcraft, there seems to be a kind of "punctuated equilibrium" - to borrow a term from evolutionary biology - wherein there is a field of possible realities anchored to a handful of absolutes.

I'll probably write another post about that...

Mass Effect 2: Hoes Before Bros?

I've begun playing Mass Effect 2, which in most cases is a stunning visual accomplishment (though there are times when one can see, especially in the initial space battle, that shortcuts have been taken). It's a space-based RPG, for those not familiar with the series, and it has many of the elements of a traditional swords and sorcery type RPG, only blended in interesting ways with, I'd say, a first person shooter like Halo. It's produced by Bioware, the same company that produced the highly enjoyable RPG Dragon Age: Origins. And it's the fact that it was produced by Bioware that makes me wonder about a certain creative choice.


I tend to play through an RPG once (or mostly once), then search for guides on Google for how to do all the things I missed. For a game like Mass Effect or DA:O, the "things I've missed" category can be pretty large considering the sheer scope of possibilities within the game: the "field of play", so to speak, is large enough for thousands of unique trajectories through the game space. In reading through guides and other players' experiences in Mass Effect, I of course came across one or two Romance Guides (always popular topics in an RPG of this kind). There are a range of possible romantic interactions in the game but what struck me was which were available and which were not.

The first Mass Effect was surrounded (I'm not sure how seriously) by a banal controversy over a lesbian "sex" scene within the game. I say "sex" because it was really just two women kissing then rolling over, and I say "banal" because because the shock factor of seeing two women kiss wore off long, long ago. Nevertheless, controversy arose around such salacious content, or was generated by Bioware to boost sales. Following up on the success of such controversy, in the sequel one now has the possibility of two different lesbian relationships to choose from, along with a range of inter-species type couplings that may seem transgressive if we ever meet aliens but just seem sort of funny now.



What I wonder though, considering they doubled up on the saucy lesbian action, is what made Bioware choose not to include a male-male option? I wonder because such an option did exist in Dragon Age: Origins, which would seem to provide precedent. Though same-sex relationships were a point of interest in discussions of DA:O, I didn't get the impression that there was any of the overwrought controversy surrounding it. Further, the game seems to have been received well by the gaming market, belying a stereotype that the largely male gaming audience is necessarily averse to the presentation of such things, or that they require only fantastical lesbianism. So what could lead to the exclusion from Mass Effect 2 of any male-male option, even though the female-female options are expanded?

Perhaps the audiences for ME and DA:O don't overlap as much as I imagine. There may be a kind of barrier between the swords and sorcery crowd and the space-RPG/FPS crowd. That's not really something I can attest to, but one thing that occurs to me is that perhaps DA:O wasn't as bold as it seems at first glance. Sure, a male main character could become romantically involved with a male secondary character, Zevran... But I wonder if this isn't still a safe choice on some level. Zevran, an elf reminiscent of Raul Julia in the Addam's Family, seems like he could be seen as an effete and purposely woman-like character and thus "safe" for male romantic interaction. He's not typically masculine like Alistair, and he's not technically human. Could he occupy some non-human feminized space, which makes him less jarring as a bisexual character?

The New DRM...

The surest way to keep your game (or any software) from being Captain Hook'd off the internet seems to be to make the game 15 gigs big. Why invest in DRM if you can just bloat the file size to such a state that no one will want to steal it?

Perhaps it's like making a TV so large that no one will be able to swipe it from the display.