So I'm watching through Death Note this week (which, again, is super awesome and I highly recommend. Probably my favorite animated show). If you don't know the premise, this guy Light has a notebook and if he writes someone's name in it while thinking of their face, that person dies. Cool premise I think, plus the mystery/suspense/crime-drama angle that get woven into the story that keeps it going at a pretty good pace for most of the show.
The thing that is sticking in my mind though is a quality the characters call the Shinigami Eyes, and it's my English Nerdism and Poststructuralism that's making it distracting for me. The Death Notes in the show are usually attached to a god of death (called a shinigami) who follows the note around until the human using it dies. The shinigami, in order to kill whoever they want, can see someone's name and lifespan above the person's head. They can also grant this ability to others.
Part of the rules of the notebook, though, are that misspelling someone's name is an important mistake. You have to spell someone's name correctly for them to die. If you misspell someone's name six times, they become immune to the Death Note, and if you misspell someone's name purposely six times you'll die. The implication of this kind of rule are manifold and interesting to consider. First is that in-universe someone's name is intrinsically attached to them as much as the days of their life are. Throughout the series, the name has power and one could say that the whole story is about the struggle over learning someone else's name. For Light, someone knowing his name would give them the power to stop him, and for others, Light knowing their name would give him the power to kill. The signifier and signified are thus inextricably linked in Death Note: your written name isn't arbitrary at all, but holds the secrets of life and death for you.
The relationship between signifier and signified is even deeper than that, however. Watching the series, there are times when you get to see from the shinigami's perspective (or someone with the Eyes) and you can read other people's names. The thing is, Japanese people's names are written in Japanese kanji, but English and American names are in English above their heads. Not only your name, but also the language and the specific spelling of that name are stamped onto you. In Death Note, then, human beings exist as stable instantiations of language. In that single body during that specific time-frame, a person's name (and perhaps even a thing's name) corresponds directly and essentially to the person themselves.
Lest we think that somehow Death Note stands athwart Jaques Derrida shouting "stop", there are exceptions which seem to make the story present a semiotic stance that fuses essentialism and Poststructuralism. On the one hand, the signifier is fixed to the signified and immutable: people go around with fake names all the time in Death Note, but only their "real" name has power. Yet intention is apparently important and the only strong link is between written names and physical objects. For instance, someone's linguistic name doesn't necessarily correspond to their written name as solidly as the name points to the person. The name of the main character is written with the character Yuè (月), which transliterates as "moon." Someone with the Shinigami Eyes remarks upon seeing him how strange it is that his name is written as "moon" but spoken as "Light," indicating some ambiguity about the connection between written and spoken signs. There is also a sense that while the signifiers are fixed, they're also temporary. When someone is killed, the name vanishes from above their heads - even in pictures and films where the person with the Eyes could normally still see a name - meaning that the name is only linked for a set span: that person's lifetime.
What this seems to set up is a fusion of semiotic ideas: a place in which language is fixed, but also contextual. Signs do point to specific things in Death Note, and meaning matters, but only for a limited time. Gone is the "endless chain of signifieds" and replaced with the original binary, though in this context it is unstable.
A fixity of meaning, but compartmentalized in a certain place and a certain time. If language works this way, then the next question becomes, who sets the lifespan on that meaning? Who gets to decide how long that name is connected to that object?
(The answer, in Death Note at least, is that no one knows who sets the original lifespan and no one can make a name last longer than it should. The only thing anyone can do is destroy a name before its time.)
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Freshman Pedagogy and Video Games
I'm beginning to construct my course for the Fall and I've luckily got two really convenient sections of ENC1145, which I've made "Writing About Video Games" again. As usual my classes are almost full already and so summer kids are kinda screwed, which is a pity since summer students tend to be pretty studious. There's also a high percentage of nerds in my current class who I think would enjoy and profit from a video game humanities. Hopefully (especially with the inevitable over-enrolling of my class) those who want it will get a spot.
Yet even as I say that, I am reminded of pedagogical problems that present themselves in a class about games. The class naturally attracts a lot of gamers (there were 4 females out of 50-60 students in my Spring lineup, funny enough) mixed in with just general enrolled students and some students who, for whatever reason, followed me from earlier classes. When I first taught this class, my instinct was to imagine that gamers would be ideally suited to the topic of the course. I'm teaching about games, after all, which for a gamer is typically a huge section of their time (even by general standards of interests: golf enthusiasts don't watch as much golf as WoW players play WoW).
In actual reality, though, the experience of having so many similarly nerdy students in one place was... mixed. First, the downsides:
* It sometimes became hard to steer the conversation appropriately towards the focus of the class: composition. Anyone engaged in fan culture can relate to this phenomenon, but if you get five fans in one place talking about fandom then turning the wheel on that ship gets harder and harder.
* This is probably not specific to my games class, but it bears repeating. Enthusiasm for the subject does not necessarily overlap with writing ability or idea articulation. It was amazing to me how deeply embedded in the culture some of the students were - a few were hardcore WoW players, naturally, and even some LARPers - yet they could struggle with examining their experience or articulating that experience.
* Nerd culture is, as one might expect, not mainstream culture. In a lot of ways it can be shockingly crude. The social cues one responds to in nerd culture are different and can be alarming if one isn't prepared for them. Discussion of internet or nerd culture was common in the classroom, but sometimes it could veer off into strange places that an anonymous internet forum would be perfect for, but not really a classroom. Herding cats in a game classroom requires not only an understanding of the nerd culture I think, but also enough resolve to dominate the discourse and derail a train heading into, you know, Goatse shock site territory.
* Not having the games on hand in class is sort of a drag. Teaching in a computer classroom isn't really an option either since there's no way the university is going to load Warcraft III onto the network for me. It might have been for the best (having a game at their fingertips could have been uber distracting), but there were several times in which it would have been nice for that hands-on discussion of the game.
On the bright side, though:
* In the places were enthusiasm and articulation overlapped, the discussion was really rewarding for both them and for me. Many students were really able to engage with the topics discussed and their knowledge of the games themselves allowed them to more easily integrate the cultural theory I was teaching them into the media.
* Once I struck a balance between discussion of cultural theory and video games themselves, I found that the majority of students were really able to understand and reprocess the ideas. Finding this balance, though, for me, required that I have a plan at the beginning of the semester about what I wanted my students to know at the end. Mine came in the form of a Cultural Studies vocabulary list (Popular Culture, Binary, Marxism, Erasure, Feminism, etc.).
* If, like me, you write about games, it's a good opportunity to interact with the gamer environment directly in both a non-professional and scholarly way. You get to hear what freshman are playing and what they think about it in their own words, but you also get to explore the cultural crit angle in ways you might not have anticipated. For a lot of disciplines you can do this almost entirely with your peers, but Games As Text people won't really have direct peers for this discourse.
Some neutral observations to wrap up. First, students really responded well to Warcraft III and Diablo II, and part of that, I think, is the setup of those games. They're both explicitly literary, dividing into chapters and acts like plays, and their storylines are not so fluid that you can't talk about traditionally literary arguments when discussing them. Second, the most shocking thing I learned though? No matter what the subject is, some students will still slack off. I rarely assigned from the reading list and almost always focused on the students "reading" through Warcraft III and Diablo II, and yet a significant portion still did not find time to play the games without me making quizzes about it. It's not Shakespeare, not Hemingway, not Beowulf: it's watching cutscenes from Diablo II. Yet still I inevitably ran into non-readers.
I vaguely suspect I could assign an hour of internet porn and would get similar results.
Yet even as I say that, I am reminded of pedagogical problems that present themselves in a class about games. The class naturally attracts a lot of gamers (there were 4 females out of 50-60 students in my Spring lineup, funny enough) mixed in with just general enrolled students and some students who, for whatever reason, followed me from earlier classes. When I first taught this class, my instinct was to imagine that gamers would be ideally suited to the topic of the course. I'm teaching about games, after all, which for a gamer is typically a huge section of their time (even by general standards of interests: golf enthusiasts don't watch as much golf as WoW players play WoW).
In actual reality, though, the experience of having so many similarly nerdy students in one place was... mixed. First, the downsides:
* It sometimes became hard to steer the conversation appropriately towards the focus of the class: composition. Anyone engaged in fan culture can relate to this phenomenon, but if you get five fans in one place talking about fandom then turning the wheel on that ship gets harder and harder.
* This is probably not specific to my games class, but it bears repeating. Enthusiasm for the subject does not necessarily overlap with writing ability or idea articulation. It was amazing to me how deeply embedded in the culture some of the students were - a few were hardcore WoW players, naturally, and even some LARPers - yet they could struggle with examining their experience or articulating that experience.
* Nerd culture is, as one might expect, not mainstream culture. In a lot of ways it can be shockingly crude. The social cues one responds to in nerd culture are different and can be alarming if one isn't prepared for them. Discussion of internet or nerd culture was common in the classroom, but sometimes it could veer off into strange places that an anonymous internet forum would be perfect for, but not really a classroom. Herding cats in a game classroom requires not only an understanding of the nerd culture I think, but also enough resolve to dominate the discourse and derail a train heading into, you know, Goatse shock site territory.
* Not having the games on hand in class is sort of a drag. Teaching in a computer classroom isn't really an option either since there's no way the university is going to load Warcraft III onto the network for me. It might have been for the best (having a game at their fingertips could have been uber distracting), but there were several times in which it would have been nice for that hands-on discussion of the game.
On the bright side, though:
* In the places were enthusiasm and articulation overlapped, the discussion was really rewarding for both them and for me. Many students were really able to engage with the topics discussed and their knowledge of the games themselves allowed them to more easily integrate the cultural theory I was teaching them into the media.
* Once I struck a balance between discussion of cultural theory and video games themselves, I found that the majority of students were really able to understand and reprocess the ideas. Finding this balance, though, for me, required that I have a plan at the beginning of the semester about what I wanted my students to know at the end. Mine came in the form of a Cultural Studies vocabulary list (Popular Culture, Binary, Marxism, Erasure, Feminism, etc.).
* If, like me, you write about games, it's a good opportunity to interact with the gamer environment directly in both a non-professional and scholarly way. You get to hear what freshman are playing and what they think about it in their own words, but you also get to explore the cultural crit angle in ways you might not have anticipated. For a lot of disciplines you can do this almost entirely with your peers, but Games As Text people won't really have direct peers for this discourse.
Some neutral observations to wrap up. First, students really responded well to Warcraft III and Diablo II, and part of that, I think, is the setup of those games. They're both explicitly literary, dividing into chapters and acts like plays, and their storylines are not so fluid that you can't talk about traditionally literary arguments when discussing them. Second, the most shocking thing I learned though? No matter what the subject is, some students will still slack off. I rarely assigned from the reading list and almost always focused on the students "reading" through Warcraft III and Diablo II, and yet a significant portion still did not find time to play the games without me making quizzes about it. It's not Shakespeare, not Hemingway, not Beowulf: it's watching cutscenes from Diablo II. Yet still I inevitably ran into non-readers.
I vaguely suspect I could assign an hour of internet porn and would get similar results.
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