Visual Rhetoric Final - Key and Rationale

Rationale

*

Rationale: Visual Map of Horus and the Emperor

I began this project to demonstrate, visually, the many contexts working together to create this piece of visual rhetoric: the digital painting from Warhamm 40,000 entitled Horus and the Emperor. When I first began it did not occur to me for whatever reason to have some purpose beyond trumping something up for my final project, which was obviously a mistake since I could have made some significant changes earlier on if I had begun with the idea I ended up with. Nevertheless, what I have created is a visual project for a very limited audience: basically me or other scholars of convergence working with a game narrative. The project is a tool for me to help understand, visualize, and gather my thoughts about how convergence and remediation are working in Warhammer 40,000 in preparation for my dissertation. The project functions a bit like a web portal, having very little information of its own, but pointing to a great deal of information and I think this quality of containing little but pointing to much has interesting implications for visual rhetoric (does a visual piece ever contain anything or does it only lead us elsewhere?). That aside for the moment, what I have made here is basically an elaborate digital notebook containing notes and research relating to my topic, but organized visually around a representation of the topic itself. What this allows me to do is to think about the dissertation visually and begin moving my thoughts through ideas of imagery even while the writing of the dissertation encourages thinking and organizing much differently. Writing for me is typically a very linear argumentative chain and setting up my “notes” in this way will, I hope, encourage me to make non-obvious connections and draw insights into this network of remediations that written outlines might obscure, yet visual overlapping can encourage.

What I have done is made a map of Horus and the Emperor by providing a numbered key pointing to various places on the map and describing several different contexts that frame or refer to that element of the picture. This allows for me to think about the picture intertextually and to visually keep track of the kinds of information that can be useful to me when doing research. While the number of contexts and offshoots – roots and branches – to this image are theoretically limitless, or at least so many that I could not really account for them with my meager HTML coding skills, I chose a small range of possible contexts most relevant to my work. So for each number on the key referring to the picture, I have provided four hyperlinks leading to further information about that element of the picture. I organized these links into four main kinds. 1) Links to explicit context or “what am I literally looking at” from the author’s perspective, 2) links to literary allusions being made by that element, 3) links to a gamer’s context for understanding that element and 3) a link (sometimes) to critical theory that can be deployed to discuss what is happening there.

For instance, number 1 on the map is hovering over the character of Horus, Primarch of the Luna Wolves who is the main (if tragic) villain of this story. The link from Roman numeral “I” points to a Lexicanum Warhammer wiki article describing the character Horus and his place within the narrative universe, giving us his back story and linking elsewhere to more information relevant to an understanding of Horus. Numeral “II” links us to an article on Satan from Milton’s Paradise Lost, since I see Warhammer 40,000 as a clear homage to Milton’s epic and Horus as our Byronic Satan. Numeral “III” sends us to a blog post announcing and describing The Horus Heresy tabletop game with discussion below from fans about the game. Numeral “IV” sends us to an article describing artistic perspective since Horus occupies such a prominent place on the “canvas” and understanding what that is doing visually helps analyze the picture. These four types of information are what will be most useful for me and I think would probably be most useful for anyone researching my topic. The primary limitation of this scheme is, of course, my own perspective here: I am the one deciding what is important, what counts as “literally happening here”, and hierarchizing what gets chosen for inclusion. For instance, it is a personal perspective that Warhammer is reflecting Paradise Lost and nothing I have read so far explicitly makes that connection from the creators’ perspective. But it is useful for me to organize around that idea since it is central to my discussion. In that sense, the map may not be able to show me anything “new” that I did not already know as it reflects my own mind to a large extent. That limitation notwithstanding, I think that organizing my “mind” this way instead of through written text could still help generate insights and connections between already known ideas.

I chose this picture specifically because it so easily embodies the grand narrative of the entire Warhammer 40,000 space. If we imagine Warhammer 40,000 as an interpretation of Paradise Lost, this picture shows a scene of Satan storming the gates of Heaven and God going out to confront him (the main difference here being that, as we can see at the bottom of the image, Warhammer’s Satan is the one standing victorious over Michael the Archangel and not the other way around). In different ways the whole narrative plays out in this one space and even references far afield from this specific scene in the story can be linked back here. It is the pivotal moment in Warhammer history. This is not to say, of course, that this project would not work with other images, even for my own purpose. In fact, if there were some way to represent it I would try not to have this image as an “anchor” but as a single “node” in a larger matrix of meaning: an important one, to be sure, but not necessarily primary. This project could be organized around other images like screen-captures from online game play, or photographs of people playing the table-top game with painted miniatures, or even just the covers of Warhammer novels stacked up in a row. I could map any visual connected to the story, but this one is particularly relevant to my dissertation because of its place in the narrative and because this image is very famous in the gaming community and gets reappropriated over and over. Because this image gets used so much in so many ways, it embodies the study of convergence before I even begin mapping it.

What I have come to understand from this project overlaps with what I think could be done to improve it as I continue working on my dissertation. While I like the picture, the format, and the perspective this kind of production allows, now that I am finished with it I see that it really would benefit from being a wiki page instead of an HTML map. As I said above, the potential contexts and remediations here are limitless and the space on the page of this map cannot account for that. A wiki site devoted to this project, however, could do just that since, instead of being organized into one visual space, the contexts and references exist in an endless cascade of embedded links. A wiki would more fully embody how I see context working, as an endless series of references, and had I the skill/literacy I would try to go in that direction! But it is something to consider as I expand on this project in the future.

Visual Rhetoric Final - Key and Rationale

Video Game Pedagogy - Week 1

Week 1 of ENC1145 - Writing About Game Culture came to a close yesterday for me. I requested two sections of the same class on Monday and Wednesday instead of what I usually have (MWF) for entirely lazy reasons. Whether those lazy reasons will work out for me over the semester is an open question right now: assigning homework requires more attention to certain details, but I like the 75 minute class because it allows me more time to do all the things in-class that need doing.

And just what needs doing to teach students simultaneously about video game culture and composition? There are a range of considerations but, having taught this class before, I was able to lay my groundwork a little better this semester. My goals for my students this semester are that they:

1) Learn to write a basic research paper (this is what the university chiefly wants from my class)
2) Learn the critical tools for interrogating cultural products (in our case, video games)
3) Learn to begin interacting with the everyday in a critical way: to see things like games as having a context and a power the same way we see "Literature" having those things.
4) Learn something about Cultural Convergence and the power of audiences.

(The last bit is my own dissertation speaking, which means that while I'd like to talk nothing but Warhammer as Convergence for the next 15 weeks, it really is the last (though still relevant) concern.)

To meet these goals, I have a few projects going in-class. The first is to prepare them to write a research paper by giving them secondary sources and critical terminology to work with as we go along. Before the beginning of the semester I made a list of the terms I wanted them to know: general critical theory ideas along with more specific technoculture things that will probably be useful to discussing games. My plan is to teach them a new idea each week and then do cumulative quizzes each week on the terms I've discussed. At the same time, the terms are ordered in such a way that they build on the previous ideas while overlapping with what we're doing for homework.

For example, next week's term is "Postcolonialism" and I'll be telling them about Orientalism, Self/Other, and West/East (which builds on this week's discussion of "Binaries", "Reading Resistance", "Ideology", and "Value"). Next week is also the time in which we begin discussing Act II of Diablo II which is set in a fantasy facsimile of the Middle East. It will allow us to go over the relationship between West and East in Diablo II (Characters start in the West and must travel East through increasingly primitive societies to find the Devil) and speculate about the kind of messaging happening on the game creator's end.

Now, keep in mind, these are freshmen. I'm not making them read Edward Said or Spivak or something like that (though I will give a list of authors they can check out if they want to know more). My goal is just to familiarize them enough with the term so that they can be able to deploy it in the simple way that a 1st year college student needs to, and be able to ask the right questions when doing their own research on the topic. I don't have time to give them all the answers, but I have just enough to teach them to ask the right questions.

The second project going in class is interrogating our games as though they were pieces of Literature, and in class I usually use The Scarlet Letter or Withering Heights as examples of books they may have had to analyze in high school that they can imagine as games. To that end, we're doing character maps for the important characters as they arise in the game: who they are, what they say, what their dialogue or actions reveal about them, how they relate to one another, and how they interact with the story structurally. This allows us an opportunity to discuss literary structural ideas that aren't necessarily covered by critical terms (for instance, we were able to discuss framed tales and unreliable narrators yesterday, but such things don't really come up in cultural-criticism discussions).

Doing both of these in relation to video games leads us quite organically to my third project in the class: illustrating how the games function as points of cultural convergence. That is to say, the games are part of a larger assemblage of media from books to websites to news articles to conventions and role playing events that all interact to create a canon more official for consumers than that provided by creators. This worked out well yesterday when the students asked, "Is Marius really the main character? He's the narrator, but aren't we the main character since we're playing the game?" And so we talked briefly about "You" as a character in Diablo II and how "You" creates and re-creates the story by moving through it, thereby affecting (however minimally in a single instantiation) the canon.

___________________

More to come soonish as I start writing for my own classes, revising my paper for the South Atlantic Modern Language Association convention in Atlanta, and push further into my own teaching.

Derrida's Death Note

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.)

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.

Dragon Age, Warhammer, and Digital Theisms

Part of my dissertation is discussing Warhammer 40K as a remediation of Paradise Lost (the digital piece of the convergence is Relic's Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War series, which I cannot more highly recommend. Simply excellent, excellent game). Part of this will involve a discussion of what I think is an interesting set of questions that Warhammer 40K raises about the nature of religiosity and the relationship between faith, technology, and progress.

It overlaps somewhat with something I was just recently thinking with regards to Dragon Age: Origins. Faith is central to the plot in Dragon Age as nearly every character will go through dialogue at some point working out their relationship to the Divine: a natural consequence I think of the in-game events like our frequent trips into the Fade (the game's version of the netherworld). The different reactions characters have to the Maker is pretty interesting; Leliana is especially devout, but flirts with heresy because she claims to have theophonic visions; Alistair was training to be an inquisitor but is ambivalent about the Maker.

Most interesting to me though was Morrigan's dialogue about the Maker. She rejects the idea of an omnipotent deity entirely. Leliana asks here, "Do you believe in the Maker?" Morrigan replies, "Certainly not! I have no primitive fear of the moon such that I must place my faith in tales so that I might sleep at night. " Leliana counters with an Intelligent Design argument, and Morrigan replies, "The mere fact of [this world's] existence does not presuppose an absentee father figure."

Her reaction to Leliana's probing about her beliefs is interesting because, general arguments in favor of atheism notwithstanding, her own experience, even in the game as we play, would seem to undercut her position in some ways. She is a swamp witch and her mother is either a demon or a dragon, which means she works in the supernatural even if she rejects a "primitive fear of the moon." She has been into the Fade many times and seen the Black City in the distance: the place that was once Heaven. We see her speak to more than one demon and the demons seem to believe in the Maker.

None of this, of course, really speaks to the actual existence of the Maker, but it does provide a unique paradigm on the nature of belief. If Morrigan is right and the Maker is a lie, then the world as it exists in the game is not undone really but it leaves some important questions. What is the relationship between "natural" and "supernatural" without a deity implied? What would make supernatural creatures like demons and dragons believe in the Maker? Do spirits have faith? And in this paradigm where there is no deity what is the meaning of the Black City: the one artifact that would seem to demonstrate beyond doubt the existence of a Maker?

Of course, this all skips past a pretty important question: why is Morrigan the only atheist?

This overlaps with a discussion I plan to have in Warhammer 40K because theism and atheism are highly troubled categories there. The "Horus Heresy" books are particularly illuminating on this point because they cover the central event of the W40K universe: the Horus Heresy: the time when half of the legions of the Emperor betrayed him and started worshiping Dark Gods. In Fulgrim we read the story of the eponymous Fulgrim, exalted leader of The Emperor's Children space marine legion. The book covers some history of the legion, but focuses mainly on Fulgrim's fall and the corruption of himself and his officers by a demon of pleasure. I think Fulgrim really highlights the theist/atheist relationship in W40K - moreso than, say, A Thousand Sons or Horus Rising (though I should probably read False Gods to get a better idea) - because the consequences of both are highlighted for the Emperor's Children legion.

As a bit of background, in the 31st millennium the Imperium of Man is ruled by the Immortal Emperor and protected/expanded by his genetically engineered super soldiers the space marines. Man travels the galaxy by jumping through The Warp, a plane of psychic energy. Part of the expansion of the Imperium is the spreading of Imperial Truth - a strictly atheist doctrine that teaches the glories of a unified mankind through knowledge and technology* - through propaganda and missionary-like figures called iterators. The consequence of indoctrination in the Imperial Truth for Fulgrim is that when he is warned by a group of aliens about the coming treachery against the Emperor and the great war he rejects the idea entirely because he rejects the idea of demons. The aliens are baffled that humans can travel the Warp - the place where gods and demons come from - without believing in them. This non-belief sets up Fulgrim for his fall as he becomes enraptured and finally possessed by a demon.

Part of the consequence in-universe for this Evangelical Atheism is that it turns inside out because of the betrayal of half the space marines. The Imperium goes from strictly atheist to zealously religious in a hundred years, setting up a cult of the Savior Emperor as well as a multitude of religious military orders and the Inquisition.

It's the demons' relationship with the Warp and the knowledge they have - and, in some respect, the knowledge the Emperor has - of the Warp that raises similar questions to those raised by Dragon Age. There is no God implied in W40K, so again there is the question of the relationship between natural and supernatural with no deity; is a "superstitious" belief more palatable without the idea of a deity? One reads in the Horus Heresy books that part of the reason the traitor marines fall is because they reject the word "demon" as applied to warp creatures, though they know of the existence of creatures in the Warp. I get the sense, though, that this is a distinction without a difference and that the space marines really reject the word only insomuch as it has religious meaning. The need to avoid the words "spirit" or "demon" does, however, cause them to go to some length to downplay possible threats from the Warp. Is religious terminology really that important, though? What W40K implies is that it is religious terminology, or the phobia about religious thinking through that language, that is dangerous to human progress and unity. Yet in-universe the terminology is describing a real thing, something that eventually can be described by an interesting blend of science and religion (the Warp has natural laws, but creatures there are fueled by psychic emanations, i.e. faith). It is a "rose by any other name" problem. Could the use of religious terminology close the door on scientific investigation, even if describing the real?

My dissertation will probably focus more on the idea of W40K as utopia/dystopia so the theis/atheist conflict will arise mostly through a discussion of this universe as a possible model for a relationship between science and faith. The problem I see though is a postmodern one: there is no clear indication of moral value in science or in faith here. Horrible things happen because of people having no faith, but horrible things also happen because people have faith. Likewise, horrible things happen to advance science while horrible things happen in scientific ignorance. That seems to preclude the typical didactic tut-tutting in some sci-fi about religious "fanaticism" or science gone "too far!" One message seems to be that there is no binary between science and faith and that the relationship is a complex and sometimes complimentary one.

The bigger message though is that humans can be horrible and even in 30-40 thousand years we'll still be acting horribly! That's actually a rather refreshing message, I think: a final and complete rejection of this 19th century idea (owing to the Enlightenment, Orientalism, and Marxism) that somehow scientific progress goes hand in hand with moral progress.

*There is also an intense xenophobia as part of Imperial Truth that gets held over into the time of the God Emperor, but that interesting tidbit is for another time.

Cultural Convergence: or My Nerdity Bears Fruit

I'm back to writing! The long break was for an unusually busy/lazy section of school. Busy inasmuch as I had writing to do, but lazy inasmuch as none of the writing was actually useful or pertinent to my overall scholarly project. Which is a pity considering why I singed up for certain classes...

There are a few points that I'll flesh out from my summer classes though that are definitely relevant to me, though I didn't write about them for class necessarily.

What I did in the last two months was take some summer courses and do a DIS (Directed Individual Study) with my Major Professor (the tenure-track faculty member who is the head of my dissertation committee). While the classes were not entirely fruitful, the DIS was very helpful because I did two important things: finished a first draft of my dissertation prospectus and wrote an annotated bibliography therefore.

My dissertation is basically a reading of Warhammer 40K as a point of cultural convergence: an intellectual space where a single idea is reproduced across many modes and in many forms, but with a recognizable core or canon. The goal of my dissertation is to explore how audiences interact with the cultural producers in manipulating or policing the core of the convergence and whose authority matters most when deciding issues of canonicity. At the same time I'll be making a case for games - as explicitly interactive spaces - being the new mode of cultural reproduction and memory. I'll do that by discussing Warhammer 40K as an obvious retelling of Milton's Paradise Lost and discuss how both those works are links in a longer chain of remediation stretching back through many interpreters to the Bible. This retelling by new speakers, or "remediation," goes hand in hand with my simultaneous discussion of who controls the canon and who makes meaning in the relationship between producers and consumers.

Really, though, the Marxist idea of "Cultural Creators ==> Consumers" may be outmoded inasmuch as the categories of Creators and Consumers are rapidly losing their stability.

Anyway, most of my writing will have something to do with the dissertation ideas I imagine, so my many, many readers have that to look forward to.

The Southern Strategy and War Games

In perusing Foreign Policy article on "militainment" and game warfare ("Meet the Sims... and Shoot Them") my eyes glazed over as they drifted across the shopworn tropes of every over-nervous mother who ever wondered why their sons turn yard waste into swords and rifles, every hypochondriac pacifist who ever got the vapors by seeing someone wearing cammo gear, and every neurotic and historically illiterate cultural critic who is shocked - shocked - at the idea that warfare is entertaining to anybody anywhere.

First, for those who may not be aware, the first marker of any hackish ignorant piece about gaming culture is any mention anywhere in the piece to Grand Theft Auto. Especially - especially - if "violence" is being discussed at all. If the author brings up GTA then the red flag should shoot up for any reader signaling, "I'm about to read ill-informed pap." In video game discourse, discussing Grand Theft Auto is like trotting out The Southern Strategy to discuss politics. Sure, there's a place for it, but the reference is so shopworn and so overdetermined by subsequent discourse that the chances of you really getting an insightful or even coherent (or even real) reading of it are in distant, distant orbit. There is almost no such thing as a serious treatment of GTA because the atmosphere around it is so polluted by shrieking nonsequiturs about gang violence and pixelated nipples. In much the same way that bringing up The Southern Strategy is usually - or gets interpreted as - shorthand for "racists(!)" and typically ends debate on an issue, referencing GTA is lazy shorthand for "boys are murderous robots who ape anything they see on TV."

More than just the lazily pejorative cultural/political stance the reference to GTA pre-inscribes, it also usually means that the person speaking isn't a gamer. It immediately marks the speaker as "outside" the community looking in (I would argue that referencing the Southern Strategy is a similar group marking act, but that's another story). The GTA controversy, such as it was, happened in 2001: an eon ago in the universe of technology and gaming discourses. The landscape between 2001 and 2010 has changed so much that any non-ironic or non-historical reference to those dark ages before XBox Live and graphical parallax mapping is an easy indicator of a voice outside the cultural stream. It also signals an outmoded attachment to the controversies of that earlier age - a point at which people treated audiences as blank slates on which culture projected value - that we would do well to move past. (It's more helpful, in my opinion, to begin thinking a little more counter-intuitively about violence in video games and imagine how audience might be using violence in culturally safe zones for the good of society).

The GTA reference and the ignorance it signals are illustrative of the kind of periodic cultural and historical amnesia that tends to grip academics every generation or so: an affliction that makes people in power imagine they are living in extraordinarily trying times of moral and cultural decay. Parents, teachers, and politicians ask, "Who is to blame for this (historically unprecedented) moral rot we see?" Previous generations had Batman, rock music, western movies, dime novels... The truth is that we're not experiencing any special kind of "moral decay" and people who imagine we are seem to be experiencing amnesia about the moral panic of yesteryear. It makes people - especially people in power - feel better to imagine they live in special times and they are doing something especially meaningful by crusading against the social cancers of popular culture.

With regards to the original article's fretting about the marriage of military and entertainment... what planet is he from? There's nothing new about this and the anxiety about war games making culture more militarized is ludicrous and ahistorical. What kind of Edenic past is being referenced when people allude to a time before war was in some sense linked to entertainment? Combat has always been entertaining - most games of any kind are on some level mimicking combat - so this rhetorical twisting over the "militarization" of entertainment is, in effect, pining for a past that never existed. Western culture is the least violent and least militarized it has ever, ever been (and I would argue this is because it has moved a natural human fascination with violence into virtual safe spaces like movies and video games).

So bring on the sex and violence: it's probably good for us.

Western Masculinity and Anti-masculine Cant

I'm really struggling to find scholarly discussions of masculinity that don't deteriorate into some kind of boilerplate about the "need to dismantle patriarchy in all its forms" (Schut 103). As you can well imagine, that particular field of feminist criticism - overlapping with the discussion of the "liberated man" - is particularly vibrant for a range of (often crassly political) reasons and sifting through it to find something in any way reflective of masculinity as it is lived instead of a cartoon masculinity used as a political prop is tough work. Either the scholarship is explicitly anti-masculine polemic, or it is a kind of Gorillas in the Mist exploration of these wondrous, mysterious creatures called "men".

Some of the scholarship can just be filtered for this gender bias and appropriated for my own uses, which sometimes yields really useful sources (like Kevin Schut's "Desktop Conquistadors" in Gaming as Culture). And very rarely I'm delighted to find a constructive discussion of masculinity like Thomas Newkirk's Misreading Masculinity: Boys, Literacy, and Popular Culture that at least attempt to understand the internal coherence and value systems in masculine discourse without the pejorative political imperative projecting external values and language onto a system that doesn't work in those terms.

Otherwise, though, the scholarship is pretty insufferable. Not because of its explicit arguments it makes about masculinity, but because of the false premises it takes for granted and the false consensus it evidences in doing so. A few shibboleths from Derek Burrill's Die Tryin': Videogames, Masculinity, Culture illustrate my point.

In a brilliant and sweeping fashion, Haraway fuses the discourse of science to a particular masculinity - a "modest" masculinity - that defies the typically visible macho and hyperviolent masculinity in Western history and culture. (19)

In what sense is Western masculinity "hyperviolent"? Hyper implies "in excess" or "above", but in relation to what? Which cultural masculinity is the invisible (and presumably "acceptably violent" or "nonviolent") denominator in this binary? One could scale back the statement to one of "violent masculinity in Western history", but the problem would remain of the word "violent" implying a non-violent corollary to define it as violent.

All these kinds of questions are rhetorical of course. This bit of semiotic laziness boils down to a lazy deployment of cant and a reliance on a false consensus of "what we all believe" that isn't in evidence. It derives I believe - as most such bits of anti-masculine canon seem to - from a reliance on feminists to define how men see themselves (which is particularly galling considering the radical imperative of being able to be called by a name you choose for yourself). Such a stance relies on outside observation to discuss an identity that must be lived to be understood (another fact that shockingly eludes those relying on feminism to discuss the internal machinations of masculinity. Would we rely on men - or more pointedly, self-described patriarchs - to theorize for us about what it's like to be women?). It fails completely to appreciate the use value of strength and force in masculinity or to postulate theories of the utility of performative "violence" beyond the facile correlation of "violence" with "bad" and ruminations about Western patriarchy (hint: there's a reason why the increase in violent computer games correlates with a decrease in actual violence).

Take this bit for example:

Marx posed the issue starkly: does social being determine consciousness, or does consciousness determine social being? Male violence must either be seen as a question of original sin ... or as a social construction required by patriarchal society. (23)

Notice the wildly false dichotomy. Either male "violence" - that is, as described elsewhere in his book, a lionization of strength and any physical competition - is an original sin, or is a social construction of the sinister patriarchy. Men are either sinners, or they're puppets. No room is made for a positive, productive use value for masculine discourses of power. "Violence" is a moral evil from the start in this formulation, and the only question is how culpable the men are in their wickedness. This is the blindness I am seeing in a lot of the scholarship on masculinity as I prepare for this conference paper: the erasure of a basic question that I would assume academics were always asking themselves when discussing anything: what makes that value statement valid? Why is masculinity and its promotion of strength de facto a moral hazard? What makes "violence" less valuable than "nonviolence" (especially across contexts)?

Furthermore, why treat masculinity as a problem to be solved instead of trying to approach it on its own terms?

Final Fantasy XIII

... has sucked up a huge chunk of time recently, and it really shouldn't have. That time is completely wasted and I should have realized by now - after having played every Final Fantasy from 7 through 12 - that I would just have to start over and play it through once I got the Prima strategy guide. I know: I'm cheap. But I realize that's the kind of player I am and I want to get all the goodies along the way and not miss anything.

Plus, the sometimes intrusive Final Fantasy tutorial system neglected to mention that I shouldn't be crapping through all my Aegisol and Fortisol fighting random trash monsters because - surprise! - you won't be able to get any more of these incredibly valuable items later in the game... They were dropping like rain in the first couple chapters so I used them up assuming my time of plenty would never end. O, what a fool I.

Generally, Finaly Fantasy XIII is a mixed bag for me. I like the game enough to play it through again (the combat system is innovative and yet the game is familiar enough to let me play it as Final Fantasy). I can definitely say, though, that I'm not invested in most of the characters the way I was in XII, X, or VII, or even as much as in the comparatively weak characters in VIII (FFIX was a disaster so I don't really count that). Apart from Lightning and perhaps Vanille, the characters could all die in a train crash and I wouldn't miss them or care where their boring stories were going. I routinely skip any cutscene with Sazh, Fang, or Snow because Sazh and Snow are boring stock characters while Fang's personality fades into the background noise as "random ornery woman".

I generally expect there to be a character or two that is just garbage: I think there's a rule somewhere in Japan where you have to have a trash character in your anime-looking RPG, no matter what. It was true for FFVII (Cait Sith), Breath of Fire III (Momo), FFX (Waka), FFXII (Penelo)... For some reason there's always a character that is neither badass nor central nor useful in battle nor otherwise interesting. Yet the game forces you to use this character for a couple hours of time-sink for reasons beyond my ability to divine (I can only imagine that these trash characters have some other value in Japan that I don't grasp). XIII's problem lies in the fact that at least half of the cast is the "worthless trash character".

Finally, is there a rule at Square Enix that all your proper nouns have to be drawn from an internet word generator? For fully a third of the game I had no idea what was being referred to when someone said Pulse, l'cie, fal'cie, ci'eth, cocoon, and so forth. These are pretty important elements and the story lost my interest several times because there was zero explanation of how to decode the game's nomenclature. It didn't help that once I realized what these words meant I recognized how stupid the names were and they could have just as easily been replaced with something recognizable (for the record, the words above can roughly be translated Earth, demigod, god, demon, and space station).

...

Hmm, I guess I didn't like FFXIII as much as I imagined; at least not the story itself. It's a testament to how well the game is designed as a game, though, that I'm still planning on playing it through again, only skipping all the tedious cutscenes.

Dissertation Ideas and Other Esoterica

Is it ever too early to start thinking about my dissertation? I started my PhD last year immediately after finishing my MA, so it may be on the early side. But, then again, one can never bee too prepared I don't think as long as the path isn't set in stone at such an early date.

My main project - in all my scholarship, including my future dissertation - is to open up new media to serious literary investigation: specifically video games, but also some other marginal pieces of cultural production. I, quite frankly, reject the continued exaltation of the "book" as a class of special objects in the 21st century. For many centuries, the book has been incredibly important to the West as a vessel for knowledge, power, and culture, but even while I don't imagine the book is dead (as some maudlin Cassandras insist with every new internet site), I really don't see it having the impact in the next 100 years that it did in the last. Literature - especially the capital "L" literature that academics like to study - simply isn't the location of cultural power any longer.

But I digress...

* My first and probably favorite idea is one I'm calling "Mapping the Multiverse: Warhammer 40K and the Reading of Game Fiction". This possible project would involve an investigation of Warhammer 40,000 as a multi-modal project and how people interact with a single intellectual property in a range of media and modes including books, magazines, websites, comics, conventions, tabletop games, card games, RTS video games, online MMOs, virtual communities, fan groups and so forth. Specifically I think I'd focus heavily on Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War and Blood Ravens: The Dawn of War Omnibus because I think the crossover between book and video game really helps erase the barriers between literary text and video game as cultural product (Basically, Blood Ravens is a 3 part novel covering the events that happen in Dawn of War). After a chapter of work erasing I'd go into the cultural significances I see in Dawn of War, why I think the multi-modal consumption by the audience is important, and finally how to read Dawn of War as a video game fiction (as opposed to just stretching the book-critique rubric over the face of a video game). This would ultimately lead to a "going forward" discussion about reading video games, and especially ones involved in a multi-model intellectual property, as important innovations in how culture is produced as well as a possible source of solutions to problems (especially Postmodern ones) posed by print culture.

* I'm considering doing something similar with Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning since the Warhammer property has as many modes of interaction as Warhammer 40K, but if one appreciates the differences between W:AR and Dawn of War - not just as stories, but as games and interactive spaces - then one understands that the approach would be very different. The main difference lies in how the community interacts with the text. Dawn of War is an RTS game and a novel, but W:AR is an MMO. The dynamics for how an audience interacts with a Massively Multiplayer Online game are unique and touch on a range of other audience-studies issues. So if I did Warhammer, I'd still do the multi-modal inter-textual reading, but it would also necessarily focus more on audience receptions, interpretations, and interactions with the text and the meta-text (like forums, websites, conventions and so forth). It's definitely possible and probably valuable to tackle issues of audience in the MMO and how that relates to Convergence Culture, but it's just a much different project I think than dealing with Convergence itself and trying to read video games from that.

In fact, the MMO experience is different enough that I wonder if perhaps the MMO is somehow different in kind from other games because of the "massively multiplayer" aspect. The MMO facet practically forces one to discuss issues of audience and mass culture even if I really just want to do a close reading and search for internal meanings. I'm wary of any topic that tyrannically compels me to discuss something, which makes me wary of tackling WAR even though I enjoy it and making connections across the modes deployed by Warhammer.

* Finally there is the option of just doing a critically-informed reading of something like Warcraft III (or Dawn of War or anything really). This may seem like a trite fallback but a serious critical reading would do a lot of the things I need it to. First, it would afford me the opportunity to make the case for video games as serious cultural production that ought to be considered critically (even apart from the politically tedious meta-concerns like "is GTA making people violent" or whatever). Second, the fact that a game is being critiqued at all is a novelty that is worthy of exploration. As far as I know - and I've done a lot of searching, but I may be mistaken - there is nothing out there that critiques video games in a scholarly way except as generic media artifacts in larger discussions of culture. No one discusses Warcraft as a Postcolonial and Ecocritical critique of Western hegemony or Warhammer 40K as a post-scientific realist dystopia. There's a tiny bit of soft pop-philosophy about Final Fantasy, but nothing scholarly. Finally, it would still afford me the opportunity to discuss how to read a video game and the ways in which that is distinct from critiquing other kinds of culture (plus, of course, how that distinction is meaningful for whatever close reading I do).

As generic as it sounds, I think a basic close reading would still be innovative and meritorious just because of its novelty here.

More ideas to come I'm sure...

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