Visual Rhetoric Final - Key and Rationale

Rationale

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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.

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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.