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.
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Sunday, June 27, 2010
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.
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.
Saturday, June 26, 2010
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.
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.
Friday, April 23, 2010
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.
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.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
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.
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:
Furthermore, why treat masculinity as a problem to be solved instead of trying to approach it on its own terms?
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?
Monday, March 29, 2010
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.
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.
Monday, March 1, 2010
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.
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...
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...
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