Gameology 2.0

Vagrant Story, I was reminded forcibly, is probably the best game of all time. Now, I know terms like ‘best’ are of course relative and subjective, but just forget that for a moment and let me tell you about this game.

I suppose it all goes back to the concept of ‘arthouse’. This is definitely an arthouse game, one of the first. You don’t necessarily enjoy a Pasolini or Warhol experimental film, but they’re definitely a harder kind of best than some blockbuster. They explore things and open new avenues. Similarly, not everyone will appreciate Vagrant Story, but that doesn’t mean that you should be so presumptuous as to ignore the cultural cringe - director Yasumi Matsuno is liek Pasolini, and who are you or I to question Pasolini? The game itself is admittedly stupendously complex, but think of the learning curve as being like salmon fighting their way upstream to spawn more salmon. Lots of effort, but good stuff waiting at the end. And death, but hey, every simile breaks down after sufficient abuse, much like a rubber band used to hold shut an exploding bank vault.

The Refractory journal's Issue 13: Games and Metamateriality, is online. It includes an article by Gameology's own Zach Whalen.

I remember making a short film with some friends after one of them had bought an early digital video camera, and being somewhat surprised that the whole process didn't consist of lining up actors in front of the lens, having them say their lines in order and then calling it a day. There was makeup, props, continuity, sound and lighting to worry about, and scenes were shot in haphazard order. Then it was all editing, editing, editing.

Now I realise that videogame academia isn't about spruiking specific products - Anatomy of the FPS anyone? - but Grand Theft Auto IV has just come out! Just what grad students and academics need in addition to papers, teaching and unwritten theses.

Even for those of us who aren't playing/researching the GTA IV, it's fascinating how hard it is to avoid the game's cultural splash damage. Within hours of the release, I saw online videos of people doing stupid things in Liberty City or hunting out Easter Eggs. Apparently the in-game radio stations are pitch-perfect parodies of grating deejays and cretinous shock-jocks as well as the mellifluous , expansively liberal tones of NPR's All Things Considered (the latter interview also interesting for those who want to hear Lazlo Jones' take on Stravinsky).

GTA IV has prised open existing issues surrounding videogames, and thrown up new ones. Concerns about violence and sex, of course, are doing the rounds; but also their converse - Australia, which lacks a 18+ designation for games, has a censored version appearing in shops (apparently New Zealand also has to suffer the indignity). Does the increasing realism of games such as GTA IV affect the status of sexuality and violence within them? How do we read the portrayal of race and the function of stereotypes in such a text? Is there any political potential to the vicious satire, or is it simply symptomatic of consumer culture's morbid self-obsession? Does the success of this iteration highlight a growing preference for sandbox style game design over more tightly structured advancement through virtual space and time? What are some of the most interesting peripheral cultural forms arising from the game and how does the fan culture work? Is there more to this all than succès de scandale?

So are any Gameologists hanging out in Liberty City? What are your thoughts?

Medical researchers at Stanford have shown that the areas of the brain associated with 'reward and addiction' are more highly activated in males than females when playing videogames. The researchers suggest that this is due to a more pronounced instinct for 'territoriality' in men.

The researchers designed a game involving a vertical line (the "wall") in the middle of a computer screen. When the game begins, 10 balls appear to the right of the wall and travel left toward the wall. Each time a ball is clicked, it disappears from the screen. If the balls are kept a certain distance from the wall, the wall moves to the right and the player gains territory, or space, on the screen. If a ball hits the wall before it's clicked, the line moves to the left and the player loses territory on the screen.

A recent news story reports on research by Simon Fraser's Diane Gromala exmaining the potential of gaming systems for therapeutical management of pain.

'Traditionally, patients suffering from chronic pain have been treated with a mixture of physical therapy, counselling and potentially addictive anti-pain medications.

Professor Gromala believes immersive environments such as virtual reality games could allow patients to improve their health and reduce their pain, especially while waiting for other forms of treatment.

"There is a real demand for this kind of therapy. As Canada's baby-boomers enter old age, pain management looms as a huge public-health issue," she said.'

Chalk another one up to the potentially beneficial aspects of gaming that nobody will notice? A happy new year to all Gameologists! Perhaps what the Wii really needs is an interactive champagne-glass clinking game. Imagine the increased degree of difficulty across timezones! Chin-chin!

From today's Age newspaper:

Here's the story. I wonder how the economics of this game will compare with the more established economies of games like World of Warcraft? Will there be 'Frag sweatshops' springing up in certain parts of the world? Perhaps an experiment worth keeping an eye on.

The DIGRA mailing list recently hosted a very interesting discussion on the use (and relevant laws in various countries) of images from videogames in academic work - a good suggestion was that DIGRA should lobby the industry to allow reproductions of visuals. Given that a number of Gameology contributors and visitors are writing theses or articles, and given that videogames are such a highly visual form, I was wondering just how people are using screenshots or video footage in their written work? Is anyone submitting a video component, perhaps a CD with footage taken from a gameplay session? Maybe some links to Quake Done Quick or Garry's Mod on YouTube? How appropriate is that for a formal piece of academic output such as a thesis? Do you include things like level or stage where appropriate in citing such things?

Who was the very first gamer? That depends a lot on what was the first computer game. And that in turn depends on how we define a computer. The most obvious candidates for the title of original gamer are the pioneers of what we now understand to be video or computer games. The members of MIT's Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC), the creators of the seminal Spacewar (1962), certainly seem to fit the bill. Summarily, we could say that one requires computer games in order to have computer gamers. Given that Spacewar is often cited as the first computer game, it stands to reason that the first gamers would be Steve 'Slug' Russell and his compatriots at the TMRC. It's even more gratifying that these students already embodied the gamer stereotype, with their own secret language ("cruft", "bunkies", "hacks"), and the taste for tinkering, experimentation and popular culture that are still associated with gaming today.

Justin Peters at Slate writes on The trouble with serious videogames. The piece argues that games which seek to communicate important or timely subject matter fall into a kind of bland gray zone: not fun enough to entice gamers to learn whatever they have to say, and too ludic for non-gamers not to just turn to more traditional media instead. There is, however, a certain horrific group (including bosses) who may well think that these games are the way to educate in a hip and happening manner, and inflict them on their employees. Such games, Peters says, are "...less informative than a simple article and less fun than doing the Jumble."

There's an interesting (largely US-centric) conversation at TerraNova concerning studying videogames at a graduate level. From what people are saying, many media and communications departments are interested in this kind of research even if they don't have academics working specifically on games. From my own experience, I'm inclined to agree: my supervisor is a Romanticist in literary studies and he's been an excellent mentor. Not that I would recommend approaching Romanticists in general with proposals for an ethnography of fetish-oriented cybersexual activity in Second Life or a rhythmanalysis-based study of the Licence Board from Final Fantasy XII, but if you do your research and think there may be an unlikely fit, don't let brutish disciplinary boundaries necessarily put you off.