Gameology: Commentary and Resources for the Game Studies Community

Academic poetics; now you're playing with power!

Much as I didn't want to admit it years ago, there is such a thing as ludoparalysis (using the game you just started) and if we do 'follow through the persona of the gamer through to the end' as Wark suggests, he's right in that the situation is pretty goddamned bleak. But games - not as a realm or space - but 'land' - contains within it a mutlifarious recombinatory system - and even the vagaries of game design can create, unmake, and reform the psychologies and topologies of other games, games, themselves. As said in my review, I think the fascination with the 'bonanza of origins' is itself fascinating; continually looking for 'abouts'.

I think that Tim Rogers, and a lot of game writers (Jane Pinckard, Raina Lee, Ste Curran, some others from Eurogamer, for example) have access to analyses that game academia doesn't have so readily, or rapidly - and to games which feature larger in the 'real' and 'normal' worlds. They may talk about themselves (or their sex lives) in the process, but its mad to ignore a moment like Rogers' reality-normal confrontation at the titlescreen of Rainbox Six: Vegas. Think even about the title... Rainbow. Six. Vegas.

Although, that said, I heard today that Sim Earth is actually considered a good game and there have been some good essays written on it - so I may have to reassess my views in that direction.

Psycholudology (and I suggest that everybody check out socialfiction.org anyway) is a bloody powerful conceptual frame leading out from studies of chess and go; formulations of strategy and styles of play being one and the same. Wark's topology metaphors in the Atopia chapter especially are powerful and distinctly useful, but I don't think the book ever pretends to be a full account of the political economy of games - that is where something like psycholudology could offer insights into what it means to inhale the fog of war; who actually benefits from the aestheticisation of male psychodrama and power in action games (Hint; not who we think) and the mental illness known as strategic thinking could be laid bare.

I see your troubles with the book, and I think we're clear on where we agree and disagree there but I think that I'm glad to have anything vex me. The only time I felt I had responded coherently to it was with one of those videos I linked. Speechlessness is a form of power. Without knowing what to say without using pagan words, I prefer to remain silent. (He says, after a monstrously long review.)