Gameology: Commentary and Resources for the Game Studies Community

I just got back from the annual SCMS Conference in Chicago, and I had a great time. This is a report I typed up in the course of my travels home yesterday. I was pleasantly surprised to find a lot of panels on game-related topics, and it was good to run into some familiar faces while I was there. The only downside was that with some 20 panels running concurrently, I was bound to have to make some tough decisions about which ones to attend. All the ones I went to were good, though, and I'll provide summaries below of the video game oriented presentations I saw. My comments are in italics.

Cinema and Gaming

"Between eXistenZ and Un Chien Andalou," Adam Lowenstein (U. Pitt)

The context for this paper is the issue of transitioning from older media (cinema) to new (gaming), and the question of interactivity defines the possibilities of the digital hinges on the availability and accessibility of digital technology. Even though interactive film doesn't really work as such, cinema provides models for linking and understanding interactivity. The potential connection here is through the sense of play in surrealism and the anti-rational (or random) mechanism of playing a game that surrealists employ in the production of art. The creation of meaning, then, is a game of connecting a chain of associations, and every player (viewer or creator) can use a different chain. The connection to cinema comes by way of eXistenZ's deployment of video game structures and mechanics within cinema, prompting user "interaction" through its apparently anti-rational narrative. To illustrate this similar, affective relationship to the audience, compare the restaurant scene in eXistenZ, with the eyeball-slicing sequence in Un Chien Andalou.

I liked this paper, and I think it draws on an interesting and relatively unexplored area of surreality in relation to gaming. In the Q&A, I brought up the idea of interface in that eXistenZ posits a relationship between games and film that relies on exposing or hiding an interface. Since in the world of eXistenZ, they're not actually playing a video game, and I think the film does a lot to remind you of its artifice. (These are the features that my students pointed to as proof that this is just a bad film). I think there's a potential problem in thinking about "play" and "game" as the same kind of thing -- that is, surrealist art is definitely playful on some level, but it's not always presenting a game.

"Come out to Play: The Warriors Video Game, Moral Panic, and the remaking of the American City," Aubrey Anable (U. Rochester)

The Warriors is a cult film of 1977 that has been adapted into a video game. The point of this presentation was to compare these two and explain why features of both imagine the idea of the decaying American city in different ways. Some features of the film like its organization by traveling through subway stops, its one-dimensional characters, and emphasis on fighting make it an obvious choice for a game adaptation. The film was released at the height of the image of New York as an urban wasteland, which has now been largely reversed. The subway map that the characters refer to in the film can be compared to the HUD map in the game, and both situate play in an epically vast, but navigable, world. Narrative is also organized by space, and mastering the space of the city through play communicates something beyond what narrative can normally do. But this is an imaginary city which reminds us that we have lost the ability to play in actual cities.

At first I was suspicious that this paper would merely talk about the film and then say that the game repeats or extends the ludic structures already in the film, but I think that the author's move from the film to the game is a really productive one. I've written before about the idea of ludic aesthetics in the imagination of urban spaces, and I think this would be another good example of that kind of thing. It would be interesting to do some kind of analysis of the film's navigable of space and compare that to what the game offers, and then to 1977 New York itself.

"Achievement Time: Chronotopic Interpenetration of Real and Game Time-Space in World of Warcraft," Erin Hill (UCLA)

This paper discussed the structures of time that obtain between players' sense of time in WoW in contrast to the sense of time in the real world. The core idea comes from Bakhtin's concept of "chronotopes" which he uses to talk about time structures in novels. There was also a discussion of game time as labor and the idea of creating capital in game time through things like gold farming.

This was the first of two papers I saw today that mentioned the chronotope, and they both actually used the same quote. I suppose that means I should make myself more familiar with it. To be honest, my attention wandered a good deal in this presentation, though it wasn't really the fault of the presenter. She chose to have a game play video of WoW running throughout her talk, which was kind of distracting, but I was starting to re-think part of my presentation at this point, so my mind was occuppied elsewhere.

Playing the War on Terror

"Playing with Fear: Catharsis and Resistance in Military-Themed Video Games," Nina Hunteman (Suffolk)

This paper deals generally with contrasting the catharsis hypothesis with the desensitization hypothesis (I'm not sure if I got that correctly). The discussion itself stems from some interviews and discussions with players of war-themed games (Kuma and others). The reactions are interesting, and reveal complicated beliefs about how in-game actions relate to real life. Some discussion of fear as the emotion to be dealt with, but the conclusion was that these games provide at most a temporary reprieve from the actual war on terror as indicated by the conscious belief that terrorists will attack American soil again.

The discussion here was good, and the research method seemed OK, but it's definitely not the kind of scholarship I normally do. That is, the presenter is working in what I guess would be a sociological field, and as such, the paper was really more about the player's ideas rather than the content or structure of the games themselves.

"From the Enemy's Perspective: An Analysis of Pro-Arab Video Games," Helga Tawil Souri (NYU)

Based on author's experiences in palestine, this paper explores Palestinian attitudes toward pro-Arab games that recreate key moments in Palestine history. The games analyzed here are Special Force (sponsored by Hizbollah), Under Ash and Under Siege (Afkar Media). These games are all based on actual events, but their hook is that they allow players to revise the way the battles actually turned out. The refrain of most of the children's comments are something like "in video games, I always had to shoot against my own people, but now I can turn the tables on the Isreali's." Some players actually talked about these games as allowing them to act out revenge for actions that had happened to them or their families. Some speculation about why these games are considered "terrorist propoganda" by people like Tom Friedman, but similar ideologically motivated games like America's Army are not.

This is a topic I've followed in the past, and it was interesting to see the ideas from the paper before (catharsis hypothesis) developed in an entirely different context. I had hoped to bring up Quest for Bush in the followup, but we ran out of time and I couldn't find Helga later to discuss it. Like the previous paper, this is the kind of paper that comes from a different disciplinary background, so I confess I was hoping for more analysis of the actual games' content, but for what it was doing, this was a quite solid paper.

""Field Generals of the Military-Entertainment Complex: The Video Game Producer as a New Media Cultural Broke," Matt Payne (U Texas)

Matt presented on a compontent to some research he already had, so this was a new angle on an existing body of interview material. He talked with video game producers, and looked for how they talked about creating military values whithin the games they worked on. The subjects here were Michael Zyda (America's Army), James Korris (Full Spectrum Warrior), and Rachael Hardwick (America's Army: Rise of a Soldier). Matt worked through ideas about how inter-organizational production works (social capital theory v. structural hole theory), and then how each game producer negotiated factors like Department of Defense influence and so-called "positive realism" (as opposed to "negative realism" - things that make war seem hard). Also discussed Social Construction Of Technology (SCOT).

There was a good piece of research here, and Matt did a good job extracting and discussing the important parts to produce an original argument. Since these were all games with some type of military or DoD funding, it was interesting to hear how ideas like realism were affected by factors like making that reality seem dangerous, but also romantic and above all patriotic.

"Combat, Combating Futures: Digital War Games and the Performance of Proleptic Histories," Joshua Smicker (UNC)

The context for this paper was a comparison or crossover between performance studies and new media studies in light of performing histories through military-themed games. Joshua talked about military games and how they revise history, but since these games tend to be about famous American defeats (because victories were flawless) and that same revision applied to proleptic history (as in games about "now" or immediate future conflicts) project that narrative of American victory into present thinking. Furthermore, he argues, this narrative works its way into policy decisions through themes like the "Army of One" and the robotically supported or enhanced super soldier of the future.

I think there were a lot of interesting insights in this paper, but to be completely frank, I found this guy's mannerisms and mode of delivery to be really distracting. I don't normally pick on people for this kind of thing -- I'm sure I'm not the world's most graceful presenter myself -- but I really would have much rather read this guy's paper and I kind of just wanted him to stop talking. I mean no offense to the presenter, and I hope if he's reading this for some reason that he doesn't take it that way. It's hard to explain what was so annoying about it, but I really think it was a valuable and interesting paper despite its delivery. I also had secretly hoped this was a paper about Combat (the Atari game), but I don't think he mentioned it. Oh well.

"Videogame Mechanics: The Structural Components of a New Medium"

This is the panel I was on, so unfortunately I don't have very detailed notes of my co-panelists' papers. I do, however, have their abstracts, which I'll post with comments below. In general, it was a really good panel that I was glad to be on. The conference room was pretty small, but it was standing room only and we were obviously speaking to a sympathetic audience. Our chair, Bob Buerkle, introduced the panel be explaining that game studies is currently in a position similar to where film studies was 40 years ago: we still need to define the basic elements and structures that make up our chosen medium. Elements like mise-en-scene, montage, and cutting in film are thus positioned similarly to things like avatars, HUDs, haptics, and replay in games. I understand why some would claim its bad to use film as a model for thinking about gaming, but considering the audience (Society for Cinema and Media Studies), it made perfect sense.

"Threshold Bodies: A Primer on Avatars," Bob Buerkle (USC)

A concept descended from Hindu belief and echoed in numerous religions, an avatar (in its initial meaning) is the embodiment of a deity on Earth, most famously seen in the ten incarnations of Vishnu. As such, it is ultimately two beings in one: the deity incarnate, yet also an earthly individual. Passed down through cyberpunk fiction and the computer science community, the term has since come to be applied to videogame protagonists, and indeed, its application is quite apt. Whether Pac-Man, Mario, Lara Croft, or any other, a videogame avatar is similarly the player's embodiment on a plane of existence other than their own, and yet also a discrete being in its own right.

Functionally, the avatar is essential to the videogame situation -- this game body is what allows the player diegetic presence. Provided agency and permitted to take action within the text, videogames offer participation in the gameworld and allow us to conceptualize ourselves as being within that space. Yet simultaneously, the diegetic world also remains "somewhere else," not present to us ("here") but rather on the other side of the screen ("there"). Thus an avatar must be offered as our proxy. The game situation cannot exist without an avatarial presence to mediate our experience, to become our representative in the game, and yet despite the vitality of this device to the medium -- comparable to such fundamental devices as continuity editing in the cinema or the narrating voice of literature -- little work has been done toward examining this figure. This paper offers a methodology for such examination.

Using this in-two-places-at-once dynamic as my foundation, I examine eight areas as having significant implications for the player-avatar relationship, along with the competing modes of engagement that accompany each. These are: embodiment/presence (character vs. observer), avatar autonomy (inertia vs. sentience), point of view (inside vs. outside), psychological alignment (subjectivity vs. objectivity), narrative access (focalization vs. nonfocalization), coherence (representation vs. abstraction), formal awareness (transparency vs. reflexivity), and pleasure (narrative satisfaction vs. mastery of the text). By isolating these eight areas, as well as discussing their inter-reliance, this methodology allows for a more thorough understanding of the avatar's impact on game dynamics and on the game situation as a whole.

"Heads-Up Display: Text and the Videogame Interface" (me)

Now into their 5th decade, videogames are a diverse medium encompassing wildly different genres and technologies. Scholarly work has begun to address the broad cultural impact of gaming, and core concepts such as the formal properties that define game structure are settling into consensus viewpoints among game researchers. There is still much work to be done, however, in unpacking the deep mechanics of game play, and this presentation seeks to contribute to that conversation by examining the use of text in videogame interfaces. Specifically, videogames frequently face the challenge of communicating large amounts of information other than the fundamental graphical representation occuring as the primary content of the game. The result is that ancillary content such as the avatar's health, location, item status or progress frequently appears on-screen in the form of a Heads-Up Display or HUD. In the early development of game conventions, this information appears as all or mostly text, but more recently, games seek to use purely graphical metaphors for communicating ancillary content. In this paper, I want to argue that the visual grammar adopted in HUDs displays an immanently textual logic as the primary means of overcoming the challenge of mixing the two information spaces of the spatial game-world with the textual display surface. Investigating the history of typographic practice in videogame interfaces can in turn be used to inform critical or philosophical analysis of videogames themselves, so the goals of this paper will be twofold: First, to investigate the development of textual practices on video game screens by looking at the historical emergence of videogame typography (for example, rediscovering the challenges overcome by early game pioneers), and second, to suggest a critical understanding of the HUD both within the context of videogame history as well as in light of contemporary critical approaches to studying videogames including Ian Bogost's "unit operations" and Jesper Juul's notion of the "half-real". The presentation will include examples of historical game typography and modern HUD interfaces and will involve visual analysis of these forms themselves to develop the argument that videogames project unique phenomenological status through their mixed use of both graphemic and spatial representation within the surface of their interface.

Of course, what I ended up presenting deviated from this quite a bit, but I think the gist of it is still here. I ended up going over, so I had to cut out about a page of it, most of which was the argumentative stuff summarized here in the abstract. Oh well. I spent a while talking about defining HUDs and their antecedents, which was interesting enough, and I briefly put forth my argument that the HUD is all about mixed mediality.

"Gamic Touch: The Haptic Semiotics of Force Feedback," David Parisi (NYU)

This paper explores the use of force feedback mechanisms in video games, arguing that these mechanisms involve the creation of a new symbolic language involving touch. Since the development of the Dual Shock controller for the first PlayStation in 1998, force feedback devices have become nearly ubiquitous in console gaming. Semiotics involves establishing an arbitrary link between a unit of sensory experience and a concept. But traditionally, the unit of sensory experience, particularly in studies of mediated communication, has been either visual (the image) or aural (the sound-image), and touch has not been considered a part of this process. The coding of force feedback involves assigning a sequence of vibrations that vary in duration and intensity to in-game events (for example, the intensity of the vibration is greater when the player is shot by a machine gun versus when s/he is shot by a pistol). In doing so, game designers arbitrary link tactile sense data to images and sounds, and touch is abstracted and detached from its physicality. In marked contrast to other forms of mass-mediated experience, touch becomes a key player in gaming experience as designers have the ability to establish new links between images, sounds and tactile sensations. Though the tactile feedback provided by mainstream force feedback devices is fairly simple, examining this process of meaning-making and establishing a theoretical language for understanding it will arm us to deal with more complex instantiations of the technology as it develops further in next-generation consoles. This paper will therefore involve a descriptive analysis of the use of force feedback in conventional gaming, but this analysis will be grounded in a historical understanding of theories of touch inherited from psychophysics, psychology and media studies. Lastly, these conclusions will be put into dialogue with ideas about mediated touch that circulate in media studies today and sprang from theories put forth by Benjamin, McLuhan and Deluze.

This was a really good paper, and I talked with David later about his research. He came up with a typology of haptics, but like me, I think he ran out of time before he got to the really argumentative stuff. He did show convincingly that there's a history of thinking about touch that's often ignored in media studies, and he's doing some interesting work on developing a vocabulary for discussing it in qualitative terms.

"Time After Time, Space After Space: Replay in Video Games," Chris Hanson (USC)

While it is readily apparent that play is a central component of any game experience, most -- if not all -- games also rely upon the mechanic of replay. Rarely does one play a game just once and this repetition is an essential element in learning a given game. For instance, a beginning chess player may engage in multiple contests in order to fully learn the rules and develop effective play strategies. Videogames place an even greater emphasis on replay, as the player must familiarize herself with increasing complex control and interface systems in order to master game environs, often demanding multiple navigational attempts through particularly challenging areas within the game.

But the simple repetition found in videogames is often required by their design and constitutes only one manner in which games incorporate replay. An increasing number of games are leveraging instant replay as both a core game mechanic and an enhancement of the pleasures of the play. In these games, the player's play is constantly recorded explicitly for the purposes of allowing the player to re-watch and replay their own experiences. These instant replays have evolved from static predetermined sequences that emphasize particularly dramatic moments to navigable three-dimensional recorded spaces to the current state in which players may actively control time within a game, allowing players to "rewind" game play in real-time to replay and correct their actions.

Functioning in this capacity, replay essentially opens up the experience of the text to its own difference, producing a dialogic relationship between both player and game and time and space. My paper will explore the significance of replay in our experience of games, first charting the evolution of replay in videogames before placing the instant replay within Mikhail Bakhtin's model of the chronotope. In so doing, I intend to locate the instant replay as an intersection between the lived and recorded experience of time and space, ultimately casting time in a similar vein to space as a fully navigable arena. As Laura Mulvey has suggested, our experience of film has been transformed by the capacity of technologies such as the VCR and the DVD player to pause and slow time. My paper demonstrates a similar shift in our subjective and perceptual experience of media provoked by replay, as the shifting spatial and temporal practices of videogames are dramatically altering our understanding of other time-based media.

Video Games: Theory and History

I didn't actually go to this panel because it was at the same time as the "Playing the War on Terror Panel." I'm glad I went to the one I did, but it sure would have been nice if SCMS had not scheduled two videogame oriented panels against each other. I'll provide the paper titles just to show the kinds of things people were talking about and that SCMS is game-friendly.

"Arcade Video Games of the 1980s," Mark J.P. Wolf (Concordia)

To be honest, the title of this paper was one thing that influenced my decision to go to the other one. I completely respect Mark Wolf and I use his books a lot, but the title of this paper just doesn't excite my interest. I'm well aware that there were arcade games in the 1980s, and I've played a lot of them, so based on this title I have no way of guessing if I'm going to hear anything new. I'm far more interested in specific, pointed discussions of individual games (and yes, I realize as I write this that my presentation was pretty general itself). And even though the War on Terror actually ended up with less overall textual analysis than I'd hoped for, it had that possibility built into its framing.

"When New Media Get Old: History, Memory, and Nostalgia in the Retrogaming Movement," P. Konrad Budziszewski (Indiana)

I really wanted to see this one, and I was kind of hoping to track down this author later and talk to him. It was really crowded, though.

"Latte Power-ups and Customized Wardrobes: Challenging Action Norms in the Convergence of Girls' TV Shows and Online Games," Vered Pnueli (Brunel)

I guess I have no way of knowing, but it sounds like this might be about Bratz.

"Navigating the Fantasy Kingdom: Mapping Meaning in Kingdom Hearts," Suzanne Scott (USC)

Again, I guess will never know what this paper was arguing exactly, but the idea of maps and space as generating meaning or organizing narrative/play came up in several of the papers I saw this weekend.

"Demonic Media"

"StarCraft, or, Balance," Alexander Galloway (NYU)

Galloway set up his talk as a discussion of cybernetic systems more generally, of which video games are potentially the most interesting subset. There were several ideas that wove together throughout this talk, some coming in comingling more than others, but the central "demon" image has to do with the concept of the swarm as an ontological category (or anti-category) in cybernetic systemes. The Zerg from Starcraft were the main figure for this, and they were discussed in terms of the Zerg-specific strategies of asymmetrical warfare (flooding your enemy with hundreds of zerglings, for example). To set that up, though, Alex spend some time with an interesting comparison between Counter-Strike and World of Warcraft. He touched on a number of important (and some obvious) differences like point of view and perspective. Like he does in Gaming, Alex proposed symmetrical or mirrored categories for thinking about these two games as "hyperbolic" systems based on antagonism as their core operation. It's hard to summarize, but one outcome is that for Counter Strike, "selection is the universe, execution nothing" and for WoW, "selection is nothing, execution is the universe." Essentially, the challenge of CS lies in targetting the correct opponents -- pulling the trigger is trivially easy. In WoW, most of the targetting is automatic or simply range-based, but the execution of spells etc. are the actual challenge. Finally, he made a comparison that pitted the ballistic optics of CS as fascist as opposed to the neo-liberal targetting logic of WoW.

I hope I'm getting all that correct since there was a lot here. I was doing my best to take notes, but I was really getting sleepy and hungry by this time. The comparison between CS as fascist and WoW as neo-liberal might seem odd, but it definitely made sense as it was presented.

"Of Daemons, Wizards and other Interface Beliefs," Wendy Chun (Brown)

Unfortunately, I didn't take notes on this one, but it really was brilliant, so I just decided to listen and enjoy it. The topics she discussed included Unix demons and ideas about computing memory and beliefs about how that works in culture.

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