Gameology: Commentary and Resources for the Game Studies Community

Review of "HackerTeen Volume 1: Internet Blackout" by Marcelo Marques and the HackerTeen Team

The first volume of HackerTeen, Internet Blackout, by Marcelo Marques and the HackerTeen Team was recently published in English. HackerTeen is an excellent comic for many reasons, including its entertainment and educational value. HackerTeen's story opens with a familiar story structure; an extremely gifted teenager's talents have led to trouble and now specialized education is required to apply those skills to a useful purpose. For HackerTeen, the teenager is Yago and his talents are in computing, leading Yago's parents to take him to HackerTeen, a school designed for teens talented with computers. From this familiar starting point, the story quickly departs for new territory both in terms of the comic's fiction and in terms of the real world connections. HackerTeen is a brilliant concept because the comic is about the real program and its all too realistic fiction speaks to the need for the HackerTeen program.

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Lisa Nakamura's Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures on the Internet focuses on race and the Internet within a contemporary frame where Internet usage has moved from niche interest to mainstream, everyday use. Digitizing Race uses visual culture studies as a method, explaining visual culture studies and then moving to focused critiques in each of the chapters. Using visual culture studies, Nakamura offers Digitizing Race as a book on "digital race formation, which would parse the ways that digital modes of cultural production and reception are complicit with this ongoing process" (14). As a whole, Digitizing Race is an excellent introduction to media and culture students and a needed work for its focus on race in relation to a post-Internet world. Not only does Nakamura examine the forms and their uses, but also the methods by which visual artifacts and cultures of the Internet are created, used, understood, and communicated across media and culture.

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The other day a student asked me to explain what World of Warcraft was. We were talking about how universities are using Second Life for an article the student was writing and I referenced WoW as an easier, more familiar game. This is a minor anecdote like so many others that show that students don't always know as much as we think they know, but it points to a larger issues of a critical gaming literacy.

While "language arts" or "English" is taught in middle and high schools and includes literature, film, plays, and basic rhetoric (normally argument and debate in some form or another), gaming hasn't yet hit the mainstream curriculum, leaving more possibilities for literacy gaps. Given that students are interested in games--or even if they aren't, games are part of the transmedia world around them--and many don’t have core gaming knowledge, we need a gaming and game studies primer. The primer needs to connect what they do know to what they don't because many students do have parts of a the core gaming knowledge from other areas or from games, but simply of the games they have played and enjoy and not a critical understanding of the games or gaming elements and how those operate. Jeff Howard's Quests fills that need for a primer as an interdisciplinary text grounded in theory while focused on practice. Quests is an excellent tool for teachers who are new to games and want to use games in their classrooms, for teaching games, media, writing, or other areas that include theory and application. Many other books exist that are excellent for game studies classes and for game creation classes (Fullerton, Swain, and Hoffman's Game Design Workshop is in its second edition and it's excellent), but Quests fills the particular niche of classes that often have titles like "introduction to media studies," "writing for new media," "first (or second, or later) semester writing across the curriculum." Quests would also be an excellent choice as a supplemental text for more advanced classes, helping graduate students or faculty connect their research areas to new ways to represent, research, and teach using games.

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This game appears to have been released last month, but I've just recently come across it via Infosthetics. The game, Torrent Raiders is Aaron Meyers' MFA project at USC's Division of Interactive Media, and it's a space-themed shooter based on the real-time content of a torrent. In it, you play as a copyright mercenary, flying among the packets of a torrent and shooting them to gather evidence about the IP addresses it moves through. Ultimately, when you gain enough evidence targeting a specific IP address, you can fire a bomb that collects a bounty -- apparently this signifies something like a lawsuit. The game is fascinating for its visualization of torrent information, and I really appreciate how smoothly the whole thing works, but the fact that you play as a bounty hunter (working, essentially, for those whom many would consider to be the bad guys) reflects an interesting design choice that reveals the game's rhetorical content.

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The Marriage, a game developed by Rod Humble, has ignited a very welcome discussion on games as art, and their capabilities to convey more complex and delicate matters. In case you are not familiar with the game, you can download it and read about its background, rules and interpretations on Rod's website. Here are some passages explaining the game experience:

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At first glance, McKenzie Wark’s book Gamer Theory resembles nothing more than a religious text. With its numbered sections which suggest a biblical citation style, its unclear textual status and the apocryphal comments of numerous exegetes, it lures its readers into uncritical acceptance of what it sets before them. After all, hasn’t the book already been reviewed, criticized, and partially rewritten by a group of readers who participated in the open-source publishing experiment that was Gamer Theory’s (or rather GAM3R 7H30RY’s) first incarnation? Hasn’t the text itself been miraculously reborn as a hardcover book by the canonical Harvard University Press, cleansed of the sin of using vernacular leetspeak in its title? Hasn’t the revised and updated version of the text been re-published on the website of the Institute for the Future of the Book (IFB), along with illuminations in glorious colour? And shouldn’t these visualisations alone suffice to make us see the light? Isn’t seeing believing?

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I have to admit I was skeptical when I read the article in CTV.ca about 'Speare. From the article, "Makers of a new video game are hoping students will become excited about Shakespeare by trading in their books for a spaceship." *yawn* Let me guess: you have to fly to different Shakespeare-themed planets and answer a series of multiple choice trivia questions, right? Well, yes, and no. There is trivia, but I was pleasantly surprised to discover that most of the game is actually a top down, scrolling shooter (think Ikaruga) that does involve some fact-memorization but mainly consists of fighting off waves of Insidians, powered by poetry. The game, designed by University of Guelph English professor Dan Fischlin and developed by Apollo Games, is being marketed to schools, but you can download a nice demo from the developers website. The plot centers on a society based on knowledge and poetry (which sounds pretty good to me), and the two warring planets Capulon and Montagor (in the fair Verona System, where I guess we lay our scene). These factions have to work together to save the the Knowledge Spheres (artifacts of Poetic Code) which have been stolen by the invading Insidian Army.

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I'm always interested in videogames that claim to present complex, controversial, or spiritual ideas, so I was interested to read an article yesterday about a game sponsored by Thailand's Department of Religious Affairs that promotes Buddhism. The English title of the game is The Ethics Game and the article (which is basically a press release) explains that the game teaches good, ethical behavior as opposed to all the violence and killing one finds in most video games. I downloaded the game last night and played through it, and while the game itself (or "games" technically since it's actually a series of minigames) isn't that remarkable, it was an interesting experiment in game-based learning since 99% of the text and spoken language in the game is Thai. I don't speak or read Thai, so was the game navigable at all? How does this experience impact the argument that games aren't good at communicating information expositionally? On the one hand, teaching ethics through a video game is perfectly logical since a game can be used to model decisions and consequences, so how well can a game accomplish this when all language is essentially neutralized?

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[Note: This review comes to us from new contributor Darshana Jayemanne from the University of Melbourne, and is part of a thesis on visual culture and videogames. -- Zach]

In his book Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism, Ian Bogost spends a good deal of time explicating the ontology of Alain Badiou. But what exactly does ontology have to do with criticism? Bogost starts bravely by saying that he is interested in combining the insights of literary theory with those of information sciences. Badiou’s thought can underpin this endeavour as:

There’s a lot going on here! An immediate problem arises because the count-as-one is itself counted only as one, when in fact the summary given a page before correctly outlines two counts. The first corresponds to presentation (the situation), the second to representation (the state of the situation). This rapid elision of Badiou’s double meta-ontological account occurs in the phrase ‘enacted by an agent’ where in fact there is nothing of the sort in the source material. The second count is the equivalent of the power set operation – which Badiou assesses in Meditation 7 of L'Etre et l'événement as vastly more ‘powerful’ than the first.

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We haven't covered many big games on this site yet. I think, like Hollywood blockbusters, sometimes we tend to view franchise games as soulless and all about the money. Still, big games are the backbones of the industry, and sometimes they really do do things right. This review is a bit on the big side itself, but The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess has a lot of interesting things to discuss, and only partially because it is first advanced title available for the Wii. I would venture to say that it is also one of the most advanced Zelda titles yet, although in certain respects it didn't live up to the hype.

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