Gameology - Review

Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures on the Internet

Sun, 23 Mar 2008 19:26:19 -0400

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.

Quests: Design, Theory, and History in Games and Narratives

Sun, 24 Feb 2008 16:45:45 -0500

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.

Torrent Raiders - A Game about Intellectual Property

Mon, 18 Jun 2007 12:17:31 -0400

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.

The Marriage - A Review

Mon, 28 May 2007 23:04:59 -0400

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:

Background:
"The Marriage is intended to be art. No excuses or ducking. As such its certainly meant to be enjoyable but not entertaining in the traditional sense most games are. This means I am certain to be perceived as being pretentious by some who read this, my apologies. This is also a very difficult game to understand, again my apologies, I have tried to assist those who are interested but frustrated with the rules summary below."

The Gospel According to Wark or Why This is Not A Review of Gamer Theory

Mon, 07 May 2007 10:32:46 -0400

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?

'Speare: Scrolling Shooter Game Helps You Learn Shakespeare

Wed, 25 Apr 2007 14:07:43 -0400

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.

The Ethics Game - A Universal Language for Gaming?

Tue, 20 Mar 2007 13:00:51 -0400

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?

Counted As You Like It: A Review of Unit Operations

Mon, 05 Feb 2007 11:51:22 -0500

[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:

Badiou offers a means of thinking about the process of configuring things of any kind – the multiples of sets – into units, namely the count as one. The count as one serves as a process for constructing a specific multiplicity, enacted by an agent… Badiou’s reliance on the formal structure of mathematics offers a logical and historical conduit to computational representation. At the same time, his transformation of set theory into a philosophical discourse unifies mathematical representation with cultural representation, a core requirement of a comparative procedural criticism. (13)

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.

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess - A Franchise Title of Epic Proportions

Wed, 24 Jan 2007 02:24:25 -0500

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.

Review of This Is Not A Game by Dave Szulborski

Mon, 20 Nov 2006 14:10:29 -0500

[Note: Dave Szulborski will be a featured keynote speaker at Florida's upcoming Game Studies Conference in March 2007.]

If you're like me and you've been intrigued but somewhat daunted by Alternate Reality Gaming, Dave Szulborski's This Is Not A Game is a great place to start. Szulborski writes engaging prose with the authority of an expert puppetmaster, and the result should be required reading for anyone interested in ARG, whether casually, professionally or academically. Not only is TINAG a detailed introduction and overview of the genre, it is also a sustained argument about what ARGs are, and what they should be. As the title suggests, Szulborski is adamant that the TINAG philosophy should be word one for Alternate Reality Gaming, and even though some important and successful campaigns have clearly broadcasted their game-ness, Szulborski argues convincingly that even those games rely on a basic tension or suspension between reality and fiction and that for future games to succeed, they will need to exploit that ambivalence to its fullest extent.

Review of Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture

Mon, 13 Nov 2006 17:29:09 -0500

Gaming is a fun book to read; it's written in an accessible and engaging style; it contains some really interesting ideas about gaming; but ultimately (and I'm not even sure this is a criticism), I'm not sure what to do with it. Part of what makes the book so refreshing and accessible is the provisional nature of the ideas it revolves around, even down to the vocabulary Galloway chooses to organize his points. Rather than delineating "elements fundamental to gameplay" and their constituent elements, for example, Galloway's first essay is a conversation in which four "moments" of gamic action come into existence as a way of discussing basic questions about the gaming situation. So although most of his essays conclude with a chart or diagram demonstrating a system of interrelated ideas, the author does a good job of making those ideas and components seem to arise naturally out of the progression of the discussion. In other words, Galloway can sidestep criticism of his taxonomies by stating them provisionally and developing them along seemingly natural conclusions.

Quest for Bush / Quest for Saddam: Content vs. Context

Tue, 26 Sep 2006 13:10:12 -0400

I'm calling this a review, but ultimately, let me be clear that I'm not actually advocating that anyone play either of these games except for educational purposes. I want to take a look at some interesting aspects of each because I think it's valuable to understand what goals their creators wanted to accomplish through these games, but these games really don't provide anything valuable either in terms of ideology or entertainment.

You've probably heard of Quest for Bush (a.k.a. Night of Bush Capturing) from various news sources or my own brief blog entry about it, most of which describe it as a game developed by Al Quaeda to attract new recruits. After playing it and comparing it to the game it's obviously based on, Quest for Saddam, I think that initial reports are somewhat inaccurate in how they portray the game's content. First, there is very little "development" evident in the game. It's a straightforward re-skinning of Quest for Saddam that simply exchanges references to Saddam with references to George W. Bush. Even calling it a mod is, I think, pretty generous considering how little work (relatively speaking, of course) went into creating Quest for Bush from the Quest for Saddam source material. What I think is important and interesting about both games, however, is the way their programmatic relationship reveals an underlying logical similarity between the anti-Saddam and anti-Bush messages. It's also interesting to consider the idea of "recruitment" as it applies to both games by looking at how each game relates to the ideological context it claims to represent.

Left Behind: Eternal Forces -- First Impressions, Finally

Thu, 07 Sep 2006 18:24:21 -0400

(Note: This review is based only on the demo, released September 1 and available here.)

Now that the demo has finally arrived and we get to see how things work, will the controversy revive, or just fade away? Left Behind: Eternal Forces is an RTS game based on the Left Behind series of novels by Tim Lahaye and Jerry Jenkins. The books in this series depict a vision of the end of the world loosely based on the Book of Revelations where the central event is the Rapture or mass disappearance of all of the world's Christians. Since the novels take an Action / Thriller approach, it's perhaps not surprising that a video game based on the books would be similarly action-oriented, as opposed to the generally mild and pedantic fare so far offered in most Christian video games. It is also not surprising, then, that this game has already generated a good deal of controversy, leading to a screed or two from anti-game activist and general weirdo Jack Thompson, as well as an expose of sorts at Talk 2 Action, where Jonathan Hutson was particularly critical of the game publisher's strategy of marketing it through the same network of Evangelical Churches that helped make Purpose Driven Life a best seller. I've withheld a full commentary until I got to see how the game played, but now that the demo is here, I think much of the criticism aimed at the idea of the game has been more or less right on.

Review of Bogost, Ian. Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism

Mon, 05 Jun 2006 20:13:22 -0400

Ian Bogost, Game Designer, Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech, and blogger at WaterCoolerGames.org has written a book that you should read. I know this is the kind of cliché that gets applied to just about every decent book on games, but honestly, whether you're serious about studying, creating, or playing video games, this book not only has something valuable to contribute to your understanding, it has the potential to radically reformulate the intellectual terms on which you relate to video games. That is, of course, if you make it all the way through. Bogost does spend a good deal of his time summarizing the material to which his approach is responding, but a reader not familiar with some of the dominant conversations in literary theory (in particular) may find portions of the text daunting.

Gabriel Knight 3

Tue, 09 May 2006 10:29:32 -0400

Most fans of GAGs credit Jane Jensen and Gabriel Knight series for keeping the genre vital during a very difficult transitional time. The technology was rapidly evolving towards 3D, and action-adventures like Tomb Raider were getting all the attention. By the time Gabriel Knight 3 rolled out, full motion video had lost almost all of its marketing appeal, but GAGs were lagging behind the 3D wave. LucasArts had released its bizarre Grim Fandango a year before Sierra, but to a mostly niche audience, and Cyan wouldn't join the bandwagon until 2003, with its utterly miserable Uru. Jensen's Knight series had managed to secure a large and loyal fanbase, but even a good story and characters wouldn't be enough to keep GAGs on the shelf if it didn't have a Z axis. In short, the market was demanding a blockbuster "show'em how it's done" 3D title, and it was up to Sierra to deliver it--and they did, big time. Indeed, Gabriel Knight 3 is one of the best, if not the best, GAG I've played to date. While it certainly has its flaws (hell, even Citizen Kane has its flaws!), it's a masterpiece.