Gameology - Essay

The Orientalist Perspective: Cultural Imperialism in Gaming

Mon, 17 Jul 2006 09:38:33 -0400

Abstract:

Japanese video game titles represent a significant portion of the U.S. video game market. With such widespread representation of Japanese made games in the video game market, this presentation asks ‘What kinds of ideas are formulated by Western consumers of Japanese games?’ More specifically, what does the consumption and digestion of this media reveal and conceal about Japan to Western consumers? These questions directly address Edward Said's conceptualization of Orientalism both in the Western consumption of Japanese games and in Japanese games' depictions of Japanese-ness in the games.

Even when not actively perpetuated, Orientalism persists as the default framework through which gaming depicts Eastern cultures. This presentation will cover three dominant forms of Orientalism found in gaming today. The first form is the exoticization of the East by the West, as from a fixed Orientalist perspective that can be found in Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, which tells a tale of the exoticized Middle Eastern Other through the Westernized Prince. The second form of Orientalism frequently found in games is the East's internalization of the Orientalist's fetish and its own production of Orientalism. Essentially, Orientalism acts as a two-way relationship in which the West consumes a fetishized version of the East and in which the East internalizes that fetishization and markets it to the West. Because the Oriental subject is founded on the exploitation of Otherness, the Oriental subject in turn allows an auto-exoticizing Japan to use cultural tropes and stereotyped icons to market themselves to a Western audience and to enforce a culturally imperialistic policy for Asia. Japan's continuance of the commodification of Japanese icons, specifically seen with the Samurai and Ninja figures, reveals the use of Orientalist perspective in selling games such as Onimusha and Tenchu that rely on distinctly Japanese archetypes. The third form of Orientalism found in gaming relies on both prior forms. This form is the imperialist and Orientalist stance that Japan takes in regard to other Asian nations. This form can be seen in the Japanese view of Chinese pseudo-history as represented in the Dynasty Warriors series. The series serves to illustrate the dominant position Japan establishes for itself within the Orientalist hierarchy.

After establishing a working framework for the types of Orientalism frequently found in gaming, this presentation will illustrate the role of Orientalist perspectives in the playing, marketing, and creation of current games on the international market. Working from an examination of the recursive Orientalism of fetishized Japanese stereotypes in games made in Japan, I also explore Orientalism as a force for subjugation and the implicit meaning this gives in regard to Imperialism, which highlights the privileged position Japan occupies vis-à-vis other Asian nations. As gaming continues to develop, the cultures which create, market, and consume games become increasingly important and this presentation will serve as one entry point into that discussion.

New Cyborg Philosophy: Techno-Religious Hybridization in Marathon and Halo

Mon, 26 Jun 2006 19:08:51 -0400

Abstract:

The cyborg is a prevalent figure in modern fiction and science fiction as authors explore the implications of the continued development and integration of technology into the human experience. The concept of the cyborg itself presents a hybrid of organic and machine, two familiar elements that are fused into new, variable constructs. These cyborg constructs are ultimately alien in a nature, as the familiarity of the opposing components comes into conflict with their inherent differences, forcing the individual observer to re-evaluate their perception not only the cyborg, but the individual components as well. Essentially, the cyborg figure makes its familiar components--that of flesh and machine--each othered through the cyborg's hybrid form.

For video games, which rely on traditional narrative devices within their interactive, visual format, the cyborg is commonly used in the game narratives as well as in descriptions of the player-game relationship. Particular games have capitalized on this troubling double relationship of game avatar to game narrative and player to game as with the Marathon and Halo series. Cyborgs and cyborg identity are common themes in the Marathon and Halo series produced by Bungie Studios. Keeping with a central concept of Donna Haraway's "The Cyborg Manifesto," that the cyborg is representative of our collective ontology, Bungie's cyborgs fuse not only the organic and the technological but also seek to create new philosophical hybrids of religion and science for those with cyborg identities. This paper will explore the implications of Bungie's techno-religious cyborgs in relation to the game narrative and the game design. I examine these in terms of the player-avatar relationship and the player-avatar experience within game worlds that depict cyborg creatures and cyborg philosophies.

Differences that Bind Us: The Alien in Media and Next Door

Mon, 26 Jun 2006 16:59:40 -0400

Invading the Past: Genre and Anachronism in Destroy All Humans!

Mon, 26 Jun 2006 13:34:39 -0400

Abstract:

American popular culture’s recent fascination with vintage sci-fi now extends to a medium that did not even exist when Martians first invaded American drive-in movie screens: the videogame. One game in particular, Destroy All Humans! (THQ, 2005), makes an unabashed foray into cinematic pastiche with its visual, musical, and thematic allusions to 1950s alien invasion movies such as The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), It Came from Outer Space (1953), and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1958). Frequently compared to director Tim Burton’s sci-fi parody Mars Attacks! (1996), Destroy All Humans! indeed employs very similar scenery and iconography. Yet, although certain criteria of genre would place Destroy All Humans! comfortably alongside Mars Attacks!
into the category of comedy/science-fiction, the videogame medium makes other generic demands that bear substantially on DAH!’s intertextual relationships with vintage invasion films, film parodies, historical representations, and contemporary culture and politics. Specifically, most videogames, and especially third-person action-adventure games such as DAH! that give players considerable power in manipulating the game world, present varying temporal expectations and experiences. Games and films may both allude to the same “story world,” but, in the words of game theorist Jesper Juul, playing a game “requires at least points or periods of temporal convergence where the time of the game world and the time of the playing merge—and the player can actually do something.” Thus, Destroy All Humans!, while riffing on a fictionalized past, is always partly rooted in the present, and this oddly anachronistic positioning of the player provides an interesting perspective on a twenty-first century culture that is mesmerized by its forward-looking past. Ultimately, the game functions both as a commentary on 1950s culture as mediated by sci-fi invasion films and on contemporary American culture by way of comparison. What are obviously anachronisms (a soldier character’s statement of regret that he passed on a cushy assignment to the Texas Air National Guard, for example) also evoke analogies between a society openly parodied as risible in its paranoia and conformity, and our own cultural milieu. This paper proposes to explore generic conventions and anachronism within Destroy All Humans! with an eye toward how this videogame’s invasion of the past mediates the player’s sense of the present.

N_A & NrAged: When RPGs Go Fannish

Sun, 25 Jun 2006 23:16:43 -0400

Abstract:

Nocturne_Alley, or N_A, is a LiveJournal-based Harry Potter RPG which ran for two years. NrAged is the discussion community created by fans a year into the game, and its forum for fan production completes a mutually defined reader-text relationship with N_A. Unlike more traditional RPGs, the players of N_A embody their characters, rather than perform them, as their 'real' identities are erased by a number of game restrictions: all players are anonymous, communicate with NrAged fans under the pseudonym 'a_player,' maintain the mystery of how the game operates, and uphold the illusion that the game is a reality, both for those playing and those watching. The players do perform, however, the ideal fan, by creating a believable paratext that represents the ideal fannish product. Likewise, NrAged functions as an ideal fandom by offering a ready-made communal space for accessing fannish versions of beloved characters, providing fans with an environment in which they can speculate about gaps in the narrative, and sustaining the pleasure of experiencing both the game and various forms of fan response.

The dynamic between game and fan community occasions many instances of othering: during the game, the player only successfully embodies the character by stripping away the other parts of her identity; though NrAged watchers are aware of the fan who, in playing Harry, is the center of her fannish activity, that player's anonymity renders her invisible and unknowable to watchers; and the players, despite their positions as Big Name Fans both in NrAged and in Harry Potter fandom, cannot acknowledge their roles in these communities during the game, and thus remain others to their fans. The players have yet to reveal their online identities, which suggests that the ideal fan player is one who has sutured herself so completely to a beloved character that her own identity not only disappears, but becomes irrelevant to her production.

The New Mediated (Em)Body Is My Others

Fri, 23 Jun 2006 19:46:56 -0400

Abstract:

The imaginary of the networked, augmented self is unitary, but the practice of this multi-user self, this multiplicity of being in the cybernated, social dataspace is far from a cohesive, organic and maintained system. Networked identity is supplemental, like a link on a page, a page on a site, a node on a network or a server in a circuitous expanse. Not only is dataspace continually invaded by the process of this other, but this realm of media saturation requires and reproduces a myriad of othernesses that shed and collect in archives and databases. These fragments of self assault the perceived purity of identity. Networked identity embodies competing notions of fluidity and fixity, of limitation and expanse, augmentation, embodiment/disembodiment, multiplicity, temporal change and stagnation and otherness. When we think about this reflectance, we are confronted with the problematics of this newly mediated self. We are challenged with the endlessly configurable in menu options and avatars. We engage in the practice of compressing ourselves into blurb-like containers, such as “about me,” and profiles that begin as templates of favorite movies and music, which need continual updating. We exist somewhere in the detritus memories of user names and passwords and abandoned email accounts collecting endless amounts of spam. We utilize the reflectance of media to both understand our use of the media and how we are extended through their use. Aside from the freshness and excitement of new media, we are left to wonder how these complex systems lack and how they also delimit us, and in this process, produce something supplemental and other.

Archives of identifiers must be created and maintained; they are enacted upon us based upon corporate, gendered or racial components, but they lack in the biological. Their machinic logic is the cement from which we cannot escape and their supplement is the fracture we continuously attempt to heal. Even their evolution into the organic, the attempts at a biologic, are the offspring of this otherness, an artificial life, and an intermediate to our being.

This paper presentation will take a playful, creative look at network identity and the thought process of what it means to manage multiple user names, profiles and identities and the fixity of these databases of identifiers and how this multiplicity relates to otherness, as well as intermediate states of being.

Navigating a new gaming environment: Learning as a process of negotiating the alien other

Fri, 23 Jun 2006 18:01:00 -0400

Abstract:

How a video game player negotiates the alien environment of a new game requires the activation of cognition to direct action. As the player constructs game play in the foreign environment mediating cognitive skills are used to facilitate progression through the game. The activation of skills used to negotiate understanding of the alien environment is reflective of a player’s general experience and familiarity with gaming technology, indicating the role of experience in how cognition is engaged. This presentation will discuss the results of a study that identifies a continuum of cognitive skills used to engage a new game, or alien environment, based on the player’s experiential level. The recognition of video game play as a domain of expertise signifies the development of sophisticated knowledge structures related to game play, allowing those with higher levels of experience to interact with a new game and activate a greater number of cognitive skills that supports learning from the new environment (Pillay, 2003, VanDeventer & White, 2002). Considering the interest in the application of video games to educational settings, the contrast of expert and novice processes while navigating the alien environment provides a method for identifying the baseline of skills activated by game play and their successive development resulting from experience (Chi, Feltovich, & Glaser, 1981; Elio & Scharf, 1990; Snyder, 2000; Zeitz, 1994). The role of cognition in navigating the alien environment of a new game has implications for the use of gaming technology by educators to support learning outcomes and their optimal design to support learning.

Charnel Houses of Europe: The Limits of Play

Fri, 23 Jun 2006 11:04:40 -0400

IndigiMMOn: Indigenous Monsters and Game-Play Imbalances in MMORPGs

Thu, 22 Jun 2006 22:46:14 -0400

Abstract:

After creating an account and viewing the opening CG clips, a player's first interaction with an MMO game is usually the character creation screen. Without experiencing the subtle and complex mechanics of the game, the user's choices are influenced by visual information. Since they only have brief summaries of the game-play dynamics, players rely on style and fantasy-gaming conventions as they decide on the appearance, class, and race of their first character. Race has become a particularly important element of character creation, as many games distribute races into opposing factions. Massively multiplayer-online games have inherited the conventions of monstrous races from fantasy novels, movies and P&P settings. The term “indigimon” refers to digital indigenous monsters: the representation of an indigenous cultural-cline as a variation of the colonizer-human form, a “humanoid,” in digital games. Some of the most exaggerated indigimons come from the MMORPG, World of Warcraft, which features native North American 'tauren' and South American trolls. It is also a convention in current MMO games to divide races into factions. World of Warcraft has the “Horde” and “Alliance” factions, Dark and Light's races are divided into Dark and Light factions, while RF Online presents players with the choice of Accretia, Cora, and Bellato. This is similar to the choices that players have always had in fantasy gaming from Dungeons & Dragons to Knights of the Old Republic. In the MMO environment, however, unrestricted choice in character creation presents a threat to the game's balance. In a traditional game with teams, a set of rules exists limiting the amount of players per team. In some MMO games, however, it is up to the players to distribute themselves into balanced factions. When World of Warcraft's “Honor System” launched, players experienced the inevitable “zerging” of Tarren Mill and Crossroads. Alliance players, who far outnumbered Horde players, relentlessly raided these Horde towns, killing players, quest givers and other NPCs. To address faction imbalances, designers would have to place limits on the types of characters that players could create, therefore balancing the population of any given server. Alternatively, the races and their organization into factions would have to be designed to distribute player preferences more evenly. The IndigiMMOn project is being developed to research the demographics of racial passing in MMO games. After collecting demographic information, the project will use a mock character creation system, and track the preferences of different player groups. By determining which group of players prefer lithe elves, scrappy undead, hulking orcs and squat gnomes, we can identify problematic faction composition before the game's launch.

Sexuality and Sexual Orientation in Computer and Console Games

Thu, 22 Jun 2006 22:25:06 -0400

Abstract:

Within the field of sociology, it is common knowledge that an individual gains an understanding of social norms, mores, mannerisms, and attitudes through means of socialization. Historically, this job has been undertaken by the parental figures, then later by educational authorities. With the infusion of media into mainstream American society, television and the silver screen both became primary sources of socialization, sometimes even stronger than the parental figures in this endeavor. Studies have been done regarding film and television regarding both socialization and representation of minorities, but computer and console games are typically overlooked as means for socialization. While video games may not have first been an effective tool for socialization – Pong had little to tell us about family dynamics, race, gender, or class – with the immense development in realistic 3-d rendering, storyline, and character, video games have a fair amount to teach us. Toys like Barbie clearly send messages about the female body (to be attractive, one must be blonde, white, thin, and essentially plastic); however, in video games, the power of these and similar messages is much stronger because in video games the Barbies talk and practically live. In a society where we mimic celebrities like Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, it should come as no surprise that children, teens, and even adults will begin to internalize characters like Lara Croft and Duke Nukem as normative. What message does this send minority gamers? How does an African-American gamer feel while playing as the all-white team of Final Fantasy VIII? How does a girl gamer feel while playing as Mario, a stereotyped Italian male plumber in Mario Sunshine? How does a gay gamer feel while playing as Jack and being forced to marry a girl or live alone forever in Harvest Moon? What message does the “norm” that’s being reinforced in all these games send to gamers, minority and majority alike?

While gender and race studies have been done on video games (even if very few and far between), the issue of representation of sexual orientation in video games has largely been overlooked academically. Within gaming culture, there seems to be a certain level of accepted homophobia, probably due to the lack of cultural diversity that is associated with “gaming culture.” The character stereotypes found in games, recent and in the days of old, do not improve the situation; in most situations, the character takes on a role of a white heteronormative male, typically to save the white heteronormative damsel in distress. This can cause severe disconnections between player and avatar if the player identifies as a minority, and only strengthens the close-minded nature of that which we have labeled “gaming culture.” That being said, this presentation will delve into the recent attempts of inclusion of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender characters into video games, the do’s and don’t’s of this endeavor, the reception of this new style of character within the gaming world, and what new messages these characters may be sending to the receptive audience.

Playing with the Other: Alterity in the Work of Peter Molyneux

Wed, 21 Jun 2006 21:07:51 -0400

Abstract:

Simulation and interactivity, ideas inherent to video games, allow the player to engage in an act of impersonation, through an Avatar or not, and dialogue in real time with the universe he is momentarily part of. While this medium is able to provide a gateway to a vast range of roles and situations to be experienced by the user, for several reasons, there has been some constancy on the position given to the player – usually the role of an archetypal hero. Games, electronic or otherwise, usually present a situation of conflict between two or more parties, where the other is an opponent. In videogames, a dramatic tone is often employed through the depiction of a ‘good side’, controlled by the player, and an ‘evil side’, more commonly assigned to the artificial intelligence of the game. As in the seminal Space Invaders, the ‘other’ is regularly depicted in videogames as the enemy or ‘the bad side’.

Of course, there are some exceptions to the rule, and few game designers have had such consideration, within their body of work, about the subject of otherness and alterity such as Peter Molyneux. Games such as Fable, Dungeon Keeper and Black & White give the player the possibility to play according to the universe and mood usually restricted, in other games, to those characters the player cannot control: the villains, the alien – the other.

The objective of this paper is to discuss how the work of Molyneux conveys such themes, as well as other instances of otherness, and how this discourse develops throughout his career. Naturally, this analysis will not be directed towards all the games he has worked on, but rather the ones that better fit within the scope of this reflection. Special attention will be given to Populous, Dungeon Keeper, Black & White, Fable and The Movies.

Player Epsilon: Demoing a New Hermeneutic for Games

Wed, 21 Jun 2006 18:04:11 -0400

Abstract:

The act of playing a video game can be, on a medial level, understood as an interplay of various and nested performative roles, each defined in terms of their other - avatar and game world, implied player and implied game, actual player and actual game, and so on. (Drawing these terms and roles from Reader-Response theory, particularly Wolfgang Iser, Wayne Booth, and Gerald Prince) These roles are locked into what can be understood as mutual interpollation - each one understandable only through the existence of the other in a particular performative role which is in turn defined by itself.

This paper looks at the intervention of the demo (in its various forms) into this sequence of dyads. The demo is a paratext, not just to the game, but to the hermeneutic of play, serving as an origin point for both player and game. It also, at times, comes in after in the form of speed run movies and ghost data, forming paratexts that reevaluate and comment upon the hermeneutic in other ways.

Time of the Twins: Video Games Presenting the Unrepresentable Through Haunting

Wed, 21 Jun 2006 15:46:47 -0400

Abstract:

In video games, ghosts can refer to multiple instances: those within the game's machine, the software, those represented in the game narrative, and those that the ghosts represent. This presentation focuses on video games that represent the undocumentable past within game worlds through the act of haunting. Haunting occurs in all digital media through the act of telepresence with the predetermined possibilities set in place by the game designers, and then the traversal and exploration (and possible exploitation) of those possibilities by the player. More traditional notions of haunting occur in games with narrativized ghosts that exist within the game space. These ghosts are sometimes only shadows that cannot be accessed and serve to populate only the visual presentation of the game space. Other times these ghosts are enemies or friends that may affect gameplay.

In addition to more literal examples of haunting, many other games include characters that haunt the game space without ever actually existing in the games. These characters haunt the game world through their remains--their notes, photographs, and other personal affects--but they themselves are never in the game in any corporeal or ethereal manner. Many horror games create haunted spaces by depicting the remains of those who have passed through the game space, yet who are no longer there in any physical sense. The games do so by presenting the remains of the characters who have passed through--their clothing, living quarters, journals, and other personal items. My presentation will first trace the types of haunting in games to show how haunting exists and operates on multiple levels and to show how that haunting affects and alters gameplay in a process of othering the player to the game and the technology of the game space. I will then conclude by focusing specifically on the characters who were never programmed, never created in the games as images or figures, but who still haunt the game space and on their significance to their respective game worlds as othered creatures to the players and the game characters.

Sid Meier’s Colonization

Wed, 21 Jun 2006 15:14:44 -0400

Abstract:

My essay addresses Sid Meier’s Colonization, the oft-forgotten first sequel to Civilization. Released in 1993, Colonization places its player in the role of a colonial leader in the New World, starting in 1492, with a choice between four historically dominant nations. This game is inherently troubling. Its object is to grow crops, earn money, build a colonial foothold in the New World and – most importantly – carry out genocide, wiping out the player’s choice of Indian tribes that already inhabit these Americas. They inevitably get in the way of deforestation, road-building, and seizure of land. All of these activities reflect historical colonization, and all of them contributed to the eradication of Native American livelihood.

These native peoples serve as obstacles to what progress the game Colonization requires, and they must be either manipulated or destroyed during the course of it. My essay examines the implications of this, and investigates the effects of making the average player of strategy games into a regular Hernan Cortes. Is it, for instance, troubling that when one plays this game the Tupi tribe quickly become irritants expressly to be exterminated? Does it attest to the brilliance of such a colony simulation, that these impulses become second nature to the player? Colonization’s relevance surpasses this factor. Slaves are conspicuously absent from Sid Meier’s colonial depiction, for instance, and events like colonial revolution and missionary expeditions are treated as inevitable. My essay addresses the limitations that a game like this places on its player, with its not-astoundingly-more-complex-than-a-chessboard playing field and its consistent formula in the face of an infinitely variable New World. Ultimately, it seems that Sid Meier’s creation is an ideal simulation of colonization, a game that by placing its player in the seat of a colonist leads him to think explicitly like a conqueror, with all of the greed and bloodthirstiness this entails.

AA: Artificial Alterity -- Toward an Ethics of Computer Games

Wed, 21 Jun 2006 13:10:24 -0400

Abstract:

When we play a single-player computer game, gazing intently into the face of monitor, to what extent is the computer an other? I propose to investigate this deceptively simple question by using the idea of alterity/otherness introduced by Emanuel Levinas in his work on the theory of ethics.

For Levinas, the basis of ethics lies in the face-to-face encounter with the other. The other calls the imperialism of my being into question, radically charging me to respect his/her difference. In most interpretations of this encounter, of course, the other is an other human being (though we must be careful not to assume too much in defining the human). But in a computer game the other may well be an AI program; moreover, we often perceive and treat the hardware as somehow personalized (a ‘you’ or even Martin Buber’s ‘thou’). The software-hardware nexus, though certainly not human, is as much an other as the opponent I encounter in a face-to-face chess game.

Levinas distinguishes between the face and the mask. The face gives us the other as other, a radical alterity of pure difference, while a mask gives us certain identifiable items of relative difference. Gender, ethnicity, physical appearance: these are marks of the mask in Levinasian ethics. They may well be important, but they are nonetheless secondary to the alterity of the other per se.

The computer game gives us only masks; no radical other appears to me on my monitor. Rather, simulations of the other appear, electronic testimonies to an other who is never really present. So one is tempted to say that computer games have no ethics: to paraphrase H. G. Wells, digital soldiers leave no digital widows, so simulations of violence lack the ethical stakes of what they simulate. Nonetheless, simulations are designed to maintain a tight relationship between reality and simulation. They always function as both entertainment and training. Pulling the trigger in America’s Army makes it just a bit easier to pull the trigger in America’s Army. So, insofar as computer games simulate encounters with the other, they simulate the ethical situation.

These masked encounters simulate the face-to-face. In shooting games violence is simulated, and so are its ethical effects. My main purpose is to demonstrate that games are ethical statements. This is not the same thing as claiming that they reinforce or attempt to damage any specific moral codes (though many do), but that by simulating the face-to-face, they present us with representations that need to be considered—as simulations— in their ethical meaning.

As specific examples I use an FPS game (Call of Duty), a third-person simulation (Tropico 2), and a god game (Civ III).