The Ivy-Covered Console

“Games are big, big objects,” said Barry Atkins, who teaches in the English department at Manchester Metropolitan University in England. “The days when you could play a couple of hours of Myst and write about it are over.” | Dr. Atkins admitted that he didn’t finish Half-Life before writing about it in his 2003 book, “More Than a Game: The Computer Game as Fictional Form,” (Manchester University Press), and only later realized he was two minutes from the shocking plot reversal at the end when he stopped. “I am very nervous that I got it wrong,” he said. —Michael Erard
The Ivy-Covered Console (New York Times)

I knew this article was coming because the author e-mailed me late Tuesday in order to ask whether I knew anything more about Mary Ann Buckles, who wrote her 1985 Ph.D. thesis on “Adventure.” (I tried tracking her down a few years ago, and found someone who thought she might be a relative, but I didn’t go further than that.)

This is an excellent article… the author notes that Espen Aarseth, whose book Cybertext is a seminal work in studying games as games (rather than as kinds of literature or film) is only 38. Erard really manages to capture the newness and multidisciplinarity of the field with the following description of next week’s Princeton conference (“Form, Culture and Video Game Criticism”):

A lawyer, a journalist, a composer, two professors, two lecturers and six graduate students will present papers with titles like “Musical Byproducts of Atari 2600 Games” and “But Our Princess Is in Another Castle: Towards a ‘Close-Playing’ of Super Mario Brothers.”

It’s very exciting to be part of such a young field (though I count three professors on the videogame conference program, not two).

My job description, as a generalist at a small liberal arts school, rather than a specialist at a research institution, simply doesn’t leave room for the kind of intense research that I was able to do as a grad student (oh, those 16-hour days in the library). My dean didn’t actually burst out laughing when I mentioned a desire to get a course release so I could play more computer games, or funding to purchase a game console and some of the latest titles — which would, of course, be part of the new media lab, and which I would let students check out, for academic use. ;)

I used to do a much better job keeping up with interactive fiction, but I find that this year I’m so busy that I’m waiting for the XYZZY Awards to be announced, so that I can catch up on the winners I haven’t played yet. Fortunately I found CliFrotz, which lets me play Z-machine games on my new PDA, so I’ve been working on some of the multiply-nominated games already.

4 thoughts on “The Ivy-Covered Console

  1. If you haven’t read Aarseth’s _Cybertext_, I’d be happy to loan it to you. He does a great job showing how computer games are entirely different objects than literary hyperfictions, how different subgenres of games require different approaches, and explores the critical confusion caused by researchers with different sets of assumptions about the terms being bandied about. For instance, the interpretive variety that results from reading and re-reading a traditional text with different approaches is sometimes described with metaphors of interactivity and agency, yet a competely different variety of textual experience results when two people who sit down in front of the same cybertext document (a game or a website) have completely different experiences (winning versus losing, getting ending #12 after two hours, or ending #21 in ten minutes, etc.).

  2. GREAT LINKS!!! Thanks Dennis! Espen Aarseth’s contentions are interesting. I guess I should resist my impulse to contain this stuff under the penumbra of “popular culture” and listen to what these folks have to say. It’s fun to track a field-in-progress.

  3. Thanks for your thoughtful comment, Mike. My response is… yes and no.

    Since I come from a literary background, naturally I’m going to bring a lot of tools I learned through literary criticism. Much popular writing on game studies (including what you’ll find on Slashdot or anywhere else that geeks congregate) does mock academics for not understanding gaming culture, gamers who study massively multiplayer online games have to wrestle with ethics such as, should a game researcher who interacts with paying customers be bound by the same ethical restrictions that govern anthropologists, or researchers who use human subjects? Much feminist work in game culture critiques the misogyny and violence inherent in titles that are created for and marketed to 12-year-old boys. (I recently sent this link to a student: Lara Croft: Feminist Icon or Cyberbimbo? On the Limits of Textual Analysis ); Sarah Sloane also wrote a dissertation on that subject in the early 1990s. Some of that work treats games as foreign objects, and thus qualifies more as women’s studies than game studies, but in my Media Aesthetics course, we’ll be reading Brenda Laurel’s Utopian Enterpreneur, which decribes an attempt by a poineer in game studies to create a company dedicated to developing and marketing computer games with positive role models for girls; it was a grand experiment in didactic gaming.

    Owing to public concern over representations of violence in games, game studies includes a social science component that is largely alien to mainstream literary studies. See “Cultural Framing of Computer/Video Games.” These kinds of methods are recognizably those used to test the social effects of television and the gender-coded playthings television advertises.
    … You might also want to take a look at Gonzalo Frasca’s “LUDOLOGY MEETS NARRATOLOGY:
    Similitude and differences between (video)games and narrative.
    “. Frasca is quite sympathetic to looking at games as narrative, but Jesper Juul hasn’t always been (though he seems to have moderated at bit): The definitive history of games and stories, ludology and narratology. (I posted some comments at the bottom the other day.)

    Whoops, my kids have woken up, so my writing is over for now. Thanks again, Mike, for your thoughtful inquiry.

  4. This got me thinking. May I ramble? Clearly, there is a growing discourse community around gaming. Reading this article, I recall that I wrote a research paper back as an undergrad inquiring into computer game violence and the impact on children; and I also gave an “informative speech” (that was the name of the assignment) on the triggering of epilectic seizures among some children who played Nintendo. These early inquiries were nothing like what I’m seeing through your blog, but it gave me pause to realize I’d done these things back in the early 90s, and also played Doom and Civilization all the way through grad school (games which our culture is currently playing for real!). However, maybe I’m wearing career goggles, but I still think of all this as a subset of current literary theory — even though gamers seem to want to claim it’s not. Aren’t games “texts”? Weren’t structuralists saying that the text is a field of “play” long ago — that all texts are interactive? Isn’t the phrase “close gaming” borrowing from the legitimacy of saying “close reading”? In my view, this is really the study of a genre and a culture as much as, say, studying modernist novels. So I don’t understand the motivation of game theorists who want to claim that this isn’t literary studies. It clearly is, but the gamers just don’t want to be associated with snooty lit crit — and vice versa. In some ways, this culture clash is more interesting than the theory itself. But in my very light examination of this, I haven’t seen much cultural criticism going on here… there seems to be a tendency to want to just rationalize structured play, the way postmodernists wanted to — which risks reifying, say, the pleasures of Castle Wolfenstein, without acknowledging the Nazi world that it immerses the player in. The problem snooty lit critics have with game criticism is that they’re trained to be skeptical of “fun” — just the same way that most film critics are skeptical of classic hollywood narrative. Fun often translates into ideological blindness. That’s the same reason why action/adventure novels are rarely studied in undergrad lit courses. But of course, there are still pleasures involved with any text, and it’s just as ideological for some critic to poo-poo games as it is to celebrate them. Same thing in lit and film studies — the gen-x scholars are seeking to legitimate the texts they grew up with in commodity culture. Nothing inherently wrong with that, but it’s also clearly a form of “contemporary literature” in my view, and it comes with all the problems of subjectivity that studying one’s own times do.

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