“Sometimes you do everything right and you still die,” Mr. Wade said. “So you pick yourself up and start again.”
I can live with that message, even though I can’t shake the feeling that it was designed to sell books to conflicted parents like me. —Learning Early That Success Is a Game (NY Times)
An interesting review of Got Game: How the Gamer Generation Is Reshaping Business Forever.
My son used to hate losing any game… but that changed when I introduced him to a “how to play chess” CD, that uses cartoon characters and creates an epic quest, not just for a single game, but for the whole goal of improving your skills so you can defeat King Black.
Peter will often hit “reset” when a game — almost any game — isn’t going well for him. When he invited me to race against him in Lego Stunt Rally, he found it difficult to resist the urge to “reset” automatically when one of the computer-controlled drone cars passed him (I didn’t even come close to threatening him… he’s got a lot of practice time on that game). The trial-and-error method works for some professions, but students who turn in five polished pages of a rough draft, then jettison their whole paper topic when I suggest revisions, aren’t really learning the writing process. (I’ve attempted to compensate by splitting the larger assignments up into many small ones, but in my lit survey course, with 30+ members, students sometimes objected to being asked to sit through so many oral presentations from peers who either still roughing their ideas out, or reading directly from their previous draft.)
This link was suggested to me by my boss’s boss (who is not a blogger herself, but must like having them work for her.)
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While there's room for plenty of political awareness in the mainstream gaming culture, feminists have been deconstructing Lara Croft and cyberbimbonics in general for a while now, though in my opinion the scholarship that relies too much on metaphors such as the "male gaze" of cinema studies misses the point. While interactive movies can be game-like, games aren't interactive movies.
There are a handful of scholars who operate on the borderline of praxis/theory, and are conversant in both. You would proabably be interested in what Ian Bogost and Gonzalo Frasca are doing on http://www.watercoolergames.org. Their site focus on games that "want to make a point, share knowledge, change opinions". Lately the site has been talking more about advertising and education, but when it first went up it was mostly focusing on political games (such as Howard Dean for Iowa, which trained volunteers to canvass for Dean; and a number of short games that I would classify as interactive political cartoons).
There are plenty of other names worth mentioning... I'm resisting the urge to throw together an annotated list of links on the politics of game scholarship, since I have final grades to compute (and Christmas cards to send). But you're right, this is definitely one of the issues I'd tackle in the "Videogame Culture and Theory" course.
Hah! Yes...
"FACULTY SENATE 2: Return of the Program Review", in Cooperative Deathmatch mode with BFG (big faculty gun) blaring. Bonus ammo if you can figure out the puzzle of the multimedia lecturn before the NPCs swarm!
Anyway, you're right: I'm being parochial when I suggest a cultural studies/lit crit approach to gaming. Can't help it -- a text is a text and that's what we analyze in English studies. As you noted, Dennis, too much of the praxis in the field is driven by economics -- but, conveniently, it's uncritical or ignorant about the political economy of it all. Ah well. So be it. The essay you linked to would make good fodder for that game theory course...definitely generate good discussions.
Mike, you're right that this area of gaming is under-examined. Much of gaming research is market-driven; that is, it takes a humanities or social science scholar, who's used to working for peanuts, to examine the kinds of issues you raise. Many of the designers and programmers who are in grad school right now are hoping to land industry jobs.
The field changes so rapidly, and so much of the basic historical scholarship still remains to be done.
Regarding possible revisions to academic rank and tenure procedures, Josh and Mike may be onto something... perhaps every Ph.D. in games studies should include a "performance" component?
Mike -
I don't want to take out my colleagues of higher rank with a BFG... Not unless we're in DeathMatch mode or something... I'd rather pick their brains to get the best "ordinance" for the next division meeting :)
Joshua Sasmor
Ironically, I saw on the news this morning an interview with a game manufacturer, so this was something I've been thinking about. The interviewee mentioned that the average age of today's gamer is now 26. I was skeptical, but did a web search and pulled up an May 04 article from that master of statisticians, USA Today, which reports that the average age of game players is actually 29 years old (and the average age of buyers was 36) with males making up 59% of the playing audience.
Amazing! So this tells me that the PARENTS of kids today -- mostly fathers -- are those working with the worldviews Belkin writes about, and that they are likely passing those worldviews down to their children through not only playing the games but (unlike Belkin, who seemed alienated by it all) also in their parenting. Thus, perhaps, the lessons of gaming are not only reproduced, but reified.
Unlike Belkin, I'm still a little scared. The lessons from the gaming world that Belkin surveys in her book review of "Got Game" are only the tip of the iceburg. The thing I liked about Belkin's piece was that those "lessons" are multifaceted and sometimes contradictory. But it seems to me that more criticism needs to be performed to examine the deeper ideologies of gaming -- the psychological subtexts, or the political unconscious of these texts -- while resisting essentializing it all into a metanarrative. Surveying the superficial narrative lessons of these games is not going far enough. The games also do not invent these lessons out of whole cloth, but in my opinion are social allegories, reproducing class struggles and fantasies. Perhaps there's more gaming theory out there that speaks to this, but it ain't being covered in the NYTimes.
By the by: when you mention the word "boss" in the context of gaming, it makes me think you want to take out your colleagues of higher rank in a firestorm with your BFG in order to get to the next level. :-)