YA drive-by

I'm teaching a course on Harry Potter this term, and gave a recent lecture on the roots and themes of YA literature. One of the articles I wound up not using was by a scholar named Mike Cadden. For the most part, Cadden gave a fairly interesting breakdown of YA literature--I particularly liked his discussion of YA as transitional literature and how the notion of length becomes intertwined with quality, but I was much less impressed by this passage:

“For girls, then, our fake realism of today comes largely

from Alloy Entertainment. These are the folks who bring

the tweeners the wildly popular series about Gossip Girls,

The Clique, The A-List, and It Girls—and what seems to

be the whole YA gossip-oh-my-gawd-he’s-so-cute-butcan-

you-believe-what-that-bitch-said industry. It’s clearly

an entertainment company and would be a target for those

concerned with representations of adult behavior and what

is/should be important to adolescent girls. I guess you

could say that they’re the guilty beach-reads for adolescents,

though we could argue that it’s without the guilt.

But hey, at least those kids are reading, right? These are

novels that, unlike more clearly comic and contemporary

realism like The Princess Diaries, haven’t a tongue within

miles of the cheek—at least not one’s own."

I'll confess, I haven't actually read any of these books, which is a definite limitation to my counterargument, but I have seen nearly every episode of Gossip Girl, which I feel gives me some ground to push back here. The accusation that Cadden implicitly levels at teenage "chick lit" is basically the same that was once leveled at the early gothic novel or the 19th century romance, genres which are now arguably read more by academics than anyone else. These books, critics complained, corrupt our girls, filling their minds with trashy drivel and sexual misconduct. You can deal with them at that level if you want, but they're also reflective of the society they're written from, and in that sense, they're almost across the board a deconstruction of how women are empowered and disempowered by societal norms.

The "tongue within miles of the cheek" line is a good line, but that's all it is. For someone who has watched Gossip Girl and read critiques of Gossip Girl (Jacob Clifton's old Television Without Pity articles were brilliant, and what got me into the show in the first place), I can say he must not have been paying attention, because the series was all about the ridiculousness of teenage extremities. Maybe the books were different, but given that the series includes Psycho Killer, a slasher parody that recasts the series' leads as serial killers, I'm thinking not. Yes, they're of a very different kind from young adult  novels exploring realism and engaging directly with social issues,  but to dismiss them so firmly is to perpetuate the same sort of literary snobbery that has long been YA's lot.

Later Days.

Friday Quotations: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

"Back when the rest of us were learning to play wallball and pitch quarters and drive our older brothers' cars and sneak dead soldiers from under our parents' eyes he was gorging himself on a steady stream of Lovecraft, Wells, Burroughs, Howard, Alexander, Herbert, Asimov, Bova, and Heinlein, and even the Old Ones who were already beginning to fade--E.E. 'Doc' Smith, Stapledon, and the guy who wrote all the Doc Savage books--moving hungrily from book to book, author to author, age to age. (It was his good fortune that the libraries of Paterson were so underfunded that they still kept a lot of the previous generation's nerdery in circulation.) You couldn't have torn him away from any movie or TV show or cartoon where there were monsters or spaceships or mutants or doomsday devices or destinies or magic or evil villains. In these pursuits alone Oscar showed the genius his grandmother insited was part of the family patrimony. Could write in Elvish, could speak Chakobsa, could differentiate between a Slan, a Dorsai, and a Lensman in accute detail, know more about the Marvel Universe than Stan Lee, and was a role-playing game fanatic. (If only he'd been good at videogames it would have been a slam dunk but despite owning an Atari and an Activision he didn't have the reflexes for it.) Perhaps if like me he'd been able to hide his otakuness maybe shit would have been easier for him, but he couldn't. Dude wore his nerdiness like a Jedi wore his light saber or a Lensman her lens. Couldn't have passed for Normal if he'd wanted to.">
Díaz
This struck a bit closer to home than I'd like to admit. It's never too far below the surface, is it? And it matters so much more to you than anyone else. Later Days.

Judging Judging Books By Their Cover

Question: is there a correlation between a fantasy book's perceived quality and the quality of its cover?

The answer which may surprise you below. Warning: surprise not guaranteed.

Friday Quotations: If A Baron Falls in the Forest, and No One Hears Him...

And so, from Prince Sanchez' laconic exclamations and a detailed account by the gentleman in black, Cosimo succeeded in reconstructing the story of this colony living on plane trees. They were Spanish nobles who had rebelled against King Charles III about certain contested feudal privileges, and been exiled with their families as a result. On reaching Olivabassa, they had been forbidden to continue their journey. Those parts, in fact, on account of an ancient treaty with His Catholic Majesty, could neither give hospitality nor even allow passages to persons exiled from Spain. The situation of those noble families was a difficult one to cope with, but the magistrates of Olivabassa, who wanted to avoid any trouble with foreign chancelleries, but also had no aversion to these rich foreigners, came to an understanding with them. The letter of their treaty laid down that no exiles were to 'touch the soil' of their territory; they only had to be up on trees, and all was in order. So the exiles had climbed up there for some months, putting their trust in the mild climate, the hoped-for arrival of a decree of amnesty from Charles III, and Divine Providence. They were well supplied with Spanish doubloons and bought many supplies, thus giving trade to the town. To draw up the dishes they had installed a system of pulleys. And on other trees they had set up canopies under which they slept. In fact they had settled themselves very comfortably, or rather, the people of Olivabassa had settled them well, as it was to their advantage. The exiles, for their part, never moved a finger the whole day long."
--The Baron in the Trees, Italo Calvino.

The Baron in the Trees is an odd book; it does what it says on the tin, in that it's about a young boy who goes to live in the trees after a fight with his father. And stays there. And eventually becomes baron, and rules over his people, all without ever setting foot on ground again. It doesn't have the metanarrative or structural complexity that I've come to expect from Calvino; rather, it's closer to the sort of thing Borges or Gabriel Garcia Marcez might write. That is, there's a dreamy yet matter-of-fact sort of innocence to the whole thing.

Sorry for the long blog silence. It's been a busy few weeks: conferences, defenses, and a lot of playing through Planescape: Torment for the dissertation. I think it's going to be the last game I go through at such length--unless you're writing a book on nothing but that game, this level of thoroughness is nice, but not really warranted, given the desired results is a dozen or two pages of analysis.   Expect more blogging in the next few days.

Later Days.

The Deep One Stirs. First Slowly, then quickly, to get the mixture right.

This whole "blog every day for a week" thing would go a lot easier if I remembered to do it before 11:30 pm at night. Okay, what happened today? Well, I finished reading Laird Barron's Imago Sequence, which is essentially a book of short stories riffing on the Lovecraft style. If that's not a familiar name to you, H. P. Lovecraft was a pulp fantasy writer in the early 20th century who specialized in writing stories around the basic of theme of "that which man was not meant to know." Building from the general tradition of Gothic horror, his stories generally had the same pattern to them: a man stumbles by accident onto some ancient ruin or otherworldly artifact and the mere contact with it starts to unhinge him. He gets more and more obsessed, and the more he uncovers, the more insane he becomes. Often, the whole thing revolves around a being beyond human understanding who doesn't even acknowledge our existence, but would drive us insane if we looked at it. It's that sort of thing, nine times, with variations. There's a mysterious photograph series, a sinister farm, a Wild West locale. Always something just different enough to keep it all fresh.

Essentially, the Lovecraft mold works because it's playing with our basic modern sensibilities. Where we, deep down, believe that all of our problems can be solved with sufficient knowledge, the Lovecraft story presents the deepest threat to that, something utterly beyond our comprehension, where the more we learn, the worse off we are. Now, I love a good genre story. Something that can create new movements while working with a known frame is like poetry, in my book. (Unless it's actually poetry, in which case, ugh.) That's why I've read romances, 18th century rake hero plays, and westerns--I like looking for the variations. And I think that's something people can relate to. We want to be surprised, but we still want a sense of the general frame of the story. We use what we know to guess what happens next.

The thing, that metaguessing should be the death knell of the Lovecraft story. Minor variation or not, you know how it's going to end. You've got a guy going from ignorance to knowledge, and he's going to go off the deep end in the process. (And it's almost always a guy--the only version I've ever heard with a female protagonist was Alan Moore's Neonomicon, and that went into a monstrous pregnancy direction--weird for a creature who barely acknowledges our existence.)  And because our knowledge of how the plot works gives us that advantage, it's contrary to the theme of the story. But it still happens. I suppose it's similar to the case as with regular horror--we know how a slasher flick works, but we still enjoy being surprised within that frame, even though knowing that frame is there damages the surprise. I think the explanation there is that there's a difference between the "art horror" we get from watching something we know isn't real and the actual experience of horror. I suppose that could apply for the Lovecraft story too, since it's a subset of horror, but... something seems off about that explanation to me. Meh. If I pursue it, and wind up stark raving insane, at least I'll be able to respect the poetic justice.  That's what you want in insanity, right?

Later Days.

Or, more accurately, things that bug me because I'm a literary snob

Things that bug me: people who have more friends than books on GoodReads.

Later Days.

Friday Quotations: (Noun) of (Bad Adjective)

"The House of Hell is a little different from other Fighting Fantasy adventures.  You start your adventure unarmed, with no provisions or potions; and you have to avoid being frightened to death!"
"As well as surviving your adventure by ensuring that your STAMINA never drops to zero, in The House of Hell you must also avoid being frightened to death."
"If your FEAR score reaches the maximum (as rolled initially--see above), then you are frightened to death and must end your adventure."

--House of Hell, Fighting Fantasy # 10, Steve Jackson.

Every time the phrase "frightened to death" appears in the instruction portion, it is always italicized, and it always, always makes me smile.  I'm pretty sure that's what Jackson was going for.    It's currently the30th anniversary of the series, and you can bet that to celebrate, I have the special new entry in the series, Blood of the Zombies, pre-ordered, and I daily check out You Chose Wrong, a tumblr dedicated to posting just the bad endings of Choose Your Own Adventure books.

Speaking of always, I've always meant to do a post on what Choose Your Own Adventure books, and Fighting Fantasy books in particular, have meant to me, growing up.  For now, let's just let the fact that I have 50 of the original series' 59 books sitting on my bookshelf speak for itself.

Later Days.

Friday Random Quotations: Context? Who Needs Context?

"Are women or girls or sexiness to have no ontological place alongside chipmunks, lighthouses, and galoshes?" --Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology.

It's an interesting book.  Expect it to turn up in a Book Triad a few posts from now.

Later Days.

Book Triad: Try to make a game out of your crippling alienation at the bottom of the ocean.

Welcome to the second edition of triple book reviews.  If you missed last time, the rules are simple. I read two nonfiction books and one fiction, write a paragraph long review of each, and then spend a paragraph on general musing. And them we can all go home. That sounds nice, doesn't it? Without further ado, then, this installment's books are:
 Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World by Jane McGonigal
Starfish by Peter Watts
 Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as Cultural Practice

Authors Behaving Badly

I've been reading Gerard Gennette's Paratexts recently, as part of my research into game manuals.  Essentially, the paratext is anything to do with a book that isn't part of what we'd normally consider its content--everything from the title page to the typesetting to the book reviews and author interviews.  The definition has been greatly expanded by pop culture scholars, to include anything that impacts on the original text.  Applied to videogames, the manual is a form of paratext, in that it shapes the player's perception of the game--if they bother to read it.  As you might gather from this description, my use of paratext has drifted quite a bit from Genette's original, and as a result, there's not a lot here to guide my own reading, though it is making me pay attention to the paratext of the manual, such as its warning labels and help numbers.  (Paratext of paratext?  Paraparatext?  Papararatext?)

But honestly, what I'm getting most out of the book is some fun reading.  I'm used to doing a lot of heavy lifting whenever I read some French theory, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Jacques Derrida.  But Gennette is a pleasure to read, filling the book with not only meaningful observations, but witty (well-translated) jokes and amusing anecdotes.  In the chapter on dedications, for example, he considers a few cases where the author has later reason to regret a signed message:

“Gide’s biography is rich in changeful inscription-related episodes, authentic or apocryphal, that may illustrate this type of embarrassment or conflict. An example: having had a falling out with Andre Ruyters, he inscribes a copy of his Voyage au Congo to Ruyters with this single word: “Nonobstant” [nonwithstanding]. Another example: Claudel having inscribed a volume of his corespondence with Gide to his grandson with the words ‘My regrets at being in such bad company,” and the inscribee having had the good taste to bring the volume to Gide for him, too, to sign, Gide is alleged to have simply added this pithy retort: ‘Idem.’ True, Claudel has already much annoyed him by sending him a copy of what was indeed their common work with this very insolent inscription: ‘With the author’s compliments”--an occasion, if ever there was one, for Gide to feel (in his word) ‘suppressed.’ And we know that in 1922 Gide held a public sale of part of his library, particularlyu all the books inscribed by former friends with whom in the meantime he had had a falling out. One of them, Henri de Regnier, took his revenge by sending Gide nonobstant his next book, but with the biting inscription: ‘To Andre Gide, for his next sale.’” 

Great stuff.  I should note that I'm free to sign any one of these blog posts, if any readers out there want me to take a sharpie to their monitor.  

Later Days. 

Friday Quotations: Witching Hour

"Three nasty gnomes, rival warlocks in squat disguise, who'd invented a cottage not a mile away, invading my territory and taunting me with their wild tricks.  So my daughter took it upon herself to have a go at them.  I tried to stop her, but with her temper up there was no controlling her, and off she went.  She was still just a little thing, able to do little more than make her dolls walk or a goat sing like a magpie with a sore throat, she was no match for those hoary freaks, so, though she was able to get her piece said and pull their beards and throw some cake in their glum faces, she became uglier than ever with a fatal curse on her head and belching toads whenever she spoke.  I tried everything I knew to undo their devilry, but the toads kept coming.  So, the first thing she did was to go back to the gnomes' cottage and unleash such a screaming plague of toads that they had to move to another part of the forest.  How could you not love her?" --Stepmother, by Robert Coover

Later Days.

Answers to Questions No One Asked

People ask me exactly what it is I do. At least, they used to. There's a lesson for you: if you reply to any question with a sufficiently detailed answer, you tend to decrease the number of future questions. At any rate, when they used to ask me, I gave a rather vague description, at best. So I thought I'd settle this past question once and for all with a visual demonstration. I did two big things today: I prepared my lecture for the class I'm teaching tomorrow ("Introduction to Rhetorical Theory," super exciting.), and I read and took notes on a section of Mitchell's book, "Picture Theory." In general, my note method is to go from ridiculously detailed, to summary, to response to summary. I'll spare you the first step, and show just the results. Here's my summary and response to Mitchell's essay on the use of image and text in photo-essays:
**********************
Mitchell uses the photoessay to approach the image-text problem, delving into the issues of gender, collaboration, and race through the examination of four photoessays. He frames the chapter with a series of questions and answers, which essentially say that the photograpic essay is a dramatization, a materialization, of the power struggle and value negotiation between photo and text. / There are essentially two views of photography—first, that it is a message without a code, separate from langauge, and second, that it can be put into a language of signs. (Barthes represents the first.) The second has tended to win out, but it doesn't explain the persistence of the first. Barthes, he notes, examines this disparity, and hew wants to as well. / In the photoessay, the text appears to dominate, even suppress the images. But in the photoessay, the two forms share much in common, as well—the notion that both are somehow “serious,” that both are real and nonfiction; both often involve something very personal about their creator; both have a sense of incompleteness, that they have failed to grasp everything of significance about their subject. That brings us to his four case studies.

/ First up, Agee and Evans. They introduce the basic three traits of the photoessay, that the photos and text be equal, independent, and collaborative, despite the apparent contradictions these qualifications. In their case, it ccame from the complete separation of photo from text, a separation Mitchell understands as an aesthetic, ethical choice, but one that depends on each part standing in witness and vigilance against the veracity of the other. / The second one to examine is Barthes' Camera Lucida, which mixes photography with text, but in such a way that the photos tend to speak more to punctum than studium, creating a visual set that seems to belie the theory at work. And then there's the issue of Barthes' mother, who seems to be at the emotional core of the text. Mitchell argues that the motif for the essay is the labyrinth, with the photos as a labyrinth, and the text Barthes' personal attempt to push through.

/ Next is Malek Alloula's essay on the French colonialist postcards sexualizing Algerian women. Here, Mitchell's figure is voyeurism and exorcism; that is, the goal of the essay is that the text appears to liberate the women from their image-based debasement, to exorcise the images of the colonial presence and attack. It's a gender issue, and a colonial issue, and Mitchell concludes with his own personal reaction to the pictures, one of guilt. / Finally, he looks at Said and Mohr's photoessay on the Palestinians. Here, the figure is one of exile and return. The photos attempt to create a people, one that requires acknowledgment from the global community, but also from the subjects themselves. It's an ambiguous essay, as its photos and text promote return from exile, but also the accept that there is no full return, that the utopic return is a fantasy. He concludes with a statement that far from being formless or having no exact genre of form, it's the form of the photoessay that grants it is collaborative force between author and reader, and its contextual significance.

I certainly wrote a lot there, didn't I? I didn't think I was that interested in this essay, but there you go. I wish I had read it five years ago when I was trying to get students to write photo-essays. I wonder how much of it could be applied to powerpoint presentations—they're certainly the most common form of academic combination of image and text these days. At that point, it's not about the permanence of the text, so I'd think that the image would tend to take center-stage, as it's better at grabbing attention quickly. But then there's also the issue of how the verbal competes with writing and image. Complicated, yes? I also wish I'd read this essay while reading Agee and Evans; I don't think it would have made me like Agee any more, but the context would make me better appreciate what they were doing. It even makes me appreciate Barthes' book more, and I appreciated the hell out of that as it was. Beyond that, there's some connection to the videogame stuff. Obviously, a videogame that uses the camera is very, very little like a photoessay. But it is combining media forms. The difference is that in the game's case, the form is all about subordinating the photograph in favor of the gameplay. There's very little on the third essay—why is that? Is it just of less interest? And while Mitchell is big on focusing on gender issues in these essays, I note that he didn't select any with female authors, though he does mention one at length in the Agee and Evans section. Given the female = image tendency he seems to be drawing out, an attempt to see things differently might have been nice. The punctum/studium issue reminds me of the mind/body split—the idea that there's something about the body and the mind so that neither can be entirely placed in the other. That's only to be expected I guess; if it wasn't the case, then one would be encompassed by the other entirely. The last section really got me thinking about exile. I've played a few games where exile has played a role, but I guess where it really comes out in videogames is in a metagame fashion—the real exile is the one left out of the discussion, because he or she doesn't have the relevant hardware or hasn't played the game—or hasn't played it properly. Can exile be used in gaming? The player is almost always the outsider, so to feel the exile, they'd have to be made the insider first. Maybe FFX-2; the way the characters had moved on without me, the way the blitzball minigame had been altered to make it feel more like you were observing than acting. Is there more to exile than a sense of separation to something you were once close to? Does there have to be?
******************************
In case it wasn't clear, the last paragraph is my response. You'll note it's very rambling, even more so than my average blog piece. The ideas tend to jump around a lot, here ranging from powerpoint rhetoric to videogame exile. That's in part because when I'm writing notes for myself, I tend not to explain the references, or even the reasons for switching topics suddenly. But moreover, it's because that's my method; I jot down running ideas in the response, and I either build connections when I try to mesh everything together in my own essays, or I forgot it forever. (Alternatively, I read it years later, and revel in my own forgotten genius/idiocy.) At any rate, that's what I do. Today, at least. I'll leave it to you to decide whether such doings has any value or not.

Later Days.

Book Review: A Casual Revolution by Jesper Juul

“It was important for me to finish the game—I believe that it is important in life, to finish things, no matter what. I like competing with myself, to see development and progress. 'No matter what,' is really the point for me. I googled for solutions and found a cheat code to make Zuma slower. It worked!!! For me, that was even more satisfying than beating the game on its own terms: to modify the game to fit my own limitations and capacities.” --50 year old woman, on discovering the casual game Zuma. Interviewed in A Casual Revolution.
“Look at chess. Why shouldn't video games aspire to [the] same kind of status? Why shouldn't the very best of them aspire to have that kind of impact on the world? A game could be something that is worth devoting your life to, for a player to grow up playing it, to spend their whole life playing it... to make it the centerpiece of their entire life.
“Is that casual? No, but that's what golf is, that's what baseball is, that's what poker is, and those are the games that appeal to a broad audience. So to me, it's foolish to not look at this larger audience. I think wwe should think about this larger audience in historical terms. It's not just about reaching a million soccer moms, it's about making a game that can stand the test of time.” --Frank Lutz, part of the development team of the Facebook game Parking Wars, and a former director at gamelab, interviewed in Casual Revolution.

Right. It's 11:30 pm, I'm still in my office, and time's a-wasting. So let's minimize the amusing anecdotal portion. I am a hardcore gamer. Here, for example, is a short list of games off the top of my head that I know I have spent over a hundred hours on: Mass Effect, Mass Effect II, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Disgaea, and Dragon Warrior VII. I am a casual gamer. I am (or was) a frequent player of casual games such as FreeCell, Minesweeper, Farmville, Mafia Wars, and online Scrabble. So what's the difference between these two identites? Or, alternatively, what's the difference between these two sets of games? Jesper Juul, veteran videogame scholar, aims to find out, in his book A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and Their Players.

The book is rather breezy, to the point of being quite short: it runs at 218 pages, but the last 73 pages are appendices detailing the resulting of Juul's interviews. The real meat is the first 152 pages, wherein he outlines his discussion of casual games. The first chapter outlines the basic theory. Videogames are becoming normalized through the proliferation of popular games, which make a point of appealing to a wider audience. In particular, the casual games function through two main means: mimetic games, that focus on approximating controls with real-life equivalents (think the Wii, the Kinect) and downloadable games that focus on flat screen interfaces over fancy 3D graphics. Juul argues that hardcore and casual don't present two choices or even a spectrum, but different stances on a variety of factors that change over time.

Chapter 2 defines what it means to be casual under five categories: type of fiction (happy or disturbing), usability (ease of learning and mastering the interface), interruptibility (how easy it is to put the game down if need be), difficulty, and juiciness (how immediately the game rewards success). Game studies, he argues, needs to pay attention to how the game addresses these elements, but also on the type of players at work (or rather, play). Chapter 3 examines the history of casual games, with a focus on the development of Solitaire, from the 19th century on. Games, Juul argues, have to be considered in terms of four time frames of experience: historic time (history of the game and genre), design time (the background of the designers), player time (the game conventions the player is familiar with) and game-playing time, the time of actually playing the game. Personally, I would have gone with something like "context" over "time," as the latter places a distracting focus on temporality, but it's still a nice consideration.

Chapter 4 looks at downloadable games, with a focus on the 3-tile swap game's evolution. Again, I would have handled this somewhat differently; in my mind, if you want to talk about the history of the downloadable game, you need to start much earlier, with not just Doom and shareware, but also with the original distribution style of the mainframe game. Yes, these games are about as far from casual as you can get, which is why I imagine Juul didn't go there, but that's the point--what changes alter the use of this medium of distribution to change it from a hardcore channel to a casual one? (Easy answer: the Internet, but I suspect there may be more to it.) Anyway, using early tile-based games Tetris and Chain Shot, he identifies four traits for the games: time (whether the game is hectically paced or turn-based strategic); manipulation (whether you manipulate pieces as they fall or after they are in place); completion criteria (matching three or filling a row), and obligatory matches, whether the game lets you make nonmatching moves or not.

The next chapter is on mimetic gaming, with an emphasis on the Wii and the Guitar Hero-type games. He focuses on the Wii, as the first console to use a simplified controller as its main peripheral, and the arcade games, which had a heavy mimetic bent (think racing games shaped like race cars). Chapter 6 is on social meanings and social goals. Essentially, Juul states that gamers in a social setting keep in mind their desire to win, their desire to create an interesting game, and their desire to keep the esteem and goodwill of the other players. (Note that in an online multiplayer game, anonymity makes the last element less of a concern.) Chapter 7 studies Rock Band, Guitar Hero, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and The Sims 2, stating that the success of these games is their flexibility in offering goals, but not forcing players to meet them, enabling hardcore and casual play.

Chapter 8 concludes things, suggesting that the casual shift is occurring because of rising costs in game production, the proliferation of PCs, and the aging demographic of players. He also briefly mentions browser-based games, like the facebook apps, and concludes that games becoming normal is good for hardcore and casual folk alike. Three appendices follow: the first show number crunches for who's casual gaming (most interesting part: the people at that particular site tested 93% female, and average age of 41); interviews with players over what brought them to casual games; and interviews with casual game developers.

As you may have guessed by my dissatisfied, almost snide remarks, I wasn't too enamored of this book. A lot of that, to be fair, must be chalked up to my own personal prejudices. As a scholar, I like studying both casual and hardcore games, though the former my focus is more on player discourses than the games themselves, per se. But as a player, I far prefer the hardcore. And I think that may be because of my single player RPG background. I *do* prefer a good story with my game, even if that story presents itself mainly in terms of ambiance, as in Oblivion. As one of the casual designers, Margaret Wallace, admits, the interruptibility of the casual game means it's not really suitable for sustaining a long term narrative, and I find that inherently less interesting. So I have a vested interest in supporting the hardcore (but not the multiplayer FPSes, or the MMOs. See, even in "hardcore," there's distinctions).

And I should say that the interviews are really quite fascinating. Juul sticks to a pretty typical set of questions for the interview subjects, and those questions really illuminate his discussion points for the book proper: whether casual refers to players or games, whether all video games were originally casual games in the 70s, but drifted away from this form, whether there's a distinction between developing games for themselves and developing for a casual audience. The first question question is significant, because it asks designers to choose a side: focus on the game, or focus on the players. Most designers, like Juul himself, answer somewhere in between. The second question is significant, because if the answer is yes, then suddenly you have a different narrative happening. It's not about casual games suddenly appearing now, but a return to the originary form. My favorite answer to this one was also a yes and no; yes, some games were very simple, like Pac-Man, but others were so punishing--and designed to be punishing, to get the maximum quarter drain--that they can't be really defined as casual. And finally, the third question is significant, because it deals with the image of the designer. If the designer designs for themselves, they are still, in some way, auteurs, creating works of art they themselves appreciate. Or, alternatively, they are selfish jerks, ignoring a wide segment of the population. If they design games they wouldn't play themselves, they are more akin to business suits, catering to demographics. Or, alternatively, they are widening games to more than their immediate narrow circle.

I quite liked the interviews; I liked them more, in fact, than the conclusions Juul drew from them in the book proper. I suppose my main problem with the book is that just because its subject is casual gaming, it shouldn't feel like a casual encounter with the subject. And yet, it does. It's too short. 152 pages is almost nothing, especially when you consider the liberal use of large screenshots and diagrams. It's great to see such quality shots, but it doesn't help me shake the feeling that this book is artificially inflated at the cost of cheapening its subject. Take chapter 6, the chapter on social gaming in casual games. It's eight pages long. Eight pages (one of which is a page long cartoon strip Juul reprints) to describe the entirety of the social element of casual games. It seems like there should be more to say on the subject. (But while I remember, that cartoon strip does get points for being incredibly moving, and a great example of social aspects of gaming--see its original slideshow version here, Animal Crossing is Tragic.)

So to wrap up then: Excellent topic, excellent discussion. I'm just left with the feeling that something of greater substance is still waiting to be written on the subject.

Later Days.

Bibliophile: Clockwork Pirhannas

It's time, once again, for another round of judging books by their covers. Or rather, titles.

Iron Jaws: The Killing Power of Civil War Artillery.
I like that title-- "Iron Jaws." The Civil War stuff I could take or leave, but the idea of a giant shark made out of metal appeals to me. Steam-punk fish FTW.

One Breath: A Personal Journey with Asthma.
As someone who can barely breathe in the morning until he has his daily puff (If you haven't experienced this, it's essentially the same feeling that motivates "I NEED Coffee," with a slight but persistent fear that you might accidentally die before you get it.

Truth in numbers?: everything, according to Wikipedia.
A documentary on all things Wikipedian. Apparently, it delves into the ethics of the wiki-founder, Jimmy Wales--though it was facing accusations of being out of date almost since its inception.

Do the gods wear capes? : spirituality, fantasy, and superheroes. by Ben Saunders.
A philosophy book on super heroes? Sign me up.

Surfing life: surface, substructure and the commodification of the sublime. By Mark Stranger.
A consumer-based study of surfing? Finally, something that can shed new light on Point Break.

Selling sex short : the pornographic and sexological construction of women’s sexuality in the West. by Meagan Tyler.
I like books that look into how we make these categories for sex. That, or I'm a dirty old grad student. Take your pick.

Joss Whedon : conversations. A compilation of interviews from Joss Whedon. The perfect gift for someone who really, really liked Firefly.

Approximate Continuum Comics. By Lewis Trondheim.
I've been following Trondheim ever since I came across the Dungeon comics. He's a French comic book writer who combines cartoonish creatures (usually anthropomorphized ducks) with slice-of-life reflections. I think this book is an autobiography.

Beard fetish in early modern England : sex, gender, and registers of value. by Mark Albert Johnston.
There should be more books on beards.

The Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers. by Robert C. Martin.
It might be interesting, in terms of what it will say on the social side of a rather tech-based profession.

Epigenetics : a reference manual. by Jeffrey Craig.
I originally read this title as "Eugenics," and was momentarily startled. But no; it appears that "Epigenetics" refers to the study of changes to genes that can be passed on, but don't alter the actual composition of DNA.

Winged obsession : the pursuit of the world’s most notorious butterfly smuggler. By Jessica Speart.
How often do you see "notorious" and "butterfly smuggler" in the same sentence?

Okay, this turned out to be a much longer exercise than I thought. A lot of good books this time around--and a lot of holds on good books. I think all the librarians may know me by sight at this point.

Later Days.

Book List

Books I brought with me to Saskatchewan, in no particular order:

Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism by Ian Bogost
Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
Twilight by Stephanie Myers
Of Grammatology by Jacques Derrida
The Knight by Gene Wolfe
Rhetorical Criticism: Exploration and Practice by Sonja K. Foss

I was gonna bring copies of Pynchon's Gravity Rainbow, and Foster's Infinite Jest, but I didn't want to appear eclectic.

Later Days.