Friday Quotations: Professional Game Crickets

"Needless to say, it is no easy thing to make a living as a critic of anything, but video-game criticism may be the least remunerative of all. Why this should be is not a great mystery. Count off the number of people of your acquaintance inclined to read criticism at all; chances are lean that they will be the same people in your life as the ones playing video games. Yet certain aspects of video games makes them resistant to a traditional approach. One is that many games are not easily re-experiencable. If i am reviewing a book, I go back and look at my margin notes. An album, I set aside an hour and listen to it again. A film, I buy another ticket. If I am playing a game that takes dozens of hours to complete and has a limited number of save slots, much of it it is accessible only by playing through it again, the game itself structurally obligated to fight me every inch of the way. Another problem is that criticism needs a readily available way to connect to the aesthetic past of the form under appraisal, which is not always so easy with video games. Out-of-date hardware and out-of-print games can be immensely difficult to find. Say you want to check on something that happens about halfway through some older game. Not only do you have to find it, you will, once again, have to play it. Probably for hours. Possibly for days.

"One might argue that critical writing about games is difficult because most games are not able to withstand thoughtful criticism. For their part, game magazines publish game review after game review, but they tend to focus on providing consumers with a sense of whether their money will be well spent. Game magazine reviewers rarely ask: What aesthetic tradition does this game fall into? How does it make me feel while I'm playing it? What emotions does it engage with, and are they appropriate to the game's theme and mechanics? The reason game magazine reviewers do not ask these questions is almost certainly because game magazine owners would like to stay in business. But there is a lot of thoughtful, critical, engaging work being done on games. It is mostly found on the blogs and almost always done for free. I have my list of five game critics whose thoughts on the form I am most compelled by, and I am fairly certain that none of these writers is able to make anything resembling a living writing only about games. Certainly, this is the case for the top critics in plenty of other art forms--dance, sculpture, poetry--but none of these art forms are as omnipresent, widely consumed, or profitable as video games."
--Tom Bissell, Extra Lives: Why Games Matter.

Add to this list of woes the fact that many of those who would identify themselves as gamers are openly hostile to the notion of applying critical analysis to games. If you hear the phrase, "it's only a game," odds are about even you'll hear it from a game enthusiast almost as often as from their detractors.

Additionally: I'm really liking this book. It's a serious discussion of contemporary games and their ability to engage the player in new configurations of storytelling and emotional response. Also, it talks about the time he did cocaine and played GTA IV for 30 hours straight.

Later Days.

Travel Anxiety

I don't think I've mentioned this, but I've got a minor conference coming up this weekend in Montreal. I say minor in reference to my role in it--I'm giving a small 12 minute presentation during a roundtable session, on the subject of remediation in the video game Dead Rising (you remember Dead Rising? Of course you do. I couldn't work the insane 72 hour mode into the paper, but that's probably for the best.). The conference is on video games and story telling, and in terms of presence, it's got some heavy hitters, including lead people who worked on Heavy Rain (Quantic Dream), Assassin's Creed (Ubisoft), Mass Effect 2 (Bioware), The Graveyard (Tale of Tales) and Amnesia: The Dark Descent (Frictional Games), and scholars such as Nick Montfort and Bernard Perron (in fact, about 70% of my secondary sources for the paper comes from a book Perron edited, so... no pressure).

At this point, I don't really have any anxiety about the conference itself; the speakers will be great, and I have enough confidence in my own abilities to be sure that I won't embarrass myself too badly. And in one of those serendipitous things, I've been reading Tom Bissell's Extra Lives, (more on that some other time), so I'll be in the right mindset for a lot of game/narrative discussion. What fills me with anticipatory dread is the commute. While I've got a travel scholarship (so it won't be a financial burden), the trip itself is almost guaranteed to be unpleasant. Here's a tip for aspiring scholars: in a semester where you teach on Fridays and Mondays, don't go to weekend conferences. Because of transport schedules and the restrictions caused by my class times, I've got to catch a Greyhound bus at 6:30 that arrives in Montreal at 5:00 am, the first day of the conference. Ugh. Then it's a 5:00 pm via rail trip back on Sunday, with an arrival time of midnight, with a morning class to teach the next day. The only good thing is that ridiculous schedule means that I only have

But really, I hate every step of it. I hate planning to get to the bus station. I hate having to make my transfer. I hate worrying about my luggage during the transfer. Which is only a problem on the way back, admittedly, but a pressing one. The train trip from Montreal to Toronto requires me to check my suitcase, but at Toronto, I have to carry the bag, and have 15 minutes to retrieve it before I'm scheduled to depart. Maybe I'll try to pack the smaller bag inside the suitcase, and claim it as my carry-on. Bringing the full suitcase for a weekend trip is admittedly ridiculous in any case; I really need some smaller luggage. Or maybe I'll try taking the book bag instead of the suitcase (immediate downside: not exactly the best way to transport clothing).

It's when I'm traveling that I reluctantly, very reluctantly, acknowledge that I could really, really use a smart phone, or at least a laptop, or SOMETHING that allows me to stay connected. So much of the information I need--my presentation, the colloquium schedule, the train and bus itinerary, map of route between hotel and university--could then be at my fingertips, as well as anything else I need to look up on the fly. Otherwise, everything has to be prepared ahead of time, and if I miss anything vital, I'm out of luck. Consequently, every time I travel, I feel like I've jumped into a swimming pool without bothering to check if anyone's filled it with water.

Anyway, expect a full report on my return. Which in my case means "write a series of posts on it that never quite gets finished."

Later Days.

Book Review: My Life as a Night Elf Priest by Bonnie A. Nardi

We haven't done a book review in a while--not in fact, since the terrible Got Game, and that was back in June. I meant to provide the ol' thoughtful critical analysis to a number of books that were read between now and then: Bernard Wolfe's Limbo, Monfort and Bogost's Chasing the Beam, Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma, and about a half dozen Charles Stross books that I'm not entirely sure why I keep reading. But they were all borrowed books, and were returned before I got into the full-discourse mode. "But at my back I always hear /Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near," so let's seize the day and the review the book at hand.

That book being Bonnie A. Nardi's "My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of World of Warcraft." Despite the subtitle suggesting otherwise, the main title of the book had me expecting a rather bombastic account, something more akin to the game-journalist stuff I've been reading (Rossignol's "Gaming Life," which I've mentioned before, and the superb "Replay" by Tristan Dovovan) than game scholarship proper. The book is actually a nice mix of the two: it's got the personal experience that I appreciate in game journalism, and the scholarly foundation of game studies--well, not game studies per se, as I'll get into, but certainly academic scholarship.

As the title suggests, the focus of the book is an anthropological, ethnographical study of World of Warcraft. The book is divided into three sections. Section one explains first what WoW is and second what ethnography entails, especially when applied to videogames. Those familiar with either subject can skip the respective chapter without fear of missing much. The second section is a mix between theory and WoW accounts: John Dewey's notion of aesthetic experience as it applies to play, WoW as a new medium combining rules, software, performance, and image; and a discussion of WoW and work, through the theory of the magic circle. And the final section shifts things away from theory towards the interviews and accounts, with a discussion of WoW and Addiction, Theorycraft and Mods, Gender, and play practices in China. I think I found the chapter on Gender most interesting, but the chapter on Theorycraft and Mods demonstrates the most potential.

I've probably mentioned this before, but I'm not a big fan of the typical social science way of doing things, vis-a-vis quantitative testing analysis, where the user tries the product, fills out a form, and is interviewed about their experience. It's a great process to observe for studying the rhetoric of form-filling and interviews, but not so much for other things. I have a couple of problems with it. First, as someone with at least a little background in statistics, I have an ingrained distrust for the results of such analysis, knowing how easy it is to nudge them one way or another. Second, I suppose there's some measure of pure disciplinary distance: I'm trained towards close readings, not data compilation, and thinking in that way doesn't come easily to me. Third and more concretely, I have a big problem with extrapolating the results of said comparison in any meaningful fashion. If you interview a gamer about his (or her) reflection of a play experience--or attempt to find some meaningful cognitive result from their physiology during that experience--what you get is an account of their reaction in one controlled setting at a particular moment in their lives. Even if you increase the sample size and change the session lengths into months or years, it's still just a small glimpse, and really can't be used for more than a glimpse.

That's why I appreciate ethnography as an alternative. I like how it emerges the investigator into the community (and with the anonymity of online games, that immersion can work a little more smoothly than face-to-face communities). I like how it focuses on personal observation and material gathered over a long period of time. It affords exactly what Nardi offers here: a nice mix of theoretical application and hands-on accounts. It's still somewhat a problematic approach with an online game, however, because online games change so thoroughly over the course of their history. What does it mean to do an ethnographic study of WoW? Do you play it for a week? A year? It's certainly changed considerably between its inception in 2004 and 2011. If it's no longer the same game, how do you account for that? Nardi recognizes that these questions exist, but doesn't go far in answering them. Suffice to say, in her opinion, it's exactly this open-ended nature of the online game that makes its study so compelling.

On a personal note, just as I have a bit of a problem with ethnography, I also have a problem with online games. The deepest I've ever gone was about six months in Farmville and Mafia Wars, and neither of those are, comparatively speaking, very intense in terms of their social interactions--they're both rather removed affairs. I think there are two things keeping me from such games: first--I don't really like the idea of playing with other people all the time. This is partly because of my personal history--I started gaming on single player games, and it's what I'm used to. Giving up a measure of freedom to cooperate with others in a game seems more like work than play to me. And it's partly because I'm actually not very skillful in my gameplay--I tend to adopt a more "play over and over until it works" kind of style. I'm also very competitive, so the prospect of constantly losing isn't very appealing either. Second, and more practically, from everything I've heard about online games, they're extremely time-intensive, if you want to keep up with your guild and opponents. I devote quite enough time to games--at least with the single player, you can turn them off and resume them without falling behind a curve.

But I still admire online games for what they are: an excellent example of game rules fusing with player behavior. I find the texts resulting from social play like this to be absolutely fascinating, from EVE Online accounts to Let's Play marathons to Guild vids. And Nardi, for the most part, does well in applying some play theory to these behaviors. Personally, I would have preferred a little more applications of game studies proper--there's some slight mention of Juul and Salen and Zimmerman, but in general, the closest she comes to applying any game-related theories in depth is her application of the predecessor's stuff on the subject of play--Callois, Huizinga, and so forth. And while the third section is the most compelling, it does suffer a bit from lacking a clear focus beyond "and here's where WoW comes in on this subject." At the same time, one of my favorite bits come from when she compares how the Chinese government censored the game by forcing Blizzard to replace death-animation skeletons with gravestones to Christian review boards who criticize WoW's tacit enabling of witchcraft. Nardi's point is that "the disapproving gaze transcended national boundaries," but the implicit equivalency between Christian groups and the oppressive aspects of the Chinese government amused me. (What can I say? I'm easily amused.)

Finally, while a deeper examination of this topic is outside Nardi's scope, I think her discussion of theorycraft shows there's some untapped depth there. How and why players research to determine the hidden numerical balances and rules of a game is a very interesting sociological topic. It's not quite cheating, as you're not bringing to the game anything that isn't there to begin with. But at the same time, it's basically the equivalent of teaching yourself to count cards--if it's not cheating, then it's definitely frowned upon, socially.

So: it's a reasonably engaging book, and it gave me something to investigate further. That makes it Good Stuff.

Later Days.

Friday Quotations: And sometimes, I just use whatever book happens to be nearest

"Gaming's own hauntology is keenly felt in games where technologies of representation find themselves arrayed to combat the dead, or to navigate around them. Hauntology is not limited to the undead, but the appearance of the past 'out of joint' more generally, media's own ghosts. So, that the gaming hauntological is most visible along genre borders speaks to the centrality of horror to game culture and design, rather than to a literal connection between the specters of media and the specters of the dead. This natural, deep media historicity and the multiple ways in which it seeks to represent the dead are, above all, traces." --Christian McCrea, "Dead Media in Dead Rising, Siren, and Michigan: Report from Hell."

Later Days.

To live, perchance to pun. Aye, there's the rub.

Some of the best verbal jokes are the spontaneous, inadvertent ones. The ones that come from unplanned spoonerisms, unwitting malapropisms, and just total mispronounciations and misreadings. (For everyone who's familiar with the frequency I utter a mispronounciation: you're welcome. I'm very glad my social mortification is a constant source of enjoyment for you.) The non-premeditated joke is funny because its arrival seems like a gift, a small, unexpected windfall. It's nothing that you can't live without, but while it's there, one should appreciate its presence, like a rainbow or a good cup of tea. (On the other side of the scale, the planned joke becomes impressive through its sheer elaborateness, the length and scale required to reach the punchline. One of my favorites is a Spider Robinson story that constructs an entire sci-fi universe just to build to a colossally groan-worthy pun between two meanings of "note.")

The repression of such a misreading, then, is all the more frustrating. It feels like a burden, a rhetorical weight on your chest. There are many reasons for repressing a spontaneous joke, but most come down to social niceties. It's not the right place for that kind of statement. It's not the right moment. There's no one around you that would appreciate that kind of humor. You don't know the other person well enough and worry that you risk offending them. So you stifle the joke, make a mental note, and if you're lucky enough, you get to recount it to someone later. But more often then not, such jokes live and die in their immediate context; transposed into a foreign environment, they wither and die. But still, a part of me thinks, better to tell a joke that flops than to bury it, suppress it, and ponder what might have been. That, more than anything, convinces me of the value of Twitter: whatever else it may have done to the level of discourse, it gives us a forum for tossing our contextually unutterables into, a place where the joke, though perhaps still unappreciated, can at least be expressed. (There's still the potential for repercussions, of course. Tweet wisely, people.)

All of this is to say, I just misread someone's Facebook status as "freeballing" rather than "bailing" and gosh darn h-e-double toothpicks, that's funny. But I'm too chicken to face the potential, pretty much nonexistent consequences of posting that publicly. So I've dissected it here in the hopes that going to such ridiculous lengths will take the original joke from inadvertent misreading to elaborate amusement. Because nothing makes a joke funny like explaining it over and over.

Bonus game for people who have access to my friends list: Try and guess whose status I'm referring to! Don't guess here though. Keep it to yourself. And only to yourself. Repress your urge to tell it to anyone else. Ha! Now you know how it feels!

Later Days.

Gender: The Gathering Mob

Some time in the middle of November, I'll be teaching a week on Gender, Sex, and Sexualities as they relate to digital media studies. My first impulse was to go to the paper AR Stone wrote, Cross-Dressing Psychiatrist, concerning the hypothetical male psychiatrist who pretended to be a handicapped woman ohttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifnline. But then I thought I should really try to teach students about these issues using something that happened in the last decade, on a piece of digital technology that hasn't gone obsolete. (Seriously, MUDs sound awesome, but it's probably time to move on.) My next impulse was to do something on Second Life and online dating, but again, I think I could go for something more current.

So I popped "digital" and "dating" and "disaster" into the google search engine, and stumbled onto for the first time the "Magic Date" debacle.

For those who haven't been following this story every step of the way, it starts here:
http://gizmodo.com/5833787/my-brief-okcupid-affair-with-a-world-champion-magic-the-gathering-player
I can't be 100% positive, but I believe the first paragraph was added in later. That's fairly significant, since it presents a moral that's not as evident--to put it mildly--in the article proper. Basically, then, what we have is a woman who blogged about a bad date in a very public manner, and concluded that the problem on her end was that she didn't do enough googling to check up on him beforehand. That provides plenty of fodder for discussion right there.
Then there's the other version of the article, which looks at the man in a more confrontational manner:
http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2011/08/my-okcupid-affair-with-a-world-champion-magic-the-gathering-player
There were responses, of course. Balanced ones, like this, that summarize the argument and note that the man in question probably won't be lacking in dates in the near future:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/jon-finkel-magic-game-master-and-the-travails-of-dating-online/2011/08/30/gIQAHeIypJ_blog.html
And, uh, less reasonable ones, including one from Gizmodo:
http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2011/08/alyssa-bereznak-just-reminded-us-that-women-can-be-predators-online-too/
And then it descended into some pretty nasty namecalling against the woman until everything came full circle again:
http://www.starcitygames.com/magic/misc/22786_To_My_Someday_Daughter.html
Are you still here? My word. Look at the staying power on you! Good show!

Ahem. Essentially, in this final, long article, Tait writes a spirited rebuke towards the woman's detractors, in the guise of a letter to his imagined daughter. He argues that the real villain of the piece isn't a woman who found Magic off-putting, but the gamer culture that lurched forward to attack her for going after one of their own.

My feelings? ....Mixed. First: from the top, it's Not Cool to post the real name of a bad date recipient, especially one whose faults were as relatively benign as this gentleman's. And to complain about someone's nerdiness on a site titled "Gizmodo" is either a very poor reading of your audience, or, as some have mentioned, deliberate trolling. Finally, in the original article, I think accusing Jon of actually lying is a little far--if you think you wouldn't want to date someone of a certain profession, you should probably, you know, ask them what their profession is before going on a date. At the same time, judging from Tait's image captures, the response has clearly gone too far--calling Bereznak is also Not Cool. Here's another rule of thumb for you: when you're swearing at strangers, you're too emotionally invested. That means it's time to let the keyboard cool, so to speak.

The bigger issue for me personally is Tait's argument that gamer culture is deeply misogynist. Because, well, it's hard to argue. Comics and gaming are two of the bigger hobby passions of my life, and they both center rather predominantly on white male fantasies (well, superhero comics do, and those are the majority that I read). But just as not all games are the same, neither are all players or readers; yes, I've played Final Fantasy X-2, but I've also read (random example) Fun Home and Fay Weldon. As a gamer, I can keep my beliefs and personality separate from the games I play, and from the cultural spaces I inhabit. That doesn't mean I pretend those elements aren't there; far to the contrary, it means I need to examine them whenever they rise, and confront them head on--that, in my mind, is what being a scholar's about. (And, you know, part being a responsible adult who lives and functions in the world.)

I'm not even going to touch the Nice Guy comment. If you do want to pursue that particular thought, I can recommend another superlong (but good) discussion: here.

One could make the case that I'm responding too personally to this issue. But I'd argue that the problem is that people aren't making this personal enough. It's personal in the sense that everyone involved seems to feel like they've been personally attacked, but I think most of those talking have forgotten that they're dealing with real people too. That is, rather than responding to each other as individual persons, they're responding to labels: the Magic "dweeb," the shallow "bitch", the "Male keyboard warriors, many with the welts of social ostracization still open and weeping upon their hairy backs" (all right, he gets points for creative imagery). Personally, I think labelling people is almost always the wrong way to go. We don't fit into categories; we exhibit and react behaviors that propel us through categories (if we touch them at all). We don't just have the potential to change, we are changing, constantly, and the focus should be in changing in positive ways (and deciding what that means) rather than trying to classify and pigeonhole the people around us into labels we're comfortable with.

Or to rephrase in a different way: don't listen to their moralizing argument, listen to MY moralizing argument.

Sigh. At least the digital aspect is front and center: this conversation wouldn't still be going on in this way and this form without the online component, and the ability to instantly reply and quickly spread information. So it'll make a nice class discussion, at least.

One last comment: on one site or another, it was argued that she was being facetious when she said he took her to a play based on Dahmer on their first date. For full disclosure, I feel I must mention I did once take a girl to Sweeney Todd (Burton version) on a first date. Yeah. Good thing she wasn't a blogger, I guess.
Later Days.

Adventures in Upper Ashdell Reserve

(This is going to be a bit awkward, as, given my commitment to semi-anonymity, I can't reveal the actual name of the city I'm in. And I feel like I've run the old "Blank" joke into the ground, so it's time for a new joke. Using a random city name generator, I came up with the name "Upper Ashdell Reserve," so I'll just use that instead of the city's real name. I'm sure I won't get tired of typing Upper Ashdell Reserve every single time.)

I was out with some friends last night, and one of them, originally from Toronto, was explaining that he was starting to feel like a tourist when he went back there--Upper Ashdell Reserve was his home now. At that moment, I realized I felt the same way. And the biggest surprise was that it wasn't a surprise. The moment wasn't a big revelation, or life-defining moment. It was like I'd been handed a piece of information that was both ordinary and undeniable: The capital of Yugoslavia was Belgrade. Germany has 81.8 million inhabitants. You can get random geographic-related facts from Wikipedia. And I live in the Upper Ashdell Reserve.

It certainly seems like it should be a big deal. I still take a lot of my personal identity from the fact that I'm from small town Saskatchewan, but now it's a matter of being originally from rather than currently from. And I know I won't be in Upper Ashdell Reserve forever, but for here and now... this is home.

Later Days.