Gaming Matters: Art, Science, Magic, and the Computer Game Medium
168
Gaming Matters: Art, Science, Magic, and the Computer Game Medium
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Overview
In Gaming Matters, McAllister and coauthor Judd Ruggill turn from the broader discussion of video game rhetoric to study the video game itself as a medium and the specific features that give rise to games as similar and yet diverse as Pong, Tomb Raider, and Halo. In short, what defines the computer game itself as a medium distinct from all others? Each chapter takes up a different fundamental characteristic of the medium. Games are:
• Idiosyncratic, and thus difficult to apprehend using the traditional tools of media study
• Irreconcilable, or complex to such a degree that developers, players, and scholars have contradictory ways of describing them
• Boring, and therefore obligated to constantly make demands
on players’ attention
• Anachronistic, or built on age-old tropes and forms of play
while ironically bound to the most advanced technologies
• Duplicitous, or dependent on truth-telling rhetoric even when they are about fictions, fantasies, or lies
• Work, or are often better understood as labor rather than play
• Alchemical, despite seeming all-too mechanical or predictable
Video games are now inarguably a major site of worldwide cultural production.
Gaming Matters will neither flatter game enthusiasts nor embolden game detractors in their assessments. But it will provide a vocabulary through which games can be discussed in academic settings and will create an important foundation for future academic discourse.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817317379 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 05/11/2011 |
| Edition description: | First Edition, First Edition |
| Pages: | 168 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Gaming Matters
Art, Science, Magic, and the Computer Game MediumBy Judd Ethan Ruggill Ken S. McAllister
The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 2011 The University of Alabama PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-1737-9
Chapter One
Idiosyncrasy
[E]verything said from the angle of a real collector is whimsical. — Walter Benjamin, Illuminations
Admittedly, it is a little odd to begin a scholarly book with an epigraph suggesting that all the text to follow will be whimsical. After all, whimsy runs counter to the very ethos of scholarly publishing, where rigor, vigor, and methodicalness—not play, ataraxia, and caprice—are the touchstones of truth and respectability. And yet we cannot in good conscience deny the fact that we often speak whimsically in this book, because we are ineluctably "real collectors" in the most Benjaminian sense of the term. We have spent more than a decade building one of the largest computer game archives in the United States. It houses hundreds of game systems, thousands of games, and a nearly uncountable number of peripheral materials, including books, magazines, souvenirs, and other game-related paraphernalia.
In contrast to other large collections, such as Game Informer magazine's venerable "Game Vault," ours is an open assemblage that is used by scholars of all levels—from schoolchildren to endowed chairs—from around the world. As such, it exists in perennial flux, never quite moving beyond a "disorder of crates that have been wrenched open, the air saturated with the dust of wood, the floor covered with torn paper"—the sights and smells of a library being unpacked (Benjamin, Illuminations 59). Both new and antique artifacts are routinely added and loaned out, shifting the topography and textuality of the archive in a dance that tends to thwart the "mild boredom of order" that Benjamin talks about so poignantly, and yet in the process reveals the surprising breadth and nuance that computer games in toto have achieved. It is from the middle of this dynamic assemblage—from the deep and diverse knowledge of computer games that we have gained from collecting and studying them in their manifold permutations and associations over the past years—that we offer this book, a sustained, cohesive, and steadfastly theoretical examination of the interplay between the constitutive elements and meaning-making processes of the computer game medium.
The whimsy we speak with, therefore, is not only meant to evoke the surficial play of our archive and the tactical play of collection, but also the diverse and multivalent play at the heart of computer games themselves. Though computer games represent the indulgence in, distillation of, and attempt to tame the wildness of play and its pleasures, they are nevertheless intrinsically idiosyncratic (as, indeed, are all media). How could they not be, when the play acts they rely on and enable are themselves equivocal? As inveterate play theorist Brian Sutton-Smith explains about the phenomenon of play in general, "We all play occasionally, and we all know what playing feels like. But when it comes to making theoretical statements about what play is, we fall into silliness. There is little agreement among us, and much ambiguity" (1). There are simply too many different kinds of play, too many different kinds of players, and—if noted play theorist Johan Huizinga is to be believed—too many different kinds of cultural and ideological processes informed by the act of play generally, for the structures, meanings, and experiences of computer games specifically to be anything but idiosyncratic.
Even were this not the case and play were somehow something physically, culturally, and intellectually uniform, computer games likely would still be both discrete and peculiar because the medium is so plastic. We will expand on our understanding of "medium" later in this chapter, but for now suffice it to say that not only do computer game aesthetics and technologies evolve regularly, even geometrically, but the medium itself openly invites exploration and expression. While games are rule-based, there are no inviolable rules for designing and building them. Games can look, sound, and play in ways limited only by taste, imagination, and technology. The medium is, for all intents and purposes, a sculptor's blank from which developers can carve whatever they want, however they want.
This plasticity explains both why there are so many different kinds of games, and why it is not uncommon for new kinds to emerge every year (e.g., LocoRoco and Killer 7). It also explains why postmorta—detailed explanations by developers about the creation of specific games—figure prominently in trade magazines and industry websites. To insiders, learning about how colleagues have manipulated the medium successfully or not is edifying, thrilling, and cathartic. We thus speak whimsically not only because as "real collectors" we cannot help but do so, but also because the computer game medium demands it. Play is the language of computer games, and games are the idiosyncratic grammatical response to that language.
Play—or in this case, "plays," for there are a number of different kinds of play involved here—notwithstanding, we also speak whimsically out of functional necessity. Despite often seeming otherwise, even the simplest of computer games are inordinately complex, engaging both the humans who play them and the machines on which they run in nested and multifarious ways. Indeed, the computer game medium is quintessentially transdisciplinary; it sits at the nexus of engineering, mathematics, hermeneutics, logic, kinesthesia, narratology, performativity, art, and many other ways of seeing, under stand ing, and interacting. Exploring the interplay among the constitutive elements and meaning-making processes of the medium, therefore, is as much about acquiescing to complexity as it is about distilling it. Computer games exist because of the élan of a multiplicity of perspectives, not the hegemony of just one. They are synergistic artifacts whose nuance really only begins to make sense when approached in kind.
Fortunately, whimsy is an avenue to synergy. It offers access to openness—to (relatively) untethered exploration and experimentation—and thus to ad hoc methodological and discursive combinations. Whimsy provides the epistemological flexibility not only to take computer games on, but also to take them on in situ—that is, to pursue archaeologies, genealogies, and analogies based on what particular games in particular situations have to say about the medium particularly. Since the goal of this book is to attend to the computer game medium particularly, whimsy makes an ideal fulcrum. It enables a critical approach based on computer games' own cultural and mediated languages, as well as providing the leverage to support the theoretical weight of an interdisciplinary tool set.
Whimsy is also an avenue to good-natured provocation, which is key to the formation of new and unusual syntheses of knowledge production. Paradigmatic shifts, to borrow science philosopher Thomas Kuhn's famous phrase, are frequently the result of conscious prodding, for "the decision to employ a particular piece of [critical or instrumental] apparatus and to use it in a particular way carries an assumption that only certain sorts of circumstances will arise" (59). Oftentimes the only way to move beyond such assumptions is by playing the devil's advocate, a role we expressly take on here because this book is not meant to provide all the answers, or even necessarily many of them. On the contrary, it is intended primarily as a playful prompt, as an initiation (not a conclusion) to a conversation about the complexities of the computer game medium. Computer games have been one of the most powerful (not to mention maligned) cultural forces in the United States since the mid-1970s. They have been invoked by presidents to justify foreign policy decisions, by social psychologists and media watchdog groups to explain increases in youth violence, by senators to revivify questions of censorship, 15 and by the armed forces to recruit and train soldiers. Computer games have also proven to be a puissant economic and pedagogical force, moving billions of dollars through the global economy each year and stimulating the creation of game studies programs at all levels of academe.
And yet the scholarly community knows relatively little about the dynamics of the medium, at least formally. Despite ferment in the field, computer game studies remains largely inchoate, having only recently begun to produce academic journals and consistently publish scholarly books. This incipience is especially striking given the fact that the medium has existed since the beginning of the 1950s and was conceptualized even earlier (as the Goldsmith and Mann patent attests). Our intent is to push at the field's inchoateness deliberately and provocatively. We want to roil and then harness computer game studies' creative and critical juices for the purpose of clarifying the complex and protean nature of the medium. As media theorist Marshall McLuhan mused more than forty years ago, "the medium is the message" (or at least a significant part of the message). Not knowing what constitutes the medium of the computer game—even in the broadest terms—means not being able to fully decipher the messages it embodies and evokes, and thus not being able to thoroughly understand and analyze its cultural, economic, and pedagogical import.
THE COMPUTER GAME AS MEDIUM
There is yet a curious but tangible limen to the computer game, as if scholars were unsettled by the medium's idiosyncrasy (we certainly are). Some have circumnavigated this confounding condition by focusing on the large-scale and transformative implications of "new media" more generally (e.g., Bolter and Grusin; Manovich). Others have taken a nadiral approach, working to reduce game idiosyncrasy to its most inornate and fundamental elements, e.g., rules, unit operations, play mechanics, and so on (e.g., Juul, Half-Real; Bogost, Unit Operations; Galloway, Gaming). Both approaches have yielded remarkable insight into the atomic workings of the medium and the impact of those workings on human communication and communicative processes. In so doing, however, they have also unintentionally created an aporia: in the field there is a profound vision of what games can be in the grandest, most abstract sense, and a similarly deep understanding of what games are in the most concrete, distilled sense, but little that works to link the two together. How is it that the same rules and technologies can produce unbridled and critically acclaimed fun in one constellation (Halo 3) and an absolute, virtually unplayable disaster in another (Haze)? What are the mechanisms by which "unit operations" (to use Ian Bogost's insightful theoretical apparatus) percolate, generating recursive, discursive, and productive syntheses that transform mere algorithmicism into immersive, memorable experience?
The answer, we contend, is magic: computer games are magical things in both the occultic and legerdemainic senses of the term. On the one hand, they are careful constructions designed to hide their constructedness and create a sense of wonder, and on the other hand, that wonder often transcends the materials used to produce it, taking on an inexplicable, even ungraspable quality. More simply, computer games are both machinic and organic, measured as well as accidental. This is not only true of games, in fact, but to some extent of all media: as visual theorist W. J. T. Mitchell explains, "A medium is more than the materials of which it is composed. It is ... a material social practice, a set of skills, habits, techniques, codes and conventions" and the constantly shifting articulations between these things (203; emphasis in original).
This dynamism, this magic, seems particularly salient in emerging media—perhaps because they have yet to be codified by tradition or tamed by repetition and sedimentation—and is likely part of the reason these media prove exciting, vexing, and unsettling to scholars. There is a distinct challenge in attempting to corral the pullulating expressive forms of the information age, for example, particularly when, like all magics, these forms reveal different powers at different times to different audiences. For Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, the magic of emerging media lies in the act of recycling and refashioning: "[A] medium is that which remediates. It is that which appropriates the techniques, forms, and social significance of other media and attempts to rival or refashion them in the name of the real" (98). For Lev Manovich, by contrast, the magic is in connection and counting; he argues that unlike new media, traditional or analog media are mostly "continuous" and "never quantified" (28). For Peter Lunenfeld, the key is the placelessness of the moment: "the very term 'new media' is ambiguous. Is video still a 'new' medium? Are operating systems media? Is hypertext a different medium than the electronic book? In the end, the phrase 'new media' turns out to be yet another placeholder, this time for whatever we eventually agree to name these cultural productions" ("Screen Grabs" xvi). And for Mark B. N. Hansen, there is magic in "embodied experience" (3), in the unique framing of a technology—and the data it contains—by a particular person.
We see the magic of the emerging medium of the computer game in the specific transformation of its atomic processes into macroscopic phenomena. To call on the automobile as a metaphor, we see magic more than logic or science in the ways in which the fundamental structures of an engine—steel, rubber, aluminum, petrochemicals—combine to produce phenomena as vast, intricate, and life altering as urban transportation systems. In other words, we see magic in the fact that there is magic at all. As a result, we offer this book as an exploration of the occultic, legerdemainic, and ludic magic of the computer game medium. In so doing, our goals are to (1) stir up and sift through the strange discursive, economic, and industrial sediments that have settled thus far upon the computer game medium as it has precipitated into its position in contemporary culture; (2) illuminate the many and unusual connections between the medium, the industry that produces it, the consumers who buy it, and the role of the academy in interpreting and historicizing it; and (3) encourage concentrated exploration of the medium and its relationship to millennial methods of meaning-making.
ARGUING FOR THE COMPUTER GAME MEDIUM
As we have noted above, this book is very much intended as a playful, provocative, and interdisciplinary exploration of the computer game medium. In it we argue this medium is:
• Idiosyncratic and thus difficult to apprehend through disciplinary ways of seeing;
• Complex to the point that developers, players, and scholars have developed discrete and often contradictory ways of describing it;
• Inherently boring and therefore obligated to constantly hail players to keep them interested;
• Built on tropes and play techniques of the past while at the same time bound to the most current technologies;
• Dependent on rhetorics of truth despite being fundamentally determined by fictions, fantasies, and lies;
• Better understood in terms of work than play;
• Enigmatic despite seeming mechanical and predictable.
These seven qualities—which we summarize with the designations "idiosyncrasy," "irreconcilability," "aimlessness," "anachronism," "duplicity," "work," and "alchemy"—are fundamental to the medium, structuring its artifacts and effects in staggeringly diverse yet strangely consistent ways.
In the chapters that follow, we work at times exactingly and at others provocatively to proffer a series of prompts for probing the enigmata underpinning the computer game's material social practice. We draw from a variety of critical, cultural, technical, economic, artistic, and scientific epistemologies and methodologies in an effort to capture the complexity and diversity of this practice. This is not to say, however, that we reach across fields randomly or cavalierly; the book is not an exercise in dilettantism. Rather, we harness the critical approaches we do as a way to most directly unpack the particular qualities of the medium we focus on. In the case of game "aimlessness" (chapter 3), for example, this means drawing on and intertwining historical materialism, cognitive science, and human-computer interaction, for these are the arenas most prominently in play in terms of how computer games hail players to action. In the case of game "duplicity" (chapter 5), by contrast, we draw from rhetoric, graphic and industrial design, and engineering as a way to get at how the computer game medium lies at every turn.
In an effort to help clarify our interdisciplinary methodology, we offer the following chapter summaries.
CHAPTER 2: IRRECONCILABILITY
One of the distinctive characteristics of the computer game medium is the discourse that surrounds it. While not technically part of the medium per se, computer game discourse nonetheless influences how games are produced, consumed, and make meaning, which is to say that to a considerable extent discourse both shapes and is shaped by the medium. This discourse reveals in wonderful detail the complexity of the computer game medium itself, because it illuminates the multiplicity of ways the medium can be maneuvered through circuits of power, from relatively wooden arguments between children and parents over the merits of computer games to blistering polemics propounded by pundits on Capitol Hill.
A case in point: computer game developers, players, and scholars each describe the medium in discrete and frequently contradictory ways. Early in the history of commercial computer games, for example, console manufacturers often advertised their products as "interactive" or "intelligent" television. In fact, the first 16-bit game console was called the Intellivision (1980, Mattel), and in a national ad campaign designed to overdetermine the system as a kind of über-television, the famously urbane and intellectual George Plimpton hawked the console expressly as "intelligent television" ("Atari vs. Intellivision" 1981).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Gaming Matters by Judd Ethan Ruggill Ken S. McAllister Copyright © 2011 by The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments vii
1 Idiosyncrasy 1
2 Irreconcilability 16
3 Aimlessness 32
4 Anachronism 50
5 Duplicity 63
6 Work 82
7 Alchemy 97
Appendix: Gameography 107
Notes 121
Works Cited 139
Index 149