One final note: I am not very good at web-publishing, ever. I tried to get a sort of Commodore 64 thing going on this journal, but any input on the design of this site would be welcomed. And, to quote SKG, "Btw, there's not much incentive to post comments if no one follows up.
Hasn't anyone else heard of RSS feeds? ;)" By all means do subscribe to Gamelit's feed -- it's part of why I opted for Blogger.
10.28.2007
Films, Obviously
Jeremy had one last point in his email (this is the fourth installment of four drawn from an email conversation -- don't miss the earlier ones on FF, gender/violence, and cyberpunk/Ender's Game):
> In
> film, obviously, the choices are rich, from TRON and The Last
> Starfighter to eXistenZ, etc. - but I'm not sure if the list you are
> looking for involves film.
For the purposes of my class, I'm already pushing my department's envelope a bit to include games as required reading; they give me a minimum of course materials that must be read -- one of the reasons The Matrix got pulled at the last minute and replaced with Fight Club.
But perhaps the crux of the conversation I'm trying to get started on this journal lies in the fact that academic considerations of gaming are almost uniformly contained in film departments, or rhetoric/anthro/sociology. New Media programs, few and far between already, seem to focus primarily on museum pieces -- and as the canon of new media hardens, it seems to leave out the lion's share of popular material (as canons so often do)...
With that said, what makes it a given that [video] games are better approached through filmic, as opposed to literary, methodologies? Why are there so many more game narratives told through film/TV/anime/etc ... or at least more successful ones?
Mainly: much of the revolutionary capacity of game narratives lies in their replacement of a reader (passive, receptive) by a user or player (active, aggressive). But the viewer of a film is surely as passive and receptive as a reader... right?
> In
> film, obviously, the choices are rich, from TRON and The Last
> Starfighter to eXistenZ, etc. - but I'm not sure if the list you are
> looking for involves film.
For the purposes of my class, I'm already pushing my department's envelope a bit to include games as required reading; they give me a minimum of course materials that must be read -- one of the reasons The Matrix got pulled at the last minute and replaced with Fight Club.
But perhaps the crux of the conversation I'm trying to get started on this journal lies in the fact that academic considerations of gaming are almost uniformly contained in film departments, or rhetoric/anthro/sociology. New Media programs, few and far between already, seem to focus primarily on museum pieces -- and as the canon of new media hardens, it seems to leave out the lion's share of popular material (as canons so often do)...
With that said, what makes it a given that [video] games are better approached through filmic, as opposed to literary, methodologies? Why are there so many more game narratives told through film/TV/anime/etc ... or at least more successful ones?
Mainly: much of the revolutionary capacity of game narratives lies in their replacement of a reader (passive, receptive) by a user or player (active, aggressive). But the viewer of a film is surely as passive and receptive as a reader... right?
Cyberpunk redux / Ender's Game
Gibson, Stephenson, et al. are among the fiction writers who have had the most influence on the way games now tell stories -- but in their stories, as Jeremy points out below, there's never any actual gaming, per se. Cyberspace = gaming in some ways; in some ways it doesn't. Can't put my finger on why.
Jeremy suggests Ender's Game and related texts -- I have recently learned that everyone has read Ender's Game but me -- alas, too late to add it to my syllabus for next semester. But there's certainly room for "Dogfight" to go into my course reader for the spring (along with "Burning Chrome").
This is the third installment (of four) of the email exchange between Berkeley and Santa Barbara on the subject (see previous posts).
> You
> are looking for specifically fiction themed around or talking about
> video games, right? Probably the most influential example in science
> fiction would have to be Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, which
> contains three important games - two of which are video games. A good
> companion piece to that is the Corey Doctorow short story Anda's Game,
> which is more themed around World of Warcraft style MMOGs (and in
> particular gold farming) than adventure games and 3D space combat
> simulators.
> Gibson's
> and Stephenson's flagship early works (Neuromancer and Snow Crash) both
> involve cyberspace, but they aren't clearly about games per se,
> although both involve many scenes that are clearly influenced by
> game-like metaphors, in particular the Case's time spent in Molly's
> rig, the Kung run, and Hero's use of the gargoyle HUD. The key short
> story there you are probably looking for however is from Gibson's
> Burning Chrome collection - Dogfight, by Michael Swanwick and William
> Gibson, which centers around the operant conditioning and military
> training aspects of video games, and involves a war vet and a convict
> playing a tournament game in an arcade.
Jeremy suggests Ender's Game and related texts -- I have recently learned that everyone has read Ender's Game but me -- alas, too late to add it to my syllabus for next semester. But there's certainly room for "Dogfight" to go into my course reader for the spring (along with "Burning Chrome").
This is the third installment (of four) of the email exchange between Berkeley and Santa Barbara on the subject (see previous posts).
> You
> are looking for specifically fiction themed around or talking about
> video games, right? Probably the most influential example in science
> fiction would have to be Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, which
> contains three important games - two of which are video games. A good
> companion piece to that is the Corey Doctorow short story Anda's Game,
> which is more themed around World of Warcraft style MMOGs (and in
> particular gold farming) than adventure games and 3D space combat
> simulators.
> Gibson's
> and Stephenson's flagship early works (Neuromancer and Snow Crash) both
> involve cyberspace, but they aren't clearly about games per se,
> although both involve many scenes that are clearly influenced by
> game-like metaphors, in particular the Case's time spent in Molly's
> rig, the Kung run, and Hero's use of the gargoyle HUD. The key short
> story there you are probably looking for however is from Gibson's
> Burning Chrome collection - Dogfight, by Michael Swanwick and William
> Gibson, which centers around the operant conditioning and military
> training aspects of video games, and involves a war vet and a convict
> playing a tournament game in an arcade.
Videogames are for boys. Boys and guns.
More of the aforementioned conversation:
> -We could bring the whole gender argument into it - which would be a
> great reason to add Fight Club to the book list. Are there any girl
> themed video games? Maybe, like, one or two. What is a girl-themed
> video game, anyway?
Consider the big reveal at the end of the first Metroid -- if you beat it,
your character takes off her helmet and space suit and you learn that
*you've been playing as a woman the whole time*. Pretty massive in its
assumptions about the player audience.
> What does this tell us about how videogames add to
> the rhetoric of what gender should and shouldn't be? To take it 15
> steps further in a crazy direction, you could read excerpts from the US
> Army Survival Manual on shooting guns, or a boxing or martial arts
> manual, and explain the relation between fake and real "masculine"
> heroism.
I'll bet the famous recruiting video game, America's Army, will have
valuable stuff for that too... maybe it's worth teaching that alongside
GTA.
> -We could bring the whole gender argument into it - which would be a
> great reason to add Fight Club to the book list. Are there any girl
> themed video games? Maybe, like, one or two. What is a girl-themed
> video game, anyway?
Consider the big reveal at the end of the first Metroid -- if you beat it,
your character takes off her helmet and space suit and you learn that
*you've been playing as a woman the whole time*. Pretty massive in its
assumptions about the player audience.
> What does this tell us about how videogames add to
> the rhetoric of what gender should and shouldn't be? To take it 15
> steps further in a crazy direction, you could read excerpts from the US
> Army Survival Manual on shooting guns, or a boxing or martial arts
> manual, and explain the relation between fake and real "masculine"
> heroism.
I'll bet the famous recruiting video game, America's Army, will have
valuable stuff for that too... maybe it's worth teaching that alongside
GTA.
The neverending Final Fantasy
I chatted with a former student recently; he chatted with his former instructor recently; our conversation moved to email and has loosely orbited the FF series. I'll begin with the FF content from my most recent response, with the previous email in italics as I go:
> Final Fantasy VII has the best plotline of any video game ever made --
Except for Final Fantasy VI.
I feel more familiar with the installments in the FF series than with
almost any other text -- but each one is self-consciously massive, and
also takes part in a massive tradition (see below), and so resists
inclusion in a course syllabus that doesn't focus on FF almost entirely.
That being said, Chrono Trigger, another extremely well-plotted RPG by
Square, was almost included on my list (and still may be) -- it's got many
of the benefits of an FF installment, but it's shorter and more
self-contained.
> and it comes straight from ancient mythology. You
> could read a fan fiction/novel adaptation of Final Fantasy VII...
Literary analysis of fanfic is EXACTLY where literary study needs to be
going right now (but it can't do so effectively until a capitalistic
system stops governing literary "quality" -- seriously). I tried to dig
into it in chapter two of my senior thesis back when, but it ain't easy.
> alongside my personal favorite, The Hero With a Thousand Faces by
> Joseph Campbell, and discuss the hero archetypes in the game. I know
> Red XIII comes straight out of Native American (eh, culturally
> appropriated Native American) mythology, and Vincent is "the shadow"
> straight out of Carl Jung.
I'll see your Jung and raise you Freud (um, Sephiroth?)... but this is to
say nothing of the (tenuous but fun) connections between FFVII and Hamlet:
a brooding, melancholic, discarded blond son is paralyzed by his own
inability to know himself, suffers from serious (serious) mommy issues, is
betrayed by a friend who acts as a spy, and loves but loses a pure
virginal sweetheart who is constantly surrounded by flowers until her body
sinks down into the deep... yeah.
> -And finally, you could take anything by Emile Durkheim, or How the
> Other Half Lives, and apply it to Final Fantasy VII in Shinra's
> post-industrialized world. Hey, you could even relate it to modern
> Calcutta!
FF games invite such comparisons. Conspicuously. Part of this is the
growth of RPG's from the pastiche of multicultural mythological references
in D&D culture...
But in FF's case, starting with FFVI, the references congeal around what
Western culture considers *legit* -- and I think there's kind of a pattern
to it.
FFVI: opera. Events in an opera house form the pivot of the plot, but
themes and plot points from the opera-within-a-game continually bleed out
into the rest of the game. The storyline itself is especially *tragic*
(romantic leaps from cliffs, for one).
FFVII: sci-fi/futurism. While not "legit" in as traditional a sense as
opera, the foray into dystopian narrative (Midgar) and especially *filmic*
moments (Cloud's and Aeris's "date" at the casino) which are built on
camera angles and dialogue, not to mention particularly cyberpunk
plotlines (Cloud's cross-dressing his way into the mafia; Shinra and Cait
Sith and the Turks), jacks into the whole world of Philip K. Dick, William
Gibson, Neil Stephenson, the Wachowski Bros, etc etc. These are beginning
to be recognized as legit by the academy, but are already big guns in
Hollywood.
FFVIII: romantic film. Complete with a cast of *only* good-looking,
early-20-year-old actors, an Armaggedon-style space scene, a prom, love
letters, a rivalry to win Rinoa's heart (and to get her to wear your
necklace), a B-story about "how I met your mother in a hotel bar", etc
etc. And most importantly -- a pop song that plays at just the right
moment.
FFIX: the most interesting of these -- it refers to FF itself. Each game
thus far has had, at its core, some "legit" genre as a governing source of
references -- FFIX self-consciously uses *previous FF games* as its genre
-- and in doing so, asserts FF's place among the "legit" forms.
After that, FFX's makers actually go on record as conscious of their own
legitimizing power -- they use specifically eastern/Asian genres to help
canonize these in fantasy.
> Final Fantasy VII has the best plotline of any video game ever made --
Except for Final Fantasy VI.
I feel more familiar with the installments in the FF series than with
almost any other text -- but each one is self-consciously massive, and
also takes part in a massive tradition (see below), and so resists
inclusion in a course syllabus that doesn't focus on FF almost entirely.
That being said, Chrono Trigger, another extremely well-plotted RPG by
Square, was almost included on my list (and still may be) -- it's got many
of the benefits of an FF installment, but it's shorter and more
self-contained.
> and it comes straight from ancient mythology. You
> could read a fan fiction/novel adaptation of Final Fantasy VII...
Literary analysis of fanfic is EXACTLY where literary study needs to be
going right now (but it can't do so effectively until a capitalistic
system stops governing literary "quality" -- seriously). I tried to dig
into it in chapter two of my senior thesis back when, but it ain't easy.
> alongside my personal favorite, The Hero With a Thousand Faces by
> Joseph Campbell, and discuss the hero archetypes in the game. I know
> Red XIII comes straight out of Native American (eh, culturally
> appropriated Native American) mythology, and Vincent is "the shadow"
> straight out of Carl Jung.
I'll see your Jung and raise you Freud (um, Sephiroth?)... but this is to
say nothing of the (tenuous but fun) connections between FFVII and Hamlet:
a brooding, melancholic, discarded blond son is paralyzed by his own
inability to know himself, suffers from serious (serious) mommy issues, is
betrayed by a friend who acts as a spy, and loves but loses a pure
virginal sweetheart who is constantly surrounded by flowers until her body
sinks down into the deep... yeah.
> -And finally, you could take anything by Emile Durkheim, or How the
> Other Half Lives, and apply it to Final Fantasy VII in Shinra's
> post-industrialized world. Hey, you could even relate it to modern
> Calcutta!
FF games invite such comparisons. Conspicuously. Part of this is the
growth of RPG's from the pastiche of multicultural mythological references
in D&D culture...
But in FF's case, starting with FFVI, the references congeal around what
Western culture considers *legit* -- and I think there's kind of a pattern
to it.
FFVI: opera. Events in an opera house form the pivot of the plot, but
themes and plot points from the opera-within-a-game continually bleed out
into the rest of the game. The storyline itself is especially *tragic*
(romantic leaps from cliffs, for one).
FFVII: sci-fi/futurism. While not "legit" in as traditional a sense as
opera, the foray into dystopian narrative (Midgar) and especially *filmic*
moments (Cloud's and Aeris's "date" at the casino) which are built on
camera angles and dialogue, not to mention particularly cyberpunk
plotlines (Cloud's cross-dressing his way into the mafia; Shinra and Cait
Sith and the Turks), jacks into the whole world of Philip K. Dick, William
Gibson, Neil Stephenson, the Wachowski Bros, etc etc. These are beginning
to be recognized as legit by the academy, but are already big guns in
Hollywood.
FFVIII: romantic film. Complete with a cast of *only* good-looking,
early-20-year-old actors, an Armaggedon-style space scene, a prom, love
letters, a rivalry to win Rinoa's heart (and to get her to wear your
necklace), a B-story about "how I met your mother in a hotel bar", etc
etc. And most importantly -- a pop song that plays at just the right
moment.
FFIX: the most interesting of these -- it refers to FF itself. Each game
thus far has had, at its core, some "legit" genre as a governing source of
references -- FFIX self-consciously uses *previous FF games* as its genre
-- and in doing so, asserts FF's place among the "legit" forms.
After that, FFX's makers actually go on record as conscious of their own
legitimizing power -- they use specifically eastern/Asian genres to help
canonize these in fantasy.
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