frog blast the vent core
25.7.07
Origin stories
I just returned from the American Library Association's Gaming, Learning, and Libraries Symposium, and I have a long list of topics to address over the next few weeks (in between writing papers for Postmodern Cinema...). Keynote speakers included luminaries like Henry Jenkins and Jim Gee, and the setting afforded three days of conversation about both analog and digital gaming - not just its place in libraries, but the role of gaming in culture.
On the other hand, I still found myself, as an actual gamer, very clearly in the minority at this conference on gaming. About five people of 300 admitted to playing World of Warcraft, and it was greeted as an exotic novelty that the closing speaker, Liz Lawley, ran a level 70 Priest. (I may have the good taste to not play WoW, but I recognize its ubiquity among us digital post-moderns.)
I recalled, from last week, a distinct moment while bicycling to work along Lake Michigan: some coincidence of sound and motion conjured, like Proust's madeleine, a bustling street scene in the city of Athkatla. Those of you steeped in geekery may recognize Athkatla as the capital city of Amn, a prosperous trading nation in the Forgotten Realms. More to the point, exploration of Athkatla occupies much of Baldur's Gate 2. What struck me as extraordinary is that my memory reconstructed not merely this street in north Athkatla, but the embodied experience of negotiating that space. I reassembled all at once the game's isometric perspective, the finely-detailed artwork, the music accompanying that game area, and even the game's character animations - and all was reconstructed as immediate and indigenous experience, unmediated by mouse, keyboard, and screen.
I recalled this moment because librarians like to talk about formative, originary encounters with books. When it came to books, I was a precocious kid. I'd read both Les Miserables and Moby-Dick by about 7th grade, and I would happily recount the conclusion of the latter; Ishmael's last narrated lines sent me scrambling to the encyclopedia for "Ixion". Raised on stories of my grandfather memorizing Gray's "Elegy" and Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner", however, and despite a highly literate childhood, I was long troubled - looking back from adulthood - by the paucity of formative literary memories rattling around in my brain. Only recently, looking to electronic gaming as a legitimate object of academic inquiry, have I recognized games as a primary constitutive experience.
For each distinct memory of Melville, I can narrate a handful from Sir-Tech's Wizardry or Silicon Beach Software's Dark Castle. I remember Prince of Persia and Fallout more completely than most of my college coursework. As early as elementary school, I invested long hours authoring my own gameworlds in World Builder and Apple's HyperCard - and I can still navigate, entirely in my head, the 3D spaces of pioneering games like Marathon and Unreal.
Partly through being limited to my parents' Mac Plus and never owning an Atari or Nintendo system, my childhood gaming was minimal compared to my literary and musical adventures. I've no doubt that Dvorak and Conrad were far more fundamental in the development of my capacities and ideals. Yet what emerges most clearly from my memory is the radical spatiality of games, recollected in the same concrete terms so often used to characterize originary literary encounters.
I recalled all of this as we conference-goers discussed gaming in libraries. The lesson of librarians' traditional focus on such literary experiences isn't that books have a uniquely privileged relationship with our interiority; the point, rather, is that we see the relationship between interiority and cultural artifacts in general as constitutive of our identity. Games, no less than books, generate what we regard as constitutive experience. As it turns out, then, one of the most compelling reasons for librarians to support gaming wasn't even mentioned this weekend: librarians may be ideally equipped to understand the personal and cultural impact of games - by analogy with one of the most venerable cultural artifacts of all, the printed word.
I just returned from the American Library Association's Gaming, Learning, and Libraries Symposium, and I have a long list of topics to address over the next few weeks (in between writing papers for Postmodern Cinema...). Keynote speakers included luminaries like Henry Jenkins and Jim Gee, and the setting afforded three days of conversation about both analog and digital gaming - not just its place in libraries, but the role of gaming in culture.
On the other hand, I still found myself, as an actual gamer, very clearly in the minority at this conference on gaming. About five people of 300 admitted to playing World of Warcraft, and it was greeted as an exotic novelty that the closing speaker, Liz Lawley, ran a level 70 Priest. (I may have the good taste to not play WoW, but I recognize its ubiquity among us digital post-moderns.)
I recalled, from last week, a distinct moment while bicycling to work along Lake Michigan: some coincidence of sound and motion conjured, like Proust's madeleine, a bustling street scene in the city of Athkatla. Those of you steeped in geekery may recognize Athkatla as the capital city of Amn, a prosperous trading nation in the Forgotten Realms. More to the point, exploration of Athkatla occupies much of Baldur's Gate 2. What struck me as extraordinary is that my memory reconstructed not merely this street in north Athkatla, but the embodied experience of negotiating that space. I reassembled all at once the game's isometric perspective, the finely-detailed artwork, the music accompanying that game area, and even the game's character animations - and all was reconstructed as immediate and indigenous experience, unmediated by mouse, keyboard, and screen.
I recalled this moment because librarians like to talk about formative, originary encounters with books. When it came to books, I was a precocious kid. I'd read both Les Miserables and Moby-Dick by about 7th grade, and I would happily recount the conclusion of the latter; Ishmael's last narrated lines sent me scrambling to the encyclopedia for "Ixion". Raised on stories of my grandfather memorizing Gray's "Elegy" and Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner", however, and despite a highly literate childhood, I was long troubled - looking back from adulthood - by the paucity of formative literary memories rattling around in my brain. Only recently, looking to electronic gaming as a legitimate object of academic inquiry, have I recognized games as a primary constitutive experience.
For each distinct memory of Melville, I can narrate a handful from Sir-Tech's Wizardry or Silicon Beach Software's Dark Castle. I remember Prince of Persia and Fallout more completely than most of my college coursework. As early as elementary school, I invested long hours authoring my own gameworlds in World Builder and Apple's HyperCard - and I can still navigate, entirely in my head, the 3D spaces of pioneering games like Marathon and Unreal.
Partly through being limited to my parents' Mac Plus and never owning an Atari or Nintendo system, my childhood gaming was minimal compared to my literary and musical adventures. I've no doubt that Dvorak and Conrad were far more fundamental in the development of my capacities and ideals. Yet what emerges most clearly from my memory is the radical spatiality of games, recollected in the same concrete terms so often used to characterize originary literary encounters.
I recalled all of this as we conference-goers discussed gaming in libraries. The lesson of librarians' traditional focus on such literary experiences isn't that books have a uniquely privileged relationship with our interiority; the point, rather, is that we see the relationship between interiority and cultural artifacts in general as constitutive of our identity. Games, no less than books, generate what we regard as constitutive experience. As it turns out, then, one of the most compelling reasons for librarians to support gaming wasn't even mentioned this weekend: librarians may be ideally equipped to understand the personal and cultural impact of games - by analogy with one of the most venerable cultural artifacts of all, the printed word.
Labels: culture, glls2007, libraries
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