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
¶ 18:11 0 comments
26.6.07
Jane's (and Dick's) addiction
Word on the street is that the American Medical Association is rethinking an internal proposal to recognize "videogame addiction" in the next DSM. The internal report is relatively nuanced, but its controversial recommendation to offer diagnosis criteria in the next DSM has occasioned the most current debate. The AMA's approach is cautious, far from the hysterical treatment we've been conditioned to fear from non-gaming culture, and it's worth a read.
Videogames are undeniably a means through which some people cause serious harm to their lives, regardless of whether "videogame addiction" is recognized as a clinical addiction. This designation would clearly be significant for sufferers, whose treatment would consequently earn at least a modicum of support from insurance providers. I don't have the technical expertise to evaluate claims of genuine "addictiveness", however, and I don't have a horse in this race; the AMA's deliberations and subsequent media coverage merely point up the general crudeness of public discourse on this subject. I'm interested in how videogames are typically addressed in public conversation - as a unitary medium with inescapable dangers and few (if any) benefits, rather than a broadly eclectic field of cultural products and practices.
I just finished Henry Jenkins' most recent book, Convergence Culture, so this is at the forefront of my thinking. There are important questions to be asked about games like World of Warcraft, which (critics have argued) correlate in-game rewards with time played rather than with skill. Indeed, the privileging of (real-life) time played has long been a defining characteristic of game design for grind-based MMORPGs - WoW, Everquest, Lineage, et al. - so it's unsurprising that "addiction" is most frequently associated with such titles. Jenkins, however, focuses much of his book on the other side of the coin, elaborating the considerable benefits of online participation. He demonstrates that active participation in online "knowledge communities" can develop social, leadership, and even writing skills beyond the standards of traditional schooling or job training.
In Convergence Culture, Jenkins focuses primarily on communities such as Survivor and Harry Potter fans, but he could just as easily have written about guild leadership in World of Warcraft. There's a growing body of research documenting significant benefits of gaming, and the MMORPG is the genre most often discussed in terms of social and organizational benefits. The community-based nature of this genre (and others such as competitive multiplayer FPS titles like Counter-Strike and Unreal Tournament) requires team-building, skills training, dispute resolution, and other leadership skills prized by the corporate world - yet these are the same games most often called "addictive" and characterized with (no doubt very real) anecdotes of ruined lives.
Even specific titles like WoW, in other words, present a range of both positive and destructive impacts - a range typically ignored in public discourse on gaming. And this is quite beside the problematic question of genre definitions in rhetoric on gaming, which I'll take up in the near future.
What strikes me in this discussion isn't the medical controversy over whether videogames are addictive, but rather the fact that few people stop to ask what videogames are. Are all videogames alike enough to be considered as one group? Is each potentially addictive? Is there something in the technology itself which leads to addiction, or are we actually discussing only a narrow subset of electronic games? What game mechanisms, specifically, contribute to "addiciton" - and are they accurately associated only with videogames, or can they be discovered in other media or activities as well? Most important: how do we build a culture celebrating the many benefits of electronic gaming, while promoting praxes or behaviors that minimize potential concerns?
The AMA's brief is with medical fact, and its approach to "videogame addiction" appears to be measured and open. One of its greatest contributions, in fact, may be to illuminate how little we still know about the drawbacks (and the benefits) of videogaming. But it's not the AMA's job to engage larger questions of gaming culture and its future - that's up to the rest of us.
Word on the street is that the American Medical Association is rethinking an internal proposal to recognize "videogame addiction" in the next DSM. The internal report is relatively nuanced, but its controversial recommendation to offer diagnosis criteria in the next DSM has occasioned the most current debate. The AMA's approach is cautious, far from the hysterical treatment we've been conditioned to fear from non-gaming culture, and it's worth a read.
Videogames are undeniably a means through which some people cause serious harm to their lives, regardless of whether "videogame addiction" is recognized as a clinical addiction. This designation would clearly be significant for sufferers, whose treatment would consequently earn at least a modicum of support from insurance providers. I don't have the technical expertise to evaluate claims of genuine "addictiveness", however, and I don't have a horse in this race; the AMA's deliberations and subsequent media coverage merely point up the general crudeness of public discourse on this subject. I'm interested in how videogames are typically addressed in public conversation - as a unitary medium with inescapable dangers and few (if any) benefits, rather than a broadly eclectic field of cultural products and practices.
I just finished Henry Jenkins' most recent book, Convergence Culture, so this is at the forefront of my thinking. There are important questions to be asked about games like World of Warcraft, which (critics have argued) correlate in-game rewards with time played rather than with skill. Indeed, the privileging of (real-life) time played has long been a defining characteristic of game design for grind-based MMORPGs - WoW, Everquest, Lineage, et al. - so it's unsurprising that "addiction" is most frequently associated with such titles. Jenkins, however, focuses much of his book on the other side of the coin, elaborating the considerable benefits of online participation. He demonstrates that active participation in online "knowledge communities" can develop social, leadership, and even writing skills beyond the standards of traditional schooling or job training.
In Convergence Culture, Jenkins focuses primarily on communities such as Survivor and Harry Potter fans, but he could just as easily have written about guild leadership in World of Warcraft. There's a growing body of research documenting significant benefits of gaming, and the MMORPG is the genre most often discussed in terms of social and organizational benefits. The community-based nature of this genre (and others such as competitive multiplayer FPS titles like Counter-Strike and Unreal Tournament) requires team-building, skills training, dispute resolution, and other leadership skills prized by the corporate world - yet these are the same games most often called "addictive" and characterized with (no doubt very real) anecdotes of ruined lives.
Even specific titles like WoW, in other words, present a range of both positive and destructive impacts - a range typically ignored in public discourse on gaming. And this is quite beside the problematic question of genre definitions in rhetoric on gaming, which I'll take up in the near future.
What strikes me in this discussion isn't the medical controversy over whether videogames are addictive, but rather the fact that few people stop to ask what videogames are. Are all videogames alike enough to be considered as one group? Is each potentially addictive? Is there something in the technology itself which leads to addiction, or are we actually discussing only a narrow subset of electronic games? What game mechanisms, specifically, contribute to "addiciton" - and are they accurately associated only with videogames, or can they be discovered in other media or activities as well? Most important: how do we build a culture celebrating the many benefits of electronic gaming, while promoting praxes or behaviors that minimize potential concerns?
The AMA's brief is with medical fact, and its approach to "videogame addiction" appears to be measured and open. One of its greatest contributions, in fact, may be to illuminate how little we still know about the drawbacks (and the benefits) of videogaming. But it's not the AMA's job to engage larger questions of gaming culture and its future - that's up to the rest of us.
Labels: culture
¶ 10:39 0 comments
19.6.07
In-world
I've had a mess of ideas percolating on the back-burner (is that technically a mixed metaphor?), but the past two months or so have been chaotic, with little opportunity to write. This too will pass.
In the meantime, swing by the New York Times Magazine for a brief photo essay pairing real-life players with their online avatars. The photos themselves aren't surprising to me; I've used visual or textual avatars for about 20 years, starting with local Bulletin Board Systems in the late '80s, and I recognize the broad range of goals and strategies with which people negotiate avatar space. More striking to me is the essay's normalization of in-world construction of identity. Avatar space is here contextualized as a generic human activity, performed by players from varied nationalities and backgrounds. The essay even takes care to balance hardcore with more casual gamers, those devoting only a few hours each week to their in-world experience.
Avatar space involves a highly specific subset of games, affording a doubling of identity not found in online poker or a frat-house match of Halo 2 (nor, for that matter, in real-world sources like board games). That's not to say the idea is outre, of course: avatar space has been cyberpunk canon for decades, and The Matrix was a smash pop-cultural success. Nintendo's Mii channel and Sony's upcoming Playstation Home even amount to "next-gen" normalization (through mass-commercialization) of avatar space, but as a context for all console gaming rather than a technique of engagement with specific titles. Nevertheless, it's refreshing to see the Times Magazine represent avatar construction and inhabitation as a perfectly normal - and surprisingly diverse - human activity. ¶ 13:16 0 comments
I've had a mess of ideas percolating on the back-burner (is that technically a mixed metaphor?), but the past two months or so have been chaotic, with little opportunity to write. This too will pass.
In the meantime, swing by the New York Times Magazine for a brief photo essay pairing real-life players with their online avatars. The photos themselves aren't surprising to me; I've used visual or textual avatars for about 20 years, starting with local Bulletin Board Systems in the late '80s, and I recognize the broad range of goals and strategies with which people negotiate avatar space. More striking to me is the essay's normalization of in-world construction of identity. Avatar space is here contextualized as a generic human activity, performed by players from varied nationalities and backgrounds. The essay even takes care to balance hardcore with more casual gamers, those devoting only a few hours each week to their in-world experience.
Avatar space involves a highly specific subset of games, affording a doubling of identity not found in online poker or a frat-house match of Halo 2 (nor, for that matter, in real-world sources like board games). That's not to say the idea is outre, of course: avatar space has been cyberpunk canon for decades, and The Matrix was a smash pop-cultural success. Nintendo's Mii channel and Sony's upcoming Playstation Home even amount to "next-gen" normalization (through mass-commercialization) of avatar space, but as a context for all console gaming rather than a technique of engagement with specific titles. Nevertheless, it's refreshing to see the Times Magazine represent avatar construction and inhabitation as a perfectly normal - and surprisingly diverse - human activity. ¶ 13:16 0 comments
