I Don't Know What Video Games Are

A few weeks ago I wrote about how the most common media to compare video games to was  film. At the time it seemed a bit strange to me that the easiest comparison was films and not other types of games, as one might expect given the title "video games." That games don't readily come to mind when talking about video games, to me refects a confusion about what the medium actually is. personally, architecture always seemed a fitting comparison. I can imagine looking with awe at a work of beautiful architecture from a distance. I can also image exploring it, walking through it, interacting with it, as I would with something like Mario 64. And as I think more and more about the question of what games are, I’m inclined to the position that most video games are not in fact games, but a new type of media entirely that contains aspects of games within it.


What do we know about video games though? We know what they are not. We know video games are not films...or books or plays for that matter. And for a moment, I’d like to assume they aren’t games either. So what are they? In the article linked above, Most computer games aren't games at all... Mike Jones examines the nature of games, comparing various definitions of "game" to four popular video games (Tetris, Bioshock, WoW and The Sims), ultimately concluding that, of the four, only Tetris truly constitutes a game. In looking for the proper term, Jones suggests a fragmenting of our concept of video games, implying that there is no one category for all of them to fit under. In doing so, he suggests the terms puzzle, simulation, interactive story and virtual world, before eventually using the term “screen-based media entertainment and art,” a few times to refer to our broader cultural category for video games. This term seems overly broad though, applying to television shows, films, the Wii news feed, and any number of the diverse forms of entertainment that now inhabit our screens. It also applies to many games in the strict sense of the word like Solitaire or Snake. But I don’t think Jones sees it as a true definition either.  


Like Jones, I don’t endeavor to provide a successful definition of video games in this post. As Rick Altman writes in Silent Film Sound, "New technologies are always born nameless. Assimilated to multiple possible models, new technologies always begin life with multiple monikers rather than a single stable name." Maybe, as video games become widely accepted enough to demand more attention and increased variety, we will get to the point where multiple names become more appropriate than a singular name. And so I’m not going to try to re-name “video games,” but only to add some thoughts to help better understand what they are. I believe the concept of “crisis historiography” will be helpful here. First developed by Altman in a work that focuses mainly on the development of the cinema in relation to a host of other mediums- radio, vaudeville, photography, theater and others, crisis historiography provides a helpful twentieth century paralell to our twenty-first century dilemma. 


Altman uses cinema as his main example, but broadens his scope to highlight the ways that we conceptualize and define all new technologies and the resultant art that comes out of them. He argues that all representational technologies are socially and historically contingent. Moreover, they are defined specifically in relation to previously dominant modes of representation. For our purposes in looking at video games, literature, film, theatre and painting are the culprits. He writes,

Successful representation has always depended on the ability of new media to disguise themselves as old media, to meet the requirements established in existing media. Because new representational modes are perceived and appraised according to in-depth training received in the school of previous modes, proper understanding of representational technologies must always start with analysis of one medium’s attempt to do the job of another. (17)

In highlighting the ways in which we, perhaps by necessity, use standards established by previous media to explore the newer mediums, Altman defines nearly to a tee our current discussions about games. Consider the following quotes from Roger Ebert, G. Christopher Williams and myself:

– Ebert, “Video Games Can Never Be Art”

No one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great poets, filmmakers, novelists and poets. 

We appreciate the design of the narrative circumstances in Hamlet because we are not involved in any way in the action…It’s a bit more difficult to make such an argument about the player’s experience in Catherine…
– G. Christopher Williams, "Why Video Games Might Never Be Art" 

When my game experience felt so much like my literary one, and not at all like my experience with the film, it brought to mind the overlaps between games, films and movies. 
–Myself, "Final Fantasty VI For the First Time: Why (Some) Video Games Might Be More Like Novels Than Films"

In each quote, we see the inability to escape from notions about how art and artistic mediums do and should function...notions that are based on our experience with previous forms. There are established standards that develop in large part from the previous media available to us and from the previous thinking about art through these media. And by assimilating our new experiences with newer media to our old standards from old media, we are able to make sense of what is undefined and novel. But are we accurate? And if we are not accurate, what elements of meaning, representation, truth, exploration and understanding do we miss out on by applying standards for what constitutes good theater or literature to a video game or internet video?

Given the blossoming nature of the medium in discussion, it seems like a safe bet to say that we don’t totally understand video games. Bur do we even understand the old standards and values that we use to evaluate art? If, like Altman argues, our understanding of media and art is socially constructed, then how can the theories and artistic standards that surround these artistic texts not be socially and historically contingent as well? Writing about the changing attitudes towards Shakespeare in America over several centuries, Scott Juster touches on this issue in an eloquent peice arguing that definitions of art are inherently mutable:

Herein lies the most insidious aspect of our historically-relative cultural hierarchy: we are compelled to position specific games and the entire medium along some theoretical, fallacious grand chain of artistic merit.  The chain is powerful and restrictive.  It brings order to a chaotic world by telling us what pieces of art are higher than others.  The chain feels like it has existed forever and is immutable, but we know that this is not true.  As is demonstrated by Shakespeare’s history in America, the boundary between mass entertainment and high art is composed of little more than social beliefs.

In our discussions of the validity of video games, we use definitions and terms as if they are settled and absolute, occasionally paying lip service to their ultimate subjectivity without really believing those disclaimers. However, the limitations of our own experience prevent us from knowing either the nature of art or of video games themselves. From Plato to Nietzsche to Barthes, there are innumerable theorists to back up whatever position we want to take about art as we attempt to define constructed and abstract concepts in ways that suit us. But the question is never settled. Both the mediums and the standards are in constant flux. And it seems at this point, we don't even have settled terms to discuss either.

Image via Girl Gamer UK

The iPhone 5 is the Message

The announcement of the iPhone 5, or 4s or 4G, or whatever it's called, will occur in about 3 hours. With the pending revelation of the object that has inspired such hysteria and obsession from around the blogosphere and popular news media, I thought it apropos to reflect on how much the medium has truly become the message today. While I don't expect anything grand from this latest iteration- a better camera, quicker loading times, maybe some voice integration- I, along with a shitload of other people, have been thinking about how the iPhone has ushered in a new era of wiring our brains to communication technologies. I had an IPhone for about two years, but even without one, I've retained the habit of constantly looking down to my phone, checking my email ten times a day instead of one or two, of expecting to know the name of any catchy song I hear in an instant. When it is constantly accessible, information takes on the quality of a drug, altering the way we interact with the world around us. I don't believe this is limited to phones either. Steven Totilo, writing on Kotaku about the Wii U, reflects not only on the influence of technology on our lives, but how our lives and relations have changed to such a degree as to demand adaptations from future technoligies that wish to appeal to our new techno-social structure:

For all its faults, Nintendo is probably making the right gaming console for our times. Who sits on a couch with other people in order to all focus on the same thing anymore? Do people really gather to watch a TV show together or have dinner? Think about it. Is their attention undivided and on the same thing? Of course not. At least one person is checking their iPhone, logging onto Facebook, reading a text or sending an e-mail. The globally rich society that plays video games is the same globally rich society that in the year 2011 always already has a private screen in the palm of their hands. (emphasis mine)

Subtly drawing on Louis Althusser's "always already" concept, the gist of which is that all of us are subjects of our society's ideologies before we can really consciously think about whether we are or not, Totilo adds a new technological demention to Althusser, updating subjecthood for the twenty-first century. In the case of the do-everything-for you iPhone and its second-class bretheren, the Android phones, we are already in the grip of the machine, and it in ours, before the first questioning editorial about what might have been lost is even published.
And so, with today's announcement, it seems that quite literally, "medium is the message," or, more elaborately, "the 'message' of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs" (McLuhan 8). We are not excited for the announcement of the phone for what its call-making potential, but for the imagined totality of increased access to communicative habits and the imagined, potentially impossible expectations of something that will revolutionize our lives and the way that we interact with our environment, something that will "shape and control the scale and form of human association and action" (9). Beyond my theoretical speculation, neuro-psychologists are starting to study these effects. The New York Times recently described a study that showed immense influence on emotions and reactions that we generally tend to think of as immensely personal, even spiritual:

Earlier this year, I carried out an fMRI experiment to find out whether iPhones were really, truly addictive, no less so than alcohol, cocaine, shopping or video games. In conjunction with the San Diego-based firm MindSign Neuromarketing, I enlisted eight men and eight women between the ages of 18 and 25. Our 16 subjects were exposed separately to audio and to video of a ringing and vibrating iPhone. 

In each instance, the results showed activation in both the audio and visual cortices of the subjects’ brains. In other words, when they were exposed to the video, our subjects’ brains didn’t just see the vibrating iPhone, they “heard” it, too; and when they were exposed to the audio, they also “saw” it. This powerful cross-sensory phenomenon is known as synesthesia. 

But most striking of all was the flurry of activation in the insular cortex of the brain, which is associated with feelings of love and compassion. The subjects’ brains responded to the sound of their phones as they would respond to the presence or proximity of a girlfriend, boyfriend or family member.

If even a part of this is the case, no content or function of the phone has a chance of valuation at the level of the phone itself. Today, the phone is the message. From our vantage point in 2011, the reconfiguration of our minds and social relations hasn't yet begun. We are still living in a world shaped largely before the internet, before personal computers and before smart phones. Any one born in the last ten years will live in a world where these are ubiquitous and unquestioned, much as I can hardly imagine life without electricity. It's kind of exciting and maybe a little sad. I miss looking at the same screen as everyone else I know.

See also:
Feed by M.T. Anderson
Singularity
Image via iHackBlog

Pitchfork Jens

My love affair with Jens Lekman continues (not literally) with the release of his new EP on Tuesday. I was gonna write a review, but Brian Howe at Pitchfork did such a good job, I figured I'd just link his review. For all its faults, the site packs a cadre of damn good writers. Choice quote:

The modern lingua franca is an abstract slipstream of memories, slogans, admonitions, and impressions, as if emotional states were free-floating entities, unmoored from specific experiences. This mode is ideal for self-projection and introspection, both valuable quantities. But Lekman's music makes me think more about other people than myself. For all of their polished mannerisms, his songs are uncommonly free of pretenses-- they're about people, places, and things that happened or could happen in the world; about how we spend our time and how we talk to each other. Against a backdrop of enigmatic universalism, musicians who undertake the ticklish business of pinning down the minutiae of human affairs are very dear.

Well said. Well said.

Watch Lekman playing a song about Kirsten Dunst.

Final Fantasty VI For the First Time: Why (Some) Video Games Might Be More Like Novels Than Films

In the age of 3D graphics and professional voice actors, it goes without saying that the most common medium to compare video games to is film. There are probably two main reasons for this. First, on an experiential level, movies provide the easiest comparison: both are visual and auditory mediums that are commonly played/watched on a television and often follow a story through a narrative arc from beginning to end. Games such as Red Dead Redemption and Uncharted invite the comparison further by styling their aesthetics after action films. The other reason, I believe, has to do with the history of film as an artistic medium. Film started as a medium that had almost immediate mass appeal, yet still had to fight for its place in the artistic world. In the early part of the twentieth century, film theorists and filmmakers wailed about the possibilities of their new medium, elbowing and shoving their way to artistic legitimacy as politicians and moral watchdogs condemned the cinema as licentious and wild. For those of us looking at video games today, the parallels are wide and many. And, so, oftentimes we think of playing a game, especially a cinematic one like Final Fantasy VII or the increasingly filmic Rockstar games, as akin to watching a movie…a really long movie. However, as games get longer, and ironically, more cinematic, the experience of playing a game can have just as much similarity to reading a novel as to watching a film.

And this brings me to Final Fantasy VI (originally released as Final Fantasy III in the US for SNES). Over the last few weeks, I’ve been playing through this heralded classic for the first time. With a huge overworld and quest that supposedly lasts upwards of fifty hours, there’s a lot of game here. And it’s been consuming my time like almost no other activity (except for The Wire. Good lord what a show!). I get home from work, I play FFVI. I wake up on Saturday. I play FF VI. I eat mac ‘n’ cheese. I play FF VI. You get the idea. And what is so great about this game, you might ask. FFVI is unique in the sense that, while it is a sprite-based game in some ways limited by its format, its plot was A) fairly complex, both in its structure as well as its themes, and B) involved a lot of character development. Compared to traditional save the princess tales of sorcery, it had a literary quality. I wouldn’t call it Proust or Austen, but it certainly had some substance to it.

In FFVI, much of the gameplay not devoted to the plot is spent wandering around towns, exploring deserts or crevices in mountains and talking to the quaint characters that you meet along the way. I love how, in traditional JRPGs, when you walk into a town and talk to someone, the character has some totally random fact to tell you. It gives the small sprite characters not only a personality, but an endearing sense of innocence and humor. There’s something about the way the dialogue works, without standard introductions or other markers of conversation. You press A and whalla, “A strange rabbit has been eating all my crops.” Oh, good to know. Everywhere you go in the game, there’s some new side quest or non-essential person to speak to. They’re not required, but they add a lot of depth and charm. And they give you a chance to sink into the world, to really get to know the space and place in which your game experience is taking place.

In thinking about my experience with the game, the complex, lengthy plot melds together with the ability to wander and explore to form a holistically immersive experience. As I’ve played, I’ve been trying to pinpoint exactly how to describe and how to think about that experience. The closest parallel for me was the last novel I read, Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men. This may seem like a strange comparison at first: steampunk fantasy world and gritty, nihilistic Texas thriller. The link between them was in the way that, while experiencing either game or novel, you get a chance to live in the world they’re set, to really spend time with the characters. Of course this can be said of many novels, but this one stuck out not only because I had just finished it, but because its film adaptation is such a fantastic and faithful one. When my game experience felt so much like my literary one, and not at all like my experience with the film, it brought to mind the overlaps between games, films and movies. The Coen brothers’ film based on No Country was great, but it had more of an immediate, aesthetic impact. In the novel, which is strikingly similar, you get more time to really know who you’re dealing with, to feel the landscape and enter into another world. To me, this type of experience is the core of the appeal for so many adventure games.

And so I wonder if playing Final Fantasy VI, or other long story-based games, is not in fact more akin to reading a novel than watching a film. It’s hard to really draw your own mind into a film in only a few hours. Novels and games take weeks, months, sometimes even years. The time between playing is spent thinking about the media object in the question. Sessions last hours at a time and you leave them feeling like you’ve just woken up into some other universe. You live for days on end with characters, learning about them slowly and through smaller, more drawn out interactions. In terms of what matters, the experience of the art and what you can take from it, perhaps our metric of film comparison is not only lacking in its relation to interactivity, but also to its accuracy as a comparison for more weighty games. Of course there are a whole host of issues outside of this one, but right now, I’m thinking, all other complications aside, the experience of playing games just might be more like the experience of reading novels than watching films.

Top image via DesktopMadness

Reader Response Theory and Video Games: Thoughts on G. Christopher Williams's "Why Video Games Might Not Be Art"

I’m a little late to the game on this one (no pun intended), but I’d like to offer a few thoughts on Christopher Williams’s piece for PopMatters, "Why Video Games Might Not Be Art." Giving his article a read before this one will probably elucidate many points here and is also worth reading for its own merits. The main thrust of my thinking in this post begins with something Dr Williams says early on, commenting on a quote from Roger Ebert’s famed “Video Games Can Never Be Art” article:

The really crucial observation to me exists in that last sentence, in which Ebert is suggesting that the player is doing something in playing a game, whereas normally an audience’s relationship to art (be that a painting, novel, film, etc.) is merely “experiencing” (in some passive sense of the word) the object before them, allowing meaning to “wash over them”, rather than actively participating with the artwork.

My problem is not with Williams's assessment of video games (even though I take issue with this aspect of Ebert’s original article) but in his later assessment of where value arises in other art forms. Williams discusses the history of aesthetics, citing Aristotle and Eliot in his discussion and gives some credence to the notion of personal interactivity in the field of rhetoric, but mainly examines Art with a capital A through the assumption that it is something you watch from the outside, not experience as a participant. In discussing Joyce, Willams does discuss the ways in which a person brings something to a text, but he only allows for true meaning to arise when the participant has stepped away from the art work, after the interaction is completed. I would like to discuss this focus on looking at a text from the outside in opposition to a view that sees meaning as arising from an interaction with a text. The reader-response theorists of the twentieth century probably provide the most helpful analysis in this area.

Reader-response theorists, incudling Wolfgang Iser, Stanley Fish, Louise Rosenblatt, Roland Barthes and others, have argued that the act of “reading,” both literally and broadly speaking, is an interactive process. Perhaps more importantly, the act of making meaning occurs not after, but through a "transaction" or interaction between the reader and the text. In Literature as Exploration (1938), Louise Rosenblatt takes perhaps the first stab at this type of thought:

The special meaning, and more particularly, the submerged associations that these words and images have for the individual reader will largely determine what the work communicates to him. The reader brings to the work personality traits, memories of past events, present needs and preoccupations, a particular mood of the moment, and a particular physical condition. These and many other elements in a never-to-be-duplicated combination determine his response to the peculiar contribution of the text (30-31).

To Rosenblatt, meaning arises, not when one looks at the text from the outside, appreciating from an intellectual and emotional distance its various impressive and brilliant efforts, but through an intellectual and emotional connection made through an understanding of its elements as they connect to your own life. This doesn't mean that a book needs to be about someone like you or relate to your life in some concrete and literal fashion, only that the ideas, emotions, characters and words need to resonate and relate on some level. I don't need to live in 19th century Russia to appreciate Notes from Underground, but I do need to have some idea of what existential angst is like, what it feels like to be an outsider, and how "rational society" can create a sort of insanity. Or, I could read the book on any number of levels, with any number of interpretations, and the meaning that would arise would depend on which aspects of the book resonated with my experiences. Here, I am not taking up the banner of extreme subjectivity. I can't decide that Notes from Underground is about loving puppies or the war in Iraq. However, I will not understand it and I will not take meaning from it except on the level that I can connect it to something outside of itself. And so I must interact with the text.

It may help to discuss this sort of meaning-making in relation to a video game. When I was playing through “Flower” on PS3 a few years ago, I was initially floored by the dreamy, transcendent quality of it. Here I was in New York City, in front of a TV in my 8th floor walk-up, drifting off into some green wonderland where, as far as I could figure at first, my only goal was to make flower petals fly around and spin them into dizzying wondrous patterns. As the game progressed, I started to see that the ways in which my experience of flying around and making flowers bloom was altered as the landscape became darker and gloomier.

However, this experience alone, interactive as it was, was not enough to see a particular meaning in the game as meaning is traditionally understood in art and literature circles. I had to go beyond the game and beyond my direct physical interaction with it to make sense of my experience. I needed to interact mentally with the game as I played, to think about what I was doing on something other than a tactical level, as I would with any other artistic text. And as I played, I thought about pollution and the destruction of the environment, the disappearing green space in urban communities and the inattention that all of this receives from our political leaders. And most importantly, I thought about how this was mostly understood as an abstract concept. Environmental change occurs so slowly that it is difficult to understand experientially. We need Al Gore and millions of scientists in order to make sense of our gloomy prospects. And I thought about how this game gave an experiential way to understand the destruction of the environment by allowing me to play in a wonderland only to watch it degrade before my eyes. Without both my physical interaction with the game as game and my mental interaction with the game as text, I would not have been able to derive the same meaning. And the same type of mental interaction that I had with this game occurrs with a book, a film, or a painting. As you read or watch, you think about what you're experiencing and you combine it and connect it with your own thoughts on the world and you make an interpretation.

This account is an almost disrespectfully simplified example to illustrate reader-response theory and one that ignores many other strands of the field. As well, I don’t mean to imply that my process for making meaning was as conscious and direct as it may seem. Understanding texts is not an easy and simple process, it occurs through various interactions, through literal and metaphorical re-readings and re-examinations. Just as you can "get it" as you do a re-reading of a book, experiencing the story anew and seeing new aspects, the act of playing a game can facilitate the process of understanding and making meaning.

In arguing for an interactive theory of meaning-making, I also don't intend to propose that reader-response theorists should be taken as gospel and swallowed whole-heartedly. However, a crucial component in most discussions of video games as art is the fact that previous aesthetic theory and previous thinking on art in general has ignored or shunned interactivity. And so, where do we turn to examine this new medium? The reader-response theory provides an examination of a crucial aspect of video games, interactivity, but does so with a more time-tested medium, literature.

I think meaning is possible in video games, or maybe more accurately, meaning is possible through electronic media commonly referred to as video games. Perhaps it just exists in ways that are not obvious when you look through critical lenses designed for different formats. And perhaps the interactivity that seems so strange and bewildering to us as we try to understand exactly what this medium is and does has been with us all along.

Sans Analysis 3

A short and random collection this time. Enjoy.

Another Thing to Sort of Pin on David Foster Wallace, Maud Newton, NY Times

Beck: 15 Years (Interview), Ryan Dombal, Pitchfork

Jenny Lewis, Conor Oberst, Jonathan Vanderslice playing together (video), The Walrus Speaks

Apple still pushing for $1.5 trillion US overseas profit tax holiday, AppleInsider

Nirvana, Grunge & Collective Cultural Longing

Did everyone feel the earthquake yesterday? I felt it here in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Not knowing how earthquakes work or what to do when they come, our supervisors quickly evacuated the building and I walked onto Flatbush Avenue to see thousands of people milling around in the street, excited and chatting about what had just taken place. I was a little shaken up by the experience (da-dum-chh!), but I couldn't help but feel happy about the immediate result. Strangers were talking. And maybe more importantly, they had something to talk about. Like when Obama won the presidency, like being in Hartford after UConn won the national championship, like the few times when everyone seems to have something in common. It's rare now and I was happy to see it taking place. But it also made me think about how our experience of the world now is so shaped by a lack of shared experience. Life without a cultural touchstone is to me one that lacks a wholeness, that is isolating and lonely. And this brings nostalgia for a time when, even if we weren't all holding hands singing Kumbaya, there was at least a greater ability for shared experience through shared cultural focus.

Posted yesterday on Slate, Simon Reynolds has a fantastic peice discussing the psychology around nostalgia, specifically for the grunge period of the early 1990s. As someone weaned on the music of the time, including grunge, its later, softer and mostly more annoying iterations, as well as the disparate popular movements that followed (ska comes to mind), I took a particular interest in its themes. I am, admittedly, a 90s nostalgiac. Reynolds discusses the longing for a defined culture, the feeling of living in "an era," and for the 90s in particular, an era of rebellious authenticity. Thom York sang on The Bends in 1995, "I wish it was the sixties," a line that seems, in a way, to define the 90s. Youthful earnestness, but with a tinge of depression and hopelessness, yearning for a more authentic, powerful life, believing that things should change, but lacking the belief that anything could. This at least, is one analysis, not exactly of the 90s as a whole, but for how early-mid 90s culture was and is conceived. For more, google "Metamodernism." Reynolds moves from the specifics of the 1990s into a discussion of how we define this time in a particular way through a particular lens, deconstructing the concept of "era" itself and the ways in which central, mainstream cultural media are necessary for the creation of our definition of not only this era, but any era, be it the 1990s, the 1920s, or the middle ages. He writes,

When people—fans, critics, industry, whoever—look back to grunge, then, what they feel wistful for is not just the particulars of that moment (flannel, shaggy hair, down-tuned guitar sounds, Tabitha Soren) or even qualities that music seemed to have then and since lost (anger, rebellion, spontaneity, anti-gloss realness, etc). It is for the concept of period vibe in itself, for "aura of era" in the abstract. It is a nostalgia for a time when the Zeit actually possessed a Geist.

The nostalgia here is not for the 90s per se, but for the escape from cultural isolation. In the age of the internet, of a million new stories from a million sources that register barely beyond the feeling of momentary sensation, I wonder where such cohesive perceptions of the world can arise. What can define us together? We're all staring at different screens...quite literally. Collective viewership, collective listenership (is that a word?) and collective cultural understanding have been dissipating for years now, with nothing to fill the void. The best we can do to define our time, to give identity to our culture in this collection of years, is to point to its infinite divergences; we define it mainly by its lack of a defining feature. And while in many ways this can be good, I wonder if the five thousand or so MP3s on my computer are worth all the cultural loneliness and isolation. I wish it was the 90s.

Image from Taringa.net