WLMA's lameness

I’m with Michelle, Caitlin, Andrea, and Dorothy on the general dissatisfaction with Chapters 15 and 17 of WLMA. The thematic arrangement of the texts is okay – if that’s how you wanted to organize your readings – and I like how they mix short stories, poems, essays, paintings, plays, songs, and films. Actually, the CD is great in theory but confusing and erratic in practice: for example, the “Enhanced Reading” of “Bartleby the Scrivener” contains some interesting questions that appear when you mouse over certain hyperlinked words, but the one for “The Taming of the Shrew” offers only a note at the top promising annotations to come “during the upcoming school year,” whatever that means. And it would have been nice if the CD actually contained some film snippets instead of just still images from the films (although, since the video clips that are there didn’t play on my computer, maybe it wouldn’t matter.)

Mostly, I’ll join everyone in their biggest complaint so far: that the questions that follow each of (or, I should say, most of) the readings are generally formalist, tokenizing, and just plain lame. Some of them are okay – the second question at the end of T.C. Boyle’s “The Love of My Life” could maybe lead a class into a discussion about gender, parental responsibility, and abortion – but if you were really trying to get some critical thinking going, you’d have to come up with your own questions.

Dream

2-24

Here’s a revision of my description of my dream course, as well as its goals and topics.

As videogames become a more potent cultural medium, the burgeoning field of game studies is trying to figure out what exactly these games mean to us. It’s a truly interdisciplinary field, with scholars coming from literature, sociology, anthropology, psychology, education, and economics. Each one of these disciplines has its own arsenal of theories and methods. In fact, there are so many perspectives being leveled at games right now that to try to understand all of them in a single class would be overwhelming. However, most of the discussions of games in academia right now approach the topic from one of two opposing points of view:

Games are texts.

Games are practices.

The former point of view generally comes the humanities, and the latter generally comes from the social sciences. It’s caused some bitter debates, and we’re going to look at some of them. But, as David Buckingham notes in the recent book Computer Games: Text, Narrative, and Play, “This tension between textual analysis… and audience-based research… is impossible to ignore… precisely because the game text is playable: it is only realized through play, and play is a lived, social and culturally situated experience.” We’re going to face this tension head-on – we’re going to break the dichotomy. Starting from the position that games are both texts and practices, and by studying a variety of actual games, we’re going to explore the following questions:

• What ideologies underlie these games’ visual, spatial, textual, oral/aural, and procedural design?
• How do these games borrow from their parent media, and how are they unique?
• How do these games combine narratives and rules to simulate systems?
• How do these games represent identity?
• How do players adapt to, modify, and subvert these games’ representations and rules?
• How do players construct/perform identities?
• How do players interact with each other, both within game worlds and outside of them?

2-11

The goals for my dream course are very similar to those of the five courses I’ve studied today. I imagine a course that’s an introduction to the game studies field, sampling the rich variety of theories and methods that scholars are bringing to the table. I’m interested in videogames as both artifacts and practices (though I’m better trained to look at them as artifacts). Here’s a tentative list of course goals and topics, cribbed from my “found syllabi”:

Course goals

• To explore games as cultural artifacts, understanding the ideological foundations of their designs.
• To explore gaming as a social practice, studying social and structural issues within games and game-playing behavior.
• To discuss the social, economic, and technical impact of games.

Course topics

· Identity in virtual environments; avatars and in-game representation

· Games as simulations of systems and procedures

· Rule-making, power and control; player rights

· Intellectual property; players as producers of game content; modding, hacking, cheating

· Social processes and interaction between players

· Distributed Culture

· Commodification in games

· Presence, Immersion, Interactivity

Found Syllabi

The dream course I’m going to create in this class is a game-studies course. I’m planning on pitching it to the department this fall under DTC 338 – Special Topics. My found syllabi are thus all undergraduate courses (though their levels vary).

I apologize in advance for my found syllabi, which probably won’t be very applicable for the rest of you, as their critical lenses only partially overlap with the ones in literary studies. It might behoove you to know something about the theoretical approaches in game studies. Broadly, writing about games falls into two main categories: game design and game critique. The former is mostly the games industry’s turf, and the latter is pretty much academia’s turf. Within game studies, there are many subgroups, as the scholars hail from disciplines like literature, sociology, anthropology, education, and economics. Therefore, there are a lot of different theoretical and methodological approaches.

1. Beth E. Kolko, University of Washington: http://faculty.washington.edu/bkolko/games/index.shtml

Course title: Digital Games

Kolko calls the class “an interdisciplinary investigation into digital games,” and its goals reflect a variety of approaches to understanding games. She spells out her course goals and objectives clearly:

Course goals

· This course provides an overview of digital games from an interdisciplinary perspective, including as a cultural artifact, a cornerstone of youth culture, an economic powerhouse, an educational tool, and a driver of technical innovation.

· This course introduces you to a variety of game genres, and discusses the social, economic, and technical impact of these genres.

· This course explores the design process for digital games.

· This course explores social and structural issues within games and game-playing behavior.

Course objectives

At the conclusion of the class, students will be able to:

· Describe the importance of games as an area of the software market.

· Describe the importance of games as a cultural artifact, especially with respect to other entertainment genres.

· Describe the importance of games as a driver of technological innovation.

· Describe how societal norms are reflected in game design.

· Evaluate different gaming populations and make design recommendations appropriate for those (potential) players.

· Describe how game-playing patterns reflect social codes and mores.

· Identify and explain core principles of online interaction and communication.

· Describe issues of identity and representation within games and game-playing communities.

· Describe the global scope of the games market and its implications for cross-cultural diffusion.

Each week, her class focuses on a different aspect of games:

· Identity in Virtual Environments; The User Experience of Gaming; Design

· Decisions Gender, Race, and other Audience Considerations; Issues for Designers; Avatars and In-Game Representation

· Commodification of Culture; Questions of Player Rights

· Games as Learning Tool, Informal Learning via Games

· Rule-making, Power and Control in Online Games

· Presence, Immersion, Interactivity

· Games as Driver of Technological Innovation, Input Devices

The class’s most interesting assignment is a weekly play diary, which I think would work well as a blog, though Kolko has her students hand in hard copies. I would also make the diary less directed than she does, though she asks really interesting questions in her diary assignments. She assigns specific games for her students to play.

The final project for this class involves designing a game and writing a theoretical justification for that game. Kolko offers several interesting suggestions for these projects, which let students work from their own programming expertise. The point is not to make fancy, polished games; it’s to apply all of the theory the class has dealt with.

2. T.L. Taylor, IT University of Copehnagen: http://www.itu.dk/courses/MSPK/F2008/

Course title: Game Culture

Taylor is a sociologist by training – her most important work so far is an ethnography of players in EverQuest – and her course reflects that approach, though it appears to be somewhat broader than her own work has been. Here’s her course description:

This course will examine computer games from a cultural and sociological perspective. Rather than focusing on tasks like level construction, it will explore the ways culture, socialization, and values are a part of gaming. Using a variety of theoretical & methodological approaches (drawn from the humanities and social sciences) a range of topics will be discussed in an attempt to understand not only the internal workings and social dynamics of computer games, but their place in the broader culture. Topics include: social processes and interaction; games as communication spaces and virtual worlds; intellectual property and commodification in games, players as producers of game content, political/ideological analysis of games; gender and race in gaming; and design & values.

Taylor’s readings are as varied as Kolko’s, and are also arranged by weekly topics. Here are her weekly topics:

· Technology & Culture

· Embodied Play

· Constructing a Project: Problem Statements, Methods, Lit Reviews, and Writing

· Avatars and Identity

· Gender & Gaming

· Game Community?

· Emergent & Distributed Culture

· Player Producers & Co-creation

· Regulating Culture & IP

· Managing Play

· Professional (Computer) Gaming

Taylor’s most interesting assignment is that she makes her students join a multiplayer space (WoW, Second Life, Xbox Live, etc.) at the beginning of the semester that will be the site of their primary field research for some kind of final project. (She doesn’t explain the final project on the website, though.)

3. Ian Bogost, Georgia Tech: http://www.bogost.com/teaching/introduction_to_computational.shtml

Course title: Introduction to Computational Media

Here’s Bogost’s description of the course’s goals:

This is the introductory course to Computational Media, a degree program at Georgia Tech jointly administered by the School of Literature Communication and Culture and the College of Computing. The degree intends to convey the history and potential of computers as a medium from the perspective of computing and the liberal arts.

Students read, discuss, and write analytically about key developments in history of digital media and the work of important theorists/inventors. They critique exemplary digital artifacts from classic programs like Zork, Weizenbaum's Eliza (an automated therapist) to the latest videogames. They also create projects within key representational traditions of computational media.

It is not often that human culture invents a new medium of representation. The computer is a powerful form of representation that is quickly assimilating older representational forms including spoken language, printed text, drawings, photographs, moving images. But the computer is not just a transmitter of old formats: it brings its own representational powers and its own new genres such as videogames, web sites, animated robots, and interactive televison programs.

This course approaches the computer as an evolving medium of expression, connected to the history of media while it is evolving its own characteristic forms. We will be exploring the unique representational properties of the computer and surveying key advances in expressive power, such as the first virtual spaces and interactive characters.

So this course, like the others, is interdisciplinary. In fact, it’s the introductory course in a cross-interdisciplinary program at Bogost’s university. Since one of those disciplines is computer science, much of the terminology in Bogost’s syllabus draws from that discipline. The course’s topics explore various “properties of the medium” of computers – special, participatory, encyclopedic, and procedural. (Bogost’s own work has attempted to combine literary and cultural theory with computational theory; his latest book combines rhetoric and computation).

The syllabus is kind of vague about the work that students have to do, though there are quizzes and a final exam. There seems to be some kind of group design project, in which past students have created simplistic games for the Atari 2600.

4. Janet Murray, Georgia Institute of Technology: http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/%7Emurray/Games04/

Course title: Game Design as a Cultural Practice

Murray states that he focus of this course is “games as cultural artifacts and on the structural and representational elements of game design, especially electronic games.” However, the first course text, Brian Sutton-Smith's The Ambiguity of Play, is clearly from the ludology camp of game studies: the folks who view games as social practices rather than as representational texts. The practice/representation divide amongst game studies scholars used to be a major one, though it’s found some resolution and synthesis lately, as all of these courses (Murray’s included) show. Other texts come from both the design and the critique camps, though Murray apparently uses the design books in order to critique their ideological positions.

The course readings begin with really foundational stuff on gaming in general, like Callois’s Man, Play, Games. For the large project assignment, Murray lets her students choose whether to write a critical paper or to build a game prototype and rationale. Like Kolko, she makes her students play certain games. All are older (the newest is The Sims), and all are available online or in a special lab at their university.

5. Aaron Delwiche, Trinity University: http://www.trinity.edu/adelwich/mmo/index.html

Course title: Games for the Web

Here’s Delwiche’s description of the course’s goals:

In this course, we will conduct an ethnographic study of the behaviors, cultural practices, and motivations of MMO gamers. Along the way, we will play and critically analyze a variety of videogames. In addition to exploring game mechanics and video-game aesthetics, we will investigate sociological and psychological dimensions of virtual worlds as well as social controversies surrounding game violence and gender representations.

We have three objectives:

1. to explore themes of cyberculture studies through sustained interaction with other residents of World of Warcraft

2. to understand the behaviors, cultural practices, and motivations of MMO players through the use of ethnographic methods

3. to develop a critical vocabulary for analyzing all types of videogames

To accomplish all this, Delwiche makes his students buy, subscribe to, and play World of Warcraft.

Awesome.

Actually, pulling that off is tricky, not only because of the cost but also because of the technology. Trinity apparently has a lab with computers that will run WoW, and Delwiche has reserved group gaming sessions in it two nights a week. I wonder if the CUE lab could handle such a thing…

Anyway, Delwiche’s course obviously has a narrower focus than the others as far as the types of games it studies. However – and this is why I study MMORPGs – WoW is such a rich, varied game that it allows player/critics to study many of the issues common to all games – representation, identity, economics, player interaction, etc. In looking at these elements of WoW, Delwiche uses a wide variety of theoretical approaches that’s similar to the rest of the instructors I’ve mentioned, but he’s clearly coming from an anthropology background.

The Glorious but Short-Lived Proletariat Revolution of Hansel and Gretel

Hard by a great forest dwelt a poor foreman with his wife and his two children. The boy was called Hansel and the girl Gretel. Despite having a supervisory position in the local paint factory, the foreman had little to bite and to break, and when his factory began to lose income from competition with another paint factory, he could no longer procure even daily bread. Now when he thought over this by night in his bed, and tossed about in his anxiety, he groaned and said to his wife: 'What is to become of us? How are we to feed our poor children, when we no longer have anything even for ourselves?' His wife, made heartless and a little insane from years of 14-hour days at the local textile mill, said, 'I'll tell you what, husband, early tomorrow morning we will take the children out into the forest to where it is the thickest; there we will light a fire for them, and give each of them a piece of bread that is laced with paint chips, and they will fall into a stupor from the lead in the paint, and then we will leave them alone. They will be too stupid from the lead to find the way home again, and we shall be rid of them.' The foreman felt sorry for his children, but he understood that there was no way to feed them; and anyway, Gretel’s recent clamoring for a violin had annoyed him, since workers had no time for music.

Early in the morning came the woman, and took the children out of their beds. Their piece of bread was given to them, and though they wondered why it was speckled with blue and red flakes, they took it anyway. On the way into the forest Hansel crumbled his in his pocket, and often stood still and threw a morsel on the ground. Little by little, he threw all the crumbs on the path.

The woman led the children deep into the forest, where they had never in their lives been before. Then a great fire was made, and the mother said: 'Just sit there, you children, and when you are tired you may sleep a little; we are going into town to buy paint and textiles from our company stores, and in the evening when we are done, we will come and fetch you away.' When it was noon, Gretel shared her piece of bread with Hansel, who had scattered his by the way. Then they fell asleep from the paint in the bread. They did not awake until it was dark night, and Hansel comforted his little sister and said: 'Just wait, Gretel, until the moon rises, and then we shall see the crumbs of bread which I have strewn about, they will show us our way home again.' When the moon came they set out, but they found no crumbs, for the many thousands of other abandoned proletariat children which skulk about in the woods and fields had picked them all up. Hansel said to Gretel: 'We shall soon find the way,' but they did not find it. They walked the whole night and all the next day too from morning till evening, but they did not get out of the forest.

It was now three mornings since they had left their father's house. They began to walk again, but they always came deeper into the forest, and if help did not come soon, they must die of hunger and weariness. When it was mid-day, they came upon a little house built of bread and covered with cakes, with windows were of clear sugar. 'This must be how the bourgeoisie live!’ said Hansel. Hansel bit off a little of the roof to try how it tasted, and Gretel leant against the window and nibbled at the panes.

Suddenly the door opened, and a woman as old as the hills, who supported herself on crutches, came creeping out. The old woman said: 'Oh, you dear children, who has brought you here? Do come in, and stay with me. No harm shall happen to you.' She took them both by the hand, and led them into her little house. Then good food was set before them, milk and pancakes, with sugar, apples, and nuts. Afterwards two pretty little beds were covered with clean white linen, and Hansel and Gretel lay down in them, and thought they were in heaven.

The old woman had only pretended to be so kind; she was in reality a wicked pastry-factory owner who lay in wait for children, and had only built the little house of bread in order to entice them there. When a child fell into her power, she captured it and put it to work in her factory, mass-producing individually packaged pastries for supermarkets and college bookstores. Then she seized Hansel with her shriveled hand, carried him into the frosting-mixing room, and locked him in behind a grated door. Scream as he might, it would not help him, for the other children working in the room would not allow him to sit idle and would force him to work with them. Then she went to Gretel, shook her till she awoke, and cried: 'Get up, lazy thing, and help these other children in the bakery. Today, we’re making HoHos! Gretel began to weep bitterly, but it was all in vain, for the 13 cents a day the witch was offering forced her to do what witch commanded.

And now the best food was cooked for production and distribution, and poor Hansel and Gretel and the other children in the pastry factory had to eat leftover Crisco and drink yellow #5. Hansel, however, had taught himself to read and write by studying the nutrition information on packages of DingDongs, and he had begun to write leaflets on stolen Twinkie wrappers that he passed to the other children, urging them to unite. Day by day, the children plotted the day when they would overthrow their capitalist oppressors and usher in a communist utopia.

Early one morning, Gretel had to fire up the factory’s industrial-size oven. 'We will bake Zingers first,' said the old woman, 'I have already heated the oven, and kneaded the dough.' She pushed poor Gretel out to the oven, from which flames of fire were already darting. 'Creep in,' said the witch, 'and see if it is properly heated, so that we can put the bread in.' And once Gretel was inside, she intended to shut the oven and let her bake in it, and then she would eat her as a lesson to her subversive ringleader of a brother. But Gretel saw what she had in mind, and said: 'I do not know how I am to do it; how do I get in?' 'Silly goose,' said the old woman. 'The door is big enough; just look, I can get in myself!' and she crept up and thrust her head into the oven. Then Gretel gave her a push that drove her far into it, and shut the iron door, and fastened the bolt. Oh! then she began to howl quite horribly, but Gretel ran away and the godless witch was miserably burnt to death.

Gretel, however, ran like lightning to Hansel, opened the door to the frosting room, and cried: 'Hansel, we are saved! The old witch is dead!' Then Hansel sprang like a bird from its cage when the door is opened. How they did rejoice and embrace each other, and dance about and kiss each other! And as they had no longer any need to fear her, they went into the witch's house, and in every corner there stood chests full of pearls and jewels. They distributed the wealth equally amongst the other children, and ran home through the forest to tell their father about their revolution.

At length they saw from afar their father's house. Then they began to run, rushed into the parlour, and threw themselves round their father's neck. The foreman had not known one happy hour since he had left the children in the forest; his wife, however, had recently gotten stuck in her loom at the textile mill and was dead. Gretel emptied her pinafore until pearls and precious stones ran about the room, and Hansel threw one handful after another out of his pocket to add to them. They told their father about the revolution at their factory and urged him to begin one at his, but he wasn’t sure the workers at his factory, who had been reading Horatio Alger, would listen to him. So they all went out and spent their newfound money on a Model T.