Archive for December, 2007
The Wii, Russian Formalism and What Makes Video Games ‘Games’.
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on December 24, 2007
Man, that is an exciting title! 
Okay – I have long had a fascination with interfaces. To me, the interface is the meeting point of user and information, the middle ground between human creativity and the raw materials with which to create. It was this I was thinking about recently as I watched people run around this Christmas for a Nintendo Wii. After all, the success of the Wii is predicated upon its interface, in the new way in which you interact with what happens on the screen. The ‘fun’ of the Wii is not solely in how brilliant the games are in theme or execution, but in how they ‘play’.
Though it may seem like an odd segue, this focus on ‘how and not what’ is something that pops up quite often in literary studies, and I couldn’t help but think of the relationship between some approaches to literature and how we think of video games. I am soon to read a whack of Russian Formalism, an early twentieth century literary school that focused upon what made certain texts literary and others merely informative or practical. Formalists like Roman Jakobson basically ended up stating that literary language differed from regular language because it drew attention to itself and its own ‘literariness’. When Wordsworth’s narrator says “A slumber did my spirit seal” rather than simply ‘I was out of it’, he or she deliberately slows down the reading process, asking the reader to pay attention to the form of what is said as much its content. The key to being ‘literary’ (according to some, anyway) is not in conveying information as effectively as possible; instead, it is the interplay between what is said and how it is expressed.
This distinction – between what is conveyed and how – is one that might also be applied to gaming. Let’s take Wii Tennis as an example: if one wanted to simulate what it is like to play tennis, the aim would be realism. You would need to replicate the physics of the racket swing, the motion of the player and the various effects of different surfaces, spins and weather conditions. The goal here would be the replication of a specific experience in much the same way that the purpose of journalistic or technical language is to convey a message or idea. The focus is on utility, on the end rather than the process. But similar to the way in which literary language focuses upon the experience of language itself, Wii Tennis does not attempt to realistically recreate the experience of tennis per se, but the fun of experiencing the interface. It is the Wiimote and how it is used that is key, the enjoyment not coming from the specific recreation of what it is like to play a sport or, conversely, participating in a war, but by creating a set of virtual rules which one then plays within using the interface available to one. Thus video games are themselves akin to sports: there is no inherent joy in placing a ball in a hoop or catching a pigskin. It is the rules of the game that create the potential for fun, pleasure coming from the joy of the process rather than the achievement of a goal. As such, a good game, one that game critics would say ‘controls well’, gives the player the maximum amount of freedom and choice within the given arena of the game through its interface.
Thus the ‘fun’ or enjoyment of a videogame lies in playing an approximation of an experience with a focus on the experience of the interface rather than completing goals. Pleasure lies in the combination of the ‘feeling’ of the movements and controls of the game and what those inputs then achieve. This is crucial for a number of reasons. First, the argument that first-person shooters are ‘killing simulators’ misses that the satisfaction in those games comes from the actions and techniques of ‘achieving a kill’ rather than the kill itself – it is the rules and restrictions of the game rather than the game’s end that is the source of fun. Secondly, in much the same way that literature’s focus upon its own ‘literariness’ provided an ‘in’ for a wealth of analysis, it is the interface in gaming that will provide an avenue for reading video games in a sophisticated academic manner. For the best example I’ve seen of this yet, I highly suggest you read Chris Sullenstrope’s brillaint reading of Bioshock. For now though, it’s Christmas Eve and my head is getting heavy with beer, so I apologise if this is still a bit unclear. If you wish to add to my slightly intoxicated thoughts, hit the comments and let me know what you think 
Slate’s Gaming Club (Part 2): Obsessions and Perversions
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on December 13, 2007
It has been a distinct and refreshing pleasure over the last couple of days to be able to sit and read four smart individuals talk about gaming. Yes, the round-table – that staple of Slate‘s end-of-year roundups – has come to gaming and N’Gai Croal, Stephen Totilo, Seth and Chris Sullentrope discuss their picks for the year’s best games and their reasons for their choices. What has been remarkable about the discussion is the way in which the writers have sidestepped the usual discussions of the best graphics or weapons and have instead engaged the question of how to evaluate the aesthetic, interactive and narrative elements of gaming. There’s too much to cover in one go, so I’ll break things up into parts. This is the second post, in which I examine N’Gai Croal’s assertion that obsession is a valid way to critically judge a game.
When asked to defend his choice for Game of the Year, Stephen Totilo is clear: he chose Desktop Tower Defence as his number one pick because of “the pure pleasure of its gameplay and the impossibility of quitting”. He acknowledges that while gaming may have yet to produce its Citizen Kane, we need to “find room to praise games” like DTD that are about “pure gameplay” and not story or big-budget production values. The argument being made is that the more obsessed you are about a game, the better the game is, an approach that everyone who plays and enjoys video games is vaguely aware of.
As Totilo writes, he sounds committed but unsure, as if he knows that his choice is fair but puts him against the flow of popular opinion. N’Gai Croal, however, comes to Totilo’s rescue and argues that obsession is a valid selection criterion. Comparing gaming to other art forms, Croal states that “whether I’m thinking about my favorite song, album, movie, TV show, novel, or play, I generally pick the one that I’ve responded to the strongest, the one that I can’t stop thinking about”. What’s being suggested is that the best types of games get under your skin and suck you in, hovering in your mind even when you’re not playing them – that it is the degree to which you become obsessed that determines how successful a game is.
Reading this, I couldn’t help but think of recently watching Dreamland, a film that stars Agnes Bruckner, Kelli Garner and Justin Long. A coming of age story set in a trailer park, the film has an ethereal, sun-soaked quality that stayed with me for days after I had seen it. Flashes of the film and its general tone lingered in my mind, its presence an odd contrast to the cold, grey Toronto winter. As a whole, however, I considered the film a failure – its woozy, romantic promise wasted by a formulaic and too-packaged ending.
So why had the film had stuck with me? Well, the acting was great and so was the overall atmosphere. But when pushed, I had to admit – the film’s creators went to great length to display the bodies of both Bruckner and Garner. They spend much of the film in bikinis, while other times the camera hovers on close up of their faces. My point is not that I’m sorta’ pervy (I’m not!… I think); rather, the film stuck with me for reasons other than its artistic merit. Instead, its depictions of teenage sexuality and young, attractive women in an almost other-wordly context appealed to something that hovered below my conscious mind: my id.
What Croal wonders is how we might “explain why we respond as we do to a particular game” when we have yet to develop the vocabulary for doing so. To my mind, the question is whether or not we can use a response such as obsession as a criterion for judgement if obsession is a primarily unconscious process. And while I’m not about to claim that good art appeals to our ‘pure conscious mind’, I am wary of using an essentially id-driven emotion as a method of judging art. Ultimately, I am again asserting the need for games to be culturally relevant beyond their capacity to entertain, distract or be a part of an economy. It is quite possible that games like Desktop Tower Defense are simply the soap operas of gaming: addictive and ultimately vapid. Their addictiveness stems from how they appeal to fundamental structures of consciousness, whether desire or reward. And to me, art’s function is to lay bare those fundamental structures and our relation to them rather than merely access them. It is in this that Desktop Tower Defense fails – there may be artistry in its design but not its experience. For this reason, I am (yet again) going to disagree with Croal and argue that obsession is probably not the best criterion by which we should judge games.
Slate’s Gaming Club (Part 1): N’Gai on Narratives
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on December 12, 2007
It has been a distinct pleasure over the last couple of days to be able to sit and read four smart individuals talk about gaming. Yes, the round-table – that staple of Slate‘s end-of-year roundups – has come to gaming and N’Gai Croal, Stephen Totilo, Seth and Chris Sullentrope discuss their picks for the year’s best games and their reasons for their choices. What has been remarkable about the discussion is the way in which the writers have sidestepped the usual discussions of the best graphics or weapons and have instead engaged the question of how to evaluate the aesthetic, interactive and narrative elements of gaming. There’s too much to cover in one post, so I’ll break things up into parts. This is the first post, in which I argue that Croal might need to reconsider his perspective on narratives in games.
One of the most interesting things about Slate’s recent round-table on gaming was watching the selected writers start to form a critical vocabulary for evaluating gaming. Reading it, one almost gets the sense that we are witnessing the birth of game criticism proper, rather than the evaluations of economic worth that have passed for game journalism so far. One of the most intriguing discussions that was brought up was Croal’s mention of an oft-cited idea in game studies: that it is simulation and not narrative that is the main ‘expressive mode’ of video gaming, and it is this that I would like to take up here. It would be difficult to posit a hard and fast division of ‘play’ and ‘stories’ in games, but it’s certainly true that the thing that separates gaming from other arts is its interactivity. Playing a game like Super Mario Galaxy or Everyday Shooter, it is easy to make the case that the art of game design lies in the actual playing of the title – what the eggheads call a ‘ludic experience’.
That said, as an occasional Marxist, I still believe that art is at its most powerful when it connects with and informs the culture in which it was created. While I agree with the general premise of Croal’s assertion – that gaming must be judged on its own terms and not in relation to other forms – I think we need to consider the position of narrative as fundamental to all human activity. Narrative is how we understand and relate to the world. From grand narratives of nation and identity to our own personal narratives of memory and family, it is our stories that make us who we are. To me, it seems that gaming will be at its most relevant when it places narrative and interactivity on an equal footing in order to create something like Bioshock, a title that blends its elements of story and play into a unique whole. I am not saying that gaming should replicate film; rather in much the same way that film created its own tools to differentiate itself from literature, so too should gaming have its own mode of expressing, experiencing and interacting with stories.
And ultimately, I believe that gaming must create its own language so that it can become culturally relevant. No matter how brilliant Everyday Shooter or Mario are, without narratives what impact will games have beyond being aesthetic experiences? Yes, it’s true that Coltrane or Pollock are ‘merely’ aesthetic experiences – but their introduction to the world was so profound because of their contrast to other works in their form. Gaming does not yet have that luxury of having aesthetic choices become profound statements as is there little context to work in. So while I admire Croal’s passionate defense of gaming and agree in certain ways, I must respectfully dissent – in order for gaming to become a locus of culture or an art form, it must engage and refine its approach to the thing that makes us who we are: narrative.
Doris Lessing: Let’s Not Dismiss Her Just Yet
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on December 11, 2007
There was a bit of buzz today around recent Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing’s comments that “blogging and blugging” (how awesome is that?) is yet another thing that’s ‘destroying our culture’. Lessing argued, quite eloquently, that we are one the cusp of a radical social and philosophical change and that, given the pace and significance of the shift, we might want to think about where we are headed.
Predictably, the ‘internet defense force’ leapt into action, with Duncan Riley decrying Lessing as an “ignorant old woman” and Mathew Ingram (who I usually dig) arguing that Lessing’s comments were a sort of intellectual fetishism. But why the response? What was it that Lessing said that was so reprehensible? She suggested that the internet is full of ‘inanities’ – and it is. She argued that the lack of a common cultural heritage due to the fracturing of popular and mainstream culture is making social cohesion more difficult – it is. That doesn’t make it wrong necessarily, but it is. Lessing is arguing that the increasing fragmentation of culture is resulting in a less comprehensive view of broad, global ideological happenings. While it’s inarguable that we have access to far more information about the world, it is equally true that our response to that information is not always to learn more but, rather, it is to focus more specifically on our own locale or speciality. So why did the blogosphere erupt?
This, I think, is a significant problem with us bloggers: criticism is not welcome, especially from the outside and particularly from those who are somehow considered to be part of the old guard of media or art. But if we are to really acknowledge the power of what we do on a day-to-day basis, then we need to acknowledge that we are part of a social revolution and that there are downsides to all social revolutions, this one included. A drop in the sort of literacy entailed by reading literature and ‘books’ is one we need to deal with – not by printing manuscripts and building libraries but by engaging the hard stuff in the shift from the textual: depth, challenge, personal space, subjectivity and how all those things related to reading. There is nothing inherent about ‘the screen’ that will prevent us from thinking through things in a serious way and it’s vital that we do. So, let’s not throw Lessing out of the window for now – the ‘ignorant old woman’ might have something to tell us yet.
What Fractured Pop Culture?
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on December 9, 2007
Think it was the long tail that fragmented Pop? Think again.
‘Tis the season for end-of-year lists and retrospectives and the Globe and Mail joined the fun this weekend with an interesting look back at the year in pop culture. While a lot of it is the usual “man, what’s up with these starlets not wearing panties!?” shtick, what stuck out for me was the debate over whether or not we could still talk about ‘pop culture’ as that which was common. Since the article will soon disappear behind a (stupid, annoying) pay-wall, here’s how Johanna Schneller starts things off:
Johanna:… there are readers who just loved getting their hands on Harry Potter one last time. … Victor: Insert tasteless Dumbledore joke here. Johanna: … and those who’ve never cracked the spine of any of J.K. Rowling’s books. There are Webheads who can recite every line from baby Pearl’s performance in The Landlord, versus people who’ve never even heard of FunnyorDie.com… In fact, I think this may be the last year when one can even speak of a pop culture. It’s really pop cultures, with each individual picking and choosing his/her own entertainment threads from an ever-denser skein.
So, ignoring the mildly homophobic Dumbledore joke, I think this sounds pretty standard now – that what we can call ‘common’ in a cultural or aesthetic sense has evaporated due to the massive proliferation of both content and distribution channels available. There’s no way that a single person can (or perhaps should) stay on top of all of pop culture at the moment. So when you ask a friend “oh, did you see/hear/read so-and-so”, the chances they’ve never even heard of it are increasing. But Elizabeth Renzetti presents another possibility when she responds:
Elizabeth: …eggheads have been complaining that culture’s cracked since the days of shadow puppets on the cave wall. I’m seeing just the opposite of what you’re seeing, Johanna (or maybe I’m just Pollyanna to your Cassandra) – the same people who go see Benjamin Britten operas at night will also go see Superbad on the weekends – even without their kids. You can read Michael Chabon and comic books, too. Look what’s selling out theatres here in London: Patrick Stewart’s Macbeth, Ian McKellen’s Lear, an avant-garde adaptation of Poe’s Masque of the Red Death. Now, on to the really serious topics: How does Britney get her labia so baby-soft?
I dunno’ – that’s pretty fascinating to me (not the labia part. okay, smooth labia are always slightly fascinating. anyway.). What’s being suggested here is that the fragmentation of pop culture is old news – that we have always had blind spots in relation to the murky public space we call ‘pop’ and that the current context is simply exacerbating the situation. But what’s actually new is not that the reference points of culture are changing but rather, that demographic boundaries as determined by aesthetic tastes are breaking down – not only in reaction to the expansion of available content, but also to the lack of stigma attached to the consumption of ‘low’ culture. What’s intriguing is that when Renzetti talks about “Chabon and comic books”, the high-low divide of culture is still present; but the punitive aspect that went along with it is gone (well, at least for privileged people it is). If you’re ‘educated’ or ‘savvy’, there is no longer a social constraint attached to immersing yourself in reality TV or serial dramas because the scale by which those things are judged ‘high’ or ‘low’ is so obviously and constantly in flux, to make no mention of the whole hipster/irony thing.
‘Course, I can’t yap about this and pretend that if someone wants to jump from their usual Jerry Springer routine to Murakami novels, this is all the same. Quite to the contrary, the postmodern breakdown of high/low in culture has cemented that same division in society as those who get to dabble in both are still those who have the power and privilege to do so. It’s still all quite interesting though. What it means is that the ‘pop’ at the front of ‘popular culture’ is now a misnomer – pop is not a designation of popularity or commonality as much as it is a marker of a particular aesthetic and availability – many things can be pop and they are equal in terms of their potential consumption. More significantly, I think, it means that the lack of ‘the common’ is much as a result of changes in how we relate to and identify through culture as it is the long tail or something like it.
Xbox Movie Downloads Arrive in Canada Dec. 11 (This time, It’s for Realz).
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on December 4, 2007
Almost everyday, some poor fellow Canadian arrives at this blog desperately searching for some sign that we Canucks will also get Hollywood movie and TV downloads on our white boxes of questionable reliability. Before, they ended up at this post – and went away disappointed. But now, we can finally celebrate – it’s coming on December 11th. The selection is limited and Microsoft Canada has released no word on pricing, but it’s a start. And hopefully, besides finally getting us some electronic, HD content, this move will also do two other things: on the media side, force Apple and other companies to get going on their ‘international’ plans, sign distribution deals and start thinking about infrastructure; and on the gaming side, force Sony to get their video download plans together while their PS3/PSP combo remains unique in the industry. Anyway, for now, we Canucks finally get some good news. Now if Sony would just release their Reader here, I’d be having a very merry Christmas.
Gerstmann-gate: Outrage For All the Wrong Reasons
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on December 4, 2007
Over the past few years, one of the more pernicious trends in advertising has been the tendency to appropriate activist slogans and images for selling stuff. Basically, ad companies use the tone of sixties-style marches to create fun pitches like “Hell no! We won’t take high detergent prices anymore!” or “Every man, woman and child has the right to more bacon in their burger!“. It is, to some extent, predictable and inevitable – but it doesn’t make it any less annoying.
I mention this because I couldn’t help but think of those ads in relation to the firing of Jeff Gestmann from Gamespot.com, allegedly due to advertiser pressure after a negative review. To put it mildly, the internets exploded in righteous indignation with people not only decrying Gamespot and its parent company CNet, but also questioning all ‘games journalism’ and the invasion of the almighty dollar into neutral, objective game reviewing.
The entire hullabaloo rubs me the wrong way for the same reason as the ads: there is a complete conflation of actual issues with the economic concerns of supply and demand. Here’s the thing: game reviews at Gamespot never have been journalism and they have never deserved the protections implied by the ‘freedom of the press’. The purpose of a review at Gamespot is not to evaluate the intellectual and aesthetic aspects of a game title but is to tell you whether or not it is worth your fifty or sixty bucks. Gamespot is not a site of journalism but instead one of consumer information. The sort of outrage we’ve seen seems to argue that Consumer Reports is as important to intellectual freedom as the Globe and Mail or the New York Times. But the relationship of game reviews to the industry is akin to the co-dependence between fashion and gossip rags and Hollywood – they both need each other to make money. Gamespot’s function is to play a part in the economics of the gaming industry, to sustain the buying and selling – not to function as an analytical cultural outlet for discussing the social, aesthetic and ideological issues surrounding gaming.
I think the best we can expect is that we get a neutral evaluation of whether we should spend our money and in this, Gamespot failed. But the outrage about the entire affair is trying oh-so-hard to differentiate between advertising and reviews; while there is an important difference, I also think we should note that both of them work to get you to spend your money and are tied up in the same thing. To wit, when reviews are only evaluations of worth rather than art, advertising and reviews are simply two sides of the same coin. So yes, in a very practical sense, be outraged about the encroachment of advertising pressure into reviews; but let’s also remember that it’s the positioning of games as only economic objects that is the root of the problem.
[Update]: As expected, N’Gai Croal took on the issue. I think he generally arrives at a similar place to me, albeit in the far more detailed and rigorous manner of an insider.
Jaman.com: Because Downloads Aren’t Just for Whitey
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on December 1, 2007
When pushed, even the most ardent luddite would have to admit that there are upsides to the internet. While one can decry drops in literacy or the easy access to dangerous materials (ya’ know, like Marxism 
) the internet does things that traditional media outlets just can’t. Want an example? Try Jaman.com, a ‘multicultural’ video download site.
On the surface, Jaman is like Movielink or Cinema Now. The difference is that, while it has a selection of indie American film, it specialises in non-Western downloads from the Middle East, East Asia and, most prominently, India (the name Jaman comes from a popular fruit from the subcontinent – but don’t ask ’cause I don’t get it either). Films can be purchased for $4.99 or rented for 7 days for $1.99. The former price doesn’t really match up well to the countless grocery-cum-video stores that dot North American suburbs where you can buy a DVD copy of a film for a couple of bucks. The latter price, however, isn’t bad as few people ever return to the poor-quality, illegal DVDs they buy. Beyond the economics though, I just think it’s great to see a modern internet-y service that’s targeted at minorities. So much of the e-revolution has either focused on the white mainstream or has attempted to replicate its models. Jaman is at least doing something to counteract that trend.
Of course, Jaman isn’t by any means perfect. Naturally, this being an American film startup trying to get a foothold… the films are DRM’ed to hell. I’m sure they had to ensure DRM to sign distribution deals, but it’s still a pain in the ass that they require a proprietary player. The films themselves are also a little heavy on the size-to-quality ratio – while the picture isn’t really that great, full-length films can hit over 2 gigs, which is a little steep considering that they start to get fuzzy on anything larger than a 19″ monitor.
It’s also interesting to note that the CEO of Jaman is a guy named Gaurav Dhillon – which is about as Punjabi a name as you can get. I suppose this proves the ole’ American dream rule – if you want something to change you have to do it yourself and it seems it took a minority in the Valley to even think that there might be money in the ‘ethnic’ market (good God, how I hate that word).
On some level, I think the service is more interesting for simply existing than for what it does. Still – if they can get rid of the proprietary player and get some more current releases, they could very well have hit on to something merely by being first to the party.
