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Wednesday, June 07, 2006
GAM3R 7H3ORY & Lucky Wander Boy
I’ve been meaning to link to this interesting project-in-process - GAM3R 7H3ORY - sponsored by those good folks at Future of the Book. The trouble is: I’m not sure what to say about it. I like the idea of developing your work in this sort of open, collaborative way. I like this quote from Adorno: “The unreality of games gives notice that reality is not yet real. Unconsciously they rehearse the right life.” (Mostly I like it because he wouldn’t have liked becoming an inadvertent advocate of Half-Life or Halo or whatever.) Tim Burke? Please weigh in on this matter. The trouble is: I’m not really a gamer myself, although god knows I played Civilization II for enough hours before decisively swearing off the stuff in favor of other activities.
I did read a pretty ok novel about gaming a few months back: Lucky Wander Boy
The novel is, I dunno - entertaining enough, funny. Sort of Douglas Coupland-y. But for me, video games aren’t wonderfully meaningful, nigh inexhaustible founts of nostalgia-drenched, poignant allegory. (There ought to be a word for it: nostalgiagory.) Not the way, say, men running around with their underwear on the outside, fighting crime, are supremely, powerfully nostalgiagoric. To me. So I’ll probably stick Michael Chabon-y stuff, for now. But please do tell us what YOU think about GAM3R TH3ORY. The form of the project is admirable and intriguing. Or, better yet, wander over and tell the author himself what you think.
Comments
I encourage Valvians to read GAM3R 7H30RY and join in the discussion that’s taking place around the book—literally in its margins.
Bottom line, this is a work of cultural studies. You don’t have to be a gamer to engage. In fact, Wark himself was not a gamer until he began writing GAM3R 7H30RY. What interests him (and I trust will interest many of you) is how computer games, the emergent cultural form of our times, might help us think more lucidly about the world around us, a world made over as an imperfect copy of a digital game.
Anyone with an interest in theory should (theoretically) find much to play with here.
Thanks Ben, I guess I was sort of negatively groping for what should probably be a positive point. The novel - Lucky Wander Boy - is largely nostalgic in mood. I think good writing about superheroes is usually inspired by a kind of (brilliantly) naive nostalgia about childhood. Superheroes turn out to be versatile literary vehicles for discussing childishness - and also making fun of it. But gamer theory is not about that, although one of Wark’s two questions is “can we explore games as allegories for the world we live in?” Obviously allegory NEED not lead you back to childhood. There’s the Cave, so forth. (But the Cave is a womb! But it doesn’t have to be.) I can see that. Still ... well, I don’t know what I think.
I hope Tim Burke shows up and says something REALLY smart.
It’s interesting, in a book about games Wark doesn’t spend a lot of time talking about childhood. He’s focused more on play as a new kind of work, or what play in digital space tells us about a world in which the line between work and play has been erased. It’s a very “adult” book in that sense.
Incidentally, a brilliant riff on superheroes and childhood, which I just finished reading, is The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem. Highly recommended.
A brief proposition concerning Theory, behind which I stand only provisionally:
No work that begins with the question ‘Can there be a critical theory of XXXXXX?’ - for *any* value of XXXXXX - is worth the time it took to write or type.
I’m not trying to be a philistine here, but these jargon-riddled hand-wavings re: the ontology of games have a great deal in common and a good deal less to offer anyone who actually plays, er, the games themselves. Since the answer to that leadoff question is ‘Yes, obviously,’ the ruminations themselves had better be, at the absolute minimum, compelling in their theoretical contours and merely correct in their claims about the games.
Unfortunately the stretch to read e.g. Katamari Damacy as an allegory for the analog/digital divide is too great for the game itself to sustain. You can overlook bog-standard graceless post-Barthes hand-waving about the Play of Signs and so forth, since that’s academic criticism’s common courtesy (and if it’s sad to see that happening to games, well, it happens to the best of ‘em). But even within that system of lowered expectations there’s little enough going on here.
Master Holbo (oh man I wanted to call you Hamfast or Proudfoot or Old Took for a second), if this sort of writing tickles your fancy, you can get an excellent cleansing from Zimmerman/Salen’s Rules of Play, which is design-oriented and thereby skips over the rocky over-’criticalizing’ ground of such things as ‘GAM3R 7H3ORY’. Jesper Juul’s book Half Real is also worth a look (Jesper’s funny and, as I recall, comparatively easily bored by non-gamer posing on the subject of games).
Still, this bears saying and repeating: that’s a damned fine bit of Wordpress programming right there. It’s clunky, mannered, and overwrought, but it’s still a hell of a thing to do to a blog engine.
(I’ll go off and think of ‘nostalgiagory’ now while I eat my greasy pizza. 10:1 I come back in a worse mood than I go off. I mean greasy.)
John: thanks for the mention. Ben: slight misunderstanding there. I have been a pretty low-key gamer since Space Invaders came out. I am neither a fan of games, nor do i think they are the end of civiization.
In which case, what i do is not really cultural studies. So waxbanks, get a new act. Boring as batshit. Must try harder.
3/10 C minus
This is interesting, Wax, if you wanted to call me Hamfast, what was stopping you?
John - No idea. I think that I’m enamored of the ‘I was going to say this but decided against it’ way of passive-aggressively saying things. I’d enlist any of several ex-girlfriends to back me up on this one but, as the ‘ex’ is short for ‘extremely unlikely to say any damn thing in my defense,’ you’ll have to take my word for it. And I just like the sound of ‘Hamfast’ anyhow. ‘Holbo’ sounds to me like a hobbit name after all. (As does ‘Belle’ when I think about it. :-)
McKenzie - I apologise for the intemperate tone of my comment, but I have no idea what you’re talking about in your response, though I understand why you’re offended. It’d be childish to insist at this point that that wasn’t my intent, in part anyhow. But I stand by the broad strokes of my reaction: the readings of games in the text don’t really illuminate for me the lived experiences of gaming, and I think this is in part because you’re trading in a rhetorical style that holds actual play at a good deal more than arm’s length, in the name of a stylized academic ‘playfulness’ that’s anything but. Since I don’t give a damn what you call your brand of rhetoric, only whether it’s new, pleasurable, and generative, I’m making a perhaps unprofessional evaluation of its worth based on the time I spent reading it earlier today.
Closer attention to the (mythical?) Average Gamer’s Experience of playing a game would more thoroughly illuminate these texts, I think. But then that’s a general principle ready to be cut-and-pasted into most reviews of theorizing-of-games (which I can’t call ‘game theory’ since that confuses my poor benighted Econ friends, those bastards). I admire the effort but I’m getting nothing out of the work - and though I may seem dismissive of a certain straw model of ‘academia’ at times (especially when hungry as before, or tired like right now), I’ve read enough about video games and Theory to say that for the average textual critic/lover/analyst wanting to know more about the nature of games and gaming, there are better resources. I listed a couple.
I think Salen/Zimmerman’s model of gameplay analysis is worth emulating. Is that constructive?
John, in his pre-typepad blog, wrote a piece of game criticism about Might or Magic (something like that), which ranks as one of the finest in the genre. I’d recommend it be included in the anthology if at all possible.
For those of us who feel that video games ARE wonderfully meaningful, nigh inexhaustible founts of nostalgia-drenched, poignant allegory, LUCKY WANDER BOY is excellent. I can’t tell you from any other point of view than mine, but, if you can put down that six-axis for a few, this is definitely worth the read. It may not make sense to “new gamers” but I loved it and want more.