Gameology 2.0

I have a new review up at Play this Thing, of Cryptic Comet's new PBEM TBS Solium Infernum.

In working on this, I became wrapped up in just how contemplative the game is. No animations, no time pressure, just interesting art, design, and flavor text (but almost no plot). I'm working on a paper on the deliberate incorporation of board game elements into original video games, but some of what I came up with isn't what I'd expected to find.

Thoughts?

What are the greatest or most important videogames of all time? Which games are most deserving of archival priority, and which should we recognize as part of cultural or institutional knowledge?

These are the questions asked in 2007 by a committee of game scholars, developers and journalists (Henry Lowood,Warren Spector, Steve Meretzky, Matteo Bittanti, and Christopher Grant). The result, in no particular order:

Spacewar!, Zork, Sensible Soccer, Civilization, Warcraft, SimCity, Doom, Tetris, Super Mario Bros. 3, and Star Raiders.

Certainly, any top ten list will generate some controversy. Some of those games listed above are no-brainers, other's less so. Still others are real head scratchers.

Anyone familiar with the discourse of literary studies over the past few decades will be well aware of the intellectual and political stakes in canon-formation, but a simple look through Digg or Cracked.com reveals how much appeal a top-ten list can have.

More importantly, the kinds of questions a game canon raises are useful pedagogical ones, and so this past semester I led a seminar with our mission to investigate them further. In what follows, I want to reflect on the seminar -- which I think was moderately successful -- and reveal our findings: a new list of games to add to the original ten.

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It's been too long since I posted anything to gameology. Most of my work online in the last year has been for Play This Thing! and I'm looking into becoming a regular blogger for Alltern8. My hope is that doing a daily blog will help keep the juices flowing, allowing me to post more often here as well.

In case you're curious, here are links to my reviews for Play This Thing!
(newest to oldest)

Gratuitous Space Battles

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Hello. Welcome to Gameology 2.0 (beta).

The site you see before you represents a major upgrade to Gameology.org. We're still running things with Drupal, but it's a much more advanced Drupal (6.x) than the ancient (4.6) software we were running (unpatched) at the old site. This new site should be much more stable, and much easier to use.

One major difference is that non-users can now become users simply by creating an account. This account will let you post comments (though you can still post comments anonymously) and submit CFPs, Events and Links for moderation.

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Interactive media artist Erik Loyer, perhaps most well known to academics as Creative Director of Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology visited the University of California, Riverside earlier this week to give a talk titled “Stories as Instruments.”

Loyer explained his design philosophy that games should break free of the restrictions of plot-centric progression and character focused instrumentality (his recent innovative iPhone game Ruben and Lullaby is a particularly illustrative example of this trajectory). Loyer points to the genre of the musical as an important influence and model for new forms of storytelling in games. Musical arias feature characters that step just outside the world in moments of intense expression. Loyer analogized this as a blend of first and third person perspective. The singing character in the musical is locked into the narrative space contextually yet elaborating that context. The best games, according to Loyer, allow the player to assume this role: doing things as they should be done logically in the world but also knowing what one is doing.

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The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, NY houses the Center for the History of Electronic Games. According to their website the museum "collects, studies, and interprets electronic games and related material and the ways in which electronic games are changing how people play, learn, and connect with each other."

They have a collection of 15,000 items and, according to Kotaku, every console ever made on display.

Without question, this is game geek heaven and a productive development for game studies. I have heard similar rumblings from other academic game research centers about developing collections of materials for the study of games, but funding, especially right now, seems to be difficult to acquire for this incredibly necessary effort in the development of game studies. Developing these kinds of collections would be an immense help to those of us interested in historical approaches to game studies specifically in light of the hardware-centric scholarship being done in MIT's platform studies.

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Art Games is a solo exhibition by Patrick LeMieux, an MFA Candidate in Digital Media Arts in the School of Art and Art History at the University of Florida. The exhibition features custom video games which explore concepts of mark-making, viewer agency, subjectivity, and gameplay as critical entryways into the history and production of art. Each video game locates the figure of a seminal artist within the landscape of their own artwork. Modeled after the juxtaposition of Ad Reinhardt's stark, black monochromes and wry, pedagogical comics, the video games stage imaginary confrontations between the artists and their minimal works--interaction signifying interpretation.

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Well, its been months, rather than the “week” I projected after my last post, but that's life in Graduate school. This post also wound up needing to be much longer (three times as long) despite having a much narrower focus. Also, I haven't added anchors to make the footnotes work. Oh well - I'll try to make time to do so tomorrow. As this post involves a critique of the conventions of Fantasy as a genre, including J.R.R. Tolkien's classic Lord of the Rings (LotR), I hope to to draw at least as many hostile posts as I did with “Muslim Massacre, Roach Toaster and Iji.” We'll see.

Before I can get into Battle for Wesnoth (Wesnoth) specifically, I need to establish a baseline for racial and postcolonial issues in fantasy fiction, including games. This is the part that would be least controversial in a purely academic setting, but that I expect will be most controversial on-line.

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One of the things that is too often lacking in Games Studies, and almost completely in popular writing about games, is comparison of work by different creators across the mosty obvious lines of "genre." In less than a month, Play this Thing has reviewed Tr00jg's turn-based strategy/puzzle game Roach Toaster, Remar's multiplot platformer Iji and Sigvatr's condemnation garnering Robotron-like Muslim Massacre as if these highly contemporary games were completely irrelevant to each other. (nota bene: in addition to being contemporary, these games are all single-programmer freeware)

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In the Technology section of NewScientist.com, David Robson reports on a study by researchers at the University of Southern California, the Palo Alto Research Center and the University of Deleware that dispel some common assumptions about gamers. Here's a link to the article. The article is short and the study focused on one MMO, Everquest II; however, it does offer some positive stats:

• "Adult gamers have an average body mass index of 25.2, compared to the overall American average of 28"

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