Hello Imaginary Audience!
For anyone looking at the blog and noticing the lack of updates, I'm just letting you all know it's not dead, just sad and neglected. I'm still involved, but grad school apps and work in general have been distracting me from posting about things. And oh boy, are there things to post about. A brief rundown of my ideas so I don't forget:
-Movement vs. Genre Part II: how modes of address (that define genre) entail certain . Pretty much I want to see if there's a sort of "male gaze" equivalent or analog from Mulvey's film theory in something like a FPS in the way it addresses the player, and how a game like Portal might subvert the "classic male gaze" of a game.
-Park Chan Wook's JSA has a few things going on I wanted to discuss, primarily . These are two different ideas (and possibly two different posts)
-Was going to upload a revised and "bloggy" version of one of my papers for class analyzing the scene from Modern Times in which Charlie Chaplin dances, make it less academic-y and more tied to cyber-digital age stuff I want to talk about.
-Finally, I've had this idea for a long time, and I haven't really been going out of my way to do this but I want to put up some beer recommendations and some reviews of what I find to be good brews.
There, that's a lot on my plate but a load off my mind.
Friday, October 24, 2008
Thursday, October 9, 2008
Genre vs. Movement (Part I)
I'll open this post with two definitions pulled from Janey Place's essay "Women in Film Noir"*:
"Film movements occur in specific historical periods - at times of national stress and focus of energy. They express a consistency of both thematic and formal elements which makes them particularly expressive of those times, and are uniquely able to express the homogeneous hopes (Soviet Socialist Realism and Italian Neo-Realism) and fears (German Expressionism and film noir) brought to the fore by, for example, the upheaval of war."
"Genres, on the other hand, exist through time: we have had Westerns since the early 1900s and, in spite of rise and falls in their popularity, Westerns are with us today. Genres are characterized more by their subject matter and their iconography than movements, and they can express a wide and changing range of ideologies."
There's been a lot of discussion in new media academics and thoughtful gamers on the topic of genre and categorization (him, her, and this other dude come to mind) and I thought I'd try to attempt to create some definitions and also point out some of the problems involved with genre and gaming. Because if we are going to talk about genre across the internet, we better define it as Janey Place so eloquently did when she discussed film noir. First of all, games are not film. They are a completely different medium. I almost feel like a fool for using an essay on film to structure any argument on games. Except that games can't seem to escape cinematic portrayals, cutscene, narrative, and pretty much this specter of the medium haunting it from it's inception**. I'd also argue that like cinema games are going through a "classical cinema" phase where the market is primarily industry and commodity driven, where people are trying to sell (virtual) stars and "the next big FPS" or "the next big RTS". Still, there's something even more disruptive about video games as a medium than say, television was to film. So my discussion of genre in terms of video games must be understood as something not INHERENT TO the medium (the medium is not the genre, even if it is the message), but rather it is something adopted from it's influence from other (mostly narrative) forms.***
GAMIC GENRE
Let's go back to Janey's comment on genre:
"Genres, on the other hand, exist through time...genres are characterized more by their subject matter and their iconography than movements, and they can express a wide and changing range of ideologies."
What is it in games that remains consistent, that once established defines the game yet is not tied to any sort of ideology? Certainly not the same cinematic genre's categorizations of horror, action, western, etc. But if we look at how people talk about games, how they label and categorize them, we first see that this categorization works along the lines of a consistent mode of address in any given genre. Note that I did not say "gameplay", since within a genre gameplay can be tinkered, bent, and politicized within a genre. Rather, it is the way in the almost McLuhan-esque level where we look at what message is being sent by this culmination of digital multimedia. The FPS will always consistently address the player as collapsed within the viewpoint of the heroic subject, an ultra exaggerated instance of "taking up the male gaze" (or female if you're playing Portal), while the Strategy game will address the player from a top to bottom bird's-eye camera angle. An FPS that addresses the player from the POV of Starcraft is an impossibility. However, gameplay changes within any given mode of address drastically over the (short) history of gaming, and as Ian Bogost explains (albeit I think his arguement has a few holes) gameplay has politicizing and social ideas backing them, and in fact do change when ideologies change.
I'm going to use FPS as the case study to solidify my definition, because I think it's precisely because it's the genre that's been bent and played with so extensively by the industry while still being recognized as "FPS" it works so well at cementing what I really mean by genre. The two shooters that established the genre, Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, presented games with a new mode of address, a totally new innovation.**** That genre creation paved the way for Quake, Duke Nukem 3D, Unreal, Half Life, Deus Ex...and so forth. Yet as that genre expanded, new gameplay possibilities emerged, people suddenly thought "within this mode of address, we don't have to have people running around shooting each other, we can create alternative modes of gameplay". Thief is also part of the FPS genre, but doesn't encompass the same . The same mode address is used (self positioned and identified at Garret, seeing one's "own arms" holding the weapon), the gameplay encompasses different ideologies (suddenly, killing is not only unnecessary but undesirable). Deus Ex again changed gameplay (added 'RPG elements', which were essentially gameplay elements), but the mode of address is consistent again with all other FPS games. Even Activision's 1998 Battlezone that claimed to "merge" two genres of FPS and RTS merely merged two gameplays that were heavily associated with the two genre's, but ultimately had to resort to the FPS mode of address.
With that said, genre follows a drastically different criteria than film does. While cinema cuts its genres through specific subjects (horror, western, comedy, action, drama), the game cuts its genres through what is specific to games, which is the mode of address (FPS, RTS, RPG, JRPG, Simulation, Sports, Adventure, other acronyms and non-acronyms). Still, the purpose of genre fulfills the same role, to (mostly inadequately) outline what the consumer can expect from the media text. So when we label Thief as a "stealth based FPS", there's a very clear expectation of what we can get out of that game (where "stealth based" is merely a description of gameplay). So far so good, right?
Onwards to movement!
GAMIC MOVEMENT
"Film movements occur in specific historical periods - at times of national stress and focus of energy. They express a consistency of both thematic and formal elements which makes them particularly expressive of those times..."
If the genre is a-historical and the movement historical, then movements are certainly tied not just to gameplay, but iconography, ideology, and depiction (graphics, sounds, portrayal). Consider FPS games again, and in particular the "military simulation FPS". America's Army, The Call of Duty series, the Battlefield games, even Counterstrike all are part of the same movement that are tied to a technological, social, and political setting. All these military simulation FPS games are tied by "thematic and formal elements" located primarily in their gameplay that "make them particularly expressive of [their] time." Each of these games stress "realism" in their use of localized damage, lethal bullet system, "real guns", and more recently "hyper-realistic graphics". These games are coming out of a context of a much more militarized America, part of what I consider to be part of the conservative national discourse that is (or in the case of the World War 2 simulators, a reaction to a time where war was in fact patriotic and necessary). When America's war climate changes, so will the production of these games. But these games are first influence by society/politics, and then also by technology; that we are at a current point in time where we can create localized bullet damage, algorithms for recoil, and also a level of texture realism that "resembles" the Middle East (Or rather a portrayal of the Middle East we all experience as citizens through our exposure to TV, film, print, and images). The reason this movement didn't exist back in 1993 was not just because of the social/political setting, but also because that technology just could not enable that.
Movements also cut across genres, and in today's modern times movements are heavily driven by capitalism. Deus Ex took the FPS genre and 'introduced' (like System Shock 2 before it) RPG gameplay elements of levelling up and increasing skills. Now we're caught in the middle of a movement where we see 'RPG gamplay elements' everywhere in all genres of games, from puzzle games (Puzzle Quest) to RTS (Warcraft III) to the platformer (Iji) to whatever. The levelling system is a gameplay movement that's being imitated off of a canonical success and has worked into the minds of many that a good game must have levelling and 'RPG elements'.
CONCLUSION
There's a real amorphousness to the way we categorize games, and I think any discussion of genre requires to some degree how we approach the terms we use. For example, the way I've defined the terms and how they are used in industry, journalism, marketing, and everyday conversation are conflicting; Tony Hawk Pro Skater is labeled as a "sports game", yet that genre labeling is inadequate. It's mode of address, for example, is not the same as Winning Eleven or Madden. The player is positioned in the latter two in a simulation standpoint, shifting identity/control from player to player and at the same time being 'team manager'. Tony Hawk you are positioned into one virtual body, your camera position set apart so you can both simultaneously spectate and inhabit that twirling skateboarder pulling 180 Beihana's (is that what they are called?) and addressed very differently. Should we call the genre "skateboard sports game"?
There's also certainly more to discuss on this topic, but I think it's enough for now that people interrogate the definitions that I've set up. I want to make sure that I'm building a sound basis to catagorize and criticize game division, because hopefully later this month I'll continue these thoughts along in a more interesting way. For ultimately, Janey Place's essay goes on to discuss how this distinction she made between genre and movement ultimately informs how the woman is placed within film noir, and I'd like to tie a parallel arguement into my discussion of games; that is, there are certain game genre's that enable special modes of identification, and different movements complicate or problematize those modes of identification. Also, I plan to delve a little deeper into the complications that arise between different genres creating drastically different relations of interaction with the media/machine, such that the extension of the senses is fundamentally different for each different genre of game. Perhaps differing modes of address in a genre send different messages (the medium is the message), perhaps not (the medium is not the message).
So until then, I'll just leave it to: What do you think?
---FOOTNOTES---
*Janey Place, "Women in Film Noir" in Kaplan, E. Ann (ed.), Women in Film Noir, New Edition (London: The British Film Institute, 1998)
**Why is Mario considered the paradigm shift in gaming history? How did it "revolutionize" game design? Because what it essentially did was introduce level iteration, narrative, classic cinema conventions down to the artificially plastered on "damsel-in-distress" MacGuffin. Essentially, it tied it back down to several already familiar media forms, that of the novel, the film, the play, etc.
***Keep in mind that the very first video games, the arcade machine games, had no narrative arc of beginning, middle, or end. Rather, it was merely a beginning, and then a struggle of survival where the ending was written by the machine's eventual conquer of the user (or perhaps the user's own inscribed ending).
****And this is part of the reason why I think no new innovation occurs now. Because people want to change GAMEPLAY, but gameplay isn't what creates the medium of the video game; it only makes the medium "enjoyable" (or not). The Medium is the Message; change the medium, change it's mode of reception, and that is how you create a paradigm shift.
Also, innovation is overrated.
"Film movements occur in specific historical periods - at times of national stress and focus of energy. They express a consistency of both thematic and formal elements which makes them particularly expressive of those times, and are uniquely able to express the homogeneous hopes (Soviet Socialist Realism and Italian Neo-Realism) and fears (German Expressionism and film noir) brought to the fore by, for example, the upheaval of war."
"Genres, on the other hand, exist through time: we have had Westerns since the early 1900s and, in spite of rise and falls in their popularity, Westerns are with us today. Genres are characterized more by their subject matter and their iconography than movements, and they can express a wide and changing range of ideologies."
There's been a lot of discussion in new media academics and thoughtful gamers on the topic of genre and categorization (him, her, and this other dude come to mind) and I thought I'd try to attempt to create some definitions and also point out some of the problems involved with genre and gaming. Because if we are going to talk about genre across the internet, we better define it as Janey Place so eloquently did when she discussed film noir. First of all, games are not film. They are a completely different medium. I almost feel like a fool for using an essay on film to structure any argument on games. Except that games can't seem to escape cinematic portrayals, cutscene, narrative, and pretty much this specter of the medium haunting it from it's inception**. I'd also argue that like cinema games are going through a "classical cinema" phase where the market is primarily industry and commodity driven, where people are trying to sell (virtual) stars and "the next big FPS" or "the next big RTS". Still, there's something even more disruptive about video games as a medium than say, television was to film. So my discussion of genre in terms of video games must be understood as something not INHERENT TO the medium (the medium is not the genre, even if it is the message), but rather it is something adopted from it's influence from other (mostly narrative) forms.***
GAMIC GENRE
Let's go back to Janey's comment on genre:
"Genres, on the other hand, exist through time...genres are characterized more by their subject matter and their iconography than movements, and they can express a wide and changing range of ideologies."
What is it in games that remains consistent, that once established defines the game yet is not tied to any sort of ideology? Certainly not the same cinematic genre's categorizations of horror, action, western, etc. But if we look at how people talk about games, how they label and categorize them, we first see that this categorization works along the lines of a consistent mode of address in any given genre. Note that I did not say "gameplay", since within a genre gameplay can be tinkered, bent, and politicized within a genre. Rather, it is the way in the almost McLuhan-esque level where we look at what message is being sent by this culmination of digital multimedia. The FPS will always consistently address the player as collapsed within the viewpoint of the heroic subject, an ultra exaggerated instance of "taking up the male gaze" (or female if you're playing Portal), while the Strategy game will address the player from a top to bottom bird's-eye camera angle. An FPS that addresses the player from the POV of Starcraft is an impossibility. However, gameplay changes within any given mode of address drastically over the (short) history of gaming, and as Ian Bogost explains (albeit I think his arguement has a few holes) gameplay has politicizing and social ideas backing them, and in fact do change when ideologies change.
I'm going to use FPS as the case study to solidify my definition, because I think it's precisely because it's the genre that's been bent and played with so extensively by the industry while still being recognized as "FPS" it works so well at cementing what I really mean by genre. The two shooters that established the genre, Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, presented games with a new mode of address, a totally new innovation.**** That genre creation paved the way for Quake, Duke Nukem 3D, Unreal, Half Life, Deus Ex...and so forth. Yet as that genre expanded, new gameplay possibilities emerged, people suddenly thought "within this mode of address, we don't have to have people running around shooting each other, we can create alternative modes of gameplay". Thief is also part of the FPS genre, but doesn't encompass the same . The same mode address is used (self positioned and identified at Garret, seeing one's "own arms" holding the weapon), the gameplay encompasses different ideologies (suddenly, killing is not only unnecessary but undesirable). Deus Ex again changed gameplay (added 'RPG elements', which were essentially gameplay elements), but the mode of address is consistent again with all other FPS games. Even Activision's 1998 Battlezone that claimed to "merge" two genres of FPS and RTS merely merged two gameplays that were heavily associated with the two genre's, but ultimately had to resort to the FPS mode of address.
With that said, genre follows a drastically different criteria than film does. While cinema cuts its genres through specific subjects (horror, western, comedy, action, drama), the game cuts its genres through what is specific to games, which is the mode of address (FPS, RTS, RPG, JRPG, Simulation, Sports, Adventure, other acronyms and non-acronyms). Still, the purpose of genre fulfills the same role, to (mostly inadequately) outline what the consumer can expect from the media text. So when we label Thief as a "stealth based FPS", there's a very clear expectation of what we can get out of that game (where "stealth based" is merely a description of gameplay). So far so good, right?
Onwards to movement!
GAMIC MOVEMENT
"Film movements occur in specific historical periods - at times of national stress and focus of energy. They express a consistency of both thematic and formal elements which makes them particularly expressive of those times..."
If the genre is a-historical and the movement historical, then movements are certainly tied not just to gameplay, but iconography, ideology, and depiction (graphics, sounds, portrayal). Consider FPS games again, and in particular the "military simulation FPS". America's Army, The Call of Duty series, the Battlefield games, even Counterstrike all are part of the same movement that are tied to a technological, social, and political setting. All these military simulation FPS games are tied by "thematic and formal elements" located primarily in their gameplay that "make them particularly expressive of [their] time." Each of these games stress "realism" in their use of localized damage, lethal bullet system, "real guns", and more recently "hyper-realistic graphics". These games are coming out of a context of a much more militarized America, part of what I consider to be part of the conservative national discourse that is (or in the case of the World War 2 simulators, a reaction to a time where war was in fact patriotic and necessary). When America's war climate changes, so will the production of these games. But these games are first influence by society/politics, and then also by technology; that we are at a current point in time where we can create localized bullet damage, algorithms for recoil, and also a level of texture realism that "resembles" the Middle East (Or rather a portrayal of the Middle East we all experience as citizens through our exposure to TV, film, print, and images). The reason this movement didn't exist back in 1993 was not just because of the social/political setting, but also because that technology just could not enable that.
Movements also cut across genres, and in today's modern times movements are heavily driven by capitalism. Deus Ex took the FPS genre and 'introduced' (like System Shock 2 before it) RPG gameplay elements of levelling up and increasing skills. Now we're caught in the middle of a movement where we see 'RPG gamplay elements' everywhere in all genres of games, from puzzle games (Puzzle Quest) to RTS (Warcraft III) to the platformer (Iji) to whatever. The levelling system is a gameplay movement that's being imitated off of a canonical success and has worked into the minds of many that a good game must have levelling and 'RPG elements'.
CONCLUSION
There's a real amorphousness to the way we categorize games, and I think any discussion of genre requires to some degree how we approach the terms we use. For example, the way I've defined the terms and how they are used in industry, journalism, marketing, and everyday conversation are conflicting; Tony Hawk Pro Skater is labeled as a "sports game", yet that genre labeling is inadequate. It's mode of address, for example, is not the same as Winning Eleven or Madden. The player is positioned in the latter two in a simulation standpoint, shifting identity/control from player to player and at the same time being 'team manager'. Tony Hawk you are positioned into one virtual body, your camera position set apart so you can both simultaneously spectate and inhabit that twirling skateboarder pulling 180 Beihana's (is that what they are called?) and addressed very differently. Should we call the genre "skateboard sports game"?
There's also certainly more to discuss on this topic, but I think it's enough for now that people interrogate the definitions that I've set up. I want to make sure that I'm building a sound basis to catagorize and criticize game division, because hopefully later this month I'll continue these thoughts along in a more interesting way. For ultimately, Janey Place's essay goes on to discuss how this distinction she made between genre and movement ultimately informs how the woman is placed within film noir, and I'd like to tie a parallel arguement into my discussion of games; that is, there are certain game genre's that enable special modes of identification, and different movements complicate or problematize those modes of identification. Also, I plan to delve a little deeper into the complications that arise between different genres creating drastically different relations of interaction with the media/machine, such that the extension of the senses is fundamentally different for each different genre of game. Perhaps differing modes of address in a genre send different messages (the medium is the message), perhaps not (the medium is not the message).
So until then, I'll just leave it to: What do you think?
---FOOTNOTES---
*Janey Place, "Women in Film Noir" in Kaplan, E. Ann (ed.), Women in Film Noir, New Edition (London: The British Film Institute, 1998)
**Why is Mario considered the paradigm shift in gaming history? How did it "revolutionize" game design? Because what it essentially did was introduce level iteration, narrative, classic cinema conventions down to the artificially plastered on "damsel-in-distress" MacGuffin. Essentially, it tied it back down to several already familiar media forms, that of the novel, the film, the play, etc.
***Keep in mind that the very first video games, the arcade machine games, had no narrative arc of beginning, middle, or end. Rather, it was merely a beginning, and then a struggle of survival where the ending was written by the machine's eventual conquer of the user (or perhaps the user's own inscribed ending).
****And this is part of the reason why I think no new innovation occurs now. Because people want to change GAMEPLAY, but gameplay isn't what creates the medium of the video game; it only makes the medium "enjoyable" (or not). The Medium is the Message; change the medium, change it's mode of reception, and that is how you create a paradigm shift.
Also, innovation is overrated.
Friday, October 3, 2008
Holy Snapples! Free games!
Not just any free games, but free games of the smartsy academic or socially aware type I really like!
http://gambit.mit.edu/loadgame/prototypes.php
Plus a smart guy talks about them!
http://henryjenkins.org/2008/10/marching_to_a_different_gumbea.html
Enjoy!
http://gambit.mit.edu/loadgame/prototypes.php
Plus a smart guy talks about them!
http://henryjenkins.org/2008/10/marching_to_a_different_gumbea.html
Enjoy!
Thursday, October 2, 2008
My thoughts on the Biden/Palin Debate
Her
Me
Edit: It's like a female Dubuya Bush.
Edit edit: Actually that's a little harsh. At least we don't have any 30 second pauses of staring into the camera. Remember that guys?
Me
Edit: It's like a female Dubuya Bush.
Edit edit: Actually that's a little harsh. At least we don't have any 30 second pauses of staring into the camera. Remember that guys?
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