Semioclast

Steven Poole has released a newly revised copy of his book Trigger Happy: The Inner Life of Videogames. The best part is that he’s made the book available via a free (as in beer and as in speech) PDF download.

Poole describes the book as, “a book about the aesthetics of videogames - what they share with cinema, the history of painting, or literature; and what makes them different, in terms of form, psychology and semiotics.”

Also, check out his new book Unspeak, a book “which analyses state-of-the-art rhetorical weaponry, from community through sound science and ethnic cleansing to the war on terror.” Rhetorical weapons? Terror? Now you’re speaking my language!

Via Videoludica (once removed).

Eludamos.org is a new, peer reviewed, online game studies journal. Their 2007 issue (they’re published biannually) is online now.

ELUDAMOS positions itself as a publication that fundamentally transgresses disciplinary boundaries. The aim is to join questions about and approaches to computer games from decidedly heterogeneous scientific contexts (for example cultural studies, media studies, (art) history, sociology, (social) psychology, and semiotics) and, thus, to advance the interdisciplinary discourse on digital games.

This approach does not exclude questions about the distinct features of digital games a an aesthetic and cultural form of articulation, on the contrary, the issue is to distinguish their media specific characteristics as well as their similarity to other forms of aesthetic and cultural practice. That way, the editors would like to contribute to the lasting distinction of international game studies as an academic discipline.

They currently have an open CFP for their 2008 (so much for biannual) issue. Full CFP below the fold.

Via Grand Text Auto

Continue Reading »

In this installation of DiGRA’s Hardcore series, “Un-Situated Play? Textual Analysis and Digital Games,” Diane Carr takes up a textual studies approach to digital games:

The shortcomings associated with analysis that focuses ‘on the game itself’ are widely and casually acknowledged, yet ‘textual analysis’ as a methodology remains rarely or broadly defined in Game Studies literature. Sometimes broad definitions are appropriate, but when the topic under discussion is a methodology (or its limitations) something more specific is probably called for. I don’t think that we can satisfactorily critique textual analysis just by listing the things that it does not do, and I suggest that defining the textual analysis of games should involve making reference to theories of text. Otherwise, why call it ‘textual’ analysis? In fact, various versions of textual analysis could be proposed, depending on the theory of text that’s being evoked in each case.

The whole piece is well worth a read. I think that many of us who study games from within English departments take for granted that games can be read as “texts.” Carr’s piece argues (as I have recently) that textual analysis has its problems when applied to the analysis of digital games, but that we should look towards textual analysis as a model that can be integrated into game studies.

1: Georgian riot police, 2007

2: Half Life 2, Combine Civil Protection, 2004

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus blog reports on a meeting of academics within Second Life where they discussed (chat transcript) the appearance of their online avatars. The responses were interesting if somewhat predictable. The potential of physical appearance to facilitate discussion about gender issues, for example, was a popular one.

Beth Ritter-Guth, who teaches English and women’s studies at Lehigh Carbon Community College, and in Second Life is the glamorous, blonde Desideria Stockton, dressed for the occasion in a purple gown. She said she adopted her Barbie look to facilitate a discussion on gender with her students. “I looked in my niece’s Barbie bag and buy only clothes that are like the clothes in her bag,” she said.

“The real Beth is much less glitzy and thus doesn’t experience the blond jokes or the cutesy-pie crap” that Desideria experiences, she added.

I think it’s interesting to mention this now when legions of grad students are thinking about their first teaching experiences. In nearly every TA training program I have been a part of questions of personal and professional appearance arise: should I dress more professionally or in a way that reflects who I actually am (a luxury at this stage and one that I particularly enjoy)? how do I respond to questions from students about my age, personal life, sexual orientation, relationship status, etc etc?

It’s only natural that these concerns arise in online teaching environments, as well, especially those where participants can assume a unique physical form that is largely unrestricted. One participant in the chat mentions the classic New Yorker cartoon “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” as a partial inspiration for his avatar’s half-man half-dog appearance.

Taking this a step further, on the Internet no one knows your race, gender, height, age, and weight. Does “misrepresenting” actual physical characteristics raise ethical questions for an instructor? What if I were teaching a women’s studies class, for example? Would I be expected to reveal my “real world” gender to my students? How would this effect my students interpretation or contextualization of my statements?

I just got back from presenting a the 20th Penn State Conference on Rhetoric and Composition. This year’s theme was “Rhetorics and Technologies” and there was a lot of talk about computers and composition, technorhetorics, the promise of online communities, etc. etc. Everyone there was energetic and genuinely excited about what was going on. With the lakeside barbecue and rhetoric camp T-shirts it was all quite fun and summer camp-like. I have to say that it was one of the nicest conferences I’ve been to.

There was a lot of talk about the promise of computers to provide a netowrked multimodal education and how we can work Myspace into the classroom. (Who knew composition studies people were so excited about Myspace?) Nearly everyone cited the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

I was on a panel called “Pop Culture and Participatory Technologies” with Heather Urbanski from Lehigh and Matt Mroz from the University of Connecticut. Heather talked about the increasingly ambiguous line between author and audience in participatory technologies and Matt discussed Livejournal and the particular rhetorical practices found there. My paper was about rethinking the relationship between serious play and rhetorical pedagogy. The Q&A was great and lead to some interesting discussions that spanned the rest of the conference.

Things to think about:

• Mashups in the Comp Classroom
• Mixtapes in the Comp Classroom
• Blogging assignments in my class this Fall
• I still have a lot of theory to read
• …a LOT of theory
• There’s not enough talk about IP issues at these things
• There’s a lot of talk about “play” but not a lot of talk about games.
• I expected more WoW and less Myspace, for some reason; it was the other way around.

On a completely personal note: the drive across PA was (almost) the best part. I took my time meandering back from State College listening to Neil Young the whole way. The Appalachians are beautiful and, after living in Buffalo for so long, it’s nice to see mountains again. And, boy is it easy to steer with your knees with a harp in your mouth.

I almost feel bad making Pitt pay for the trip (almost).

As this semester declines towards a close I am starting to think a lot about upcoming projects and about writing in general. I’ll be writing a draft of my project proposal over the summer, so my thoughts have tended to gravitate in that direction. On that note, I present to you, our reader(s), the first-ever post at the new Semioclast.net:

Game scholar Jane McGonigal of 42entertainment and I Love Bees fame (among other neat things) has been posting chapters of her epic, 573 page dissertation titled “This Might Be a Game: Ubiquitous Play and Performance at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century” over at AvantGame. She’s been releasing it chapter-by-chapter on her site and it is shaping up to be quite a thorough and engaging piece of scholarship that works on some key questions about what it means to experiment with play these days. As always, McGonigal’s work is innovative and exciting.

The dissertation itself is only part of the story as I just learned today. Throughout the process of writing the dissertation, McGonigal blogged what she called her “Best Sentence of the Day”. Some, like best sentence #87 (”There is nothing inherently fantastic about receiving a fax.”) are short and sweet, while others are more involved and take the “best sentence” designator fairly loosely. Others still, like this conversation with Ian Bogost, give us a look inside the process behind the document. The whole thing has a rather informal feel to it, which is a nice change from the seriousness with which we normally treat projects of this size and importance.

I think it’s nice to focus on this level of the writing process as it feels more compartmentalized and manageable than the chapter or section sized chunks that we are used to hearing about people suffering through. The idea of having a daily best sentence must help with the feeling of accomplishment that makes the grind of daily authorship more manageable.

I have to say that I am intrigued as we don’t often get a chance to look at what goes into writing one of these things if we’re not on the author’s committee (and if you are, then you’ve experienced this meat-grinder of a process for yourself). The whole endeavor is very Web 2.0 and seems to invite annotation and commentary. I look forward to seeing more sites like this (perhaps my own) in the future.

Having recently defended his own dissertation, I ‘m interested in what Dr. Robertson has to say about this.

Edited to add: I see one more way of thinking about this. There is a storytelling element here. The blog itself seems to unfold the process through a narrative that includes not only selections from the dissertation, but through the personal experiences and thoughts that circulate around its production.