Video Games & American Culture » January 20th: Introduction to Video Game Studies

January 20th: Introduction to Video Game Studies

Video Games & Culture

  • We’re asynchronous this week
  • Review the syllabus if you haven’t done so
  • Canvas Posts–you don’t have to wait for class…
  • Face to face next class: 1/28

Define Technology

What is technology? Let’s get started thinking about technology/ies broadly.

Cultural Studies

What do the Red Hot Chili Peppers have to say about media and culture?

“Space may be the final frontier / but it’s made in a Hollywood basement”–RHCP “Californication”

Ubiquity of Rhetoric

You’d think that with such a rich history, rhetoric would be introduced to students long before college. Well, it is, but not necessarily as a pillar of Western Civilization. The term comes up when politicians or their critics denounce an opponent’s speech as empty; therefore, “rhetoric” is often associated popularly with “empty speech,” non-contributing verbiage, or fluff.

But the study of rhetoric is much more complicated. Just as each discipline has its own epistemology–the study of knowledge, its foundations and validity– each discipline’s communication has a rhetoric. And rhetoric isn’t limited simply to disciplines: Movements, Social Norms, Technology, Science, Religion, etc. have a rhetoric. I often define such analyses into “rhetorics of…” as common factors surrounding the power or belief in a particular area. In other words, beliefs, attitudes, values, and practices are rhetorics of prevailing social ideology: One’s acceptance of cultural “truth” is based largely on one’s immersion into the culture’s myths and beliefs. Therefore, this definition of rhetoric requires us to recognize the relationship among sender-receiver-mediator. Of course, for our discussion, the “mediator” is culture. There is no concrete, definitive transmission of rhetorically pure communication. Sender and receiver filter the message(s) based on their experiences. Lucky for us, we can locate prevailing patterns in messages because culture mediates them. When doing a rhetorical analysis, you have to ask what are common ways particular ideas are conveyed in a culture. There are plenty of examples in new media.

For instance, what’s the rhetoric behind Hollywood movies that end in marriage and/or babies? Well, getting married and having children is a major cultural practice, so that gets “played out” in films. Additionally, women are often consider babymakers in search of a man to donate the necessary ingredient, so female characters in Hollywood films have traditionally not been *complete* until they marry and have children or somehow fulfill a woman’s socially constructed “proper” role according to prevailing attitudes. Because our culture (remember, this is a generalization) favors families as opposed to singles, the rhetoric of our entertainment–the power behind acceptance or enjoyments of a film–conforms to the cultural value of privileging families.

A brief Introduction of Rhetoric–From another class Web site.

Locating American Values

Because this course is a theoretical exploration of how we can locate a society’s values by “reading” its technologies, we ought to think about what those values are. This page asks you to think about American values. That page isn’t specific to this class, so, when it asks you to “discuss in groups,” just contemplate that for yourself, and we’ll come back to it when we’re face to face again. The goal is to get you to start to identify values that we might be able to “read” in technologies from American society.

History of Video Games and The Industry

I’m not sure how much we want to go into the history of video games, but we’ll start down that path and either stay or change course depending on our mood.

  • Video Game Invasion (2004) (try to watch at least the first half–45:40)
    • The documentary is nearly 20 years old, but this is the section on “history,” so keep that in mind
  • For a VERY recent situation in the video game industry, listen to the Here & Now (1/19/2021) segment on Microsoft’s bid to purchase Activision.
    • We’ll definitely come back to this.

Understanding Video Games, “Introduction”

  • p. 2: Passive vs. (inter)Active Entertainment
  • Perhaps all media is interactive, but video games are extremely interactive and will continue to become more interactive.
    • We will unpack this passage later, but, for now, consider what drives innovation, including video game development:
      “Of course, in the much larger cultural scheme of things, ours is a time of impressively sudden, varied, and deep shifts. And our age is one in which technology is often the bellwether of these cultural transitions.”
  • p. 2: From Ancient Greece to 1960s MIT to today–“play….[serves] many purposes, from entertainment to competition to education.”
  • p. 4: “Understanding how games work and why they look the way they do requires an interdisciplinary approach.”
  • p. 5: The root of all games? Did we evolve play to “simulate real-life situations”?
  • p. 6: Competition and humans…The authors hedge here, but I’ll ask, “did capitalism inspire competition, or did competition inspire capitalism?”
    • Enjoy that question.

Understanding Video Games, Ch. 1 “Studying Video Games”

  • p. 11: Table 1.1 The culture–“understand how games and gaming interact with wider cultural patterns.”
    • It will be difficult for you to do statistically relevant studies of gaming communities this semester; however, that is a major area of study, especially in Rhetoric/Composition and Technical/Professional Communication.
    • I focus almost solely on cultural studies, video games tell us much about the culture from which they come.
  • p. 13: The authors have repeated this verbatim since their 2nd edition, and it’s quite problematic:
    “…Espen Aarseth claimed that “the dimensions of Lara Croft’s body, already analyzed to death by film theorists, are irrelevant to me as a player, because a different-looking body would not make me play differently. When I play, I don’t even see her body, but see through it and past it.”
    • I guess, if he doesn’t see it, it mustn’t be an issue…
    • Note the sarcasm above, and note the WGST cross-listing…we’ll return to this.
  • p. 13: “…game researchers Ermi and Mäyrä have noted that ‘if we want to understand what a game is, we need to understand what happens in the act of playing, and we need to understand the player and the experience of gameplay.'”
    • This is the dominant view in video game studies. You’ll hear my thoughts several times about this. For now, just know that this is a way of discovering meaning and significance and not the only way.

Understanding Video Games, Ch. 2 “The Game Industry”

  • p. 17: The video game industry is enormous
  • p. 18: “[T]hree major markets: the US, Japan, and Europe.”
  • p. 19: Table 2.1: The second edition mentioned the Wii?
    • Remember that console? In fact, try to list all the consoles you’ve played.
    • Here’s my list:
      Atari 2600, Intellivision, ColecoVision, Nintendo (NES),* Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo, Sega Saturn,** PlayStation, Nintendo 64, PS2, GameCube, XBox, Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, PS4
      *The last console I owned…1986
      **my memory is a bit fuzzy on this one
    • Of course, console gaming is inferior to computer gaming, but it’s still better than playing on your phone, so here is my computer list:
      Texas Instrument 99/4a, Commodore 64, Apple IIe, PC…the rest is 30+ years of different PCs (and a couple of laptops)
  • p. 21: “Grand Theft Auto V…[had] a production budget of $265 million, and over 500 people in the credits.”
    • What’s the significance of that?
  • p. 23: Console versions sell for upwards of $60, although the price varies between countries, and has become more varied over the years as the consoles have also introduced online services.
    • Personally, I haven’t bought a physical copy of a video game in over 10 years. I purchase everything through Steam or UPlay (Ubisoft).
    • Also, I haven’t paid full price for a new game since 1992! (The original Civilization, by the way)
    • What do you think about the future of game streaming?
  • p. 24: “A design document consists of text, illustrations, mockups, concept drawings, and other details, such as lists of objects in the game.”
    • That sounds like a job for…technical writer of editor
  • p. 28: Notice the binary future the authors suggest at the end of the chapter.
    • “we have recently seen and will most likely continue to see two parallel themes in game development: increasing AAA budgets on one side, and increasing interest in alternatives to the full-scale model on the other.”
  • Any parallels to television shows and streaming services?
  • p. 28: Beta testing…any betas out there?

Next Class

Keep up with the reading on the syllabus: Ch. 3 in Understanding Video Games. We’ll start getting more postmodernism next week. I do expect that you’ll be taking notes on these readings and will participate every class. If you don’t take notes on the reading, that’s a problem. If you don’t read, that will be a bigger problem. I’ll have a Canvas Prompt up early next week. Remember, you respond to that prompt (250 words) before 11:00 pm on Friday, 1/ 28. You don’t have to wait until class to respond.