I went to a family gathering this weekend, about two hundred miles from the places I call 'home'. This is actually the first time this decade I've been that far from home (I don't get about much). The journeys there and back were seven and five hours respectively in a car, and were the longest car journeys I've been on in the same period.
Travel is starting to become a theme of my writing about video games. Many of my favourite in-game moments have to do with travelling through virtual worlds. A big part of my excitement for upcoming games like Tales of Zestiria, Xenoblade Chronicles X and Final Fantasy XV is that they offer vast new worlds to explore.
By contrast, I really don't like to do anything in the real world that's vaguely analogous to my virtual explorations. I don't like hiking, I don't like driving (or being a passenger, since I can't legally drive myself anywhere), and I generally don't like to travel. There are a variety of reasons, but the biggest is quite simply that real travel is a lot of effort.
I want to see mountains like the ones my dad likes to climb without getting sore feet. I want to experience the vast sweeps of landscapes like the ones we drove through this weekend (some of which were very pretty) without the steadily-hardening crick in the base of my spine. I want to float through the world as effortlessly and intangibly as a videogame camera.
And I thought until this weekend that there was no harm in this, provided I kept to my lane and didn't get too whiny when I actually do have to travel. But Actually Travelling, and looking at the landscapes I travelled through with the same critical eye I've been training to look at videogames with, put me ill at ease.
Games, by the limits of their technology and the demands of their audience, compress distance. Sure, you can walk for some hours in a straight line without touching the sides of some recent games. But you could walk the real world for the same length of time and in many places not even leave the valley you start in. I found myself wondering, as we drove over the crest of a hill and the horizon retreated on Friday afternoon, how dishonest it is to indulge in this, and how harmful.
It would be a pretty shallow critique to say that the shortening of distance in games is straightforwardly misrepresentative and creates harmful expectations of travel - no better than tired old arguments that the mere presentation of violence is sufficient to induce people to be more violent. It's more complex than that.
But games are so often about the mastery of space, the individual eventually rising to an effortless, unchallenged mobility. There's no better example of this than the 'airship moment' in JRPGs, the point at which you've explored most of the world on foot and, to avoid forcing you to retread old ground, you get a tool that allows you to hop or float to wherever you want, bypassing even the abstractions that are supposed to add labour and time back into the earlier compressed journeys.
This is all a bit unfocussed and musing-y (which is why it's here and not on my actual games blog). The problem probably has more to do with the way games construct mastery than the way they handle travel and distance. But this weekend, looking out at the same sweeping vista for twenty miles and realising it would take ten times as long to walk it on foot as in-game, I had a moment of very sharp discomfort. I hope I'll be able to hold that in mind as I develop my critical ideas on this theme.
Showing posts with label video games. Show all posts
Showing posts with label video games. Show all posts
Monday, 20 July 2015
Tuesday, 30 December 2014
Cultural Vertigo
A few weeks back, someone challenged me on Twitter to come up with a New Year's Resolution and I came back with 'Open some of the doors I've got my toe in at the moment'. That's a worthy, if slightly trite, answer, but since then I've come up with a better one.
I'll get back to that at the end of this post, by which time I think it will be obvious what I've chosen. I've had a year, particularly this final third of it, of learning a lot. There are personal and professional elements to that, but where I've learnt most, where I've been most challenged, has been from the Twitter timelines of people I've followed because gamergate targeted them.
Gamergate has been and remains terrible, but in listening to those fighting it, I've received a whirlwind tour of critical gender and race theories on a par with the experience I had a couple of years ago as an amanuensis on a university-level Special Educational Needs/Disability Studies course. It's forced me to reexamine a lot of my preconceptions about games, about feminism and civil rights, about myself as a progressive and a liberal, and about my species as a whole.
And I'm starting to realise that there's a characteristic emotional state that accompanies the best of this learning. It's not a pleasant one. It often hits when least expected - this piece challenging the player-centrism of established gaming, for example, challenged me much more than any number of pieces about how reprehensible gamergaters are (because its critique applies to games I love just as much as, say, Hatred). It involves a slight feeling of nausea, and a stronger feeling of panic, of being overwhelmed by how much change might be needed to accept the argument.
I think of it as cultural vertigo. It's one thing to say 'I support diverse perspectives in art!', and another entirely to actually look down from the cultural pedestal (or out from the cultural bubble) of being straight, white and male and catch sight of those perspectives for the first time. It has nothing, of course, on the terror and hurt that straight white men inflict on others worldwide, but those are terrors that I am unlikely ever to experience the like of.
Cultural vertigo isn't comfortable, but it can be inspiring, and it has been a pretty consistent sign of opportunities to make myself a better person. Since there's a lot of work to do on that front, my New Year's Resolution for 2015 is to seek out cultural vertigo as much as I can stand to.
I'll get back to that at the end of this post, by which time I think it will be obvious what I've chosen. I've had a year, particularly this final third of it, of learning a lot. There are personal and professional elements to that, but where I've learnt most, where I've been most challenged, has been from the Twitter timelines of people I've followed because gamergate targeted them.
Gamergate has been and remains terrible, but in listening to those fighting it, I've received a whirlwind tour of critical gender and race theories on a par with the experience I had a couple of years ago as an amanuensis on a university-level Special Educational Needs/Disability Studies course. It's forced me to reexamine a lot of my preconceptions about games, about feminism and civil rights, about myself as a progressive and a liberal, and about my species as a whole.
And I'm starting to realise that there's a characteristic emotional state that accompanies the best of this learning. It's not a pleasant one. It often hits when least expected - this piece challenging the player-centrism of established gaming, for example, challenged me much more than any number of pieces about how reprehensible gamergaters are (because its critique applies to games I love just as much as, say, Hatred). It involves a slight feeling of nausea, and a stronger feeling of panic, of being overwhelmed by how much change might be needed to accept the argument.
I think of it as cultural vertigo. It's one thing to say 'I support diverse perspectives in art!', and another entirely to actually look down from the cultural pedestal (or out from the cultural bubble) of being straight, white and male and catch sight of those perspectives for the first time. It has nothing, of course, on the terror and hurt that straight white men inflict on others worldwide, but those are terrors that I am unlikely ever to experience the like of.
Cultural vertigo isn't comfortable, but it can be inspiring, and it has been a pretty consistent sign of opportunities to make myself a better person. Since there's a lot of work to do on that front, my New Year's Resolution for 2015 is to seek out cultural vertigo as much as I can stand to.
Wednesday, 24 December 2014
Idiot Overload
It's been a truism of human society for centuries that it's easier to sound convincing than to be right - 'a lie has run around the world before the truth has got its boots on' and so on. I want to pick out one particularly egregious manifestation of this, something I've only taken conscious note of recently, though it's probably not new. There may be a 'proper' name for it, but for now I'm just going to call it idiot overload.
Idiot overload happens when there are so many errors, inaccuracies and other logical problems with a statement that it's impossible to refute succinctly. 'Succinctly' here means 'coherently and within the attention span of the relevant platform' - to use a pretty blunt example, most tweets are very difficult to refute in the space of a single reply. (Another example would be how hard it is to write a comprehensive reply to something in a blog comment before other commenters get in and move the debate along).
The sole intelligible claim to emerge from gamergate, 'Gamergate is about ethics in game journalism!' makes a pretty good example. As far as I can see there are at least five major objections to this statement:
1: gamergate more or less ignores actual serious breaches of journalistic ethics, like the review embargo on Assaassin's Creed: Unity that meant no reviews were published until 12 hours after release. Sure, maybe some gamergaters shouted about it briefly, but there's been nothing like the sustained campaign of anger directed at gamergate's preferred targets.
2: gamergate has yet to articulate a clear system of ethics of any kind. Ethics are systematic - not just a collection of arbitrary laws, but a coherent framework that allows the extension of those laws into situations unforeseen by their authors (again, unsophisticated example, but the provision of the U.S. constitution for later amendments is a version of this).
3: unethical behaviour in the promotion of an ethical system is hypocrisy, and self-invalidating. If your behaviour is unethical, you are not supporting ethics of any kind, no matter how you shout about it. The ethics of what is and isn't OK in acts of protest are complex, but without thoroughly engaging in a discourse on that topic you have to err on the side of caution - one thing gamergate certainly hasn't done.
4: game journalism is, by and large, critical journalism rather than reporting. It's not purely descriptive. In the early days of gamergate, there were attempts by various gamergaters to codify the journalism they wanted from the games press - focus on facts that could be presented honestly without or in resistance to financial/privileged incentives from the development side of the industry, the removal of opinion. The problem with this is that that's not what game journalism is or was ever for. Yes, factual journalism has always been a part of it, in reports and previews of what's coming up in the near future, and in discussions of hardware, but the majority of game journalism is reviews, and reviews are always going to be a matter of opinion. Want a broader perspective than any one person's opinion? Read a bunch of different reviews.
5: the feminism that gamergate actually spends most of its time fighting is itself ethics. What Anita Sarkeesian, Brianna Wu, Leigh Alexander et al have been campaigning for is more ethical weight in gaming. I suppose in that sense one could argue that gamergate is about ethics in gaming in that it's about keeping ethics out of gaming, but I don't think that's the claim gamergaters are making.
(sidebar: no, feminism is not 'an ideology', at least not in any sense that implies it isn't ethics. People describing feminism as an ideology are generally trying to paint it as a matter of opinion, when many of the most important concerns of feminism - rape statistics, wage gaps and so on - are matters of clear, repeatedly-proven facts. Just as human rights are an ethical system, not an ideology, so it is with feminism)
So there you go. It took me 473 words to give a (very brief) sketch of the objections to a 7-word statement. I may be missing some objections outright, I'm certainly missing key details from all of those points (to say nothing of evidence and examples, but this is one blog post and I am only human). It's just not possible to give an organised, ordered summary of the objection to 'it's about ethics in game journalism' (at least, that provides any more detail than 'NO') in a short space of time - human beings don't read fast enough.
I don't have a solution to this one, I'm afraid. Other examples include 'if global warming is real why is winter still cold?' and 'evolution must be wrong, my grandparents weren't monkeys'. When there's just too much to argue against, you have to rely on the general audience understanding enough to enumerate the problems themselves, which has never yet been a safe bet (though of course we can work towards that in the long term).
Idiot overload happens when there are so many errors, inaccuracies and other logical problems with a statement that it's impossible to refute succinctly. 'Succinctly' here means 'coherently and within the attention span of the relevant platform' - to use a pretty blunt example, most tweets are very difficult to refute in the space of a single reply. (Another example would be how hard it is to write a comprehensive reply to something in a blog comment before other commenters get in and move the debate along).
The sole intelligible claim to emerge from gamergate, 'Gamergate is about ethics in game journalism!' makes a pretty good example. As far as I can see there are at least five major objections to this statement:
1: gamergate more or less ignores actual serious breaches of journalistic ethics, like the review embargo on Assaassin's Creed: Unity that meant no reviews were published until 12 hours after release. Sure, maybe some gamergaters shouted about it briefly, but there's been nothing like the sustained campaign of anger directed at gamergate's preferred targets.
2: gamergate has yet to articulate a clear system of ethics of any kind. Ethics are systematic - not just a collection of arbitrary laws, but a coherent framework that allows the extension of those laws into situations unforeseen by their authors (again, unsophisticated example, but the provision of the U.S. constitution for later amendments is a version of this).
3: unethical behaviour in the promotion of an ethical system is hypocrisy, and self-invalidating. If your behaviour is unethical, you are not supporting ethics of any kind, no matter how you shout about it. The ethics of what is and isn't OK in acts of protest are complex, but without thoroughly engaging in a discourse on that topic you have to err on the side of caution - one thing gamergate certainly hasn't done.
4: game journalism is, by and large, critical journalism rather than reporting. It's not purely descriptive. In the early days of gamergate, there were attempts by various gamergaters to codify the journalism they wanted from the games press - focus on facts that could be presented honestly without or in resistance to financial/privileged incentives from the development side of the industry, the removal of opinion. The problem with this is that that's not what game journalism is or was ever for. Yes, factual journalism has always been a part of it, in reports and previews of what's coming up in the near future, and in discussions of hardware, but the majority of game journalism is reviews, and reviews are always going to be a matter of opinion. Want a broader perspective than any one person's opinion? Read a bunch of different reviews.
5: the feminism that gamergate actually spends most of its time fighting is itself ethics. What Anita Sarkeesian, Brianna Wu, Leigh Alexander et al have been campaigning for is more ethical weight in gaming. I suppose in that sense one could argue that gamergate is about ethics in gaming in that it's about keeping ethics out of gaming, but I don't think that's the claim gamergaters are making.
(sidebar: no, feminism is not 'an ideology', at least not in any sense that implies it isn't ethics. People describing feminism as an ideology are generally trying to paint it as a matter of opinion, when many of the most important concerns of feminism - rape statistics, wage gaps and so on - are matters of clear, repeatedly-proven facts. Just as human rights are an ethical system, not an ideology, so it is with feminism)
So there you go. It took me 473 words to give a (very brief) sketch of the objections to a 7-word statement. I may be missing some objections outright, I'm certainly missing key details from all of those points (to say nothing of evidence and examples, but this is one blog post and I am only human). It's just not possible to give an organised, ordered summary of the objection to 'it's about ethics in game journalism' (at least, that provides any more detail than 'NO') in a short space of time - human beings don't read fast enough.
I don't have a solution to this one, I'm afraid. Other examples include 'if global warming is real why is winter still cold?' and 'evolution must be wrong, my grandparents weren't monkeys'. When there's just too much to argue against, you have to rely on the general audience understanding enough to enumerate the problems themselves, which has never yet been a safe bet (though of course we can work towards that in the long term).
Wednesday, 19 November 2014
Getting what you wish for
Back in early July I wrote this post, basically bemoaning the fact that video games aren't 'taken seriously' by our culture. Since then some very serious things have happened in gaming (i.e. gamergate), and so one negative element of gaming has come to be taken a little more seriously, but that's not what I'm going to talk about today. I refrain from talking about gamergate primarily because I've yet to think of anything I have to add to the discussion that hasn't already been said - I do, of course, wholeheartedly condemn gamergate itself.
Today, I have something rather more optimistic to offer. I'm now part of the planning process for a university-level 'gaming and interactive media' course (title not final) within the University of Liverpool's School of the Arts (backstory: UoL is my alma mater and now my primary employer; I lecture and teach in the Department of Philosophy, part of the SotA). We had our first departmental discussion of possible modules/topics this morning, and I got clearance to engage in some informal public consultation.
This is exactly the kind of thing I was yearning for when I wrote that post back in July. It's not a technical course - we're not expecting to cover programming, hardware design etc. though we may build links to courses that will - but a cultural/humanities one. The process will put gaming closer to film, television, theatre, literature and so on in terms of serious cultural consideration.
But this is a very new field, and if we're clear about one thing so far it's that we're not clear about much. I'm looking for suggestions of issues that a course like this - a humanities course, one approaching games as cultural artefacts - could or should address. If you're a gamer (either in the sense of 'someone who plays games' or of 'someone who identifies primarily as a gamer') what would you like to see discussed?
Some issues are obvious; for example, there's no clear definition of 'a game' or 'a video game', and phenomena such as augmented reality gaming and the gamification of education make the definitional question profoundly interesting. There are complex issues relating to authorship within videogames, too; who is the author of a narrative which is directed as much by the player (the audience) of a game as its developers? And, given everything that has come to the surface over the last three months, it would be negligent not to discuss feminist critiques of games (along with other dimensions of privilege - race, sexuality, ability etc.).
Not everything need come under the banner of philosophy. Our School of the Arts includes Music, English, Architecture and Communications/Media Studies, and there's a joint meeting in three weeks' time where we'll all be putting things forward. Any suggestions you can offer for what we should cover will be most welcome.
Today, I have something rather more optimistic to offer. I'm now part of the planning process for a university-level 'gaming and interactive media' course (title not final) within the University of Liverpool's School of the Arts (backstory: UoL is my alma mater and now my primary employer; I lecture and teach in the Department of Philosophy, part of the SotA). We had our first departmental discussion of possible modules/topics this morning, and I got clearance to engage in some informal public consultation.
This is exactly the kind of thing I was yearning for when I wrote that post back in July. It's not a technical course - we're not expecting to cover programming, hardware design etc. though we may build links to courses that will - but a cultural/humanities one. The process will put gaming closer to film, television, theatre, literature and so on in terms of serious cultural consideration.
But this is a very new field, and if we're clear about one thing so far it's that we're not clear about much. I'm looking for suggestions of issues that a course like this - a humanities course, one approaching games as cultural artefacts - could or should address. If you're a gamer (either in the sense of 'someone who plays games' or of 'someone who identifies primarily as a gamer') what would you like to see discussed?
Some issues are obvious; for example, there's no clear definition of 'a game' or 'a video game', and phenomena such as augmented reality gaming and the gamification of education make the definitional question profoundly interesting. There are complex issues relating to authorship within videogames, too; who is the author of a narrative which is directed as much by the player (the audience) of a game as its developers? And, given everything that has come to the surface over the last three months, it would be negligent not to discuss feminist critiques of games (along with other dimensions of privilege - race, sexuality, ability etc.).
Not everything need come under the banner of philosophy. Our School of the Arts includes Music, English, Architecture and Communications/Media Studies, and there's a joint meeting in three weeks' time where we'll all be putting things forward. Any suggestions you can offer for what we should cover will be most welcome.
Wednesday, 9 July 2014
Video Games
When I'm not writing, and don't have chores of one kind or another to attend to, I spend most of my time playing video games. Gaming is a big part of my life and I particularly enjoy any context I can find that gives me reason to take a game seriously; one of the things I love about World of Warcraft, for example, is that playing with other people at a high level puts an obligation on me to play well, so as not to hold other members of my team back. Currently I'm also very keen on the Games Done Quick marathon, a twice-yearly charity event which has raised over $1.7million this year alone.
But I don't feel comfortable talking about video games here, so much so that I've often thought about starting a second, entirely separate blog just to talk about my gaming experiences. It feels to me as if discussion of video games 'doesn't match' the themes of an author's blog, despite the fact that, as a genre fantasy author, many members of my core target audience are likely to be gamers themselves.
I don't feel the same way about other media. I'm not as interested in cinema as I used to be, but I wouldn't feel uncomfortable blogging about a film that had particularly moved or inspired me, or about something that could be learned from cinema as a form. Similarly, I've often mentioned webcomics, and sequential art in general, to draw comparisons with the ongoing evolution of publishing.
Maybe I'm imagining things, but I feel as if, just because of the association with video games, any similar point I tried to make from them would be dismissed. Part of this is hangover from my childhood, when video games were regarded with considerably greater suspicion than they are now. It took a long time before my parents were willing to let me have much access to games, though they have subsequently admitted that their doubts about the form were misplaced.
It comes down to this; I feel like there still isn't much of a casual audience for discussion of video games. There are specialist groups of various different kinds, including bona fide academic institutions and departments whose main focus is game design, but there isn't much outside of that. I can visit family and talk about my writing, even with people who aren't particularly interested in fantasy, or genre fiction, or even in fiction at all, but I wouldn't expect the same to be true for video games, despite them being an equally significant part of my life.
Maybe it's a bit different in business circles, since games are now one of the largest sectors of the entertainment market in the US and UK (I can't find a better source for the statistic, but I attended a lecture a couple of years ago by this guy, who made the claim that the video game industry is now larger than either film or TV in the US), but I'm not sure that's a discussion that would touch very much on game content.
The solution really ought to be for me to start talking about the stuff I'd like to talk about in a non-hardcore-gaming sphere and see if anybody listens, but I'm not quite willing to stick my neck out that far. If all else fails, time will doubtless do for games what it has done for all other forms of media - the average age of 'gamers' is now apparently 30, and the average age of game buyers is higher (though some of that will be parents buying - perhaps still with some reluctance - for their kids).
If you're a regular reader of this blog, and particularly if you don't consider yourself a gamer, I'd be very interested in your views on this; would you be surprised to see video game topics here? Would you read a blog post about video games (apart from this one)? Thanks for reading.
But I don't feel comfortable talking about video games here, so much so that I've often thought about starting a second, entirely separate blog just to talk about my gaming experiences. It feels to me as if discussion of video games 'doesn't match' the themes of an author's blog, despite the fact that, as a genre fantasy author, many members of my core target audience are likely to be gamers themselves.
I don't feel the same way about other media. I'm not as interested in cinema as I used to be, but I wouldn't feel uncomfortable blogging about a film that had particularly moved or inspired me, or about something that could be learned from cinema as a form. Similarly, I've often mentioned webcomics, and sequential art in general, to draw comparisons with the ongoing evolution of publishing.
Maybe I'm imagining things, but I feel as if, just because of the association with video games, any similar point I tried to make from them would be dismissed. Part of this is hangover from my childhood, when video games were regarded with considerably greater suspicion than they are now. It took a long time before my parents were willing to let me have much access to games, though they have subsequently admitted that their doubts about the form were misplaced.
It comes down to this; I feel like there still isn't much of a casual audience for discussion of video games. There are specialist groups of various different kinds, including bona fide academic institutions and departments whose main focus is game design, but there isn't much outside of that. I can visit family and talk about my writing, even with people who aren't particularly interested in fantasy, or genre fiction, or even in fiction at all, but I wouldn't expect the same to be true for video games, despite them being an equally significant part of my life.
Maybe it's a bit different in business circles, since games are now one of the largest sectors of the entertainment market in the US and UK (I can't find a better source for the statistic, but I attended a lecture a couple of years ago by this guy, who made the claim that the video game industry is now larger than either film or TV in the US), but I'm not sure that's a discussion that would touch very much on game content.
The solution really ought to be for me to start talking about the stuff I'd like to talk about in a non-hardcore-gaming sphere and see if anybody listens, but I'm not quite willing to stick my neck out that far. If all else fails, time will doubtless do for games what it has done for all other forms of media - the average age of 'gamers' is now apparently 30, and the average age of game buyers is higher (though some of that will be parents buying - perhaps still with some reluctance - for their kids).
If you're a regular reader of this blog, and particularly if you don't consider yourself a gamer, I'd be very interested in your views on this; would you be surprised to see video game topics here? Would you read a blog post about video games (apart from this one)? Thanks for reading.
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