Ponderance

Video Games, Theory and Irony...

I think it's sadly ironic that I find myself writing on the theory of video games, but because of the demands of writing in recent years, I can't actually remember the last time I played a computer game! Anyway, I've been working on some reviews today, and have just finished looking at The Video Game Theory Reader. The review is below, and comments are most welcome!

The Video Game Theory Reader begins not with a bold statement or manifesto for interpreting video games but in a far more grounded manner with a foreword from Warren Robinett who is widely regarded with having revolutionised gameplay in 1978 with his design for the Atari 2600 Adventure game. Robinett opens with an obvious but inescapable question about the acceptability of video games: 'It is hard to say what ranks lower on the artistic food chain than video games. Comic books? TV sit-coms? X-rated films? These ratlike vermin at the bottom scurry to avoid the thunderous footfalls of the towering behemoths of the art world.' (vii-viii). Robinett argues that most new art forms require an 'enabling technology'-cinema had the motion picture camera-and now video games have the affordable home PC (preceded somewhat by dedicated gaming systems like the Atari, which seem to have come full circle with new console Nintendo, Playstation and Microsoft's Xbox systems). With the technology firmly entrenched and a large body of work (the games) available for analysis, it's time for the critics and theorists to pay attention. As video games become increasingly complex and, more to the point, socially entrenched, the humble video game has become a worthy subject for critical analysis and a new cultural studies field is emerging. Moreover, the fact that in the US, UK and Australia video games sales outstrip the box office takings for first release films indicates that video games are playing an increasingly substantial role in our leisure hours and social interactions. While editors Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron may be overstating the case somewhat in claiming that 'the video game has recently become the hottest and most volatile field of study within new media theory' (1) , this collection certainly goes a long way to ensuring that video game analysis will have firm critical footholds.

Wolf and Perron's excellent introduction goes a long way to illustrating that the field of video game study and theory does have both a lineage and its own proto-canon of important texts. As well as sketching the history of video game design and analysis, Wolf and Perron highlight four key elements of video games which distinguish them from the amorphous umbrella of new media: graphics, the changeable display almost always on a pixel-comprised screen; interface, the all-important connection between the game and player, which usually includes the graphics, but also speakers, microphones, keypads, joysticks, as well as onscreen elements such as sliders and menus; player activity, 'the heart of the video game experience' (15) and key to video game design; and algorithm, the program and procedures which must be to some extent unique for each different game.

Walter Holland, Henry Jenkins and Kurt Squire's first chapter 'Theory by Design' looks at the feedback loop between design, play and theory in the realm of 'edutainment'-educationally oriented games-and uses four case studies to illustrate how designing games-to-teach involves utilising, critiquing and extending video game theory. Wolf's own article in the collection looks at the role of abstraction in video games. He traces abstraction from a technological necessity, due to the processing and graphics power of the earliest game devices, to an exploratory artistic potential for current games which almost all now tend toward representational techniques and the digital holy-grail of photorealism. Alison McMahan's 'Immersion, Engagement, and Presence' then looks at methods for analysing 3-D video games as opposed to their 2-D predecessors, focusing on degrees of presence and immersion in different games and game types, including a useful case study of Myst III: Exile. Miroslaw Filiciak's 'Hyperidentities: Postmodern Identity Patterns in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games' (MMORPGs) looks at the phenomena of MMORPGs where hundreds or thousands of game users participate in a shared virtual environment and argues that MMORPGs actualise postmodern ideas of self more so than any other medium. Filiciak's chapter, while ambitious, tends to get stuck in explicating various postmodern theories of self rather than the specifics of MMORPG gameplay, making this the weakest chapter of the collection. By contrast, Bob Rehak's 'Playing at Being: Psychoanalysis and the Avatar' intertwines a rich knowledge and appreciation for the historical spectrum of video games with an equally broad knowledge of psychoanalysis and film theory to produce a provocative chapter which explores how the video game avatar operates from a mediated mirror stage through to far more nuanced and subtle notions of identity. Torben Grodal's chapter 'Stories for Eye, Ear, and Muscles: Video Games, Media, and Embodied Experiences' starts from the premise that video games are primarily 'different realisations of real-life activities' (129) and makes the argument that the best critical tools for engaging with video games are thus drawn from cognitive psychology. Maintaining a focus on embodiment, Martti Lahti's 'As We Become Machines: Corporealised Pleasures in Video Games' examines the oft-touted idea that video games and cyberspace fetishise a 'meatless' disembodied view of subjectivity. In contrast, Lahti argues that the technologies of video games complicate corporeal responses in a number of ways, not so much erasing the body as reincorporating it in a cybernetic system which to some extent actually re-emphasises the material body for game players. Mia Consalvo's 'Hot Dates and Fairy-Tale Romances: Studying Sexuality in Video Games' also delineates how video games can complicate aspects of identity, but this chapter focuses specifically on sexuality. Consalvo conducts tight focused readings of Final Fantasy 9 and The Sims, exploring the ways sexuality is portrayed, the potential for non-heterosexual readings and activity, with the latter especially interesting in Consalvo's examination of the massively popular The Sims. Markku Eskelinen and Ragnhild Tronstad 'Video Games and Configurative Performances' add performative perspectives from theatre and drama studies, highlighting the role of pleasure in reading video games. Gonzalo Frasca's chapter 'Simulation versus Narrative: Introduction to Ludology' follows in which Frasca outlines ludology-the study of video games not anchored to analyses of narrative-and shows how useful Espen Aarseth's ideas of cybernetic texts are in studying video games as simulations rather than representations. The following two chapters by Bernard Perron and Chris Crawford both focus on interactivity and narrative, the former from a more theoretical viewpoint and the latter more technical. The final chapter, Patrick Grogan's 'Gametime: History, Narrative, and Temporality in Combat Flight Simulator 2' examines similarities between gametime, gameplay and recent feature films, such as Pearl Harbour, and concludes that gametime is inherently ergodic; temporality is dictated by the episodic experiences of the game itself.

As this brief overview illustrates, the chapters in The Video Game Theory Reader range across a huge spectrum of academic disciplines, from new media studies to cognitive psychology to literary analysis and gender studies. Most of the articles are extremely well written, making firm arguments for the importance of analysing video games in contemporary society, and providing many theoretical tools with which future work can be performed. Video game analysis and ludology may be a newly emerging field, but The Video Game Theory Reader guarantees that it's a field which will have considerable theoretical groundings and provide important insight into contemporary popular culture.

Comments or thoughts anyone?