In the world of videogame studies there has been a lot written about Wow and MUDs and MOOs and fairly little written about FPS players so I’ve looked at the MMORPG stuff to see where it is similar to or different from my research interests.
I was listening to the latest episode of the podcast, A Life Well Wasted the other day and it got me thinking. If you don’t know, A Life Well Wasted is kind of like the This American Life of videogame podcasts. It is really good even if it doesn’t come out as often as I would like.
The latest episode is “Artists, Fans, & Engineers” has some great interviews with cosplayers and fanfic authors. Felicia Day’s work on The Guild has also been getting a lot of attention and in particular her song “Do You Want to Date My Avatar.”
Back in the 90s I participated in a comic book APA and did a little bit of comic book fanfic and I’ve read Henry Jenkins so I am familiar with fandom. I’ve never played WoW but I have played a little bit of City of Heroes, Lord of the Rings Online and I’m currently playing the free-to-play Dungeons & Dragons Online. Through none of this experience, however, have I done much team questing and never joined a guild. My experiences with anime, manga, and jrpgs is also pretty limited. I’ve seen a few anime shows (I grew up with Robotech), I’ve read Lone Wolf and Cub, and I’ve played Final Fantasy 7 and part of 8. However, when it comes to a lot of these less popular jrpgs I am clueless.
I got to say, this kind of cosplay and fanfic just doesn’t happen in First-Person Shooters. Sure, there is some but it just isn’t at the level it is among the mmorpg and jrpg players. There are certainly reasons for this, more story, a different perspective so you can see your character and character customization, and so on. But because of this they really seem to attract different kinds of people. There is overlap of course but the hardcore mmorpg and jrpg players don’t tend to be hardcore fps players and vice-versa.
I think that perhaps we really need to stop thinking about “videogames” as a monolithic thing and about “gamers” as belonging to a single monolithic group. Just as figure skating fans and hockey fans don’t tend to be the same people despite the superficial similarities of the two, neither are mmorpg, jrpg, and fps players (there’s some gendered aspects to those sports and I don’t think it is a coincidence that female mmorpg and jrpg players are much more common than female fps players. However, that is a matter for another post at another time.).
I guess what I’m saying is that videogames aren’t the same and neither are the players.
The summer is almost over. Actually I started teaching one class for Ivy Tech last week. IU doesn’t start until Monday.
This summer I moved, got a new car, and drafted out two chapters. I’m going to the Association of Internet Researchers Conference in October, and I’ve got an SCMS paper proposal to get out by Tuesday.
With some help from someone on the yahoo pipes message board (who did all the hard work. I’m not even 100% sure how the thing works to be honest because it uses regex and I don’t know anything about regular expressions) I was able to get a “beta” of my yahoo pipes delicious.com videogame theory ultimate rss mashup working. here’s a link to the page for it. It asks you to put in some terms but the default ones work fine. (If there are any i’m missing let me know.)
This came about from the fact that delicious (I still want to type del.icio.us) isn’t smart enough to search for synonyms. So if you search for things tagged “videogame” is won’t search for “videogames” or “games.” Additionally, just searching for “videogame” will turn up anything related to videogames which isn’t all that useful to my purposes. So what tag do you add? theory? academic?
So what the pipe does is runs all the combinations of one group of terms (in this case variations on the term “videogame”) with a second group of terms (in this case terms that people might use for videogame theory stuff). Because there are lots of sites that might be tagged with all the terms it also tried to filter out duplicates.
My next step is to take this basic pipe and also apply it to twitter and friendfeed searches with all the term combinations so that it will pick up any posts on those that might be of interest to videogame studies people.
I’ve been playing Cryostasis and wow it is pretty scary. Before it came out people were saying it was like Bioshock but I think it has a lot more in common with Penumbra: Overture. Like Penumbra: Overture, Cryostasis also takes place in a cold snow and ice-bound environment and while Cryostasis does have combat, it pretty well stinks and the majority of the game, like Overture, seems to be about figuring out what is happening and the scary environment.
I’ve also started playing an MMORPG that is in beta. Since it is in beta I’m not supposed to say anything about it which is weird since it isn’t really a “beta” but rather it is a big budget, MMO that is transitioning from a monthly subscription model to a free to play model. So although the game has been out a year or two and is based on a pen and paper rpg that started the whole pen and paper rpg genre I am not supposed to say anything about it. So I won’t. Except to comment that I’m amazed that it is also just like the only two other MMOs I’ve played, City of Heroes and Lord of the Rings Online. The combat is a little different but that’s about it. Since it is free I’ll probably play it every once in a while.
Finally, I’ve also been messing around with trying to use Yahoo Pipes to make a better way to keep track of any interesting sites people tag on delicious.com. Because delicious doesn’t really have a legitimate search, if you try “game” you will get something different than “games” for example. So I’m trying to use Pipes to aggregate as many variations on “videogame” and “theory” that seem useful. If anyone cares, here’s a link to the delicious videogame theory mashup pipe. I’m adding more delicious tags to it as I go so I suppose I should be cool and call it a “beta” (although the cool kids seem to have moved on to labeling thing as from their “labs” now rather than “beta.”). I don’t really know what I’m doing with programing the pipes so if anyone has a better method please let me know.
Wow, could the researchers have a lower opinion of videogame players? So the only reason someone would like violent games is if they were uneducated and violent? Crazy.
I haven’t read the article so it could easily something more reasonable but as a title it sure is ponderous.
The summer is here and that means one thing: lots of writing.
I’m starting to write the dissertation and I’m 15 pages in on my first chapter. I’m starting to get burned out from writing so much but I’m going to go see the new Terminator tomorrow. I know it isn’t getting very good reviews but big deal, right?
I’m writing about the community of LAN parties and coming up a bunch of question without answers. Is it a community? if so, in what way? Is it a thrid place? Oldenburg explicitly says that a room full of people playing videogames isn’t a third place but he was writing that back before multiplayer games were common. However, he also makes a big deal about talking as being very important but there isn’t much talking going on at the LAN parties….
So many questions!
And the new Team Fortress 2 update is out!
The Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University-Bloomington has been authorized to hire a Visiting Assistant Professor for the2009-2010 academic year (August 2009-May 2010) to teach courses in digital media and television studies. We invite candidates from a wide range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary backgrounds and encourage applicants whose teaching and research interests are grounded in critical humanities scholarship concerning the cultural, political, and communicative aspects of digital game studies. Ph.D. and teaching experience required. Applications will be reviewed starting May 21, 2009. Indiana University is an equal opportunity employer.
Send inquiries, CV, and names of three references to:
The semester here at Kokomo is finished. Another good semester of teaching ethnographic-based interpersonal communication.
I’ll be back in Bloomington in the fall. I’m only scheduled to teach one class in the fall at the moment so I need some money. If it weren’t against Google’s terms of service I’d encourage people to click my ads but since that is against the terms I won’t…
Now I’m trying to write my dissertation. My advisers want me to get 2 chapters done this summer so I have a lot to do. I’ve got 2 pages done so far. That’s about half way done, right?
“I didn’t see any racist imagery in it”
“No one says anything about the Spanish people in RE4”
“Why does it matter what color zombies are?”
“Why do people have to read so much into things?”
“Games are escapism”
“They didn’t mean to be racist”
“This is made by the Japanese so why would they know about racism?”
“Someone who thinks this is racist is racist”
These are all comments that I’ve seen on places like gamepolitics, Kotaku, and Joystiq. I’ve been putting off writing about this because I really don’t know if it will do any good and I don’t want to get into some flame war. I imagine that the people who have made up their mind probably won’t change them very easily. However, with N’Gai Croal leaving Newsweek, it came up again and it seems like it will keep coming up. That coupled with a website story about an “expert” talking about the game has made me decide not to hold my tongue any longer.
For anyone who doesn’t know what I’m talking about, I’m talking about Resident Evil 5. More accurately though I’m talking about people’s reactions to Resident Evil 5 (more accurately than that I’m writing about people’s reactions to people’s reactions to the Resident Evil 5 trailer). I haven’t played RE5. I don’t have any current gen consoles so I probably won’t be playing it any time soon. But that’s ok because most of the online discussion has been about the trailer.
Now, at this late date it is kind of hard to understand what people are talking about because there have been several trailers for RE5. The one that people first picked up on was an early first teaser trailer which didn’t really show much.
Even a later trailer which showed more included the questionable lines, “there’s no reason here… no humanity.”
I’m not going to say the game is or isn’t racist because, as I said, I haven’t played it. I’m not going to say the trailer was racist either. I do think that the early trailer did contain some imagery that was troubling in terms of its depiction of race when presented in isolation the way in which it was. The trailer has imagery that perpetuates stereotypes that everyone in Africa is poor and all of Africa is a desert.
Reading through the numerous comments on some of the stories some common themes seemed to come out. Most of the comments were pretty kneejerk and reactionary. It seems as if any criticism of videogames calls out the internet fanboys and the mere suggestion that a trailer for a game might be a bit racist is a horrible thing and requires vehement defense. One of the oddest and yet more common comments was something along the lines of “Anyone who thinks this is racist is racist themselves!” Ummm, what? So thinking something might not be the best way of depicting race makes you racist? That’s just bizarre.
Another common comment was “it is just a trailer.” Well that is true but that trailer just didn’t happen. They picked those scenes specifically because they wanted them to represent their game. When that trailer came out, no one knew what the game was like. All we had togo on was that trailer.
“They didn’t mean to be racist” No. I’m pretty sure they didn’t. So does that make it ok? I didn’t mean to break the law so I won’t get arrested? More importantly, people often use the excuse of “they didn’t mean it” as a way of forgiving something or dismissing criticisms. However, can we ever really know someone’s intention? We don’t have telepathy so all we ever have is perception. Even if someone says they don’t mean it, how can we know that they aren’t lying? No, intention isn’t ever possible to discern with total certainty and so all we have is perception.
“This is made by the Japanese so why would they know about racism?” Sadly, the USA doesn’t have a monopoly on racism. No they probably don’t know much about the history of racism in the USA. But Japan has a history of racism all its own, just ask Korea. Also they are pretty ignorant of other races. Japan is really homogeneous in its people. So they don’t have much experience with people of other races so they aren’t aware of it. Heck, blackface is stillacceptablein Japan. And people of African descent aren’t the only ones stereotyped. In 2005 the UN called racism in Japan “deep and profound.”
More recently, a videogame site asked an anthropologist to look at Resident Evil 5 and lead their article with the pull quote: “‘It’s silly to call it racist’, says leading anthropologist.” I’m sure that Glenn Bowman, the anthropologist in question, is an excellent scholar but the fact is he is not an expert on videogames or even media in general and I think that really undercuts the authority of his opinion. The reason for this is that he, like myself, did not actually play the game so neither of us knows what it is like to play it. Perhaps more importantly, he doesn’t say anything about the camera angles used and I really think that this is what people are latching onto when they have a negative reaction to the trailers.
Because I’m talking about the trailers, perhaps the most appropriate way of looking at them is through the lens of films studies — yes, I of all people, am advocating applying film theory to something from the videogame world! Let’s be honest, these are little movies. Based on the comments and articles I’ve read and podcasts I’ve heard (and Rebel FM’s episode where they Discuss RE5 is pretty good), people are responding to these films as if the camera didn’t exist and looking only at the world presented within the game and not the camera angles, lighting or editing. Ignoring the fact that these are computer generated and not actually filmed (which perhaps make the filmic elements more important since all of them were purposely chosen and nothing within it “just happened” or was “already there.”), all camera work is subjective. Camera angles do not just “happen.” They are chosen and they are created. They picked camera angles to make the Africans look threatening. They used shadows to make the distinction between human and zombie blurry. They edited it in such a way that nothing was fully shown. We cannot just ignore the kino eye in these situations.
When attempting to look at these trailers critically it is a mistake to allow ourselves to be sutured into the game. The Resident Evil games have always taken cues from cinema and replicated dramatic camera angles and so especially when it comes to this game series we must not allow ourselves to pretend that we are there and that this is not a constructed work.
This is especially important when countering the claims of those who argued, “No one says anything about the Spanish people in RE4.” Look at the trailers for Resident Evil 4. None of them use camera angles, lighting, or editing in anything like the same way that the early trailers for RE5 do.
In the end, like I said in the beginning, I’m not saying that the game or the trailers are racist. I am saying that a lot of the things people have written aren’t taking the manufactured and, dare I say it, “cinematic” nature of the trailers into account.