I found a link to this short piece by Slavoj Zizek in Andrew Sullivan’s blog, of all things (why do I read Andrew Sullivan’s blog? It’s a long story, but I’m sort of fascinated by the crisis of the gay conservative in America – perhaps I suspect that it runs to the heart of the crisis in American thought in the collapse of continuity between its scientific/technological sophistication and its religious/repressive impulses.)

One of the facets of the videogame/new media ascension that strikes me as both elusive and important is its relationship to the cognitive turn itself. Videogame pleasure occurs across of cognitive spectrum that prior forms of discourse – the poem, the novel, the film – left relatively untouched. The function of learning as pleasurable, across a number of cognitive and perceptual systems, is key to the motivation behind the game, and is, along with simulation and other more traditional elements of artistic production, constituent of the game itself (specifically the videogame in this case, and I’m willing to make this case later.) The videogame subject-position in toto, even more than the player position in any game, is explicity cognitive, is articulated by its fluencies, is held accountable for their navigation through the game-text-space by those fluencies.

I’ve seen works that try to exploit superficial aspects of videogame logics by people who simply do not have experience in engaging the variform cognitive demands into a game experience (whether pleasureable or not) to any real extent, and they suggest to me the same kind of crisis in ethics which Zizek discusses in relationship to biological intervention: the impulse is to protect the humanist, holistic conception of the subject against this segmentarity of function and post-humanist demand that the current subject as such is not the end of the story: the player who begins the demanding game is not yet good enough to finish it, and only in navigating through frustration and learning, and often somatizing skills or turning them into rotes outside of conscious awareness, do they become something they were not at the beginning of the experience – a qualified “reader”/player/gamer. The inadequacy returns at the beginning of the next game.

Works could be made the challenge that position, that subjectivity – or can exploit it as a canvas, as the substructural prerequisite to utilize the game-form in another type of discourse act. But that challenge is problematic when it simple comes from exteriority or an impatience with frustration – or simply a defense of older, humanist subjectivities in texts.

I have never been more impressed with Zizek, even if at times he abuses the idea of the cognitive tradition by conflating it with a kind of nativist determinism that doesn’t fit most of the cognitive scientists I know (he himself is repressing the history of his own lineage, I think – Dennett never was opposed to the notion of social relations as fundemental in subjectivity, it is largely a question of scope of analysis.) His own curiousity – too rare a feature among contemporary humanist thinkers – has lead him to a point of breakthrough.

I’m getting my footing here at UCSD. If there’s a slogan for my immediate future, it’s interdisciplinarity. In order to do the kind of deep-playing that I want – to access (some)games as richly as I think they can be accessed, I am now looking back at social cognition, learning theory, developmental models, even some cognitive semantics. At the same time, I intend to write historicizing texts and work in a critical tradition, not a primarily analytic one. I just need a theory of the playing subject that I can use, and I am starting to feel that those based on old psychodynamic models aren’t adequate.

Not that I’m some brave pioneer in this: I think I see James Paul Gee’s footprints on this beach, among many others. Before he wrote specifically on learning theory and video games, he wrote a number of books about discourse analysis, ideology and language. In my not-too-distant past life as a student of cognitive science, I had some inkling that its insights could be harnessed for more critical work, and it seems that James Gee was way ahead of me already.

Fortunately, I’m being encouraged to build connections and take seminars across a number of disciplines, from cognitive science to Japanese area studies. The problems are going to be plentiful, and methodology will not be the least of them.

I’m happy to announce that I’ve just sent off my acceptance of an admission offer to the art history/theory/criticism PhD program at UCSD. I’ll be moving to San Diego at the end of the summer.

It’s a little early to be completely sure of what my program will look like, but my primary interests will probably remain in the study of videogames as texts and cultural artifacts, on transnational cultural flows in new media, and on borders, migration, and hybridism in/after globalization. Not only is San Diego a great place to study – with resources like the Pacific Rim Institute, the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts, and the Center for Iberian and Latin American Studies, the whole SoCal area is just brimming with possibilities.

Before then, I’m heading to E3 – there should be a small contingent of Ludonauts there.

It’s been a busy couple of weeks. Last week was the GDC. My “report” is a simple one: I met a lot of intelligent, funny, and wonderful people. I spent some time helping demo Facade, and managed to see a couple talks. This week, I’m going to visit UCSD to, well, check things out. My longer posts on specifically game-related issues are going to be at Ludonauts.com, and I’ll link to them as appropriate from here. I’ve just put up a piece about Facade and social cognition.

Game sequels, chess, and how videogames are not exactly games. Gonzalo was recently interviewed by a Brazilian magazine¹ on violence in games and film, and asked him about GTA3: San Andreas, the upcoming West Coast-locale version of the GTA3 series.

In his comments about the interview², Gonzalo makes some criticisms of the phenomena of sequels in games.

This is not the first time that concerns about sequelitis have been raised. Edge Magazine once ran a cover story on the problem of sequels, and others have remarked on this before. Gonzalo compares the sequels of GTA to the game of chess, which did evolve over the years, but remained essentially without “sequels” even as variants were introduced.³

What this says to me, ultimately, is that in a very important way, videogames are not like other games – they are also visual media artifacts, subject to phenonema of branding and franchising. In this sense, there are precursors in non-videogames: Dungeons and Dragons spun off a considerable secondary market in pulp novels, children’s cartoons, and ultimately a film.

The case of the GTA franchise, however, is more than simple branding. There is a persistant character, there’s a distinctive millieu, there’s continuity and diagesis; there are unities in visual aesthetics, and there’s also consistency in gameplay.

This is, of course, all within the GTA3 “set” of games. The ‘3’ refers to, I would guess, the same core engine and characters, and gameplay mechanics; GTA1 (and the London 1969 pack) had a top-down interface, and didn’t represent the player-character directly (the use of cut-scenes with comic-art character animations, and the sort of pulp characterizations, was already present in GTA1).

So, in a mini-replay of the question of genre, the “thing” that is sequelized in a videogame is somewhat ambiguous. Final Fantasy sequels have little – but not nothing – in common with each other: it isn’t quite the episodic feeling that you get with, say noir-games like Hitman and Max Payne, but there are recurrent features (moogles, chocobos), some continuity of game-play (map-exploration, turn-based combats, skill systems, etc.) The first true sequel in the FF series was FFX-2, which featured distinct gameplay, but narrative continuity.

In all this, we have channels of content and features for which chess has no real analog, nor do most board games. “Sequelitis” relies on these channels or axes (an improvised list: diagetic, narrative, structural, interactive, franchise) – and like Rick Altman observed with genre, stability in one axis coupled with dynamism in another makes genre-evolution possible. Much of the sequel-logic in videogaming is a consequence of this multiform nature.

1. that link for the benefit of my vast Portuguese-literate readership. Reharl, are you reading this?
2. in English, despite the thick Uruguayan accent.
3. what is now the standard move for the queen, for example, was at one time a variant game-rule called “mad queen.”

Doing theory and cultural studies post-Sokal… The work of cultural studies, critical theory et. al. isn’t science. It’s not subject to the same success-criteria that scientific work is concerned. But Sokal happened, and anyone attempting to do work that shares epistemic terrain with scientific domains must either realize that or risk irrelevance or worse. So, I give myself a few ground rules. Any claim I make must make sense – and contradict – it’s opposite. One needs to be able to prepend an “It is not the case that…” to any declarative statement, to generate a statement that on some level they would be arguing against. It is worrisome how many pre-Sokalian texts – often cited, often respected – failed of this basic falsifiability. Given such a constraint, one can still do this sort of work and avail oneself of introspection and intuition, of allegory and pure speculation, as part of one’s method. This doesn’t absolve anyone from the need to justify or support a stance, nor does it excuse anti-empiricism, but it indicate a freedom from some evidentiary constraints of the traditional sciences.

J2O’s flash game is an excellent example of smart game rhetoric. The drink is marketed as a “pacer,” a non-alcoholic chaser to support an evening of debauch. The game makes the benefits of the product it is advertising as clear as, erm, pee. And I’m sure that any resemblence to the work of the diligent researchers of MIT is strictly coincidental.

Postscript: please, no remarks on peer-to-peer software.

Post-postscript: also, no comments about European (you’re a-peein’) game design. We have standards here. In theory.

Found on Rhizome.org, this piece by Giselle Beiguelman is both technically and creatively excellent: a flash-powered tableu for remixing a catalog of images, sounds, clips, and texts, allfrom the social, political, environmental, and creative landscape of northeastern Brazil. In taking these almost atomic elements of a local millieu into a database, she creates a post-narrative epic of place. The tension between the futurity of the media and the ambiguity of the modernisms of the south is recast by each participant.

Long time coming now, this is the article that I presented at the DiGRA conference last year. There’s a few things I’d probably change or expand upon at this point, I think: fleshing out what a new-historicist approach to game texts might look like elsewhere, maybe, and expanding a bit more on current shomin geki tropes in film and television.

There are some good things about the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts exhibit, Bang the Machine: Computer Gaming Art and Artifacts. Among them are an impressive implementation of Waco Resurrection, with a David Koresh mask holding headphones and microphones, the Kingdom of Piracy exhibit, including a reappropriation/skinning of the Civilization III engine into an allegory about multinational capitalism and corporate power, and the delightful Sims Gallery. But the problems are damning, and they are telling. Hopefully, this will serve as an object lesson to others who plan to curate exhibits about videogames and art.

First, the entire back wall of the main gallery is dominated by an exhibit of/about America’s Army. Built into a rather chintzy faux-Middle Eastern fort structure (looking more appropriate for a county fair than for a museum exhibit) were small alcoves featuring screens showing game-play in action, amid little dioramas of desert warfare bric-a-brac. Posters described the technology of the game and graphic engines, and dutifully described the development team’s heroic efforts to create the game. As far as I could tell, the game exhibit is not playable, and the viewer does not get to access the game’s greatest irony: that no one can play” as the terrorists, but in multiplayer mode, each side appears as terrorists to the other.

The piece – in fact, the entire area devoted to the game – was not only completely uncritical and unironic, it had almost nothing to do with art and videogames, and featured a fawning “story of the creation of the game” that wasn’t part of any of the other exhibits. There was nothing to relate America’s Army to other games (at least not within the piece itself: on the far side of the room, on a table across from the sprawling, costly, and tasteless faux-tress, were a couple defunct computer monitors that featured such works as Gonzalo’s September 12 and other more satirical/problematizing games, but there’s absolutely no sense of continuity between the two.)

Perhaps the exhibit is the result of a generous, yet conditional, gift on the part of the group behind America’s Army, the Navy’s MOVES Institute. That would be perhaps a bit more understandable if either the rhetoric of the game were problematized more, or if the work, as an uncritical, complimentary description of game-technology in action, were at least placed in a less dominating position. But that’s not the case: the America’s Army exhibit towers over the more nuanced and inventive works of the exhibit, and disrupts the effectiveness of the room. That the content of an exhibit, and the stance towards it, be so strongly overdetermined by the wishes of a donor, would never extend this far in a typical art exhibit. Imagine if Campbell Soup was able to place a self-serving display about soup, nutrition, and the food industry in the middle of an exhibit of the work of Andy Warhol. Yes, it’s that bad.

Then there are the difficulties that dog the curating of any new-media exhibits: the challenges of maintaining equipment, of creating a good interactive environment (I’ll mention this in my next section.) Some exhibits were off-line, due to technical difficulties. As more new media works are exhibited in museums, this should be unacceptable. A skilled media technical staff should be part of every museum’s team, along with preparators and guards. In the case of Bang the Machine, on my second visit to the exhibit, about a fourth of the interactive exhibits were offline or not functioning. This is simply not acceptable. In comparison, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s 2001 Art in Technological Times exhibit did an excellent job of keeping some very complex and interactive works on-line and working.

I visited another exhibit recently: an overview of installation art from 1969 to 2002 at the Museum of Contemporary Art at the Geffen Center in Los Angeles. The overall exhibit was fine, with a good selection and effective use of the Geffen Center’s space. I did notice that Gabriel Orozco’s piece, Ping Pond Table (a four-ended ping-pong table with a pond in the middle, with 4 paddles and a number of balls) didn’t enjoy the same reception here that it had when I saw it at the Tate Modern in London: while at the Tate, it turned anonymous gallery-goers into a friendly group of people interacting playfully with each other, the MOCA’s installation was treated as an entirely scopic object (yes, I did pick up a paddle and encourage a couple other visitors to play with the piece a bit, but they quickly retreated back to the typical stance of pure spectatorship.)

This resistance to immersion or participation with an artwork was more pronounced in the exhibit of Julie Becker’s Researchers, Residents, a Place to Rest. The piece invites exploration and consideration, but the curators decided on a high-security, preservation-focused stance towards the work. Viewers were not allowed to flip through notebooks, and given little chance to unravel the subtleties of the work. Instead, they were rushed through by museum guards. It was a disservice to the work, and also went to demonstrate the problem of any interactive work: the risks to the physical element, and the (reasonable) failure of trust between the audience and the curators. The question is, if the aura of the intact material work is so important that it merits intervening in the direct relationship between viewer and work, just why bother with site-specificity at all? Would the best interactive work be a DVD-rom you pick up in the museum store on the way out?