reading two [week seven]

Persuasive Games: The Proceduralist Style by Ian Bogost

• "As the 20th century wore on, it became much harder to distinguish art by its form or function alone; context became the predominant factor, its arbitrariness exposed forever by Duchamp's urinal."

• "[On the term "games as art"] It suggests that games can be construed as art natively, within the communities of practice and even the industry of games. Its practitioners are game developers first, working artists second, if at all."

• "Beyond such a distinction, however, and despite its rhetorical power, "artgame" is an insufficient name to be useful for players, creators, or critics. It is a stand-in for a yet unnamed set of movements or styles, akin to Realism or Futurism."

Video Games Can Never Be Art by Roger Ebert

•  "One obvious difference between art and games is that you can win a game. It has rules, points, objectives, and an outcome. Santiago might cite a immersive game without points or rules, but I would say then it ceases to be a game and becomes a representation of a story, a novel, a play, dance, a film. Those are things you cannot win; you can only experience them."

• "Kellee Santiago has arrived at this point lacking a convincing definition of art. But is Plato's any better? Does art grow better the more it imitates nature? My notion is that it grows better the more it improves or alters nature through an passage through what we might call the artist's soul, or vision."

• "The only way I could experience joy or ecstasy from her games would be through profit participation."

reading one [week four]

Play the Game: Grand Theft Desire by Stephen Duncombe

• "As unlikely as it seems, progressives can learn a lot from a video game like this. But two things need to be recognized at the start of any discussion about its political possibilities. The first is that all the hand-wringing, wet-blanket, moralistic critics of video games are right: Grand Theft Auto is apocalyptically violent. In order to “win” the game a player has to shoot, beat, and run over literally thousands of individuals ... It is Sigmund Freud’s nightmare of unsublimated erosand thanatos, with a heavy emphasis on the latter: the return of the repressed expressed onscreen."

• "It’s true that most of those playing video games are boys and men between the ages of fourteen and thirty-four, but even within these parameters you have a lot of people vicariously acting out a spectacular fantasy. More important, you have a lot of desires and dreams begging to be addressed. But in order to tap into that popularity, progressives first have to understand it ... It is not the healthy and constructive sublimation that Freud hoped for—sex into civilization and destruction into high culture—but it could be considered a sort of desublimation, a return to our basest desires which are then given release by roleplaying in a virtual domain, similar to what Aristotle identified as the cathartic function of tragic drama."

• "Character identification in video games reveals deeper possibilities than merely identifying with the rebel. It signals a desire within us to identify with what we are not. In GTA this means acting out a racist stereotype like CJ, but it needn’t be so limited. Identification with “the Other,” whether that other be someone of a different race or station, or someone who embodies political options previously not considered, opens up new possibilities ... This identification with the Other is not the banal “respecting difference” of the multiculturalists: it entails embracing difference. It means transforming a distant object into an intimate subject. Grand Theft Auto also teaches us that this identification with the Other can be experienced as a pleasure, not as a guilty chore ... The Other is, by definition, foreign and incomprehensible, an object to be treated with charity or contempt, but always at a distance. Role-playing games suggest a popular desire to jump the gap and make the Other, literally, identifiable and thus not an “other” at all."

• Video game theorists:

• Narratologists argue that what is important about video games is the story they tell

•  Ludologists argue that the game is the thing. What a character can do and how he or she can do it is what matters most, not the narrative path they follow

• "Yet this division does call attention to the fact that two things drive video games: one, the character and the story he or she acts out; two, the quality of the action itself. In other words, how the game is played."

• "I played Wolfenstein so much that it started to make its way into my dreams. But I never dreamed that I was the Allied soldier (a character even flatter than CJ), and I didn’t feel the need to gun down threatening Nazis or complete any missions in my sleep. I did, however, have vivid dreams about walking through the virtual maze of Wolfenstein castle; red brick hallways and slamming steel doors became part of my nightly dreamscape ... What sticks with the player is not so much the story told, or even the protagonist one identifies with, but the virtual world where the player gets to play around in."

• "Johan Huizinga, the renowned theorist of play who originated [the term magic circle], used it to describe the space of games where outside rules are suspended and rules of play are enforced ... All video games allow for a certain latitude of player agency—that is, the player is always free to go left when it would have been better to go right ... It’s about giving people freedom of choice ... It’s still very much an action game, but there’s also a whole world out there to explore ... If designers like Costikyan and the ludologists are right, then one of the key things that explains the popularity of a game like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is the experience a player has within the magic circle of the game. The scope of the world, the texture of the experience, and the autonomy of the action matter as much as if not more than whether the game is won or lost. (Winning is actually bittersweet, for once you win the game is over.) Means matter more than ends."

introduction

Hello there! My name is Crystal and I enjoy doodling. 

Let's see if you can recognize who these gentlemen are: