Blu wrote:Great stuff Dave. Historiography takes a committed individual, and you've got the knack. Also, Hemingway would like a word with your comma usage.
Seriously though, if your target audience is scholars and the academic crowd, that's fine, but my only critique is if you want to appeal to the masses, editing down to some more, simpler, and direct sentences might help vary the pace. Given the constraints of writing what you have in your mind in an hour might not be possible.
Get this published so we can all read it!
Thanks for the feedback and the kind words
These are very much "stream of consciousness" exercises to get some ideas down on paper. While I am writing here for an audience, these ideas will be refined, abandoned, reversed, etc. at some point between now and actual "sitting down to write the book" in such a way as to consider audiences. Right now I don't know that any of these are right for general or academic audiences. For example, the one I just finished
Pre-Writing #3
On Critical Game Studies
Term slippage is a very real concern for emerging disciplines and for interdisciplinary forms of scholarship. The use of certain terms, for example, can attract or repel people to the content of a manuscript such as this. Misunderstanding of a key term can drive someone to take on a project under false pretenses, pursue the wrong degree , or speak to an audience on issues in a mode that diverges from audience expectations. For those who work with and study games, this is a present conundrum. This text is part of a new series that takes the title “Digital Game Studies”. However, it purports to address subjects that, at various points, might fall into a variety of closely related (yet sometimes distinct) terms:
Game Studies
Digital Game Studies
Video Game Studies
Critical Game Studies
Ludology
Critical Ludology
Digital Ludology
Associated with these “umbrella” terms are many sometimes distinct and sometimes overlapping sub-areas of research in the humanities:
Video Game Criticism
Video Game Analysis
Video Game history
Video Game pre-history
The Rhetoric of Video Games
The Philosophy of Video Games
The Psychology of Video Games
Games and Pedagogy
…many more
There are also, of course, many career fields related to games which may or may not match up to these subjects or areas, and all of which may be institutionalized in any number of areas of academe:
Video Game Journalism
Video Game Design
Video Game Programming
Video Game Artist
Video Game Sound Engineer
Game Hardware Development
…etc.
The relative recent growth of game-related areas of academic research and training is, on the one hand, a good problem to have. It suggests an interest and awareness of the cultural impact of the medium and, like other disciplines tied to particular media before it (e.g. Film Studies, TV Studies, etc.), it is evolving at a rate that is quicker than the slow pace of the academy is able to accommodate for. The result is, in part, the creation of specialized universities entirely related to games (usually seen as “technical schools” for the industry) and the majority of the most well-developed programs existing at newer, smaller private universities. Game Studies has a way to go before it reaches the ubiquity of Film Studies…
On the other hand, rapid growth and expansion is a more serious problem for creating focus, for understanding the relationships between these often polysemous terms, and for communicating the connections between academic research, industry considerations, and player interests. There’s a messiness here which, while perhaps necessary and inevitable, is also an obstacle to those looking to get involved in a meaningful way with these various fields, subfields, etc. Perhaps a formalized taxonomy, grafted over the entire list of terms, might be a start (though there may not be universal agreement on any such rubric).
All of this preamble brings me to a few points about a specific term: Critical Game Studies. The qualifier of “critical” suggests that the interest is in applying critical methodologies to the analysis of games – those methodologies derived from the critical research found in fields like literary studies, rhetorical studies, cultural studies, media studies, etc. And, by in large, this has been how the term has been employed. Key theorists from these other disciplines are regularly represented in work that embraces the moniker/keyword “Critical Game Studies” – the requisite French postmodernists, the Frankfurt school thinkers, the Canadian media ecologists, etc. Marx, Foucault, Derrida, Habermas, Baudrillard, Adorno, and McLuhan have all had a romp with Super Mario Bros., Ico, Portal, World of Warcraft, etc. To the extent that they wrote about the function of popular culture, about the work of discourse, about the intervention of mediation into more areas of life, or about the grand dilemmas of the late twentieth century makes these obvious and sometimes useful figures. They are also especially comfortable. If we are being honest, perhaps they are not always well suited to the task of launching “critical analysis” of games at all.
This suggestion for pushback against these Giants of Critical Analysis is due, in part, to the lack of other qualifiers in “Critical Game Studies”. That is, the term doesn’t announce video games or digital games. Instead, as formulated, it suggests that “games” might be a widely defined set of texts and that the work of “Critical Game Studies,” while often applied to video games, is also relevant to the study of any form of gaming past or present. However, Ludology, which has concerned itself with gaming writ large for a long period, and which often uses critical approaches, does not draw on the same reservoir of “go to theory” that modern “Critical Game Studies” seems enamored with. “Critical Game Studies” as a term does more to group together work that is very much done in established disciplines than it does name something distinct.
This phenomenon is, of course, a tendency or a generalization and not a rule. There is “Critical Game Studies” scholarship that is, in fact, grounded in a body of theory that applies directly and usefully to digital/video games, that doesn’t attempt to apply Hebdige to game subculture (!!), and that instead is focused on creating insightful analysis of the artifacts of the medium in such a way as to advance our understanding of its distinctness from what came before. Perhaps this is “Critical Video Game Studies,” a qualifier that – as Derrida might suggest – is a difference that matters.
