Building Blocks: Toward a More Substantial Introduction

So here we have a rough draft of a literature review starting. I thought I would post this up here. I think that I will post a couple more revisions...or at least will continue posting them until the first rough draft is complete. Once that is done, I will begin focusing more on the analysis of the game through the blog. The grammar here is very rough, so please forgive me. Also, there may be a few logic leaps I need to add some grounding too.

This is a paper that wants to look at video games. A video game is a game played in digital space via a dedicated console (SOURCE). By digital space I mean to say that it is a space created by computer programmers that is manufactured by a video game console. This console, typically a specialized grouping of hardware meant to connect to a graphic display (typically a television), processes and displays the digital space that the player then explores. What this paper wants to do specifically is look at what is happening inside the game and look at where those things are coming from in culture. Why does it matter where the things within a game come from? Well, as Johan Huizinga once told us, “In the twin union of play and culture, play is primary” (46).

Play
(Coming Soon)

Cultural Proximity (Will add more on translation and tech answers to culture problems)
Video Games are recent cultural phenomena. By recent, I mean to say video games did not exist until technology that could display digital data was ‘hacked’ in 1961 to emulate missile launches in space (SOURCE). While some people would say that video games began with a game created by Steve Russell called Spacewar created at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1961 (SOURCE), for the sakes of this paper, video games are run via a “dedicated console” whereas Computer Games are just that, games on a computer. This distinction is rarely made in the present as it is no longer useful, but it is useful to make here for two reasons. One, there is a marked distinction between American console games and Japanese console games. Two, American computer games have begun to be American console games (SOURCE). This distinction will become clearer in a second.

The history of the computer is inexorably tied to the speed of processors and the graphic displays that show the result of that processing (VIDEO GAME DEFINITION). Faster processors means more code processed more quickly. This code allows more commands to be sent to a display, thus allowing for what began as little dots to become beings that move, act, and talk like us; video games emulate culture. The atmosphere that video games take place in are quickly becoming familiar streets and cities. Some new games boast that their gameplay is so advanced that they can even emulate sexual relations between same sex or different sex partners. Video games are quickly becoming a place where we can explore questions we can’t explore in the real world (SOURCE – CASTRONOVA?). Because video games are meant to emulate culture, the culture those video games tends to take on a special meaning. Puzzles that might seem easy for the culture they are created in might not be as easy outside of that culture; characters meant to be comedic might be repulsive to other cultures. I have made a logical jump here; video games are a worldwide phenomenon (SOURCE). Video games began in America. As stated, the game often associated with the term “first video game” is called Spacewar! and was created in 1962. This game lead to a series of events that American popular culture inevitably caused video games to be considered a fad.

After Spacewar! was released, similar video games began to appear around the world. Pong was the first video game to appear in consumer’s homes. Because of the lack of processing power, Pong was a single machine meant to be used on a single television. From Pong arose a myriad of consoles that were very different from Pong. These game machines were created to run proprietary cartridges, meaning, they would only run games made for that particular hardware configuation. The number of these machines and the number of cartridges eventually reached dizzying heights. At its peak in the early 1980s, there were five machines available: The Atari 2600, The Magnavox Odyssey 2, The Intellevision, the Colecovision, and the Atari 5200. Each of these systems had hundreds of games available for them. The market that had appeared after the success of Pong had flooded itself and eventually collapsed around 1984. The major company in video gaming at the time, Atari, was sold off in pieces. Pop culture then labeled video games as a passing fad.

While America was not ready for anymore video games, they were not prepared for what came next. Seeing that the video game market had collapsed under its own weight, Nintendo of Japan had a plan. In 1986, after three years of trials in Japan, Nintendo introduced the Nintendo Entertainment System. By labeling it as an entertainment system and by offering peripherals that would attach to the machine, Nintendo wanted to convince consumers that this wasn’t just another Atari. Also, Nintendo did something that other companies in America had not, Nintendo declared complete control over the production of software. This meant that any game created for their Entertainment System was sent to Nintendo and Nintendo decided how many copies of games would be produced, when the game would be released, if at all (SOURCE). This was the creation of the video game industry. It was regulated and dominated by Japanese interests for almost twenty years. It was also at the creation of the video game market that American software makers went to the then blossoming personal computer game market to continue making games in the way they wanted to (SOURCE). The introduction of this system signaled a tremendous shift in video games that began to end when the Sony Playstation was released but was solidified when the American created Xbox appeared (SOURCE).

This paper will examine the themes present in video games now that they have achieved a modicum of cultural proximity. Previous literature on video games has revolved around the advertising of and basic premise or motivation for characters. These studies almost all originate in a time when Japan was still the primary location of hardware and software manufacturing. This paper attempts to close a gap and take a step forward in the study of cultural relevancy with regard to video games. This paper will be split into four parts. First, I will examine the literature about video games and feminist literature about the power of messages in media. Second, I will describe my method of study. Third, I will describe the themes present in video games that came out during my time with them. These themes were not present in the data but emerged ancillary to it. And lastly, I will examine the data I collected by playing these games.

Building Blocks: Logic and Literature

It's all coming together, this literature review. I have 3 games left to go through: Bioshock, Call of Duty 4: World at War (or Modern Warefare), and Fallout 3. I've been working on an introduction and transition to feminist theory and I think I have it. The sources i've been looking at are:

Huizinga, Johan. 1950. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. Boston: The Beacon Press.

Caillois, Roger. 2001. Man, Play and Games. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Laurel, Brenda. 2001. Utopian Entrepreneur. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Latour, Bruno. 1996. Aramis or The Love of Technology. Paris: Editions La Découverte.

The logical leaps don't seem to be too bad but what do I know. For now, i'll throw this up here so I can look at it later.

A. Games are important because they communicate ideas about fair play, the magic circle, and use of free time.

a. Huizinga 46: “Social life is endued with supra-biological forms, in the shape of play, which enhance its value. It is through this playing that society expresses its interpretation of life and the world. By this we do not mean that play turns into culture, rather that in its earliest phases culture has the play-character that it precedes in the shape and mood of play. In the twin union of play and culture, play is primary.”

i. Over time, the play-character crystallizes begins to be hidden by cultural phenomena (like video games) (46-47), other parts of it become sacred (religion, government, etc).

ii. In this way, video games, we can say, are an essential part of the cultural transmission, that certain elements of play are given form by them.

1. Naturally enough, the connection between culture and play is particularly evident in the higher forms of social play where the latter consists in the orderly activity of a group or two opposed groups. (47 Huizinga)

b. Caillois 40: “They (Games) reflect forms which, while doubtless remaining in the domain of play, evolve a bureaucracy, a complex apparatus, and a specialized hierarchical personality. In a word, they sustain permanent and refined structures, institutions of an official, private, marginal, and sometimes clandestine character, whose status seems nonetheless remarkably assured and durable.”

B. Technology as an answer to a cultural problem

a. Translation - Video games began in America, failed, picked up by Japan and sent in a new direction, American Gaming centered on the 'nerd' culture of America and went into the fringe computer hacker realm for years. Eventually it came back beginning with the success of the xbox. Now it has come full circle. Key event: Nintendo released the Wii in America before it released it in Japan.

i. Source to refer to: (Aramis: 33): “People always wonder how a laboratory, or a science, can have any impact at all on society, or how an innovation arises in the mind of its inventors. The answer is always to be found in the chains of translation that transform a global problem into a local problem through a series of intermediaries that are not “logical” in the formal sense of the term, but that oblige those…who are interested in the global problem to become interested through almost imperceptible shifts, in the local solution.”

ii. Page 32: Any engineer is posing questions and critiquing society through answering those questions: Video Games are an answer to the question of fun in the cold war at first, when that fails, interactive manga and anime in Japan that is eventually exported. When those wane, the video game is retranslated by American engineers as that of a multiplayer experience based on the popularity of multiplayer PC games by Microsoft. It is a way to bring a whole slew of disconnected people together.

iii. In doing this, American engineers take the global market of the video game and bring it within a close cultural proximity of American gamers. For the first time since the 90s, video game hardware and software were being created here, designed by companies here, and played by players here.

C. Cultural Proximity - Beginning with the re-translation of the video game we have begun to see a growing cultural proximity of the American video game with the American video game console.

a. The American video gaming fringe that was eventually re-translated to the XBOX was the white male dominated PC Gaming market.

i. Quote: Laurel 23: “Computer games as we know them were created by young men around the time of the invention of graphic displays. The whole industry consolidated very quickly around a young male demographic – all the way from the game-play design to the arcade environment to the retail world – and it made no sense for a company to swim against the tide in all three of these areas at once.”

b. American norms, moirés, and ideas about how a game is played are making it now into a much wider scope of people than previously thought possible.

c. Despite video games coming back to an American cultural proximity, the new video games are continuing through the PC market. The PC Market continued after the video game bust in the 80s. That market, created by young white males for young white males, has been copied into the new American based console market.

D. Feminist Theory or, why it matters that a video game is transmitting the translated nature of a new cultural proximity.

TERMS TO DEFINE:

Fair Play

Magic Circle

Translation

Cultural Proximity

Mediator

Intermediary

Collaboration versus competition

Anime

Manga

Cold War Innovation

Play-spirit

Video Game PC Market

Building Blocks: Cultural Proximity

Another step in the direction of a sociological justification for game studies is cultural distance. The main article for this is:

Aoyama, Yoko and Hiro Izushi. 2003. "Hardware Gimmick or Cultural Innovation? Technological, Cultural, and Social Foundations of the Japanese Video Game Industry." Research Policy 32: 423-333.

This article acknowledges the fact that without companies like Sony Computer Entertainment, Nintendo, or Sega, the video game industry as a whole would not be as viable an operation as it is today. It traces the penetration of the Japanese video game industry into the global market by tracing the Japanese video game's association with Manga, Anime, and a rich creative environment that lead to a collaborative environment with hardware manufacturers that systematically leveled the playing field of video gaming and stabilized it. Unlike the American market lead by Atari, Japanese companies were slower to catch on but much more active in the overall dissemination of their product into the market.

Because of the cultural proximity of hardware manufacturers to software manufacturers, Japan lead all video game industry discussions. Aoyama says,

"Evidence shows a presence of cultural proximity between platform developers and third-party software publishers, as it has been observed in other industries. Japan's software publishers have been in a unique position to access, almost exclusively, dominant platform developers particularly at the early stages of the industry's development. There are multiple ways in which cultural proximity matters, yet in all cases it functions to reduce barriers of communications and facilitates the flow of information." (Aoyama 2003: 434)

So, basically, these authors are saying that the cultural proximity of the group of engineers of a piece of hardware will allow them to create software that probably works better for it. I think that this is a fair sentiment. A thing to note here is that this article was written in 2003 and already the effect of the Xbox was being seen. The authors note: "The entry of Microsoft with Xbox may undermine the exclusive advantages of cultural proximity..." Looking with the eyes of 2009, this is definitely the case. Aside from the Wii, which enjoys the celebration of its cultural proximity while also tackling the idea of the "Gamer" generic type, Japanese gaming has been on the decline.

This is where the justification for studying the video game comes in. For the first time in decades, games from American Developers are being created for American gamers on a system created for a system from America. This shift of cultural proximity allows for influence of video games from a culture that plays and creates them to be studied.

Evidence of Japan's Decline:

http://xx-xxx-xx.hp.infoseek.co.jp/kikaku2/game.html

http://www.joystiq.com/2009/10/01/japanese-gaming-market-continues-to-decline/

http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2008/08/05/declining-influence-japanese-game-developers-nearly-absent-from-e3-awards-lists/

Building Blocks: The Sociological Stance on Video Games Part 1

It comes to my attention, in writing about video games and thinking about sociology, that video games are something of a mystery to sociology. Take, for instance, the definition of video games from the blackwell dictionary of sociology:

Video games are played via a dedicated console connected to a television (e.g., Sony's Play Station) and computer games are played on a personal computer, or PC. These two forms of digital play comprise a lucrative sector of the global entertainment complex, an immersive, simulation-based interactive medium, a high-profile domain of youth-oriented popular culture, and a preferred leisure activity for millions of media consumers. Emerging early in the new millennium, game studies is the field of multidisciplinary scholarship devoted to the analysis of video and computer games.The origins of digital play lie in the US military–university complex. Cold War-era technologies that were intended to combat the “socialist threat” and to boost industrial productivity were turned upside down – from work to play – when, in 1962, student hackers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology created Spacewar?, one of the first computer games. This breakthrough was harnessed in the 1970s by Atari, the US corporation that led the transformation of digital play into a cultural industry. A harbinger of the “information society,” the spread of video arcades and the launch of the first home-based consoles in the 1980s saw interactive entertainment suffuse cultural space, commodify “free time,” and prepare many young people for the digital age.

There are some assumptions here that I have been thinking about. First, that video games prepared youth in the 80s for the digital age that was about to come. I'd say that video games were a product of the digital age and computers themselves did this. Video games were just another mode of showing the current digital display technology. But then I started thinking of other things.

Now, video games do have some impact on our lives. No, i'm not talking about leading to murdering terrorists or killing your sister, i'm talking about creating or changing the a priori knowledge, the metaphysics for your action. While I typically try and espouse the academic sources, i'll use some blogs. Take for instance: TCBAGS from Brainy Gamer. Would this have happened to someone who didn't play games? Has the video game had an impact on real world people? Everyone in that thread would say yes.

The other side of that coin is what we bring with us into the game. Mia Consalvo in There is No Magic Circle says that the real world knowledge, our real world circumstances. She says:

"Because of that, we cannot say that games are magic circles, where the ordinary rules of life do not apply. Of course they apply, but in addition to, in competition with, other rules..." (Consalvo 2009: 9)

The magic circle is what we enter when we play a game, it is the boundary of game space. It comes from Johan Huizinga's Homo Ludens. What Consalvo says is that there is real life that exists within the magic circle, we bring it in with us. Can we really call game space a pure place?

So, here we have two associations. The first is the link between the magic circle and real life and the other is between real life and the magic circle. While gameplay does stop when the game is finished, we often think about and act upon victory or defeat. Those feelings are real. I (and this is anecdotal evidence at best) still remember that tragic moment of complete and utter defeat when my linkshell in Final Fantasy 11 fought a dragon for 15 hours and eventually gave up. I was shocked, dismayed, destroyed. I didn't play anything for a day or two, I didn't do anything. That is an extreme example. Later, that same linkshell would defeat that same dragon in 20 minutes. But it serves as a reminder at just how serious some video games can be.

If you look up news on video games on google news, it won't take long to see a news media outlet linking video games to violence, video games to ADHD, or any manner of derogatory statements. If you look further, there is another movement (and i'll call this the James Paul Gee area) that looks at how video games are a benefit to learning and making sense of the world. What both of these stances agree on is that video games are doing something to us.

So, all of this arguing over what exactly is happening probably isn't as important to me as the simple thought that playing a video game does something to us. Now, from there, I suppose I need to pick a side but that is for another time.