Legitimacy and the Dialectic

This was written sort of in response to the talk by Jesse Schell's "mindblowing talk on the future of games." Many people have been picking up on the fact that he isn't really clear about whom should be doing this creation of making all aspects of a person's life an achievement system. My take on it is that people are doing it, not game designers. His intent seems to have been that game designers need to take control of the development of games in order to stop his 'new world' from happening. In thinking about this, I wanted to take a journey through trying to piece together some thoughts on this idea using the famous Georg Simmel dialectic metaphor. We have to be either or, in all things. 2 and only 2. And in all things, both sides want to be fully realized while at the same time the person wants neither to be fully realized. What ends up happening is an uneasy balance, a strife, tension in the human spirit. It is this spirit that makes us yearn for a world in which it does not exist, again, a dialectic.

For a while now, there has been this dialectic going on within the gamers mind. On one side you have legitimacy as an entertainment medium. Surely, given the amount of money spent on said medium means that it is a bonafied industry of entertainment! On the other, is the side that struggles with the fact that the only way we could be a legitimate entertainment medium is to generate and show media in similar ways that other entertainment media has; legitimacy would be selling out. As with all dialectics, each side of this string seeks to head into the infinite void. Each side seeks full realization. Each side balances the whole while inbetween, the members of the video game “industry” struggle with it.

However, this dialectic is not too dissimilar to each other entertainment media’s rise to legitimacy. We can say with little uncertainty that the mode through which each medium’s rise came through the form of technological progress. The world we live in, the time we find ourselves in, is very unlike the world each of these media created. Georg Simmel, writing in the late 1800s or early 1900s stated of society that it was our material culture that has changed, not our culture itself. In fact, most times, the non-material culture declined as material culture progressed.

Simmel wrote these things just before a great tidal wave of development came into our lives. While our material culture has changed a tremendous amount since Simmel wrote On Culture, it is through this idea that we must park ourselves. For, while the infinite progress of our ways proceeds ever toward the horizon, there is something happening to our culture that has an impact on the very dialectic that video games is trying to cope with, nurture, loathe.

Video games were the result of a romanticized hacker culture during the original stages of the cold war. Early video games were hacks of display technology that, while perhaps not consciously, were meant to show just how much more advanced than the soviets we were. Afterall, wouldn’t a society that made toys out of their technology created to watch rockets and nuclear devices be a superior society? A more advanced society?

Like all good ideas worth making money off of, someone did. Atari, Colecovision, Intellivision, Vectrex, and many others exploded onto a scene that the world had not quite prepared for. This suddenly cheap and exciting, formerly outrageously expensive technology was purchased by every household that could scrape together the money for it. However, like good ideas worth making money off of, too many people tried to…and the idea, the blossoming industry, fizzled out. It seems as though society decided to write video games off and place them in the same realm as the nerdy scientist. American culture, it decided, was done with video games.

While this destruction of the fad was short lived, while american culture found itself duped by the entertainment system developed by Nintendo, American perception, american fear of the computer was growing. In America, fear, ignorance of the computer is still the most uttered phrase. “I don’t know nothing about this machine.” “I swear this thing hates me.” “Whatever, I’m not a computer nerd.”

These same people bought a playstation, bought an xbox, bought a wii, and while they can hook them up to their television and connect to the itnernet, it still isn’t a PC, so it’s ok.

Video games are stuck here. Connected to a PC, video games are the devil, connected to a telvision through a dedicated console and video games are ok. The dialectic here is no longer legitimacy through culturally prescribed means vs monetary ones, it is now trying to overcome 30 years worth of stigma based on a general hatred of technology.

American culture is tired of progress. It is tired of having to figure out new things when the old ones worked just fine. Here to, is a dialectic. The want of progress with the want of staying still for a while.

Video games can’t gain legitimacy through the old ways of tauting technological prowess and amazing graphical features, or total number of polygons on screen. While we struggle with this as people, before we turn on the game, it somehow goes away when a new video game comes out and the main character’s breasts jiggle on screen when you shake the controller.

If video games want legitimacy, it will have to be through another mode, another means. If you’ve made it through this, you are probably thinking I’m going to say facebook games.

Facebook games are a breakthrough for video games but, like the original video games, too many developers, too many products, and the consumer will simply walk away.

No, to achieve legitimacy, it is going to require a synthesis of methods and modes most of us couldn’t possibly imagine. To struggle for this synthesis goes against the very idea that video games were founded on. Each time something like facebook games happen, there is an enormous backlash from game makers and gamers alike. “They just aren’t games.” They’re stupid.”

We sit now in a new development project. Technology is quickly being replaced with user configuration. The human mind is the new development project. Is it time for video games to get an actual second chance at bonified legitimacy?

We’ll just have to see.

OEM - The Global Process Part 1

A significant portion of social and economic theory has been devoted to the ideas of Globalization. While some authors would argue that global society started way back before industrialization, generally, globalization refers to the period of time after World War II whereupon the capitalist aligned countries (not Russia) adopted the idea of modernization theory. That all societies develop in a predictable, unified way, like America and Europe. As history has gone on, thanks to the need for America to buffer Communist countries, countries like Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, and Hong Kong have become significant manufacturers of electronic goods. As this is a video game blog, I want to explore where video games are manufactured and if the general findings of globalization hold true.

This series of posts will not be happy.

In breaking down the ideas of Globalization, I decided to take an educational trip across the internet. I am interested in a few different things but for now, this post is a small glimpse into the world of the Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM). OEMs are what you would call factories. They have a generic factory setup in what Wallerstein would call the periphery countries. This factory is as such that they can run large orders for generic things made of a certain material. These factories can be retooled quickly to allow for the manufacturing of multiple products throughout the course of a day.

Most of these factories (electronics factories are generally located in China, Taiwan, Vietnam, South Korea, Singapore, and other parts of the Pacific) employ women because their employers argue, "...that women are suited to the jobs because of their dexterity and patience" (Development and Social Change). These employees also prefer that these women are unmarried, young, and educated. These factories also tend to prefer women simply because they can pay them less and the local society will not cause too much of a protest.

In this case, I was interested in where particular parts come from for the Microsoft Xbox 360. If I were to break this down further, I am specifically looking for:

1. Hardware casings (Things like the little case for the hard drive on the xbox or the controller).
2. Computer Hardware (chipsets, boards, etc).
3. Power Supplies
   

As an exercise in research and application, I am interested in constructing what globalization analysts in America would call a Commodity Chain. The best definition I can think of for commodity chain is a long list of linked companies whose manufacturing of small products or base materials result in a complicated product assembled for the cheapest price possible. This post is the beginning of a process to outline the commodity chain that results in the Microsoft Xbox 360.

This blog entry will be short but will expand to many others as time goes on.

To begin, I simply typed Xbox 360 Manufacturer into Google. I assume here that these types of global manufacturers have to have at least basic web presence.

Following a series of links, I landed at Shenzen YuYuan Electronics Factory in 4F, Building A, Shanghenglang, Baiyunshan New Village, Longhua Shenzhen Guangdong China 518109.


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This factory offers:

Shenzhen Yuyuan Electronics Factory is located at the exit of Longda highway, Shenzhen City. Established in 1999, we are a video game accessory manufacturer specializing in the manufacture, marketing and OEM/ODM projects. We offer a variety of accessories for Wii, XBOX360, XBOX, PS3, PS2, PSP2000, PSP, GameCube, NDSL, GBA, GBC, GBA SP, and more. The range covers controllers, light guns, dancing blankets, wireless accessories, remotes, memory cards, converting cases, cables, console cases, chargers, battery kits, and Wii work-out series.

Our factory takes up an area of 8000 square meters. And the staff amounts 400, including more than 50 managers and about 30 technicians. We can develop three new products per month and export over 200 million RMB worth of products every year. Through nearly one decade's development, we have been serving a great many customers worldwide, resulting in long-term partnerships based on mutual benefits. All these attribute to our rapid development and remarkable achievements.

Aiming at high efficiency and high quality, we carry out stringent production following the ISO 9001 quality control system and implement 5S management. With substantial experience in game accessory designing and producing, we are confident to build up a prestigious brand well-known domestically and worldwide. We have been serving many buyers from Europe, the US, Australia, the Middle East, Japan and South Korea. We are an excellent partner of many national name-brand enterprises as well. To join them in partnering with a successful supplier, contact us today.

In looking at their product selection, their current catalog is mostly filled with Nintendo products. Everything from Wiimotes to the Balance Board seems to be manufactured there. However, with some digging you can find just about all aspects of the xbox 360 aside from the actual motherboard, processor, and power supplly. They do show that they manufacture DVD Drives, HDD Casings, the faceplate, and shell.

It is quite a nice find. I look forward to seeing what else comes about as I dig deeper.

The Modern Mind

For the student, especially for the graduate student, realization and spontaneous clarity are a wanted, but seldom experience event. Then, when we do experience it, we are shocked to find that, most times, we are horribly wrong. What follows is an exploration of such an event. This event occurred yesterday during the middle of a discussion I was providing tech support for. I read the following passage from Persuasive Games:

Situations like this help explain why we often despise the role of computers in our lives. They are inflexible systems that cannot empathize, that attempt to treat everyone the same. This is partly true, but it is not a sufficient explanation of a computational procedural expression. When the human clerks and supervisors in the retail store agree to forgo their written policy, they are not really "breaking procedure." Instead, they are mustering new processes - for example, a process for promoting repeat business, or for preventing a commotion - and seemlessly blending them with the procedure for product returns.This distinction underscores an important point about processes in general and computational process in particular: often, we think of procedures as tests that maintain the edges of situations...there is no reason one could not model the more complex, human-centered product return interaction computationally. (emphasis mine) (Bogost 2007: 6-7).

This sentiment is important as, in most social theory in the world I inhabit, the underlying discussion that created this sentiment is usually ignored. This sentiment has been around since the early 1900s but only since the mid-90s has it really begun to make its way into more discussions. The earliest example I can find is a quote from Georg Simmel:

I will now contrast this discussion of the general concept of culture with a specific relationship within contemporary culture. If one compares our culture with that of a hundred years ago, then one may surely say – subject to many individual exceptions - that the things that determine and surround our lives such as tools, means of transport, the products of science, technology and art, are extremely refined. Yet individual culture, at least in the higher strata, has not progressed at all to the same extent; indeed, it has even frequently declined. This does not need to be shown in detail. (Simmel 1997 On Culture: 38).

This sentiment is that there is a line between human interaction and non-human interaction. This sentiment is perhaps best captured in the Bruno Latour book We Have Never Been Modern:

From Blogger Pictures

This chart is tricky. First, we have on the left (1) Non-humans, nature. (2) is Human Culture and (3) is a hybrid of the 2. Let's go through this in order.

(1) is Nature. Humans make things to conquer nature, to control it. In many ways, this act is a pure thing. It is what we, as moderns, want to do. We want to be in control of nature. (2) is Human Culture. This is a pure form as well as human culture is in its own little bubble outside of nature. The most interesting thing that has happened to human culture in thousands of years is what Mumford would call the Re-awakening of the Human Mega-Machine. A gigantic procedure to human existence. That is as simple as I can think to make these distinctions. Here is where (3) comes in. Through the process of industrialization, we have essentially seperated ourselves from nature by creating routines, procedures, to govern our interactions. A work of translation is anything that does something human culture needs that nature usually does. For example, an oven provides fire with which to cook our food in a highly routinized and predictible way.

The thing here, getting back to Bogost, is that all of these things are created by us to meld culture and nature, yet are done so in such a way that it exists outside of both.

This is where my critique of video games comes from.

Video games are a hybrid of the cultural play-character with that of technology. Play-form, as I have posted about previously, is essentially the essence of culture. The issue with video games, is that video games are a portion of the essence of culture yet are still separate from us in the same way that an oven, a refrigerator, an ATM, or a return procedure is.

Bogost's work is the first I really read that has actually tried to do something about it. The simple quote: "there is no reason one could not model the more complex, human-centered product return interaction computationally." is indicative of what I wish more video game programmers would at least try to approach. However, the procedure for creating video games (indie games aside), is as such that seeing outside the procedure might be more difficult than actually doing it.

So, this is where I am at. I'm excited that this logical leap ahead has occurred. Still and all, it will take some searching through the annals of reading and theory that are in my mind to really and fully understand where everything about modernity and modernization fits.