----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
To all, esp. Johannes and Ana,
I concur that there are much more interesting questions to ask, than to try and
figure out how/if games can be absorbed into art-historical discourse, or
museum culture.
Two essays you may be interested in that deal with American ideologies and
games:
Sara Humphreys, "Rejuvenating “Eternal Inequality” on the Digital Frontiers of
Red Dead Redemption" in Western American Literature 47.2 (Summer 2012): 200–15.
Tanine Allison, "The World War II Video Game, Adaptation, and Postmodern
History" in Literature/Film Quarterly Vol. 38, Iss. 3 (2010): pp. 183–193.
-SM
..........................................................................
Soraya Murray, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Film and Digital Media Department
1156 High Street
University of California
Santa Cruz, CA 95064
On Mar 9, 2013, at 7:42 AM, Ana Valdés wrote:
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> as always Johannes I love your capacity of resume and provoke and put the
> right questions!
> When I wondered why the game industry is a Western male and middle class club
> I was asking the same questions I discussed when I started to review games in
> 1988, when we played at Commodore 64, Amiga and Atari.
> I remember specially a game called Commando Libya for the Commodore 64,
> created by Robert Pfitzner in 1986. It was an awful game where the sole goal
> was to chop so many heads as possible of Arabs and to kill Ghadaffi. It was a
> typical recruiting game, where the game maker wanted to have the players to
> feel Ghadaffi was their enemy. If I remember André Mattelart and Ariel
> Dorfmans "How to read the Donald Duck", the idea of the Disney corporation
> and of this kind of games is to create the illusion the enemies of American
> way of life are your enemies as well.
> Many of the mainstream computer games reproduce the victories of the Allies
> in the Second War World or Napoleons battles or Rome legions. But I have
> never seen a game from the Vietnamese Viet Cong view (they won the war but
> they don't make games :( or from the German Blitzkrieg.
> I assume the only explanation is the programmers are recruited from MIT
> wizards or from other similar institutions and they reproduce the Western
> memes.
> Again, the lack of games made in India or in Bangladesh or in South America
> gives the market very homogeneus games where the heroes are definitely white
> males.
> The Japanese console games don't offer either very much alternatives, their
> gods or myths are also taken from a male perspective and the samurai sword
> works as well as Excalibur.
> Ana
>
>
> On Fri, Mar 8, 2013 at 7:50 PM, Johannes Birringer
> <johannes.birrin...@brunel.ac.uk> wrote:
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>
> dear all
>
> very interesting discussion this month, thanks to all of you, and I
> particularly began to ponder Paolo's postings, and Claudia's, then Ana's
> replies [i did enjoy Renate's story about the "two cultures"], as I think in
> the beginning the conversation was perhaps rather more invested in discussing
> games in relation to art or art institutions and art history, but with all
> due respect (i mean to those latter things), I don't think we have to worry
> so much about art / museum institutions and whether they can manage to
> appropriate or incorporate or legitimize gaming & game culture, or as
> Isabelle proposes, "create more and more encounters between these two worlds"
> ....... After reading Renate and Ana, my only interest really was roused by
> the political gender critique or the class critique implied, and also Ana
> took us into looking at games from a non western, arabic perspective which i
> think is a very crucial intervention here -- would love to see more of this,
> and what other understandings there might be of "game" or "play" or action
> or rehearsal, or retro-engineering or hacking or machinima.... (and what
> would a 'subaltern' context mean and where and how do you use such reference
> systems to a subaltern if you, at the same time posit a hegemonic global
> 'protocol').
>
>
> I wanted to ask what Paolo meant, more comprehensively, by - "thinking in
> systems", or beyond them, and how we have to understand the provocative
> reference to Boal's theatre -- and Freire's pedagogy - of the oppressed
> (via Frasca)?
> and how this connects back to the thesis on total consumption (as game?).. I
> am not a gamer, and do not know the term "gamification" and the resonances it
> might have for all of you here.
>
> [Paolo schreibt]
>
> >>
> Everybody is lying to everybody else on multiple levels, intra- and
> extra-corporate.
> But as a whole the advertising system works because it succeeds at
> pervading every corner of the mindscape with the discourse of consumption.
>
> To me it is not too crucial to find out whether or not you can control people
> through game-like systems. What's more intriguing is that the fantasy is out
> there, strong and loud. Governments and corporations are investing lots of
> money in this idea. Feasible or not, this is the object of desire of
> contemporary capitalism and as such it's worth investigating.
>
> Is the fantasy of gamification a testament to the decline of money as the
> general, all-encompassing incentive to regulate human relations?
> Could it be a premonition of the next power paradigm? We went from a
> disciplinary society (the stick) to a society of control (mass
> surveillance). Is the society of the incentive (the customized carrot) next?
> Is gamification a tension toward the measurement of the unmeasurable
> (lifestyle, affects, activism, reputation, self esteem…), being measurement
> the precondition of commodification?
>
> >>
>
> You also then argue: " I find persuasive games an intriguing idea, in
> particular as a way of thinking about how the player/user is constructed" -
>
> and would you care to suggest how Boal's theatre rehearsals (with workers, I
> assume, on the street or in the factory or community centers etc, what now is
> the precariat?)
> might be associated with playing a game - do you mean in terms of a potential
> rehearsal (acting out via avatar) an alternate narrative or plot? an
> occopying stratagy?
> how can you, as Boal, following Brecht's Lehrstücke, would insist, change
> the plot of a game that is designed? how can you change its (variable?)
> predictable endings? are all games predictable or
> has the indie sector created open games? again, please forgive my near
> ignorance of what might be possible in a design that is not design (a "system
> of rules" and algorithms, steps to play, levels to go up to?, medicine to
> take, POV's to adhere to?) but something else (I think Tim spoke of the
> collaborative and the social)
> - social choreographies of undesigning mainstream games and ironically
> gothically steampunking them? Now i am not even sure whether there can be
> such a thing as a steampunk game... but most likely
> there are?
>
> How is the player constructed and how, in Boal's rehearsals, can she step out
> or not step in?
>
> regards
> Johannes Birringer
> dap-lab
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