Dave's pre-writing exercise #7: GameIndustry Economic Tropes

[dsheinem]

My one word response since I'm jumping on the train: blech.

Should I take that to mean you don't like those folks? Who are your "theory heroes"? You're a goddamn structuralist, aren't you?

[o.pwuaioc]

My one word response since I'm jumping on the train: blech.

Should I take that to mean you don't like those folks? Who are your "theory heroes"? You're a goddamn structuralist, aren't you?

I'm a messy structuralist. I think structures help explain things far better than anything coming out of the mouth of a post-structuralist/postmodernist, but I think if I were to pick heroes, it would be the Annales school: Febvre, Braudel, and Bloch and their successors. I understand the postmodern backlash against it, but at times I find the criticism of it reductionist to the point of absurdity. Following that, I enjoy the great reactionaries, but most of all Allan Bloom for aesthetics; Harold Bloom to some extent follows, but for other reasons. It's a shame aesthetics has fallen to the wayside, but I think it will return.

I generally can appreciate the work Greenblatt and other New Historicists are doing, but I often find the attempts misguided and mangled. There is need for a new New Historicism. As a one-off, I could probably add Searle and Chomsky to the mix, but again, both have their flaws. I was especially put off by Chomsky misreading of Alan Bloom.

Addendum: Foucault is wrong and Derrida is an idiot.

[dsheinem]

I'm a messy structuralist. I think structures help explain things far better than anything coming out of the mouth of a post-structuralist/postmodernist, but I think if I were to pick heroes, it would be the Annales school: Febvre, Braudel, and Bloch and their successors. I understand the postmodern backlash against it, but at times I find the criticism of it reductionist to the point of absurdity. Following that, I enjoy the great reactionaries, but most of all Allan Bloom for aesthetics; Harold Bloom to some extent follows, but for other reasons. It's a shame aesthetics has fallen to the wayside, but I think it will return.

I generally can appreciate the work Greenblatt and other New Historicists are doing, but I often find the attempts misguided and mangled. There is need for a new New Historicism. As a one-off, I could probably add Searle and Chomsky to the mix, but again, both have their flaws. I was especially put off by Chomsky misreading of Alan Bloom.

I want to so "blech" myself to most of this, but I am with you in regards to aesthetics...though I lean more towards the "ideology of the aesthetic" folks (e.g. Eagleton) in that regard. Chomsky is hit and miss with me, but you should read the Chomsky-Foucault debate to see why you are incorrect about saying...

Foucault is wrong and Derrida is an idiot.

Those are fighting words!

[Erik_Twice]

You know, my brain knows these people you talk about and some of the terms but it shut down when trying to piece all of them together. It makes me feel academically inadequate

[Ack]

You know, my brain knows these people you talk about and some of the terms but it shut down when trying to piece all of them together. It makes me feel academically inadequate

Don't feel bad. I've read the writings of these individuals, and my brain still wants to shut down. These kinds of arguments were never my cup of tea.

[o.pwuaioc]

I want to so "blech" myself to most of this, but I am with you in regards to aesthetics...though I lean more towards the "ideology of the aesthetic" folks (e.g. Eagleton) in that regard.

No doubt we are on opposite ends of a spectrum. We'll have to hash this out sometime. Perhaps a meetup in the summer if you arrive early and stay late? (And perhaps skipping Barcade entirely this time around.)

Chomsky is hit and miss with me, but you should read the Chomsky-Foucault debate to see why you are incorrect about saying...

The Chomsky-Derrida and Searle-Derrida debates are why I think Derrida is an idiot. Foucault is wrong historically speaking for largely the same reasons that Nietzsche was wrong and Wilamowitz was right about the Dionysian v. the Apollonian (which really had disappointed me about Nietzsche, since I was at that time really getting heavy into existentialism and particularly Nietzsche's brand of nihilism). Everywhere I look in e.g. The History of Sexuality (which, admittedly, was rather limited to his treatment of ancient sexuality), he proves himself a inept historian. He has good ideas about power, but his ideas map poorly onto the historical data. I think that's a big hurdle that many post-structuralists and postmodernists (as well as structuralists and others) need to figure out how to leap. The data cannot take the backseat to Theory (with a capital T!), and yet, I fear that's what many in the School of Resentment (to use H. Bloom's coinage) have effected.

[dsheinem]

had time to do a short 30 minute one today. A bit sloppy, but here you go!

Pre Writing #4 (half hour version) – Games and Activism

The idea of a medium being instrumental in stirring political reflection and activist thought is certainly not new. Indeed, the history of television journalism is punctuated with triumphs of reporting that forced people to make sense of events going on in remote parts of the world (or underneath the hustle and bustle of everyday middle-class life). There was, for the first time, evidence of events which viewers would not have direct access to being presented to them in their own living room. Murrow’s reporting on migrant farmers, the footage of burning of Vietnamese villages by American troops, the effort to report on the urgency of the AIDS crisis: these are events that not only sparked political action, but also announced the legitimacy of the medium in driving that interest.

TV’s “coming of age” as a medium for prompting political action is just a recent example of an old phenomenon. Newspapers, the telegraph, radio, film and earlier mediums had already accomplished this feat many years before. All of these media continue to function politically today: they have political content, they have activist purposes, they have public significance beyond their primary function as a medium for entertainment. The internet, too, has long had political significance in both mainstream party politics and activist movements. In fact, it was near impossible to read about the internet as it gained increasing adoption in the early 1990swithout encountering piles of treatises by futurists/utopians about the political significance of the medium in a democratic society. Wired magazine was founded , in part, on this kind of popular rhetoric.

Curiously, this expectation of political significance has not, by in large, been applied to video games as a medium. That’s not to say that games haven’t had this kind of cultural weight (famous examples would include Dave Theurer’s Missile Command and Chris Crawford’s Balance of Power ), but that there hasn’t been an expectation that the medium might approach the kind of political significance that accompanied many previous mediums. Indeed, the idea of “serious games” or of designing games as a way to advance a “political agenda” is a relatively recent one in the history of the medium – one that originates near the end of the 20th Century. While games have had political undertones, few have had political overtones, wherein the point of the game was to spark political action in the way that media before and after it had been used to do.

In recent years, there have been many flash games created that attempt to raise political consciousness or, in some cases, drive players towards sites where they can educate themselves or get involved in a cause. Prominent examples would include The McDonald’s Game, Darfur is Dying, or Climate Challenge. These games, however interesting they might be and whatever reach they might have, are ultimately not commercially successful enterprises. They also aren’t games that suggest the medium itself has attained political parity with other mediums. So while there might be Randian undtertones in a commercially successful title like Bioshock or questions about the nature of war permeating a relatively popular game like Spec Ops: The Line, the medium has not yet had its The Plow that Broke the Plains or even its Bowling for Columbine.

[dsheinem]

No comments on yesterday's? I thought it was more accessible for a general audience

Here's today's...

Pre-Writing #5

Harvard, 1983 – Part 1

If there is an academic conference that I could go back in recent history to attend, it might very well be the May 1983 conference held by the Harvard University College of Education entitled “Video Games and Human Development: Research Agenda For The ‘80s”. This three day conference brought together researchers from around the country who were considering at a very early time in the medium’s ascent towards cultural significance the modes through which video games might become important objects for academic research. The published proceedings of that conference address these areas: “Video Games & Social Behavior,” “Video Games & Cognitive Skills,” Video Games in Medical Rehabilitation & Learning,” “Video Games & Informal Settings,” “Video Games & Formal Education,” “Video Games & Atari, Inc.,” and “Video Games & Human Development.” From a certain perspective, it is humbling to recognize that Game Studies has been grappling with many of the same questions addressed in this book for at least the past thirty years. It puts current “hot topic” questions about the role of games in education (see institutional backlash to Valve’s “Steam for Schools”) or about whether major publishers value their bottom line more than artistic creativity (see contemporary criticism of Activision or Electronic Arts) into a harrowing historical context. There’s evidence in these proceedings that gaming has been dogged with these same questions for decades and that who are invested in understanding the social and cultural impact of the medium have struggled to achieve recognition as scholars. That is, in and against multiple periods of growth and change, some perceptions of the industry have gone largely unchanged.

There are also many interesting little moments in these proceedings that suggest things have changed in significant ways. For example, in a statement that would seem alien to most major game publishers today, Atari’s Vice President and Chief Scientist Alan Kay foregrounded his remarks about the future of games by suggesting that “Children are our main clientele” and then geared most his speech towards the future of games as a medium for children to learn on. In another now-bizarre interaction, a representative from Apple suggests during a Q&A session about the costs of funding computers for schools that “The term ‘computer literacy’ does not make a great deal of sense to me. You don’t have to go out and teach a kid how to use the TV. It is of interest, he or she should be able to use it and learn on his/her own”. These kinds of statements today come across as anachronistic, relics of an era where digital technology was only beginning to find its way into middle-class homes.

(From a modern perspective of selling products and enhancing the bottom line, there’s some reckless abandon on display from tech company representatives.
On the other hand, there’s also sincerity present here that should provoke greater skepticism about positions that are now taken for granted. )

Despite its many vestiges of a bygone era of games research, the conference also offers some extremely compelling questions that have been of increasing importance in contemporary game studies. Questions about gender representation both in the industry and amongst players are broached. Detailed discussions of design decisions, artificial intelligence, and some early thoughts on what might now be considered Platform Studies are addressed in ways that are still relevant and accessible today. There’s interesting research presented on games in non-commercial contexts beyond education. And, despite the framing of his company’s products as directed towards adolescent audiences, Alan Kay’s remarks are thoughtful missives on the potential of the medium to function as art, as a place where unique transcendent experiences might occur. He explains, for example, the possibilities of moving past “shoot-em-up games” and towards games that simulate, from an animal’s perspective, what it would be like to visit a coral reef. He suggests that “A computer is not only a gadget for manipulating numbers. It is a container for a new kind of kinetic art…if we think of the visual arts as the imitation of life, then the computer arts are the imitation of creation itself.” This idea, now institutionalized in something like The Smithsonian’s “The Art of Video Games” was, in 1983, a revolutionary way of thinking about games. But then, as is true now, there’s a need to dissociate “shoot-em-up” fare from games that are “actually” art.

(This argument persists, of course, in both formal and informal modes. Call of Duty is not art, but Unfinished Swan is. Super Mario Galaxy is not art, but Braid is. Uncharted is not art, but Journey is.)

For an example of persisting issues raised by the conference take, also, the introductory remarks by Harvard Librarian Inabeth Miller, who warms the crowd for the keynote by highlighting an award winning essay by a ninth-grader entitled “Video Games…Are they hip? Or is it just hype?” that touches on the impact of the arcade craze on her and her peers. That speech included the lines: “”Children can no longer understand machines that don’t gobble money. How sad it is to see Junior vainly trying to stick a quarter in the mixmaster. And what of their minds? ‘Junior clean up your room.’ ‘If I do it in under fifteen minutes do I get a bonus?’…Grisly, ladies and gentlemen, but highly feasible if the youth of America stays this course.” In 1983, the threat of Gamification. In 2013, the promise.

(I have much more to say about these proceedings…more to follow!)

[dsheinem]

Pre Writing #6 – False Starts

(The following is a list of potential intro paragraphs for the introductory chapter…again, these exercises are largely about getting ideas down on paper with a forced “public” element, so this is very much brainstorming around.)

Idea 1 - conceptual
This book is a place where you will find interesting conversations that bring together related areas of knowledge and expertise that, too often, do not engage one another. On one end of this conversation are the innovators and executives in the games industry that, unsurprisingly, are on a day to day basis largely concerned with inventing, designing, and testing new ideas for games or with running a business that remains profitable and sustainable. (Or, as is the case with an increasing amount of independent game makers, they are concerned with both.) On the other end of the conversation are those who recognize that the work of these innovators and executives has had tremendous influence on existing and new (as well as small and large) cultures. These are the people who study games and gaming communities, talk about the “cultural impact” of games or games’ status as art, or – as is the case with some of the participants you will find herein – are actively involved in molding that culture from a position outside the “industry” itself. The experts on each “side” of this conversation about games have a set of recurring questions and concerns that can productively be addressed by the experts on other “side,” and this book functions as a way to both capture those rare discussions as well as to provoke and facilitate their future occurrences.

Idea 2 – illustrative story
In 1983, object-oriented programming pioneer Alan Kay spoke to a gathering of researchers at an academic conference at Harvard University. What is notable about this speech was that Kay did not speak about what one might expect him to address in most contexts at Harvard (e.g. his own recent work in computer science, his thoughts on the challenges of programming in the early 1980s, etc.), but he instead spoke about his vision of the future for the video game industry. In that speech, Kay laid out a type of research agenda for advancing the medium ; he discussed gaming and treating disability, gaming and enhancing education, gaming and the development of artificial intelligence, and gaming and artistic expression. Kay, himself a well-known computer scientist who would go on to win a Turing award, came to the conference that day as a representative of Atari, Inc. He functioned as a type of representative figure for a potential marriage between academic research and the video game industry. Kay’s work at Atari as the company’s Chief Scientist was to bring his expertise about how new technologies could advance human understanding to bear on how video games might become a significant part of that advancement (and, of course, to evangelize that connection). That kind of direct engagement and interaction between the games industry and academic research is, today, not a common phenomenon. This book offers a series of conversations that suggest it should be.

Idea 3 – informal/personal
You hold in your hands [blech!] a book that represents the coming together of two interests that have long shaped both my professional and private life. On the one hand, I have been a gamer since I was a very young child. I belong to a generation that has always had video games in the home, that has seen an industry move from producing blocky 2D games inspired by arcade cabinets as a matter of marketing cutting-edge technology to children to producing blocky 2D games inspired by arcade cabinets as a matter of marketing nostalgia to adults. I have spent countless hours exploring dungeons and planets, have likely taken more virtual lives than all the real ones that were lost in the combined world wars, and have delved deep into numerous aspects of gaming culture. On the other hand, I have been professionally trained as a researcher in communication who professes the importance of a rhetorical, critical sensibility in understanding all forms of human expression. In the classroom and in academic literature I have applied this training to the analysis of a variety of artifacts: political speeches, advertising campaigns, activist movements, television shows, film, comic books, the internet, social media, and, yes, video games. This book brings together these interests in a way that attempts to put them productively into conversation with one another, to show how gaming can be productively interrogated by the application of critical methodologies and to show how academics might reconsider what they study in games..

(bleh! Time!)

[dsheinem]

Been a few days....very busy. Here's a new one, for anyone still reading:

#7 - Games Industry Economic Tropes

In gaming press and in so many forums and conventions where gamers congregate, there are oft-repeated tales* addressing the past, present, and future of the economics of the games industry economics: The games industry is larger than the movie industry in total sales. The games industry is largely recession proof. Nintendo saved the games industry from a crash in the 1980s. The popularity of the home console killed the coin-op arcade and the golden age of gaming. The average gamer is now in their mid-30s and has disposable income.

Related to this, there are recent recurring predictions* about the industry’s future: Digital distribution will make it possible for any indie developer to strike it rich. Consoles are “dying” and will be replaced by mobile devices. DRM will bring an end to many “hardcore gaming” scenes in the near future. MMORPGs will have to adopt free to play models to survive. Piracy will mean the end of gaming. Dedicated media is near-obsolete.

*(note: should this end up in the final project, these short stories will be populated with ample footnotes and references to said tales of economic success and failure)

When one examines these narratives – whether they address the past, present, or future – it turns out that there is a lot of important context that is unaddressed by these curt, recurring one sentence summaries of economic prospects. Indeed, it is fair to say that for as much “certainty” as there might be in any of these “facts” about the industry, there is an equal or greater amount of uncertainty, competing information, or skewed analyses that call these kinds of claims (and those like them) into question.

To put it simply, tracking and understanding economic history is a hard thing to do. Furthermore, leveraging that history towards actionable predictions about the future of something as complex as “The Video Game Industry” is almost always going to yield results that are frustrated by unforeseen considerations. By being situated at the intersection of two very volatile industries – entertainment and technology – the games industry is always in a state of fluctuation.

This section will address that fluctuation and attempt to provide an overview of the economic considerations that, historically and presently, have shaped the growth of the games industry (if one thing is not contestable, it is that in the long view of its economic history the games industry has grown substantially from decade to decade). What are the similarities and differences, for example, between the types of considerations that a business makes surrounding the launch of an open-platform piece of gaming hardware that is intended to serve as a home for independent gaming development and low cost digitally distributed software and those made by a business invested in the launch of a proprietary platform that uses physical media and emphasizes high end hardware as a major selling point? Additionally, what different roles does the concept of accountability play in decisions about game development if one is answering to Wall Street investors vs. answering to crowdsourced funders? How, if at all, does the virtual economy of a global game like World of Warcraft or Lineage 2 account for economic disparities amongst its users in different parts of the world? Is the fight against piracy one that is worth fighting from the perspective of the bottom line? These are some of the questions that take shape in the following discussions.

The answers to these questions (and many related ones) should, in theory, reverberate in the academic study of game industry economics specifically and the study of political economy more broadly. That is, the cumulative effect of the experiences shared by those in the games industry should function as a good argument against preferring quantitative methods of research as a predictor of profitability and growth in this area of the economy. The narratives here, unlike those that circulate so readily in parts of gaming culture, are filled with examples of predictions gone awry, decisions made in defiance of predictors that yielded success, and an awareness of volatility that should undermine much of the application of many traditional economic models to the games industry.

Moreover, the emergent argument suggests that productive qualitative and critical research might be undertaken in global areas of game industry development to better understand how and why cultural differences shape the successes and failures of certain kinds of games, certain business models for game companies, and of the varied adoption of different elements of gaming culture. (Here, for example, Dal Yong Jin’s “Korea’s Online Gaming Empire” serves as an instructive model study). These types of analyses will allow for a better understanding of how and why the games industry has developed as it has and provide greater context to those increasingly tropified (is this a word?) narratives mentioned above.