Review of Steve Jones The Meaning of Video Games

Despite the rather ambitious title, this book is a subtle investigation of various factors surrounding a video game text that have not been taken up in either the narrative or ludology camps. Jones makes cogent arguments that the meaning of video games is developed within the following structures:
The boundaries between different media and reality (chpt 1, chpt 4)
Fan groups and their
a) Drive to collect (chpt 2)
b) Their distributed knowledge (chpt 3)
b) Creation of new content (chpt 3)
Marketing, particularly when it crosses into its own entertainment (chpt 3)
The platform (and the concept’s necessary perspective through social construction) (Chpt 5)
Expectations and feedback from the audience (chpt 6)
While these are good reminders, and a useful frame, Jones is less helpful in helping understand how the meaning of games might differ from other types of media. He develops a few readings of games where the form and content are shown to be in harmony – and his reading of Katamari is quite an improvement over Wark – but overall there are few tools to do closer readings. This is not so much a problem of Jones text as the state of the art in which it appears – but in a book about context this is important.
A somewhat more troubling problem is that the image of textual studies Jones projects seems to have at its core a self-determining liberal subject who knows what kind of critical edition or game they ‘want’. Its hard to briefly trace this rather subtle assumption, but I think its the product of a change in perspective where the object at the center of the critical inquiry takes second place to the peripheral events. This is fine if it is openly acknowledged, but if not the question must be asked: why this object? why this center? Otherwise we end up with a particular text replacing the transcendent author as the source and structuring center of all meaning in a given field.
Overall however a useful series of questions that opens up the construction of meaning in games to a wider set of social acts.

Autobiology

There is a lot of talk about the narrative side of games which also seems to take it for granted that this is also the fictional aspect of games (Juuls). Fair enough, but it would be interesting to bring the whole question of autobiography into games, to force the question of what kind of representations are real – and what kind of rules are fictional (the question of cheating, soft rules, etc). To that end, the game would be an autobiographical one, where my own life and the decisions I made would be represented. However there would also be room to explore other possibilities – while the people I spent most time with would be most fleshed out, there would be the opportunity of interacting with less developed characters more than I did, or differently with those key people.

Review of Gamer Theory

McKenzie Wark’s ‘Gamer Theory’ belongs to a class of cultural criticism stemming from the concept of the simulacra, through post-structuralism, the situationists and Baudrillard, a genre that is often too highly rhetorical. The book wants to be a Marxist critique of contemporary culture, but sees a need to think through something like the subject position of the game-player. This in itself is not perhaps a bad approach, the construction of a ‘gamer theory’ seems like one among a number of tasks for critical theory. The problem is the approach which smacks of a cartoon perspective, like so much of this kind of criticism. Wark’s gamer subject is conceived as having lost an understanding of the historical perspective on culture (while seeming to maintain a good grip on abstract philosophical concepts), and yet this position is built up through a series of precisely historical differentiation (from the novel, the film, previous modes of production, genres etc). In a similar, perhaps even archetypal way, we are given over to a world of surfaces of pure signs and yet Wark continues to insist on the reality of the digital that underlies game-space. At times this is a legitimate tool, at others Wark argues that something like the code (or its analogical counterparts) forces things into the mould of the digital. This double move, of denying and continuing to assert something beneath the surface is part of the vulgarization of the more stringent philosophy that justifies it.

While Wark cannot stay within the image of gamer thought it projects, there is also a cartoon vision of the singularity of that mind. Games to Wark exude into public space as if through osmosis until it is saturated while the lines of force of other media are characterized as obsolete, decrepit, non-existent. What then one might ask is the exact function of the numerous quotations Wark makes from contemporary theory? Surely they are not meant to explain arguments, and we are left with prime examples of the continued force of writing. At the same time as games become the model of reality, individual games are viewed as unnable to affect that world a rather callous assertion. Again Wark continually devalues the sign, as if its lack of origin made it meaningless. Not only meaningless but quality-less, this is surely making an already stretched concept do too much. Who really believed in the divine origin of the color blue? To take one example he states that pornography and critical theory are formally indistinguishable. While I won’t deny similarities – I have never been reading Derrida only to realize I was actually watching Ron Jeremy.

Beyond the striking problems, there are a number of conceptual difficulties that can be seen next to occasional moments of truely useful analysis. What really gets me though, and perhaps why this post might seem vitriolic is that the book seems so promising as a source of close readings. What is it about video games that stops people from treating them in all their unique density. Anyways there are a few worthwhile moments.

Problems: the assimilation of the virtual to game-space and the absence of psychoanalytic phantasy, the location of primary difference between the analog and the binary, the adoption of Caillois’ game typology and its values, the rather careless use of the link between topos as topic and topos as space, the confusion in the concept atopia, the lack of ground for the use of space and time (does the historical production of game-space and clock time destroy the other modes? do they continue in a Heideggarian mode? are they parasitic on another time and space as 1st world nations are parasitic upon 3rd world nations?) The under-developed concept of art (particularly with the use of Adorno throughout). The use of boredom, the view that it ever was the province of the young or the idle rich, attendant upon all the simplifications highlighted above.

Useful notions: the use of allegory, allegorithm, algorithm etc, and particularly the continuation of allegory as some kind of return of difference. The reading of America and history in Civ 3. To a degree, the link of genres with historical concepts of space. The hints at the end of atopia about critical theory and heidegger. The reading of Rez and its relationship between triggering, time, and death (though not its generalization to all of ‘game-space’). The somewhat slipshod analysis of Deus Ex that nonetheless provides the first convincing generalization.