Video Game Studies
in SPACE
(1978). BagoGames CC BY / Smithsonian
(2020). Official Site
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Macbeth (2021)
(1831)
THAT Love is all there is,
Is all we know of Love;
It is enough, the freight should be
Proportioned to the groove.
- Emily Dickinson
NES / Apple II (1985)
SEE THE WORLD IN A WHOLE NEW WAY.
THIS CHRISTMAS, THE GIFT EVERYONE WANTS IS THE MAGIC EYE.
(1993)
Sick Kids - first lines of ch 1-3
“Before Mazer invented himself as Mazer, he was Samson Mazer, and before he was Samson Mazer, he was Samson Masur–a change of two letters that transformed him from a nice, ostensibly Jewish boy to a Professional Builder of Worlds–and for most of his youth, he was Sam, S.A.M. on the hall of fame of his grandfather’s Donkey Kong machine, but mainly Sam.”
“On the day Sadie first met Sam, she had been banished from her older sister Alice’s hospital room.”
“The Advanced Games seminar met once a week, Thursday afternoons from two to four.”
README
“The day after Christmas, Sam sent Sadie an email: Hello Stranger, I’ve played your game twice now, and I want to talk to you about it!” (47)
(EarthBound, 1995)
Themes and Readings - overview of the next 3 weeks
Week by week
(Katamari Damacy, 2004)
Video Game Storytelling - SPACE
(Various)
Video Game Studies - Art, Music, and Theory
(Ware Collection)
Art
“...around four thousand painstakingly accurate fire-blown glass and hand-painted specimens. A German father-and-son team had made them, around the turn of the nineteenth century, as a commission from the university. They were the answer to a problem: How do you preserve the impossible to preserve? Or in other words, how do you stop time and death?” (65)
“It is worth noting that greatness for Sam and Sadie meant different things. To oversimplify: For Sam, greatness meant popular. For Sadie, art.” (69)
Harvard Gazette (67)
Strawberry Thief, William Morris (230)
Cherry Blossoms at Night, Katsushika Oi (227)
Gates of Nezu (230)
The Art of Video Games - Smithsonian, 2012: Flower (2009)
Picasso, Guernica (315)
Hokusai, Cherry Blossoms at Yoshino (Yoshino), from the series Snow, Moon, and Flowers (Setsugekka) ca. 1833.
Music
“In November, Marx hired a composer–Zoe Cadogan, one of Marx’s many spectacular exes–to write a score inspired by the avant-garde composers they had listened to all summer [ie. Brian Eno, John Cage, Terry Riley, Miles Davis, and Philip Glass].” (103, 90)
See also: Clair de lune (174), Penguin Cafe Orchestra (5), Everybody’s Free (to wear sunscreen) (332) – in fact there’s a whole playlist Zevin put together!
Video Game Orchestra - Boston Live 2014: Chrono Trigger (1995)
Theory
“It is one thing to have made a great game, but there will inevitably come a time when someone needs to be able to articulate to other people why it’s a great game.” (91)
“Sam’s grandfather had two core beliefs: (1) all things were knowable by anyone, and (2) anything was fixable if you took the time to figure out what was broken.” (97)
“A game she often played with herself to pass the time was to try to figure out the relationships between patients and visitors. She liked to name the people, as she imagined what their lives and connections were.” (119)
Play and Games from Plato to Wittgenstein…
What comes to mind when you hear the word ‘play’?
How would you define ‘games’?
Is there a family resemblance between games, say, Goya’s The Puppet (1791) and Tomohiro Nishikado’s Space Invaders (1978)?
Video Game Studies as a Discipline
What do Shakespeare, Star Trek, and Tetris have in common?
‘Ludic’ and ‘Narrative’ Approaches
From Latin, ludus - game, ludology refers to studying games in terms of gameplay;
Narrative has to do with the story that the game has to tell (or that we read into it)
Donkey Kong (1981) cf. 158
The ‘Magic Circle’
“All play moves and has its being within a play-ground marked off beforehand either materially or ideally, deliberately or as a matter of course. Just as there is no formal difference between play and ritual, so the 'consecrated spot' cannot be formally distinguished from the play-ground. The arena, the card-table, the magic circle, the temple, the stage, the screen, the tennis court, the court of justice, etc, are all in form and function play-grounds, i.e. forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within which special rules obtain. All are temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart.” - Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens (1938)
Power and Preservation
Barnett Newman, Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue III (1968)
Parthenon - Ancient Athens
Ways into game studies
Podcast - Game Studies Study Buddies
Film - High Score (or King of Kong)
Reading - Video Game Academy
Game - The Hex
Class - this one!
Volute Krater, c. 500 BCE
Gameplay and the Player:
Technology and Identity
“Anna shrugged. ‘And this is the truth of any game–it can only exist at the moment that it is being played. It’s the same with being an actor. In the end, all we can ever know is the game that was played, in the only world that we know.’” (82)
“‘No,’” Sadie said, “‘it’s genius, actually. It’s the best part of the game, because it acknowledges that the world you’re playing is not the real world…But that’s what I want our game to be like. I want it to be like Xyzzy. Only instead of toggling between two places like in Adventure, the game should toggle between two worlds.” (143)
“He wanted Ichigo’s life, a lifetime of endless, immaculate tomorrows, free of mistakes and the evidence of having lived. Or if he couldn’t be Ichigo, at least he could be back at the apartment, with Sadie and Marx, making Ichigo.” (118)
“Once Ichigo had become a real boy, his identity and Sam’s identity became more and more inseparable….Ichigo became Sam’s creation, not Sadie’s, and as such, he became the game’s auteur.” (132)
“‘The child’s body moves the way a body can move before it has felt or even encountered the idea of pain.’ Oh, the ambitions of design documents!” (88)
“But in her initial design document, she had ambitiously written the same thing: ‘The weather in Myre Landing must feel like a character.’ (182)
Schell, The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses
“When they arrived at the other high school, they found that the building was almost identical to their high school, but with everything in reverse…They team had joked that maybe they would find alternate versions of themselves…” (216)
“The tech Sadie had created was worth more than the game she had created it for. When Marx came to her with the idea to use Oneiric for Counterpart High, Sadie agreed. She liked the game’s pitch, and she liked Simon and Ant. How could she not like them? They reminded her of Sam and herself.” (217)
“‘I saw you as an extension of myself,’ Dov said.” (218)
“The theater was warm and smelled of lacquered wood and incense, and it felt like a dream to her.” (227)
“Computers make everything too easy…great for experimentation, but they’re bad for deep thinking.” (229)
“Ah, but Sadie Green was a gamer! In a game, if a sign warns you not to open a certain door, you will definitely open that door.” (233)
“‘I feel like God,’ he joked.
‘Let there be light!’” (239)
“KOTAKU: It is said that the original Ichigo is one of the most graphically beautiful low-budget games ever made, but its critics also accuse it of appropriation. How do you respond to that?
MAZER: I do not respond to that. [...] The alternative to appropriation is a world in which artists only reference their own cultures.” (77-8)
Hearst Castle (256)
Story, Culture, and Society - week 4
“Once upon a time, in the great simulation beyond Mapleworld, the mayor of San Francisco instructed his City Hall to grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples.” (268)
“(Newsweek: ‘Should Games Be Political? Mayor Mazer Thinks So.’) Sam on TV talk shows, quoting Marshall McLuhan, ‘The games of a people reveal a great deal about them.’” (273)
Games are a sort of artificial paradise like Disneyland, or some Utopian vision by which we interpret and complete the meaning of our daily lives. - McLuhan, Understanding Media
“...despite evidence to the contrary, it is not an inevitability that we should be our worst selves behind the mask of an avatar. What I believe to my very core…is that virtual worlds can be better than the actual world. They can be more moral, more just, more progressive, more empathetic, and more accommodating of difference. And if they can be, shouldn’t they be?” (252)
Now ‘Faërian Drama‛—those plays which according to abundant records the elves have often presented to men—can produce Fantasy with a realism and immediacy beyond the compass of any human mechanism. As a result their usual effect (upon a man) is to go beyond Secondary Belief. If you are present at a Faërian drama you yourself are, or think that you are, bodily inside its Secondary World. The experience may be very similar to Dreaming and has (it would seem) sometimes (by men) been confounded with it. But in Faërian drama you are in a dream that some other mind is weaving… - JRR Tolkien, On Fairy-stories
To be stories at all they must be series of events: but it must be understood that this series--the plot, as we call it--is only really a net whereby to catch something else. The real theme may be, and perhaps usually is, something that has no sequence in it, something other than a process and much more like a state or quality. Giantship, otherness, the desolation of space, are examples that have crossed our path. The titles of some stories illustrate the point very well. The Well at the World's End--can a man write a story to that title? Can he find a series of events following one another in time which will really catch and fix and bring home to us all that we grasp at on merely hearing the six words? Can a man write a story on Atlantis--or is it better to leave the word to work on its own? And I must confess that the net very seldom does succeed in catching the bird. Morris in the Well at the World's End came near to success--quite near enough to make the book worth many readings. - CS Lewis, On Stories
“And how do you know where these meanings are?”
“I kind of see 'em. Or feel 'em rather, like climbing down a ladder at night, you put your foot down and there's another rung. Well, I put my mind down and there's another meaning, and I kind of sense what it is. Then I put 'em all together. There's a trick in it like focusing your eyes.”
“Do that then, and see what it says.”
Lyra did. The long needle began to swing at once, and stopped, moved on, stopped again in a precise series of sweeps and pauses. It was a sensation of such grace and power that Lyra, sharing it, felt like a young bird learning to fly.
…
In Mary's world they had a kind of picture that looked at first like random dots of color but that, when you looked at it in a certain way, seemed to advance into three dimensions: and there in front of the paper would be a tree, or a face, or something else surprisingly solid that simply wasn't there before. - Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials
“‘Amnesia is a gaming chestnut…but we know we can make it work.’
‘Actually, we were inspired by the original Ichigo… The challenge of having to rely on a child’s memory and perceptions to win a game. It’s brilliant.’” (286)
“‘Who’s the NPC now?’ you say to him. ‘I’m the one with the controller. I’m the one with the task.’” (294)
“Video games don’t make people violent, but maybe they falsely give you the idea that you can be a hero.” (300)
“‘Okay, so you spoke to her. She was definitely not a ghost. Did she ever reply?’
“Bong Cha narrowed her eyes at Sam, deciding if her grandson was trying to trick her into appearing foolish. ‘Yes, in my mind, she did. I knew your mother so well I could play her part. The same with my own mother and my grandmother…’” (311)
“She had once read in a book about consciousness [I Am a Strange Loop] that over the years, the human brain makes an AI version of your loved ones. The brain collects data, and within your brain, you host a virtual version of that person.” (381)
“‘Sometimes, when I’m working on CPH, that world feels more real to me than, like the world world, anyway. I love that world more, I think, because it is perfectible…There’s not a goddamn thing I can do about the actual world’s code.’” (331)
“‘We were obsessed with the idea of the perfect play…The idea that you could play a game without ever dying or restarting…. Anyway, for a long time I took this idea into the work I did as a designer, and it was absolutely paralyzing.’” (376)
“Onstage, in the middle of white Elizabethan England, improbably stands a handsome Asian man as Macbeth. Macbeth has just heard the news that his wife had died, and he is giving the most famous soliloquy from the play, the ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow’ speech.” (335)
“‘What is a game?’ Marx said. ‘It’s tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It’s the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever.’” (336)
“As a wedding gift to Ms. Marks, Dr. Daedalus created a topiary hedge maze in the garden by her house. When asked why she had decided to make such a gift, the doctor replied cryptically, ‘To make a game is to imagine the person playing it.’” (355)
“‘I imagine people playing. Sometimes, it’s one of our games, but sometimes it’s any game. The thing I find profoundly hopeful when I’m feeling despair is to imagine people playing, to believe that no matter how bad the world gets, there will always be players.’” (387)
Bruegel the Elder(?), Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
“‘How do you get from there to here? That’s what I don’t know how to do.’
‘It’s a long story.’ Sadie recognized the look in Destiny’s eyes…” (378)
“Sadie and Naomi read the Magic Eye book together at bedtime. ‘I can see it!’
‘What do you see?’
‘A bird. It’s right there. It’s all around me. It’s amazing! Can we do another one? I think this might be my favorite book, Mom.’” (379)