Onward and Upward

By admin on April 10, 2012

While I normally focus on bits of gaming culture I find interesting, I’m going to make a bit of an aside today. I have crossed a number of milestones (or hazing rituals, depending on your perspective) over the past few weeks, and I would like to share some of that here.

1. I have defended my dissertation, which means I’ll be graduating in just over a month.

Best Gamers in the World, Ottumwa, 1982

The "Best Gamers in the World" photographed in Ottumwa, Iowa for Life Magazine.

My dissertation is a cultural history of the pre-crash video game arcade. Like many great things in my life, my dissertation started at the movies. I took myself to go see The King of Kong: Fistful of Quarters one afternoon, and became completely fixated on the Life Magazine image of the best video gamers in the world. Tracking down the historical and cultural context of that image yielded a conference paper which yielded an idea for a dissertation topic. Now, three years later, I’ve wrapped up that dissertation.

I entered the University of Texas in Fall 2004, which means I’ve been floating around Austin for nearly 8 years. Austin has been good to me, and so has my department. The Department of American Studies at UT is the kind of place where a food studies scholar, an expert on circuses, and a dedicated teacher up to his elbows in a project on alcohol and drug policy agree to oversee a project on video gaming. It’s an oddball department in some ways, and the people drawn to it are themselves often oddballs of one kind of another. I have been incredibly fortunate to find myself in such compelling company. I’m smarter, by leaps and bounds, not only because of the structured course of study I’m now completing, but because of the informal education I’ve received from mentors, faculty, peers, and friends. Like they say, it takes a village.

So, while I am excited to complete my dissertation and move forward, parting is, as always, such sweet sorrow. And, I am parting, because:

2. I have accepted a position at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Illinois Institute of Technology

I am pleased to announce that come August, I will be joining the faculty at the Illinois Institute of Technology as Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities and Media Studies. IIT is a great school, and I am excited to have the opportunity to contribute to developing programs in the Digital Humanities.

I would be hard pressed to find a job that is a better fit for what I do. I still can’t get over how incredibly cool the IIT campus is. Seriously, the architecture is jaw dropping. And, I was led to believe they’d let me play with the 3D printers.

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Feminists in Games Workshop

By admin on March 15, 2012

I was pretty excited to see this call for participants for the Feminists in Games Workshop. I don’t think I’m going to be able to apply this year, but I will be excited to see what comes of it. It’s a broad call, open to industry types, gamers, writers, scholars, and anyone else with a stake in gaming.

Open Call:

We are inviting submissions for participation in an inaugural “Feminists in Games” workshop to be held in Toronto, Ontario at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in collaboration with York University, Simon Fraser University and OCAD University from May 4-6, 2012. The structure of the workshop is two-fold:.

1) For Participants

We invite young and up-and-coming scholars as well as established practitioners in the field (including researchers, educators and practicing or aspiring game designers) who are interested in presenting a short paper (maximum 3000 words) on questions related to, but not limited to the challenge of advancing gender equity in relation to the following areas:

- game design and development;
- game content;
- socio-cultural constructions of “gameplayers”;
- player communities and online play; and
- the games industry

Applicants will have the opportunity to bring their work into conversation with established feminist scholars and activists during a two-day invitational workshop.

There is a limited amount of money allotted to assist participants with their travel costs. If you wish to apply for this funding please include a short statement (no more than 100 words) with your abstract describing your financial need.

2) For Observers

We invite members from the general public, the games industry and academia to attend keynotes and workshop roundtable sessions, and to lend their voices, perspectives and experiences to conversations and emerging initiatives that support feminist purposes and processes in games education, research, design and development.

Those interested in participating may send abstracts of no more than 1000 words, outlining their research question(s) and approach, to Jennifer Jenson (jjenson at edu.yorku.ca) or Rachel Muehrer (rachel.muehrer at gmail.com) by April 1, 2012. Those wishing to attend as ‘observers’ are invited to reply by April 1, 2012 with a short statement about how attending might be of benefit to you (250 words).

 

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Going Cardboard: Documentary

By admin on March 1, 2012

I was fortunate enough to get to see Going Cardboard, a board game documentary by first-time director Lorien Green. The documentary features interviews with board gamers, including collectors and critics, as well as both well established and aspiring game designers.

Going Cardboard Trailer from Lorien Green on Vimeo.

As the documentary makes clear, while board gaming is a mainstream activity in much of Europe, it is something of a subculture in the United States. German newspapers publish reviews of games with some regularity, while in the U.S., this kind of information is best found via niche podcasts and websites.

I’m posting about this today because yesterday I spoke to two graduate classes — one in game design, one in technology and culture — and in both instances, the documentary came up. In the first instance, a student had mentioned he had a particular interest in board gaming culture, and in the second, a student had mentioned that his brother, who is an accomplished video gamer, was also a dedicated board gamer.

For anyone interested in gaming culture, it’s worthwhile viewing. The sections of the documentary that follow the trials of an aspiring board game designer to see his game published are especially interesting, and demonstrate some of the barriers designers run into. For those of you more interested in video gaming, the documentary is still recommended viewing. Historically, pen-and-paper and board games have had some significant impact on the development of video gaming.

Besides, it’s just fun viewing.

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THATCamp Games postmortem

By admin on February 14, 2012

THATCamp Games Cake

We quickly discerned that the cake was not a lie.

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend THATCamp Games. The “unconference” is one of a number of THATCamp (The Humanities and Technology Camp) events held throughout the year. This was the first games-specific THATCamp, and as I’m working on further developing my own “making” skills, the bootcamps and sessions proved quite relevant.

When I first read about THATCamp Games, I was pretty excited. If you’re reading this on my blog, you probably know that I study the history of video gaming, and you may have deduced that I’m very interested in the use of digital tools for teaching and research. For me, THATCamp Games looked like an excellent way to level up some of my existing skills and to get some guidance on broadening my skill set.

Bootcamp

The first day of THATCamp Games was dedicated to bootcamp sessions focused on specific skill sets. In particular, I benefited from the bootcamp on working with Gamemaker, which is a tool I’ve been meaning to get around to playing with. I also learned about a host of other gamemaking and modding tools. One bootcamp I attended covered modding Civilization IV to teach world history, and another had participants building board games by destroying Monopoly Jr. sets.

What was once Monopoly, Jr. is now a Tarot-inspired new-Ouija kind of game called Oracle.

The hands-on aspect of THATCamp Games was a great kickstart for me, as I always think about learning tools, as soon as I find the right tutorial set, and consider trying to figure out how to use a program as soon as I can find someone to show me the ropes. Certainly the workshops involved some rope-showing, but they also served as an important reminder that there’s a lot I can teach myself if I just roll up my sleeves and stop worrying about breaking things. I came back from THATCamp excited to play more with some of the tools I’d had the opportunity to work with, but also excited to spend some time with the tools I heard about but didn’t get an opportunity to fiddle with hands-on at THATCamp Games: Flixel, Unity, Inform 7, and Twine, among others.

For someone like me who is interested in teaching game studies, and who is concerned about what it means to be fluent or literate in gaming, the ability to lead students on game-design projects is an exciting thing to have in my teaching tool kit. If nothing else, I will definitely have board- and card-game design projects handy as assignments.

Sessions

THATCamp Games, like all THATCamps (or, at least all THATCamps to my knowledge) features sessions voted on the morning of the unconference. While I love the flexibility of this model, in that it meant that the sessions featured were the ones the attendees were the most interested in, it definitely took some getting used to. Because the sessions are intended to be interactive, most are essentially very, very large roundtables. The session I found the most provocative, which was a hybrid of several proposed sessions titled “Gender and Video Games/cultural Studies and Queering Video Games,” had around 20 smart, passionate people in attendance. It’s difficult to have a particularly in-depth conversation in a fixed time with so many participants. Many interesting points were raised, and the Twitter backchannel for the session was particularly rich.

Ultimately, the sessions at THATCamp Games felt more like jumping off points and networking opportunities, and considered in this way, the sessions were incredibly rich. The most similar format I’ve seen at a conference is the preformed roundtable session format used for the Flow Conference (which is apparently happening again in 2012). And, as in the case of the Flow Conference roundtables I’ve attended, the THATCamp session experience requires a little bit of letting go, as conversations frequently move in unexpected directions and may or may not fulfill whatever expectations I had when I walked into the room.

Summary

THATCamp Games definitely proved useful for me, and I’ll be looking forward to participating in further THATCamp events in the future. More immediately, I’m enjoying seeing what I can teach myself in Gamemaker and getting ready to dig into some of the other making tools I learned about. While the sessions were interesting and I thoroughly enjoyed getting to have discussions with so many smart, passionate people from such a variety of disciplines, the bootcamp sessions were the real high point for me.

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Alan Alda for Atari

By admin on January 18, 2012

Alan Alda with an Atari Computer

Alan Alda, looking particularly gleeful in his role as Atari spokesman.

I recently stumbled across a series of Atari advertisements featuring actor Alan Alda. I have a soft spot for Alan Alda, partially because of his feminist politics, and partially because of a deep love for the series MASH — which Alda agreed to star in only after gaining assurance that surgery scenes would feature in every episode. Alda was worried the show would become too much of a sitcom and move away from showing the horrors and absurdity of war.

The advertisements Alda did for Atari certainly draw on his MASH-related celebrity, but they also draw on his feminist politics. Alda appears in the ads as both a familiar face and an advocate for girls in computing.

In the ad embedded above, Alda introduces the audience to Stacy, a young girl who is teaching herself touch typing using an Atari computer, and a game called “Typo Attack.” A second advertisement, in which a teenaged girl uses an Atari word processing program, plays more directly with Alda’s known investment in gender equality. The girl types, “All men are created equal,” then says that it seems out of date before updating the phrase to “All men and women are created equal.”

I enjoy these ads for the ways in which they play with gender politics to sell home computers. But, they’re also an artifact of a rather specific moment in video game history. Prior to the crash of 1983-1985, Atari had controlled 80% of the U.S. video game market. Atari’s flailing had in many ways set off the crash, and the company’s efforts to regain a toehold in the market resulted in efforts at diversification into other consumer electronics sectors, including computers and telephones. Atari was not alone in these efforts, as several other companies had attempted to enter into the home computing market. These ads, most of which ran in 1984, provide an interesting glimpse at the ways Atari tried to rise from its ashes.

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