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Dovey, et al.
Jon Dovey, Principal Lecturer, School of Cultural Studies, University of the West of England, Bristol. Email: jonathan.dovey@uwe.ac.uk
Helen Kennedy, Lecturer, School of Cultural Studies, University of the West of England, Bristol. Email: helen.kennedy@uwe.ac.uk
Seth Giddings, Senior Lecturer, School of Cultural Studies, University of the West of England, Bristol. Email: seth.giddings@uwe.ac.uk
Rune Klevjer, PhD scholar, Department of Media Studies/InterMedia, University of Bergen. Email: rune.klevjer@intermedia.uib.no
POWER UP: COMPUTER GAMES AND IDEOLOGY
THE POWER UP PANEL
This Panel comes out of the Play Research Group in The School of Cultural Studies at the University of the West of England. Following the School's hosting of the UK's first academic games conference in 2001 we have continued to develop our work in this field. The group has a core of researchers working in the field of computer games alongside a number of others with an interest in the idea of play and culture more generally. So the study of computer games is pursued within a context of a more general set of Cultural Studies methods and understandings. In July of 2003 we are hosting a small symposium, 'Power Up', exploring the themes of computer games and ideology. This panel will summarise and disseminate some of this work to the wider game studies community. The panel will consist in 4 x15 min presentations.
PLAY AND IDEOLOGY
The panel will address the question of how computer games relate to the serious business of real life, and what this relationship has to do with mechanisms of political power in our societies. On the most general level, the theoretical challenge is to reach more informed, contextualised and detailed understandings of how various practices of play are situated within wider cultural and social formations. In computer game studies, one way of doing this is to look at how the space of potential practices is structured by specific and genre-based aesthetics of play, as they can be analysed in the games. Secondly, we want to focus on how players make meaning out of and make use of this raw material. Finally, we also need to reflect on how potential meanings of play are created through our discourses about play. In this game of discourse formation, game researchers should be key contributors, expanding the range and diversity of our 'rhetorics of play' rather than restricting it.
Our concern with 'ideology' also implies a more specific interest in how computer game practices and game discourses relate to structures of power and inequality, dominance and subordination, order and disorder, exclusion and access. Games encourage or discourage specific forms of engagement with the technology that underpins them, and they mimic quite different ways of coping with the world. In this way they enable a repertoire of subject positions to be taken up by the players. Somehow these temporary, playful identities relate to identities in the real world, but they do so in ambiguous ways, and they are constantly re-negotiated through discourse. When we move from culture to politics, these ambiguities of play appear as contradictions. In this symposium, we want to explore some of the richness of these contradictions, as a starting point for discussing the role of critical theory in game research.
ABSTRACTS
Talking Power
Jon Dovey
This presentation will offer an overview of ways of thinking about ideology and games. It will foreground some of the contradictions and possibilities raised by such a line of inquiry. Recent developments in game studies have in the main been determinedly anti-ideological, preferring in the main to concentrate on understanding the computer game through genre and rhetorics. Attempting to situate games within an ideological field poses two immediate difficulties. The first is how this might be achieved without feeding into the discourses of moral panic around gaming. The second is how such an analysis might be achieved without being seen as attempting to 'improve' or 'sanitise' our subversive pleasures. There is of course a more general and obdurate third difficulty; that is the problem of any kind of post-Marxist ideological critique of popular culture. Despite these problems, ideology has not disappeared! In fact it remains a part of many of the critiques we are starting to make of games. Our defense of gaming pleasure is based on an opposition to the discourses of media effects, which have an ideological dimension. Our discussions of play are informed by ideological understandings of the relationships between social structure and play worlds. Our discussions of gender and gaming have an ideological dimension. Debates about simulations have foregrounded their ideological limitations. Our work already takes place within ideologically constructed discursive formations. This presentation will highlight some of these formations in detail and attempt to put them into the context of wider contemporary debates about ideology and popular culture.
Feminism 'In' and 'At' Play: Female Quake Clans and the Politics of Subversion
Helen Kennedy
This is a position paper that asks what is at stake in offering a feminist analysis of inappropriate or illegitimate forms of play. It highlights the productive tensions at work in the development of a feminist critique of play and pleasure. In my own study of female Quake clans, I have previously argued for the transformative power of play and insubordinate pleasures. This can be persuasively argued from both a technofeminist perspective developed through the work of Haraway and a queer perspective developed through the work of Butler. However, this argument also depends upon a belief that there exists a deep-rooted set of connections between play, subjectivity and gender. It also depends upon the assumption that there exists a relationship between play and reality - that they affect and are affected by each other. This argument also goes further to suggest that the liminal is a crucial site for the production of transformative meanings and identities. Developing the study of the female Quake clans, I want to work through these problematic assumptions by attending to the alternative readings which are available and by interrogating how far these assumptions are at odds with the theories of play offered by Turner and Sutton-Smith. The potentially contradictory nature of any analysis of play and gender needs to be foregrounded and understood before we can move on and further develop a nuanced feminist critique of games.
Circuits
Seth Giddings
This presentation will be a screening of a video essay examining continuities in, and transformations of, children's culture and play through computer games.
Documenting two young boys' engagement with the simulated environments and gameplay of Lego Racers 2 both on and off screen, the video essay will identify and explore how the everyday playing of this computer game on the one hand capitalises on well-established strategies of accumulation through cross-media licensing and the positioning of children as consuming subjects, whilst on the other hand these strategies are exceeded through semiotic and performative play.
A number of circuits of signification and playful activity will be identified: between game rules and frameworks and emergent, exploratory play in the computer game; and between play with simulated action / space and play between children in actual space; between play with virtual toys and play with actual toys; between software and bodies.
The video essay will question conceptual oppositions between game and player, rule-based and emergent play, cyberspace and everyday space, old media and new media, subjects and objects.
Dancing with the Modern Grotesque
Aesthetics of play in the single-player First Person Shooter.
Rune Klevjer
In this paper I will try to make an outline of the single-player First Person Shooter as a distinctive aesthetics of play, and discuss how this aesthetics relates to wider practices of play, work and war. Selecting Doom and Half-Life as the two most important defining classics of the genre, I argue that the FPS requires the player to be at once very primitive and very civilized, indulging simultaneously in the pleasures of violent excess and civilized work. Drawing on theoretical models from Brian Sutton-Smith, Roger Caillois and Mikhail Bakhtin, I discuss whether this ambiguity can be said to open up for the modern individual a space of transgressive and subversive practice.
Very little theoretical work has been done on the aesthetics of the First Person Shooter - in particular on the single-player variant, which, I would argue, must be seen as a distinctive play-genre of its own, one that is quite different from the multiplayer variant. In order to be able to discuss the typical play-patterns of this yet unexplored genre in relation to wider cultural and ideological practices, three basic questions must be addressed.
1. In what sense does the single-player FPS constitute a 'genre', and which are the distinctive features of the genre at this moment in time, well 10 years into its development?
2. What kind of violence and warfare is mimicked in the playing of a typical FPS?
3. In what way is the technological form of the computer-toy articulated through the FPS?
In the last part of the paper, I claim that the FPS, through its spectacular sensations and restricted form, offers the player a ritual experience, and as such opens up a space for regression as well as transgression. Drawing on the theories of Victor Turner and Donald W. Winnicott, I argue that the FPS-aesthetic delineates a distinctive and liminal space of techno-romantic power play, where the individual is given the opportunity to engage with the grotesque and destructive dimensions of modernity, in a ritualistic dance of spectacle, power and powerlessness.
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