Huber

William Humberto Huber

Email: whh@zang.org

Abstract:

It is becoming commonplace to hear that games are not like cinema, and that reading a game must account for it as a uniquely ludic artifact. That criticism has been largely negative, focusing on the inadequacies of extant film theory, rather than demonstrating what a critical reading of a videogame should be approached, and how to access them as cultural artifacts. Understanding and recognizing game-specific rhetorics will make new, robust historicist readings of videogames possible.

My paper addresses the production of meaning in the game-media in differentiation from film, with an eye towards problems in game style, genre and thematics. I will analyze the 2001 console videogame Ka (Mister Mosquito) as a work in the shomin-geki genre of light comedy set in Japanese lower-middle-class domestic environments, as dominated by Yosijiro Ozu in the middle of the twentieth century. The persistence of genre-marking elements is seen in light of formal models for videogames, while the genre motives are elaborated in a historicist framework.

This paper is centered on specificity: exhaustively and rigorously addressing the game as a game, as something other than cinema, that exploits filmic genre rhetorics yet functions distinctly. A close reading of the game sees the meaning of the game as collaboratively by the player session, and then brings that model to more established production textual analysis. For the film component of the cross-comparison, I rely on the existing body of criticism of Ozuâs work, while remaining cognizant of recent anti-Orientalist critiques of Japanese film criticism.

Biography:

William Huber begins graduate studies in new media theory, visual culture and videogames at San Francisco State University in fall of 2003. He works as a technology consultant and lives in small flat in San Franciscoâs SOMA district with two PlayStations and a very patient fiancŽ.

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