Noisy Noisy

So, I don’t know. I posted some stuff to youtube, but the audio didn’t work for whatever reason, which completely defeated the puporse….. but yeah. Instead, I am having posted a file to megaupload because I’m ghetto like that. The link is here: though I’m not sure how permanent megaupload is… so, get it while its hot, or whatever.

I don’t think it’s particularly good, though it has good sound quality… I’m just trying out the different things I can do and figuring things out. Whatever. No energy today.

What I think about Q3A

I wrote this too. But really, it is only a summary of the article I mention “Zigzagging Through a Strange Universe,” which is much more accurate and in-depth, plus a little bit of my commentary. But this is more what I want to be writing…. I wish I just had more time to talk… maybe I’ll read really fast.

 

 

The Player Is Co-Creator of Procedure: A Concise History of the Strafe-Jump

 

Enter the world of Quake, an early FPS game for the PC, the birthplace of the strafe-jump. But what is a strafe-jump, you ask? In gamer terms, the strafe-jump is one of those things that separates the pros from the noobs. You have before you a  series of platforms; the space between each greater than the last. How do you get across? Common sense dictates that the fastest route between two points is a straight line, so you run straight ahead and jump. Maybe you make the first jump, but not the second. If the second jump looks hard, look at the last one. Clearly, nothing you know about jumping will get you over this gap. Yet the solution to this problem is not a rocket pack, a grappling hook, a speed boost, or anything else provided by the game; in fact, it never occurred to the designers of Quake that players would ever be able to jump this far. The solution, of course, is the strafe-jump. The strafe-jump is a technique, discovered by gamers, that exploits the physics of the game to increase one’s momentum while jumping.

Seemingly the only written history of the strafe-jump is by one of the gamers who helped develop the technique: Anthony Bailey. In a 1997 editorial, “Zigzagging Through A Strange Universe” posted to Planet Quake, though now missing from that website, Bailey describes how the strafe-jump developed. Before Quake, players of DooM discovered that running at an angle by strafing to one side while running forward combined the speed of both movements, making it possible to traverse the diagonal of a square at the same speed one could travel along any of its sides. When developing Quake, id sought to remove this exploit by adding the command “sv_maxspeed” to the physics engine, which attempted to cap the running speed of players. However, this was only a brief setback. “sv_maxspeed” had two shortcomings: first, it only applies to running speed, movement through the air is unaffected; second, it is bound by the force of the friction mechanic and thus does not restrict speed instantaneously. Working within these limitations, gamers developed what is today called strafe-jumping.

For many people, including some members of id, strafe-jumping was considered a form of cheating. During the development of Quake II, id made attempts to remove strafe-jumping, but it was left in at the game’s release. To make a long story short, when QuakeLive was released in 2007, it included this (point) training map along with video tutorials teaching players how to strafe-jump. Similar patterns, though perhaps none are as strong as this one, have played out in other games as well, such as “wave-dashing” in Super Smash Brothers: Melee, and “skiing” in the Tribe franchise, to name a few. The important thing to note is that the players are co-creators of the game’s procedure. For procedure is only ever virtual: it has no concrete existence until actualized. As long as the system is open and relatively complex, players are able to decide how they wish to engage with that system. Even in games that have not been affected by developments like strafe-jumping, the players with similar interests are often able to control their position in the game through a number of ways (e.g. competitive servers, role-playing servers, “no sniper rifles” rules, etc. etc. etc.) Clearly, if we wish to gain a genuine understanding of video games, as if you’re not sick of hearing it, we need to abandon the artist/spectator framework and pay serious attention to how the game is actually played, instead of continuing to reserve interpretation for anything but already ambiguous terms like the “artist’s intent.” Further, this requires an in-depth knowledge of the game, and an attention to technical detail as yet unprecedented by critics of video games.

how am I going to cut this down???

So- I organized my paper into two parts. The first part is done, but it is already as long as my whole paper is supposed to be… need to find a way to cut this down. Here’s part number one: tell me what can go.

 

Introduction

 

In an essay considering the possibility of a Chess-playing machine, the mathematician Claude Shannon presents an interesting dilemma: “chess is generally considered to require ‘thinking’ for skilful play; a solution of this problem will force us either to admit the possibility of a mechanized thinking or to further restrict our concept of ‘thinking.’” In a similar vein, McKenzie Wark theorizes, in his work GAM3R 7H3ORY, how the subversive element of “play” has been removed from contemporary video games, which instead “[respond] to the boredom of the player with endless games of repetition.” Such games would require nothing more than “mechanized thinking” as proposed by Shannon. Further, Steven Poole, in his essay “Working for the Man,” has argued that video games are often little more than exercises in following the rules, and the most successful player is the one who follows the rules the best. If this is true, then we should find that contemporary video games discourage creative thought, training their players to “think” like machines. Further, the more difficult or competitive the game, the more its players are assimilated to mechanized thinking.

Video games, then, would be a primary site of what, in “The Question Concerning Technology,” Martin Heidegger calls “Enframing:” that is, the force of technology to recode the world in its image, and thus condition us to think only within its terms, while hiding the true essence of the world. The gamer, by being “enframed,” gives up his humanity in exchange for an image of the “human” as that which interacts with the computer: the “U” in UI. Or, as Adorno explains it: “The movements machines demand of their users already have the violent, hard-hitting, unresting jerkiness of Fascist maltreatment. Not least to blame for the withering of experience is the fact that things… assume a form that limits contact with them to mere operation, and tolerates no surplus” (40).  As those extraneous motions fall into disuse and are lost, something new is formed: closer to machine than human. As the possibility of creative expression deteriorates, experience itself is slowly drained of meaning.

Yet Heidegger, quoting Hölderlin, insists that “But where danger is, grows / the saving power also” (28). In short, this “saving power” is that which may reveal the world in its true essence. Heidegger identifies the arts, which are centered around the poetic revealing of poiēsis, as holding this saving power. Following the root of poiēsis, however, Heidegger discovers that the arts and technology were once both called by one name: technē (34). The division which has grown between the arts and sciences, specifically that which forgets the human basis of technology, which couples art to the human, but allows technology to run free, this division, Heidegger argues, has obscured the essence of both art and science, thus hiding their shared root: technē. If we do not reclaim technology as our own, “[it] may entrench itself everywhere to such an extent that someday, throughout everything technological, the essence of technology may come to presence in the coming-to-pass of truth” (35). That is to say, if we continue to give technology free reign, we may at last learn the essence of technology only by noting what has been lost at the moment technology disjoins itself from the human entirely. Only by discovering human creativity, the “saving power,” within the technological, can this fate be avoided.

Is it possible that in video games there waits such a “saving power”? If so, why hasn’t it been found? By closely examining several games and critical writing on games, I hope to display the very human creativity of gamers, and explain why this has been overlooked by most critics of video games.

Octet

The most appropriate place to begin solving this problem is with an explanation of my paper’s title: “Beginners Play Atari.” To most Americans, the word Atari refers to a company, producers of the Atari video game consoles. Anyone who has followed the development of video games can attest that early games are, in many cases, much more difficult than games are released today. So when I say “beginners play Atari,” I mean to refer not to the difficulty of the games, but to a certain concept of gaming, in which a single player pits his or her skills against a computer opponent. In these games every element of the playing field is programmed except for the actions of the player’s avatar (which is often already very limited). This is “for beginners” insofar as it provides an easy framework for interpretation. Most critical work on video games seems to be stuck under this model, which parallels the traditional artist/spectator dichotomy. Under this model, the player/spectator, although granted token agency, has no real freedom outside of performing the actions prescribed by the designer/artist. As difficulty increases, freedom is further limited.

Using such games as case studies, it is easy to see why critics have continued to use the general outline of the artist/spectator model. The player has as little control over her avatar as the museum patron has over a painting: choosing to not to follow the game’s objectives offers as much escape as closing one’s eyes. In order to ascribe creativity agency to the gamer, it is necessary that we abandon this model.

Attempts have been made in this direction, but I feel they have been largely unsuccessful. Ian Bogost, in Persuasive Games, is perhaps the first critic to account for the actions of the player as significant to the interpretation of a game, in what he calls “Procedurality.” A game does more than present viewers with a series of sounds and images; it establishes procedures for the players to follow. Bogost claims that these procedures should be the primary object of study when interpreting a video game. But that shift in focus has as yet done nothing to break the artist/spectator dichotomy. The game’s design retains its position as determining force, and the player still obediently follows procedure. Bogost’ response seems to be advocating for a more responsible approach to game design, one that would perhaps encourage creative thinking, but this still places creative agency entirely within the hands of the designer, and is thus self-defeating.

There is another approach available, which takes into account the fact that many of today’s games are multiplayer. The possibility for social and political action could open avenues for creative expression not available in single-player games. Leading this approach is Henry Jenkins, who has shown that players of games like The Sims are politically active within the game’s world. But The Sims is designed to facilitate community building and politics, so it is not clear how much this could be considered anything more than following procedure. Further, it is questionable how effective Jenkins’ approach would be when applied to other, less obviously open games. Moreover, Jenkins makes little or no mention of the UI or controls for The Sims. The political events Jenkins examines are, at worst, only  adjacent to the game itself. At best, insofar as they are not innovations in the operation of the game, they affect the content of experience, but not the form. The technology of The Sims might, in Heidegger’s terms, “bring to presence” the “essence” of sociality, and how new media have provided new and interesting platforms for human interaction, but Jenkins has not turned toward the essence of technology itself. The division between the human and the technological remains intact.

Before admitting the gamer is nothing more than a slave to the system, even more so than the television viewer because he actively works toward his own subjugation,

there are a few other options. We could examine how the gamer can be creative through a “pro-sumer” model: using modding software to create her own content, but again this does not look for creativity within the gameplay itself. Another avenue to investigate, which I don’t have time for in this paper, is the casual gaming movement, whose focus is on the quick apprehension of a system of rules, and whose wide market frees the player from commitment to any specific rule set. For this paper, however, my focus is on what are called “hardcore” games, generally produced for mass audiences. It is my belief that, contrary to the general opinion, the highest levels of creativity in gaming are to be found in competitive games, and that, contrary to what is found under the designer/gamer dichotomy, it is precisely hardcore games’ difficulty and competitive nature that makes possible, encourages, and even necessitates creativity.

To follow this line of thinking we must return to the phrase “beginners play Atari,” which is a translation of a “proverb” from the ancient Japanese board game, Go. The general idea is that the most obvious route to victory, if pursued, will be easily defended against, leaving the aggressor worse off than when she started. More often than not, putting an opponent’s piece into Atari, in an attempt to capture it, is a wasted move. The experienced player grants her opponent the small victory and secures her position elsewhere on the board. The nuances need not be elaborated further, for the problem is the same everywhere. The beginner has only a coarse understanding of the game and hastily makes decisions, neglecting the broader implications of her actions. As scholars, we must heed this advice. Without an adequate understanding of our subjects, we can do nothing more than fight over minor victories that have little bearing on the overall game.

Video game studies, if it exists at all, is very much in danger of making itself irrelevant by ignoring the subtleties of its subject. McKenzie Wark, in his formulation of a game theorist, claims that “For a gamer to be a theorist might not require the ability to play any particular game especially well. The prizes have nothing to do with thinking the game.” While I agree that it is possible to rely on the testimony of skilled players if you have little experience yourself, this still requires the view of an expert. If it is not already, it should be clear by the end of this presentation that the veteran and novice gamer have fundamentally different understandings of the game. The theorist who makes claims as a novice gamer does so with the same authority with which a reader may appraise a novel written in a language he does not speak.

This same false sense of authority allowed Ian Bogost to publish the following description of the game Counter-Strike: “Strategy in Counter-Strike is grounded in free-for-all: players often use “bunny hopping,” or continuous jumping, to avoid fire; they respawn immediately when killed; they can fire effectively while running or jumping. Players enter the game and start scuffling immediately, without the need for preparation of any sort” (75). While several games might fit the description Bogost has given, Counter-Strike is not one of them. Spending any significant amount of time playing this game would directly contradict nearly every one of these claims. I won’t take the time here to adequately debunk these statements; my purpose is only to point out how basing one’s claims on a novice skill level can lead to a highly flawed interpretation. On the subject of Proust, Adorno remarks that “it is Proust’s courtesy to spare the reader the embarrassment of believing himself cleverer than the author” (49). For true critical work can only be done from a position of respect, and although Bogost grants this respect to the makers of so-called “serious games,” he generally denies it of games produced by the entertainment sector: especially “hardcore” competitive games, like Counter-Strike. In neglecting to take “seriously” non-“serious games,” Bogost fails to discover the creative creative potential of video games and gamers.

 

 

 

 

after this, is the part I’m actually excited about writing, where I give detailed descriptions of some games, etc. etc. But yeah… shit.

A brief aside (HL2)

I’ve been thinking about what the G-Man says to Gordon at the end of HL2: “rather than offer you the illusion of free choice, I will take the liberty of choosing for you…”

Valve plays a dangerous game. Their attempt is to create the illusion of an open world while at the same time offering only one path. At times this really works. The first few scenes I remember running scared, ducking into whatever doorway I could, getting ambushed and doubling back, finding a different path open, leaping from windows, etc. etc. But as soon as their illusion falters, and you take a “wrong” turn, you’re at a dead-end. You quickly realize, when it comes down to it, that despite all the 3D and dynamic environment bullshit, you might as well be running in a straight line. The magic of the game is lost at this moment, and everything to come afterward is tainted by that feeling. That conveniently placed dumpster; that “hidden” ammo box.

The moment you see that everything in the world is put there for a specific purpose is precisely the moment those objects cease to mean anything.

Introduction to shit-talk

So I’ve been very lazy. I think that’s been good for me. Anyway, I’ll be going to the SLSA conference in like, 2 weeks, and I am only now beginning the paper for it. Hopefully posting on here will keep me on task, and fill up the general void of this here web log.

This is my introduction. The shit-talk isn’t palpable yet, but it’s coming.

Introduction

In an essay considering the possibility of a Chess-playing machine, the mathematician Claude Shannon presents us with an interesting dilemma: “chess is generally considered to require ‘thinking’ for skilful play; a solution of this problem will force us either to admit the possibility of a mechanized thinking or to further restrict our concept of ‘thinking.’” In a similar vein, McKenzie Wark theorizes, in his work GAM3R 7H3ORY, how the subversive element of “play” has been removed from contemporary video games, which instead “[respond] to the boredom of the player with endless games of repetition.” Such games would require nothing more than “mechanized thinking” as proposed by Shannon. Further, Steven Poole, in “Working for the Man: Against the Employment Paradigm in Videogames,” has argued that video games, and games in general, are often little more than exercises in following the rules, and the most successful player is the one who follows the rules the best. If this is true, then we should find that the contemporary video game discourages any creative thought, training its players to think like machines.

Video games, then, would be the primary site of what, in “The Question Concerning Technology,” Martin Heidegger called “Enframing:” the force of technology to remake the world in its image, and thus condition us to think only within its terms, while hiding the true essence of the world. The gamer, by being “enframed,” gives up his humanity in exchange for an image of the “human” as that which interacts with the computer: the “U” in UI. Yet the computer is concerned with only a narrow subset of human behavior; the button is either pressed or not—there is no room for subtlety of expression. As those extraneous motions fall into disuse and are lost, something new is formed: closer to machine than human. Yet Heidegger presents the reader with lines from Hölderlin “But where danger is, grows / the saving power also” (28). In short, for Heidegger this “saving power” is art: human creativity. Is it possible that in video games, quite possibly the most techno-philic segment of society, there is such a “saving power”? If so, why hasn’t it been found? By closely examining several games, I hope to both show that creativity plays an important role for gamers, and explain why the current critical work on video games has failed to notice that.

look, there’s a new post.

Vampires have turned gay…

The recent rash of romantic-comedy vampire movies/shows/books whatever is nothing other than the desperate straining of middle-class bourgeois ideology as it tries to assert its hegemony- to naturalize and universalize itself. These petty, stupid, trivial emotions are natural and everyone has them. No matter what. So go shopping, be happy.

GAM3R 7H30RY

so, I stumbled across this thing while I was doing research on strafe jumping…. would be of interest to anyone who finds what I’m writing interesting… http://www.futureofthebook.org/gamertheory/

site renovations…

thinking of making this something worth seeing, I’ve been trying to remodel things and am feeling very heavily the constraints of working with themes and “customizations” which I have complained about before but hadn’t thought would actually end up affecting me…

anyway, I’m content with leaving this as kinda shitty looking. The biggest change has been that I’ve actually made categories and intend to stick to them, added link to them on side for happy fun time.

Instead of actually doing something, I’ll do what I always do and make a list of things I plan on doing. In no particular order.

1:  Comparison/Review of Tales of Phantasia vs. Star Ocean. There are some of these around but none of them seem adequate to me… right now I’m leaning toward Tales, although I haven’t actually beat Star Ocean. I think I’ll have interesting things to say… I’ve been working toward expertise in the 16-bit rpg field, which for some reason is totally enchanting to me, even though I never bother to finish a lot of the games… uh. whatever. But those games were developed by mostly the same people right at the height of the SNES’s reign, pushing the system to its physical limits in a lot of ways… Star Ocean especially, which I think is precisely why it didn’t work. I might not actually need to write a detailed review, but anyway, moving on.

2. More seriously, I’ve been playing Team Fortress 2 and have things to say about that. As much as I’d like to be a video game reviewer, I’ve always been too poor and too busy to really keep up with new games; TF2 is about as close as I’m getting to “new.” Anyway, TF2 will never be a great game. That much is apparent to anyone playing it, I should think. Once the novelty wears off, the community will disappear (unlike games like Q3, Tribes, UO, etc. that keep a vast playership long after the original company withdraws support). Still I think the game is going in an interesting direction– an attempt at merging affect and gameplay. An issue really at the core of gaming. This will be a big article.

3. I’ve applied to a conference. I sent them a proposal on the place of creativity in gaming, and the dangers of us all turning into robots. If I get accepted, I’ll have to write the paper. If not, I’ll probably write a somewhat crappier though perhaps more wide-ranging and entertaining version of it on here. I’ll talk about FF:T, Go, Q3, WC3, Savage, all sorts of shit.

4. I want to write about DoTA and games like DoTA that use serial updates. This is interesting (1) because it is only a recent possibility, and (2) because it demands the player’s constant attention (if you don’t know what a new hero does, it’s going to kill you)

5. perhaps a short article based on some email conversations I’ve been having about writing, which occasionally bleeds into my thoughts on gaming. Basically, I expect pretty much the same thing from poetry as I do from games. I have this idea about the importance of the amateur… a figure antithetical to the “pro,” but more elastic, more human. Perhaps in the end a better gamer. Then perhaps it’ll be a long article about the nature of perfection.

6. At some point I’m going to read some Henry Jenkins, then I’ll have something to say about that I’m sure. I really hope I like him. Everything I hear about him seems good, but I’ve been so disappointed by people in this field.

7. I have a “lost post” from my digital media class. I never finished it for whatever reason. It’s going to be about map-making and kind of a marxist thingy about the power of the community. This can maybe expand into my overall argument about the political power of gamers.

ah, that’s enough for now. I don’t want to commit to too much. More coming, though. And someday this will be something, really. I’m going to use more pictures and videos and crap– make this thing actually readable.

I’ve got a secret (a digression)

Contrary to its implicit thesis, PostSecret confirms that the emotional life of the bourgeoisie exists only in representation. The apparent need for a forum where secrets may be shared anonymously is proof enough that the secret has ceased to exist as such. Once the secret may have been intensely personal; now an experience becomes valid as a “secret” only once it has passed a certain number of social criteria. Or rather, once it has failed to do so. For the secret always reveals what we knew already: that the bourgeois family unit is a product of ideology which is never realized in material practice. The power of this ideology asserts itself most forcefully in the pain felt by those who have failed to live up to this standard, even though their pain is only validated once it is shared and accepted as common to the community. This pattern repeats itself in the style of the postcards as well. Seeing that she has produced an object similar to those featured on the website, the bourgeois child, now an adult, feels the emotional impact of her family’s dysfunctionality only through the connection she has established via the postcard that says “yes, your emotion is likewise profound, important, and worthy of representation in this style.”

This is the same phenomenon that causes brides to cry at the trite speeches given by the officiators (religious or otherwise) of weddings. The words are always the same; we all know this and so of course understand there is nothing personal in them. Emotion is felt by the bourgeoisie, again, only in the shared representation in standard form. It says “yes, you too are getting married, and so you are warranted to feel emotion equivalent to the value we have placed on this institution.” And so she cries. But I’ve digressed from my digression…

We call this tradition. As Eliot claims, “we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of [a poet's] work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.” Eliot urged poets not simply to copy their ancestors, but through variation (improvement?) on the tradition, to create an organic continum of change. Tradition in this sense is replaced by the uniquely western, enlightenment principle of progress. But here I am not talking about video games or even the internet.

I don’t mean by bringing up Eliot to condemn PostSecret for a blind adherence to tradition, in which creativity has been poisoned by the stagnant waters of dogmaticity. Though that sounds nice, huh? PostSecret shows all the signs of progress. The contributors continue to innovate and those postcards most well received are often those that push the boundaries of the style. In weddings too, we adore the couple most for the ways they have broken tradition, made the wedding uniquely their own. My resentment lies elsewhere.

If the critique stopped here, it would be far from adequate. For that the failing of the bourgeois family unit is a symptom of postmodernity is a principle of postmodernity the contemporary subject is already well aware of. (of which the contemporary subject is already well aware, for grammar snobs). It has, in practice, become a competition to see who is more “fucked up.” But does our being aware of the postmodern status put us somewhere beyond it? Apparently not. What’s more, our awareness of postmodernity does not even bring us beyond the modernity it was a rejection of. (of which it was a rejection). The secret is shared with the same self-congratulation one enjoys while wearing designer clothing, or while discussing left politics in a trendy bar. The spirit of fascism lives on always in the irrepresible desire to be on the inside. This is seen as much in frat houses as it is at PostSecret or in YouTubePoop’s AIDS infection. (And again, perhaps even more so, in the war on AIDS.) Nowhere, though, is this desire given as much free reign as in the social networking bloc: facebook, myspace, esp. twitter. The fascist fascination with diachrony is more than I can handle in this post, however.

This conformism, which subsists off concepts like tradition, serves a dual purpose. Underneath the readily acknowledged fact that the secret has turned from a taboo into a mark of prestige, hides a system by which emotional experience is controlled. Despite its new look, the system remains the same. Emotion is divorced from its human subject and relegated to discrete objects, which, expressing commonly agreed values, are commodified. That is, the pain of sexual abuse remains virutal until it is disclosed on a postcard whose style is compatible with the tastes of the community from which the contributor desires acceptance. This becomes a problem insofar as the deformations of our humanity which lead to child abuse are also those that wrest emotion from its human subject, making such brutality, if not forgiveable, at least pallatable to the offender, whose emotional life has been drained from experience and placed in things, which, kept truly secret, are free from exchange, and thus only ever virtual, and whose virtuality is ensured by the rules of the very system set up by the victims who have uprooted the secret as such in their search for acceptance.

And I’m done.

Working Class Orientalism

So- a quick note. The University of Pittsburgh (loathsome institution it is) hosts a “Working Class Studies” conference (I think) every two years. In some ways, I feel like what they’re doing is great and necessary. Yet at the same time, I feel like this is another case of Orientalism. (I thank Mark Anderson every day for making me read The Names of History.) Anyway, isn’t it a terrible irony that I can’t afford the conference fee? I mean, I’d love to attend, but I don’t have the money or the leisure… guess I can’t disagree with yous guys about your unwarranted portrayal of the working class, but I guess they’re too stupid to do it themselves, huh? Fuckers.