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A review by nickfourtimes
The State of Play: Creators and Critics on Video Game Culture by Katherine Cross, Cara Ellison, William Knoblauch, Linus Larsson, Ian Bogost, Zoë Quinn, Anita Sarkeesian, Ian Shanahan, Dan Golding, Evan Narcisse, Leigh Alexander, Hussein Ibrahim, Anna Anthropy, David Johnston, Merritt Kopas, Ola Wikander, Daniel Goldberg, Brendan Keogh
5.0
1) "More than any other form of creative expression, video games are highly dependent on, and to a certain extent an offshoot of, advances in computing and digital technology. This means games have traditionally been engaged with and discussed as products of technology rather than products of culture, which is why most game criticism still tends to read a lot like a review of a mobile phone or a car. [...]
Video game production has historically been prohibitively expensive and time-consuming, giving big-name publishers a virtual monopoly on production, sales, and marketing. As a result, the cultural identity of the 'gamer' was from an early stage largely appropriated and shaped by the dominant corporate interests of the industry. This created a consumption-centric culture with its own norms and value systems, clustered around a small number of brands and big-budget franchises while showing little concern for identities other than the prime demographic of the young, white, Western male." ---Daniel Goldberg & Linus Larsson, "Introduction"
2) "Everywhere, it seemed, we saw a puzzle, a mystery. Why was that bundle of twigs leaning against an old oak? Why did some stones glitter when you struck them, and others stank of gunpowder? Under this log, a salamander, and under that, a nest of beetles. There were loamy, unseen living things always scuttling just out of reach. We left notes and signs wherever we could get away with it, and it felt like important work. [...]
There were, there had to be, gorgeous infrastructures beyond what I could reach, just waiting for me to know the right words. The whole world was a blinking prompt, daring me, ENTER COMMAND." ---Leigh Alexander, "Advent"
3) "What excites me about being black is being connected to a history of resistance, innovation, and improvisation---a history extruded out from under the most inhumane physical, psychological, and systemic oppressions in human history. Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man is only trenchant, angry, and darkly funny because it rebelliously gives voice to an existence that defied all the forces that tried to suppress it. Of course, I don't have to live inside any of that understanding if I don't want to. I can take from it as I want or need. Canadian poet Dionne Brand once remarked that, 'To live in the Black diaspora is I think to live as a fiction---a creation of empires, & also self-creation."
Yes, the empires of the video game landscape---big publishers like EA, Ubisoft, and Activision---are making slow, stumbly tentative progress. But it's really the self-creation of black video game characters and universes that I hold out the most hope for." ---Evan Narcisse, "The Natural"
4) "You decide to cope with everything feeling too big and too serious the best way you know how: by being totally absurd.
You and your friend find an Angry Birds piggy bank and fill it with sequins because, let's face it, you're still a game designer and care about particle physics. You climb up to the roof of the theater where he works at two in the morning, throw the stuffed bird off the roof, and scream 'FUCK VIDEO GAMES!' into the night as a sacrifice to the gods of gaming for better luck. It's ridiculous. It's asinine. It's cathartic." ---Zoe Quinn, "A Game I Had to Make"
5) "Every game needs some kind of goal or endgame. In this one, women are kind of like the ball being tossed between competing men. Other times we're the point system. Still other times, we're the damsel waiting to be rescued and victoriously smooched by the gentleman hero. More often than not, we're the final boss in need of a strategic takedown, barring the way between the male player and his final triumph. [...] If you want to know what 'objectification' means, that's a good place to start.
Our game metaphor grows out of Anita's study of her own harassment and Katherine's sociological work on the wider phenomenon of harassment in gaming. Both of our analyses converge on one key point: harassment happens because the dehumanization it entails takes the shape of gaming itself, with all the suggestions of play and inconsequentiality therein. If it's just a game, then it's not real, and if it's not real then no one can get hurt and no harm is truly done. The corollary to this, of course, is that if people believe no one is really being hurt, then no one will be punished or held accountable for the harm." ---Anita Sarkeesian and Katherine Cross, "Your Humanity is in Another Castle"
6) "In a way that might be disturbing, I really liked that permanence, that ability to see my performance of Doom inscribed on the virtual space. I could walk back through the space and see where I blasted that imp or squished that zombie under a door. In more recent violent video games, like Hotline Miami, this gets even more detailed. [...] I don't think it is simply ordering these spaces that is so satisfying, but personalizing them with my performance." ---Cara Ellison & Brendan Keogh, "The Joy of Virtual Violence"
7) "We play games because games are stupid, like drawer pulls are stupid. Flappy Bird is a game that accepts that it is stupid. It offers us an example of what it might feel like to conclude that this is enough. That it's enough for games just to be crap in the universe, detritus that we encounter from time to time, and that we might encounter as detritus rather than as meaning. That we might stop to manipulate them without motive or reason, like we might turn a smooth rock in our palms before tossing it back into the big ocean, which devours it. For no matter how stupid it is to be a game, it is no less stupid to be a man who plays one." ---Ian Bogost, "The Squalid Grace of Flappy Bird"
8) "Equally interesting is the post-apocalyptic landscape The Last of Us presents. In Fallout's post-nuclear worlds, bomb-ravaged decimation makes perfect sense, but The Last of Us imagines how nature might reclaim man-made cities. Instead of burned-out buildings and piles of rubble, a lush green overgrowth takes over.
This nature reclamation theme appears in a handful of recent pop culture outbreak narratives (in two films, Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys and M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening; the NBC show Revolution; and Margaret Atwood's splendid book The Year of the Flood) but it strikes a tone seldom seen in video games, which tend to rely on the dark, eerie mood of horror films. Without humanity, the world doesn't collapse---it just moves on. In this way, The Last of Us shuns the anthropocentrism apparent not just in zombie games, but in most first-person shooters." ---William Knoblauch, "Game Over?"
9) "It's a simple move, but it effectively shifts sex to being an everyday, normal, maybe even kind of boring thing that isn't the ultimate goal of your character but is just a part of their daily life. Later in the game, you might get in a car and sing along to the radio with a character you fucked earlier, or fight hordes of aliens alongside them. [...]
Sex here isn't a quest or minigame; it's not part of the goal structure of the game at all. It's true that Saint's Row doesn't depict sex mechanically---but it doesn't have to. And actually, by de-emphasizing sex as a goal and refusing to allow the player monogamous relationships, the game mirrors a queer politic of deprivileging romantic relationships and elevating friend relationships. In other words, this means trying to treat everyone we're close to in our lives with the same respect and tenderness that heteronormative culture tells us to reserve for our One True Love. In this sense, Saint's Row IV does more interesting work aroud sex than the games it's satirizing." ---merritt kopas, "Ludus Interruptus"
10) [Spoilers: Deadly Premonition]
"When this switch occurs, it is much more than a multiple personalities trope Fight Club-style---"It was me all along!"---No, when Zack understands who he really is---that he is Zach and that York is the fake with whom he has been conversing all this time---the game implicitly switches the places of the player and the played, the ruler and the ruled, the creator and the created. The personality that we believed to be 'us' was really 'him' all along; the alien of the story is, in fact, its protagonist. In story terms, this is really the moment of redemption for Morgan. It is the point where knowledge destroys ignorance, where the dichotomy between creator and created is finally inverted. He is himself the 'god of the game' that we, in all our vanity, believed ourselves to be." ---Ola Wikander, "The God in the Machine"
Video game production has historically been prohibitively expensive and time-consuming, giving big-name publishers a virtual monopoly on production, sales, and marketing. As a result, the cultural identity of the 'gamer' was from an early stage largely appropriated and shaped by the dominant corporate interests of the industry. This created a consumption-centric culture with its own norms and value systems, clustered around a small number of brands and big-budget franchises while showing little concern for identities other than the prime demographic of the young, white, Western male." ---Daniel Goldberg & Linus Larsson, "Introduction"
2) "Everywhere, it seemed, we saw a puzzle, a mystery. Why was that bundle of twigs leaning against an old oak? Why did some stones glitter when you struck them, and others stank of gunpowder? Under this log, a salamander, and under that, a nest of beetles. There were loamy, unseen living things always scuttling just out of reach. We left notes and signs wherever we could get away with it, and it felt like important work. [...]
There were, there had to be, gorgeous infrastructures beyond what I could reach, just waiting for me to know the right words. The whole world was a blinking prompt, daring me, ENTER COMMAND." ---Leigh Alexander, "Advent"
3) "What excites me about being black is being connected to a history of resistance, innovation, and improvisation---a history extruded out from under the most inhumane physical, psychological, and systemic oppressions in human history. Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man is only trenchant, angry, and darkly funny because it rebelliously gives voice to an existence that defied all the forces that tried to suppress it. Of course, I don't have to live inside any of that understanding if I don't want to. I can take from it as I want or need. Canadian poet Dionne Brand once remarked that, 'To live in the Black diaspora is I think to live as a fiction---a creation of empires, & also self-creation."
Yes, the empires of the video game landscape---big publishers like EA, Ubisoft, and Activision---are making slow, stumbly tentative progress. But it's really the self-creation of black video game characters and universes that I hold out the most hope for." ---Evan Narcisse, "The Natural"
4) "You decide to cope with everything feeling too big and too serious the best way you know how: by being totally absurd.
You and your friend find an Angry Birds piggy bank and fill it with sequins because, let's face it, you're still a game designer and care about particle physics. You climb up to the roof of the theater where he works at two in the morning, throw the stuffed bird off the roof, and scream 'FUCK VIDEO GAMES!' into the night as a sacrifice to the gods of gaming for better luck. It's ridiculous. It's asinine. It's cathartic." ---Zoe Quinn, "A Game I Had to Make"
5) "Every game needs some kind of goal or endgame. In this one, women are kind of like the ball being tossed between competing men. Other times we're the point system. Still other times, we're the damsel waiting to be rescued and victoriously smooched by the gentleman hero. More often than not, we're the final boss in need of a strategic takedown, barring the way between the male player and his final triumph. [...] If you want to know what 'objectification' means, that's a good place to start.
Our game metaphor grows out of Anita's study of her own harassment and Katherine's sociological work on the wider phenomenon of harassment in gaming. Both of our analyses converge on one key point: harassment happens because the dehumanization it entails takes the shape of gaming itself, with all the suggestions of play and inconsequentiality therein. If it's just a game, then it's not real, and if it's not real then no one can get hurt and no harm is truly done. The corollary to this, of course, is that if people believe no one is really being hurt, then no one will be punished or held accountable for the harm." ---Anita Sarkeesian and Katherine Cross, "Your Humanity is in Another Castle"
6) "In a way that might be disturbing, I really liked that permanence, that ability to see my performance of Doom inscribed on the virtual space. I could walk back through the space and see where I blasted that imp or squished that zombie under a door. In more recent violent video games, like Hotline Miami, this gets even more detailed. [...] I don't think it is simply ordering these spaces that is so satisfying, but personalizing them with my performance." ---Cara Ellison & Brendan Keogh, "The Joy of Virtual Violence"
7) "We play games because games are stupid, like drawer pulls are stupid. Flappy Bird is a game that accepts that it is stupid. It offers us an example of what it might feel like to conclude that this is enough. That it's enough for games just to be crap in the universe, detritus that we encounter from time to time, and that we might encounter as detritus rather than as meaning. That we might stop to manipulate them without motive or reason, like we might turn a smooth rock in our palms before tossing it back into the big ocean, which devours it. For no matter how stupid it is to be a game, it is no less stupid to be a man who plays one." ---Ian Bogost, "The Squalid Grace of Flappy Bird"
8) "Equally interesting is the post-apocalyptic landscape The Last of Us presents. In Fallout's post-nuclear worlds, bomb-ravaged decimation makes perfect sense, but The Last of Us imagines how nature might reclaim man-made cities. Instead of burned-out buildings and piles of rubble, a lush green overgrowth takes over.
This nature reclamation theme appears in a handful of recent pop culture outbreak narratives (in two films, Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys and M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening; the NBC show Revolution; and Margaret Atwood's splendid book The Year of the Flood) but it strikes a tone seldom seen in video games, which tend to rely on the dark, eerie mood of horror films. Without humanity, the world doesn't collapse---it just moves on. In this way, The Last of Us shuns the anthropocentrism apparent not just in zombie games, but in most first-person shooters." ---William Knoblauch, "Game Over?"
9) "It's a simple move, but it effectively shifts sex to being an everyday, normal, maybe even kind of boring thing that isn't the ultimate goal of your character but is just a part of their daily life. Later in the game, you might get in a car and sing along to the radio with a character you fucked earlier, or fight hordes of aliens alongside them. [...]
Sex here isn't a quest or minigame; it's not part of the goal structure of the game at all. It's true that Saint's Row doesn't depict sex mechanically---but it doesn't have to. And actually, by de-emphasizing sex as a goal and refusing to allow the player monogamous relationships, the game mirrors a queer politic of deprivileging romantic relationships and elevating friend relationships. In other words, this means trying to treat everyone we're close to in our lives with the same respect and tenderness that heteronormative culture tells us to reserve for our One True Love. In this sense, Saint's Row IV does more interesting work aroud sex than the games it's satirizing." ---merritt kopas, "Ludus Interruptus"
10) [Spoilers: Deadly Premonition]
"When this switch occurs, it is much more than a multiple personalities trope Fight Club-style---"It was me all along!"---No, when Zack understands who he really is---that he is Zach and that York is the fake with whom he has been conversing all this time---the game implicitly switches the places of the player and the played, the ruler and the ruled, the creator and the created. The personality that we believed to be 'us' was really 'him' all along; the alien of the story is, in fact, its protagonist. In story terms, this is really the moment of redemption for Morgan. It is the point where knowledge destroys ignorance, where the dichotomy between creator and created is finally inverted. He is himself the 'god of the game' that we, in all our vanity, believed ourselves to be." ---Ola Wikander, "The God in the Machine"