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Literate Gaming Analysis
aderack writes "The first issue of The Gamer's Quarter, a magazine that tries to take a more literary approach to videogames than do current publications, has been released in .pdf format. Included are fourteen lengthy articles, each with a unique perspective; one piece looks at the cultural meaning of Katamari Damacy, while another piece speaks of the writer's gradual acceptance of death as a learning tool."
Wholeheartedly
"while another piece speaks of the writer's gradual acceptance of death as a learning tool."
It really sucks. I mean you make a mistake, you die and you don't even get a chance to learn from that mistake. It's like game over, man! How the hell are you supposed to learn from that?
Oh you mean video game deaths?
Sometimes my arms bend back.
Well I will read most anything if it has to do with video games. If it is something that no one else has done then that is one more reason to read it. I hope they succeed in doing whatever it is that they are trying to accomplish.
It sounds like one of those misguided attempts to directly apply literary criticism to gaming, something which always turns into an embarassing failure.
But I'd reserve my final judgement until I read through the whole thing.
I am impressed. This is definently quality reading, although it does reak of a stench of self importance. It feels like they are trying to use big words for the sake of using big words, however if you can get around that (I did) it is actually very well written and insightful. Very insightful, and leaps and bounds beyond the standard magazine/gamesite review. While I certainly wouldn't recommend reading it to decide if you want to purchase a game (in fact it is written in a way that in order to appreciate it you should have already played the game in question), I would definently recommend it for anyone looking for a deeper more intellectual look then games are often given.
--- "End Of Line" - MCP
I don't think I've seen that much intelligent discussion about video games in one place ever before.
The articles are all well-written (saw a typo here and there, though), with insightful content relating personal experiences, gaming epiphanies, reviews of interesting games with novel ideas. It is a thoroughly enjoyable read, and I would without a doubt subscribe to this magazine were it distributed as such.
you guys are morons if you think this is intelligent discussion. it's just a bunch of hyperemotional lit majors writing in the most convoluted, self-important, cluttered, and cliched style imaginable. for christ's sake, it takes one of the authors most of a page to explain to readers why they don't truly understand the life-affirming, mind-expanding revalation from God that is Metal Gear Solid: Snake Eater, before launching into a description of what the DVD case looks like. truly, that is some penetrating and insightful writing...FOR ME TO POOP ON!!!
you'd be amazed at the number of wannabe-intellectual weenies that are running around proclaiming themselves the new revolution in games journalism. they call themselves the New Games Journalists (which i assume is patterned after Hunter S. Thompson's "gonzo journalism"). in my nightmares i can see them gathering at a big conference to discuss the dialectics of gaming theory, or some bullshit like that.
Sensible, mature people like you and i have an obligation to stop this nonsense before it gets started. We have to expose and humiliate these frauds before they reach critical mass and become a bona fide movement.
Yeah.. we could be "sensible and mature" and waste energy trying to stop people from doing something they, apparently, enjoy.
Or we could let them do their thing, while we ignore them. This must be the illogical and juvenile method, but I think it's the one I'm gonna stick with..
Holy crap man. Are you for real?
I guess I should take it as a compliment that the magazine can inspire paranoid delusions like this. You are worried about this becoming a "bona fide movement"?
Give me a break.
I can't decide whether or not you're serious, but I'll respond as though you are.
I can authoritatively say that no one at The Gamer's Quarter is a "wannabe-intellectual weenie." We're just a bunch of people who love videogames, and love to write about them. We're not out to be "journalists," as nothing in TGQ is traditional journalism. None of our articles are reviews, and nobody is pretending that they would be useful things to read if you want to make a purchasing decision.
Our writing is for a different purpose--not a "higher" purpose, not a "totally new purpose that's going to fucking rock your world," but a purpose all the same. Rather than writing dry, purely informative and objective articles about games, we try to give things a more personal, introspective spin. Yeah, if you want, you can look at a game, sitting down with it and saying, okay, it looks nice, and it sounds nice, but the control is shit and it's all over in six hours; 7.3/10. But...what is that accomplishing? In analyzing the game that way, have you learned anything deeper about the game, or even about yourself?
The idea is, we try to establish a personal context, and to analyze games more in terms of their themes, their tone. How do they make us feel? Is it important that they make us feel that way? What more can we get from them? You can say that they're "just videogames," but...what the hell does that even mean? Are books "just books?" Is the sky "just the sky?" Is life "just life," something that doesn't need to be examined?
People, you know, some of them care about games, and what they mean. I know I do. And it's not just videogames--you analyze everything you come into contact with, on a sensitive, personal level. When you read a good book, it's not something cut-and-dried, something that was assigned a numerical score by a reviewer for a huge media conglomorate. It's something you felt; something you understood.
The point is: the same thing applies not just to videogames, but to all things in life. The Gamer's Quarter just focuses on the videogame part.
And, you know, it looks like you don't want to think about this sort of thing. It looks, to me, like you're spouting off vitriol about how we're just freaks patterning ourselves on gonzo journalism having secret conventions and plotting to destroy your hobby. Trust me. We're not out to get you. No one, very likely, is out to get you. Relax.
There is no movement to speak of. When you talk about us being "frauds," what the--pardon--flying fuck are you talking about? No one is defrauding anyone. We think videogames deserve sensitive, critical analysis, for reasons I've already laid out. So, you know, we're trying to provide that. Maybe some of our writing is shit, and we need to work on that. Okay, fine. Maybe our magazine didn't catch your fancy. That's fine, too. People want different things, in life. If you think this is all "bullshit," that's cool. Don't read it.
But why the defensiveness? Why the vitriol? Why do you feel you have an obligation to stop this "nonsense?"
I mean, honestly.
That's not very sensible.
At least half of it is from Insert Credit forum members.
If this horrible scourge is as bad as you say, then readers won't pay much attention, and the New Games Journalists will disappear into the abyss. If, on the other hand, people find something of value in such writing, then who are you to say that it must be stopped?
if only it were that simple, grasshopper. here is a short list of bullshit intellectual movements that didn't just disappear into the abyss, with tragic consequences:
1) communism
2) postmodernism
3) third wave feminism
4) scientology
yes, i really am comparing New Games Journalism to communism. considering the mass human suffering that resulted from the scourge of communism, don't you just wish that one of Marx's school chums had called him out BEFORE Marxism caught on? well, that's basically what i'm doing, because i am an american hero.
The writing may appear a little whimsical, but this sort of 'magazine' writing is important for the world of gaming.
It is nice to have an alternative to the sort of games writing that will only tell us if a game is totally awesome or not, and if the grafixx are 10/10.
Personally I find this sort of game editorial of value, and indeed cool 2 tha maxxxxx! 93%!!OMG.
Sensible, mature people like you and i have an obligation to stop this nonsense before it gets started. We have to expose and humiliate these frauds before they reach critical mass and become a bona fide movement. I wonder if that's how IBM discussed the thread of Apple.
Sure, I have some specific complaints regarding what they were saying (the PoP author never mentioned the Dahaka), and I was a bit overwhelmed by the massive amount of knowledge that they possessed (especially the Sonic Article. Major fanboy of the originals), but the idea is exactly what is needed.
It treats video games as something of an art form, which is something that I think is sorely needed. I like the lack of focus on the visuals when compared to the gameplay. In the entire MGS article, he mentioned the graphics only once, to say that they were a bit sluggish when compared to the first two games, because of the massive environments. He spent the other ten pages talking about the gameplay.
Definitely looking forward to the next issue.
Beyond the Polygons : Because 50,000 polygo
The back page blurb suggests that at some level they 'get it'. Unfortunately the content seems to be the same old overblown, obvious fanzine crap.
I'm trying to remember if I've ever read anything interesting that contained a question along the lines of "But what do we mean by 'X'?"
Preferences > Homepage > Customize stories on homepage > Authors > Zonk > Uncheck
What an overwhelming assault. Shock and awe indeed. You crushed him like a bug... 10/10
"How good the prince moves is the most notable presentation of the Prince of Persia series."
Hey, they do write very good!
Who wants to bet that the word 'pwned' appears at least once? As in:
"The crux of the emotional impact of this game is clear: achieving the stated goal of the game, that is, to defeat your similarly-armed enemy in an equal contest, and utilizing the chat key in the 'pre-game' stage of the subsequent round, broadcasting to every player the following statement, to signify your dominance over your chosen opponent: pwned."
That's not a soda... it's a caffeine delivery device!
This isn't bad, for an non-peer reviwed fan journal. But if "literate thought about video games" is something any of you are seriously interested in, you need to join the conversations that already exist in academia. You need to read the ludology/narratology debate - Janet Murray, Espen Aarseth, and the like. You need to read other theory too - Lacan, Zizek, some Marxist theory - other stuff that will let your thought about video games fit in with literate thought in general. And you need to do more than run a fanzine - your work needs to be read by independent people who have no ego invested in the project.
Which is not to say that you guys don't have a good start. You're noticing the right things in video games. Your writing style is clunky at times, but that's certainly no crime in academia. But right now, you've got a bunch of cool observations about video games that you haven't learned how to connect into academic thought yet. For that, you need to read the guys who are already doing this.
(And you do all know about gamestudies.org, right?)
Philip Sandifer's academic website
violently_ill you are not alone in your crusade.
/. classic.
Whenever this "New Games Journalism" shit gets posted, there you are warning the masses about these beret wearing cretins.
Your post "how to start an 'intellectual' revolution" is a
I have identified the ringleader - one Kieron Gillen - the head of the snake. He peddles his brand of snakeoil at eurogamer.net and freelances for magazines dumb enough to pay him.
New Games Journalism is his one and only hope at going down in history.
He is recruiting naive young lit majors to his cause by the day.
The anti NGJ revolution begins here! For great justice!
Oh my.
Quick question: Why do you keep on bringing up postmodernism with reference to all the NGJ stuff? Looking at - say - Bow Nigger or Possessing Barbie could you tell me where either is actually postmodernist or attempts to hide its message behind obscurist terminology? Both are written in common language, and are probably less obscurist than the average videogame review due to their lack of any gaming slang and explanations of everything they *do* use.
KG
postmodernism is the philosophy that produced the professors who educated/indoctrinated the New Games Journalists. it is a philosophy championed by some of the greatest intellectual frauds in history -- evil geniuses who conjured up an entire school of thought with smoke and mirrors. they attracted legions of followers (your professors) and became revered thinkers. then a physicist by the name of Alan Sokal came along and gave these impostors one of the biggest intellectual beatdowns of all time. you can read about it here.
once upon a time, i was a young and impressionable intellectual. i had professors that dazzled me with fancy vocabulary and talk of "critical analysis" and "theory". it's hard to unplug yourself from their matrix, but it can be done.
now i walk around my university like a bad ass. i look straight at former professors as they walk by, sheepishly avoiding eye contact with me. they're TERRIFIED of me, because i'm a walking indictment of their life's work. when they sleep, they have nightmares about me humiliating them in front of their students. don't believe me? mention Sokal's name to your lit professors sometime and see what happens.
excellent reconnaissance work! soon i will have acquired the last of the plutonium triggers and the strike can proceed. work on the anti-hippie laser is proceeding as planned. i've recently managed to increase the efficiency of the german death metal core by over 30%. preliminary tests have already shown it to be highly effective on berets and thick-rimmed emo glasses.
the revolution is drawing nigh!
But, as far as I'm aware, none of the NGJ people you're so determined in your attack of actually are Liberal Studies grads. AB, specifically, has no training. The gent's a trained programmer, talking about his experiences in games in his own language. Me neither, for that matter - I'm a science graduate. There's only as much influence of post-modernist studies as there is indirectly in anything in the cultural groundswell.
That's why your attacks are coming across as slightly hysteric: your prejudices (which are reasonably justified) are entirely unrelated to the thing you're attacking.
KG
you guys didn't come up with your ideas about "critical analysis", and the interpretation of "text" on your own. that had to come from some spongeprofessor tweedpants somewhere. the very idea of interpreting games as you would a work of literature or art smacks of postmodernism, because those fields of study are so thoroughly infested with postmodernist "metawaddle" that it's virtually impossible to apply their methods without contaminating your ideas.
finally, if you guys don't want to be associated with postmodernism, and want to be taken seriously as an academic pursuit, you should stop dropping names like Lacan.
Don't believe I've ever name-dropped Lacan. Don't even remember anyone me recommending name-dropping Lacan either. Care to point to it? If it's the other chap in this thread, note that he's from gaming Academia, which is another kettle of gaming writing altogether.
It's also worth noting that, as the chaps and their PDF mag do, they're nothing to do with the concept of New Games Journalism. That was *specifically* about use of the subjective experience when relating games. It wasn't really meant to be used as a catch-all phrase for any "intelligent" games journalism.
(Christ - there's lots of room for some comedy NGJ. Most of the subjective experiences we relate about games are pretty funny, and I'd like to see someone try and capture them too)
KG
1) Loathe as I am to stick up for Kieron, you're talking horseshit worthy of the people you're attacking. You're presuming that other people are ignorant of the source - so you can get away with a half-baked attack on NGJ.
2) Sokal and Bricmont's book DOESN'T perform a slash&grab on postmodernism (both Lacan and Deleuze, two of the authors given a "beat down" in II, certainly aren't postmodernists anymore than they are greengrocers). What it does do, and very well, is call out the use of bad science by modern critical theorists. This is fundamentally different to what you're arguing. (Hell, if you had paid more attention to the texts in those critical analysis classes, you might have realised that already.)
3) Using theory to attack the idea of theory. Well done. Very clever. Very postmodern, even (if you want to misuse the debased term any further). I'm sure your professors are scared of you humiliating them still, not embarrassing yourself even more.
4) I have no real opinion on NGJ, other than the people who "get" it appear to be far less tedious than those who don't. It's marks out a cultural fault line, over which you choose a side to stand. The opposite of Coldplay fans, if you will.
5) Kieron, as a qualified scientist, is probably better to talk about how he uses or misuses science in his writing better than me. Or you.
all right. here's the point-by-point:
1) this i will skip, since it's just an introduction to point #2
2) this is exactly what pisses me off about postmodernism. the whole philosophy has been intentionally ill-defined and muddled-up so thorough so as to facilitate exactly the type of counterattack you just made. even the thinkers most associated with postmodernism will, when backed into a corner, deny any label or allegiance to any movement. if you really worked on derrida, you could probably get him to deny being a deconstructionist.
these frauds i've chosen to call postmodernists, and i make no apologies for my sloppy use of the term. there is no other way to employ a word that is devoid of any clear meaning. i'm hardly alone in my use of the term to describe these people. you'll notice that dawkins titled his essay "postmodernism disrobed" and not "intellectual frauds who inhabit the field of cultural studies disrobed". since dawkins and i are scientists and therefore accustomed to clearly-defined vocabulary, we've imposed our own meaning on the term. we needed a term for what we're attacking, and "postmodernism" was the best candidate, even though, as you point out, our targets don't hold identical beliefs.
3) i'm not really sure what you're saying here, but i'm glad that you understand that "theory" is a debased term.
4) the cultural fault line is between hippies and anti-hippies.
5) i'm curious, what kind of scientist is kieron?
I don't believe that you're actually familiar with Sokal & Bricmont's book, merely Dawkins' argument (and of course, Dawkins is as much a literary and cultural theorist as a scientist - and I'm a fan of his work). If you have read it, you've quite fatally misread it as an attack on all "postmodern" theorists. So let's go to the primary text, as literature students, quite rightly, are taught to do.
Note before we go on: II, the primary text, is IN ITSELF a book-length form of deconstruction.
"We show that famous intellectuals such as Lacan, Kristeva, Irigaray, Baudrillard and Deleuze have repeated abused scientific concepts and terminology: either using scientific ideas totally out of context, without giving the slightest justification...or throwing around scientific jargon in front of their non-scientific readers without any regard for its relevance or even its meaning. We make no claim that this invalidates the rest of their work" (my emphasis)
OK. So that's cleared up: Sokal & Bricmont are arguing that some critical theorists employ bad science and should be called out on it - but that doesn't mean the entire field is without value, as you seem to be arguing.
Now. WHAT THE HELL does this have to do with NGJ? As I understand, it is just a more holistic, playful, literary and sharp approach to criticism than the subliterate PR feed that litters the gaming press, and has never invoked bad science, critical theory etc. If anything, it's related to ideas that ran concurrent to the wave of theorists that you don't like: the New Journalism (do you see?) gang of Thompson, Wolfe, Capote, etc. They were pretty much arch traditionalists in terms of their literary tastes, but believed (and FWIW I agree) that journalistic writing could be made more interesting and worthy by infusing it with literary values. It has nothing to do with the above. At all.
Now, can we have a similar joke paper for undergrad scientists' inability to use basic concepts of philosophical argument? And with it, state that every scientific theory that has since been discredited means that the whole of scientific research should be brought to an abrupt halt?
1) i've read intellectual impostures cover to cover.
2) i'm fully aware that sokal and bricmont's criticism is limited strictly to the abuse of scientific concepts. however, as dawkins pointed out, when someone gets caught commiting intellectual fraud, they've blown their credentials when it comes to things i don't know anything about.
3) this has everything to do with NGJ, as I pointed out in the original post that spawned this thread. i will likewise refer you to this post. i've already explained how i'm using the term postmodernism to stand for larger problems in the humanities.
4) i never asked for research in cultural studies to be halted because of a few unscrupulous "theorists". when scientists, like this guy, get caught faking it, the whole of their work gets reexamined and much, if not all of it, gets thrown out.