The infamous notion that video games will receive their critical and cultural due when they can bring people to tears is the perfect concept for exploring the long standing split in game studies: namely, the battle between ludology and narratology. This battle is perhaps most pointedly expressed in the work of Espen Aarseth on the one hand, and Janet Murray on the other.
Aarseth’s “ergodic literature” maps various ‘texts’ by the degree of non-trivial effort necessary for users to traverse them and his conception of user engagement in interactive forms is characterized by aporia (an impasse), which is eventually replaced by epiphany, and thus, closure. Murray, by contrast, gauges all texts by their narrative potential, arguing that the immersive power of narrative is all that is necessary for games to mature (and for gamers to achieve catharsis). She bases her position, in part, by linking Homeric epics to Aristotelian poetics to folktales to cyberdrama.
In this presentation I briefly survey the narrative | ludology divide, examining its roots and current formulations, before suggesting that the ‘crying test’ is a seminal, yet highly problematic standard which elides the media specificity of narrative and game structure, and, in so doing, blocks our ability to imagine the full potential of each. I will suggest that the immersive component that Murray assigns to a “stirring narrative in any medium [which brings] an intensity that can obliterate the world around us” (98) results from surrender and helplessness, two feelings that are in direct opposition to the type of impetus to act demanded of video games.
The motivation to act, I suggest, arises not from immersion, but from engagement and focus. Using Huizinga’s 1955 argument that play precedes culture (since animals play), I explore the role of affect in image-based media, and ways of accounting for the type of focused action that games are particularly good at stirring (cf: McGonigal). Ultimately, I maintain, mapping game theory exclusively onto preexisting media forms is a misguided endeavor. By way of example, I close with a case study during which my interdivisional team developed a game for ABC News and the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition.
Saturday, March 10, 2012
Friday, March 9, 2012
Teaching the Moving Target: SCMS2012 Workshop
The current mediascape—from
authors, viewers, objects, to platforms of distribution—is in a state of flux,
and this poses interesting challenges for university level teaching. This
workshop examines the limitations and potentialities for engaging dynamic media
objects, from serial texts, to digital archives, to the tools and underlying
coding systems that render these “texts” widely accessible, but also leave them
fluid and unstable with respect to established formal models of analysis.
Participants will consider a range of strategies for approaching course
processes as well as course products: we will consider not only what we teach
and how we teach it, but also how we guide the production of student texts.
Sean O’Sullivan begins by discussing the twin challenges of teaching complete serial texts (an entire season or entire run of a TV serial) and of teaching incomplete serial texts (either still in production, or unfinished in some other way). The classroom can make contemporary storytelling limits and limitlessness a central topic; the problem of the elusive satisfaction of serials spotlights our choices in entering and investigating the unstable worlds of vast narratives.
Anne Moore then considers strategies for teaching serial narratives in the composition classroom, where she uses serial cult television as a way to examine the mutually productive relationship between reading and writing. By using fans as both a model and an object of study, students gain the opportunity to think critically about their own reading practices as part of their writing process.
Vicki Callahan extends the conversation by positing “participatory archives” as dynamic sites for student research, writing, collaboration, as well as community engagement. This approach gives students an active role in research and writing history, as well as an understanding of their role in creating and circulating the cultural artifacts that shape archives.
Likewise, Virginia Kuhn argues that the boundaries between form and content are increasingly problematic in today’s media ecology, such that students must engage all semiotic registers: they must write both in and about the visual objects of analyses they encounter in class.
Finally, Craig Dietrich interrogates the digital media asset: it can be contained by multiple paths within the same text (aided by relational, or in some cases, semantic databases), providing opportunities for remix, reuse, and multi-vectored narrative.
________________
Virginia Kuhn's THREE premises:
Sean O’Sullivan begins by discussing the twin challenges of teaching complete serial texts (an entire season or entire run of a TV serial) and of teaching incomplete serial texts (either still in production, or unfinished in some other way). The classroom can make contemporary storytelling limits and limitlessness a central topic; the problem of the elusive satisfaction of serials spotlights our choices in entering and investigating the unstable worlds of vast narratives.
Anne Moore then considers strategies for teaching serial narratives in the composition classroom, where she uses serial cult television as a way to examine the mutually productive relationship between reading and writing. By using fans as both a model and an object of study, students gain the opportunity to think critically about their own reading practices as part of their writing process.
Vicki Callahan extends the conversation by positing “participatory archives” as dynamic sites for student research, writing, collaboration, as well as community engagement. This approach gives students an active role in research and writing history, as well as an understanding of their role in creating and circulating the cultural artifacts that shape archives.
Likewise, Virginia Kuhn argues that the boundaries between form and content are increasingly problematic in today’s media ecology, such that students must engage all semiotic registers: they must write both in and about the visual objects of analyses they encounter in class.
Finally, Craig Dietrich interrogates the digital media asset: it can be contained by multiple paths within the same text (aided by relational, or in some cases, semantic databases), providing opportunities for remix, reuse, and multi-vectored narrative.
________________
Virginia Kuhn's THREE premises:
I. ARCHIVES as alphabets
Iraqi Doctors Project
II. FILMIC media as books
Filmic Texts and the Rise of the Fifth Estate:
III. FORM as content
Speaking with Students: Profiles in Digital Pedagogy
Thursday, March 8, 2012
Media Literacy Workshop for K-12 Boston Teachers 3/24
Sponsored by the SCMS Media Literacy + Pedagogical Outreach SIG
Featuring new remix projects by Pop Culture Pirate, museum work and remix activities!!
The event is free and all are welcome.
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