From Games to Comics: I saw a few people (including my buddy Dan) link this Kotaku post about an Apple patent for a technology that would turn your video game stories into comic books through a series of screen shots. The example used in the patent is clearly from Mass Effect, with the implication being that this is most intended for games where the player gets to choose how the story unfolds, so each comic created would be about a player’s own, personal story.

Kotaku seems pretty jazzed about the idea. Personally, I’m confident this would result in many terrible comic books that might make us realize just how disjointed video game plots tend to be. Maybe that’s a good thing, though, as it might encourage better stories in games in the long run. As I mentioned in a recent post, for instance, Alpha Protocol and Heavy Rain both foreshadow things that the game might never deliver on again later, depending on what choices you make. We forgive that kind of poor storytelling in games because it’s a concession to player choice and because games are often so long that we forget what happened earlier. I think we would notice those kinds of plot holes and paths leading to nowhere if we could revisit the stories in another format.

With Great Power: A BBC article summarizes a study by Sharon Lamb describing how superheroes make poor role models for boys. (I can’t find just one article, as the study seems to have been presented at a conference and possibly derived from the book Packaging Boyhood.) The researchers suggest that it’s problematic that so many comic book heroes are either hypermasculine jerks or lazy slackers, as they present poor role models to boys.

What I found particularly interesting, though, was that the researchers don’t seem to be condemning superhero comics altogether, but sort of commenting on how the “dark and gritty” move since the ’90s has resulted in male characters with less depth and emotional vulnerability. I imagine that there are examples of heroes that don’t fit this “problematic” mold nowadays, and I’ve never been one to suggest that material for adults should be changed or restricted in order to provide “healthy” material for kids, but I thought it was some interesting food for thought. In a way, Lee and Ditko’s Spider-man was a real nerd role model for readers, but I imagine those are harder to find in comics today.

Catching up with the Trend: The BBC also asks “Will Geeks Inherit the Earth?” (with regard to politics and business). The Guardian muses on “The Geek Stranglehold on Cinema” (which may be debatable after Scott Pilgrim vs. the World‘s unimpressive box office take this past weekend). CNN asks: “Geeks: Smart, Harmless, Authentic, Exploited?” Adweek notes that “Consumers Embrace Geekdom,” and Businessweek reflects on ThinkGeek: The Home of Geek Chic.” (I am pretty sure these came from Church, who sends me so many interesting links that I lose track of them.)

The Psychology of Geek Community: Psychology Today offers some words on how Comic Con offers a community for geeks and nerds. The article notes…

The folks at the convention may use the Internet to create their own virtual communities of like-minded “friends” (I use the term friends loosely, in much the same way as Facebook does). But there is something about stepping into a convention center, an exhibit hall, and a hotel, knowing that you share an interest with almost everyone there.

… And handily sums up about two or three chapters of my dissertation. Turns out I can be pretty wordy!

“Why does everyone automatically assume I know tailoring and cooking?”: Geek Feminism reposts an incisive critique of issues of sexism in World of Warcraft and gamer/geek culture more broadly, “I don’t see your problem: Sexism, World of Warcraft and Geekery.”

I have a bunch more links about Scott Pilgrim, but I’m thinking that deserves its own post after I get some other work done.

The social sciences have too often jumped in feet first, raising unnecessary panics over video games, “fad” mental illnesses, and “crises” of sexual assault. I’ll acknowledge that it’s probably difficult to sell a book or get a government grant arguing that something isn’t a big problem, yet it is time for the social sciences to carefully consider the chasm that too often exists between the data that they produce and the claims they make to the scientific community and general public. Words such as “epidemic” should only ever be preceded by words like “smallpox,” and should henceforth be stricken from the social scientist’s lingo. (…)

The evidence just isn’t there for an epidemic of narcissism or anything else. Social scientists would do well to exercise a degree of caution when interpreting data. Just like with the little boy who cries wolf, people are bound to notice too many phantom epidemics. The price to be paid is the credibility of social science itself.

Of course I was thinking “video games” (and “comic books”) before I even got to the part of the article where the author mentions this. (Little did I know while reading this that the author, an associate professor of psychology at Texas A&M, has already written about his take on game “violence” in particular.) I recommend the article for all academics who will wring their hands over the next big cultural boogeyman, and to all professors who lament the moral fiber of “kids today.”

(And as an added side note: As someone who was bullied and played dodgeball as a kid, I’m a little offended by the commenter who calls dodgeball a “particularly horrific game (in which authority figures actually encourage normal kids to act like bullies).” Maybe the bullies were different in this person’s neighborhood, but where I grew up, bullies beat you up, up-close and personal, and did not invite you to play a game of dodgeball with them.)

This article focuses on how people interact in arcades, and how social dynamics and the cultural connotations behind games influences who plays what and with whom. It’s not nominally about geeks or geek cultures, but this study did end up influencing how I thought about my dissertation research. When you get to the parts about how people insulate themselves socially, and particularly one moment in which a boy loudly proclaims upon winning a game, “I’m the One! I’m ****in’ Neo!”, you may see what I mean.

A lot has happened since I wrote the first draft of this paper, back when the Wii was still codenamed the “Revolution.” I wish I had been quick enough in revising it and progressing through the academic publishing process that I could have explained why the results of my research indicated that Nintendo’s new console was going to sell like hotcakes, but not as much among the gamers who call themselves “hardcore.” The best I can do is point back and say, “In retrospect, this should have been obvious to us.” Ah, research.

My thoughts on the terms ‘casual’ and ‘hardcore’ as applied to game players have also developed somewhat since writing this article, but I think that has more to do with how the terms are applied elsewhere than with what seemed appropriate for this paper. I opted to use ‘experienced’ over ‘hardcore’ in the most recent revision, and I suspect I could have replaced ‘casual’ with ‘inexperienced’ or ‘irregular’ (which is not at all consistent with how you’d refer to a “casual” gamer who plays Plants vs. Zombies several times a day), but those terms have their own sorts of connotations as well. For now, I hope I can be forgiven for using the terms that seemed most appropriate at the time, despite their lack of terminological specificity. For more on how I was thinking about the terms, check out Diane Carr’s excellent 2005 study in Simulation and Gaming, “Contexts, Gaming Pleasures, and Gendered Preferences” (sadly, not available free online unless you belong to a library that subscribes to the journal).

Of course, probably the most predictable development since writing this has been the continued erosion of the arcade business model in the US. The first draft of this paper covered such developments in greater detail, but I had to pare the focus down to something more manageable. For now, though, I’ll say that arcades have only gotten more scarce since this paper was written, and I think that’s a shame. For all the negative stereotypes surrounding such establishments, what I remember most about my months of research was how central some of these arcades were to their communities. The two sites where this struck me the most—”City Arcade” and “Strip Mall Arcade”—are still in business. The other two have closed since turning in the final revision of this paper to the journal editor. I can’t speak for the reasoning behind closing down “Campus Arcade,” but as far as I know, “Sports Bar Arcade” was still doing good business when its landlords refused to renew its lease so the space could be sold to a chain store. As the end of the paper predicts, chains like Dave & Busters still seem to be doing okay.

As a final side note, I thought some of my readers here might arch an eyebrow upon reading the sentence, “One of the most useful tools at my disposal was being good enough at certain games—and being sufficiently able to gauge the ability of my opponents—to control for the outcome of a match.” Please do not think me merely boastful. Before graduate school, I worked a job as an overnight security guard in a mall (which was not among my research sites). I was only expected to patrol once every few hours, and invited to use the rest of my night as I wished, so long as I stayed awake. The mall left the arcade open all night, where it remained accessible only to the security and cleaning staff. The arcade had Soul Calibur 2, and I am drawn to playing characters with Italian names. Let us leave it at that.

(But yes, I do still stink at the entire Tekken series.)

Later this month, however, I will be in St. Louis at the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association National Conference. I’ll be presenting a paper that originated as a loosely-connected series of posts here about “The Multiple Appeals of Gaming.” Let me know if you expect to be at the conference and feel like discussing geeky things, as I have a tendency to do that when given the chance.

Sexist, racist, and homophobic sentiments may be amplified by the somewhat anonymous and depersonalized format of internet venues – an “online disinhibition effect” (Suler, 2004) in psychological terms, though well known to geeks under such terms as “the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory” (Kruhulik & Holkins, 2004).

The phrase is indeed well known, and I offer an endnote to expound upon that a bit. But it still looks like a weird sentence. (And yes, the lowercase “I” in “internet” is intentional.)

My dilemma today is how to cite an article by Iroquois Pliskin. Citing people by handle/screen name is usually no big deal for me. Because I’m quoting heavily from comments on blogs and publicly viewable forums, I already have plenty of citations like “(CmdrTaco, 2007).” This gets trickier when citing someone using a screen name that takes the form of a pen name. If I’m to treat this like a screen name, I’d cite it as “(Iroquois Pliskin, 2009).” On the other hand, this has a first and last name, so should it be “(Pliskin, 2009)”? “Mark Twain” was just a pen name for Samuel Clemens, but I think you’d still cite him as “(Twain, 1876).” And I haven’t even addressed how I decided to cite the Penny Arcade strip noted in the quote above as “(Krahulik and Holkins, 2004)” rather than “(Gabe and Tycho, 2004)”; citing when you have a screen name and a real name associated with a work presents its own challenges as well.

I’m not going to let something so silly hold me up right now, so I’m just going with citing as a screen name for consistency with the other online sources I’m using in cases when no real name is given on the work itself. Perhaps I’ll revise after defending if need be.

Part of what fascinated me about this subject was how many journalists and even some other academics described video arcades as havens of racial harmony and class equality—a development, I think, partially resulting from the fact that arcades are much more socially stratified around gaming skills and interests than any more normally recognized index of cultural belonging. The distinction between “hardcore” and “casual” players made by many in the gaming press may be an incomplete and problematic construction of who plays games, but arcade-goers appear to make similar sorts of divisions between themselves, both in terms of social organization and formal differences in the games they choose to play. (Some of this now reads like a retrospective of how the Wii has been capable of reaching new gaming audiences, but this research was first conducted before the Wii’s control scheme was even announced. Ah well—so goes the pace of academic research and publication.)

The first version I wrote of this (even before presenting it at a conference) was actually quite a bit longer because a good portion was devoted to discussion of the much-lamented “death of arcades,” which ultimately seemed better addressed in some other paper. I focused on this direction because I’m more interested in connections between gameplay and culture than in developments in the industry, but we’re probably overdue to see a paper comparing and contrasting the American and Japanese arcade scenes. In fact, it was somewhat challenging to find enough sites for this paper, as some of those I planned to visit had closed not long before I started the research. Two more of my four sites have been effectively closed since submitting the paper for publication.

“Arcadian rhythms” goes online in the fall of 2009, but please feel free to email me now (jason @ this domain) if you’d like a copy to look at in advance.

The core of the project was an analysis of just about every bill proposed at the state and federal level, between 1999 and 2006, which proposed some sort of regulatory intervention. This analysis suggested that politicians have been approaching games as if they were just like movies, but devoid of cultural value and especially dangerous in their effects by virtue of being more interactive. Operating under this understanding, the game rating process probably seems woefully inadequate—but as anybody who has played a video game in the last several years can tell you, that’s not exactly how games work. I avoid the the tricky and sometimes misleading concept of “interactivity” in favor of explaining a few formal properties of games that make rating their content worthy of being approached differently from movies. Ultimately, I explain how the video game industry has come under disproportionate scrutiny relative to other media industries with regard to its content rating processes, but some minor adjustments to that process (and other means of regulating games besides legislation) may still be worth considering. I conclude with a number of “practical alternatives” to state-mandated regulatory reform, including resources that parents might find useful and the game industry might consider expanding upon.

In writing this, I knew I was kind of skirting or replicating existing theoretical paradigms of how games are played (notably Espen Aarseth’s theories of games as “ergodic”). My hope, though, was to write something that would be equally approachable by media researchers, policy wonks, industry insiders, parents, and gamers alike. This is a somewhat time-sensitive issue, too, as some states—including my own home ground of Massachusetts—are still pursuing unsound and uninformed game-restriction legislation at the cost of taxpayers. Because of these reasons, I wanted to make sure this article got into an open-access journal, not sealed up in something that only a small group of specialists and scholars would ever see.

The writing style (especially the analysis of legislation and ratings processes, before the “Theoretical and Practical Considerations” section) is, I must admit, a bit dry compared to my tone here on Geek Studies. And, because IJOC has no real printing overhead, this is probably about twice as long as most peer-reviewed papers. Still, I think the review process helped me fashion a much more clear and precise argument.

IJOC offers the ability to comment directly on its site for articles, and I’d be happy to engage in discussion there. If you’d rather comment anonymously and without registering with an email address, however, I’d be just as interested to field feedback and criticisms here on the blog, so please feel free to let loose.

Games & Culture. The first panel of the weekend for me was one of those I most looked forward to, and not just because two of my Annenberg compatriots were presenting. As it turned out, though, their papers were particularly interesting to me.

Adrienne Shaw, presenting on “Putting the Gay in Games,” discussed the representation (or general lack thereof) of homo- and bisexual characters in video games. As one audience member pointed out (and as Adrienne has addressed in a recently revised version), there are of course plenty of players who will read queer relationships into games, but this really isn’t any substitute for having that built into the narrative.

Adrienne’s argument may make some roll their eyes—those who don’t fully understand systematic social and cultural marginalization may complain that video games are no place for politics, but even concerned queer gamers have countered that calls for representation for its own sake could too easily lead to tokenism. As Adrienne points out, however, there’s a real storytelling issue here that affects the market for all of us: You don’t have to be G, L, B, or T to think it’d be worth it to have the option to play some characters who are. Personally, playing Mass Effect as a female helped me realize how interesting it is to play a protagonist even slightly outside the normal archetype for science-fiction, action gaming. I’m kind of tired of playing the same heterosexual macho, male, messianic superhero again and again, aren’t you?

In the same panel, Joel Penny presented on “Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, and the Ideology of the Military.” This study provided a great example of the multiple appeals of gaming we’ve talked about on this blog, illustrating how different players approach the same games differently. Some players he interviewed reported gaining a greater appreciation of soldiers from World War II video games, and highly valued such games for their historical accuracy and narrative force. Others, on the other hand, were so much more concerned with gameplay mechanics and weaponry/toys over other elements that they dismissed WWII as boring.

I’d be quite interested to see how players understand the experience of playing Axis soldiers in games that allow you to do so. (I remember a conversation at Penny Arcade, awhile back, surrounding Gabe’s grandfather, a WWII vet, not understanding why anybody would want to do this.) Perhaps this only comes up in multiplayer situations when gameplay is at the forefront of people’s minds, and “Axis” and “Allies” are as neutral as “red” versus “blue,” with no concern for narrative implications. Still, chatting with some friends about this, I found it interesting how people noted that new World of Warcraft players tend to skew towards the “good” (“Alliance”) races instead. It’s one thing to have a hard time actually committing evil actions in a game gives you the option to do so, and subsequently recognizes your character evil or “renegade” (like Mass Effect and certain Star Wars games). But it’s an even greater testament to the narrative power of games, I think, if characteristics of the avatar and its backstory are sufficient to guide what a player feels comfortable doing with that character.

Incidentally, my youngest brother text messaged me during this 9:00 AM panel to brag that he beat “Psychobilly Freakout” on Expert level on his first try, and then “Free Bird” on his third try, in Guitar Hero 2. Clearly, “Game Studies” runs in the family.

Media Literacy and the Health and Well-Being of Children. Ever since doing a literature review on how communication researchers understand the term ‘media literacy’ for a class a few years back, I’ve had an ongoing personal interest in the topic, and I’ve been looking forward to discussing it more as I teach. One branch of media literacy researchers in communication is particularly concerned with staging “interventions”—videos, workshops, or entire curricula—designed to teach children about how media work, with the hopes of enabling children to critically assess and perhaps produce their own visual messages. Most such curricula that I’ve read about stress that television ads are designed to convince you to buy something and that food packaging is actively misleading, but stop short of telling students not to buy any particular toys or foods.

Ever since I wrote that media literacy lit review, I’ve had one lingering concern: Media literacy interventions test for learning, but not for effects. I think it should not surprise us that if you teach one class some stuff about media, and then test them later on the course material, they’ll do better at the test than the control group who doesn’t get a class. What I want to know, though, is what skills this translates to outside of a test-taking, classroom setting. Seeing as how such curricula seem to get government funding at least in part due to claims that they provide children with psychological resistance to misleading ad messages—a public health concern, as the panel of this title indicates—I’ve been dying to see a study that actually tests whether these curricula actually have that effect.

This panel provided just that study, and the result was even more cleverly and robustly designed than I’d imagined. Ariel Chernin, a recent Annenberg graduate, presented a paper co-written with her advisor, Bob Hornik, which tested two things: Can an instructional video teach kids that commercials are meant to persuade you, and if so, does being taught about persuasive intent make kids less susceptible to persuasion?

The previous presentation on the panel, by Cynthia Scheibe, offered some evidence that young children can be taught about persuasive intent, contrary to the claims of some developmental psychologists and anti-advertising advocates. Ariel’s presentation offered additional evidence for this, showing a bit of the video that kids watched, which explained rather plainly that ads are trying to make you buy stuff. (The control group got a video with Bill Nye talking about plants.) Two weeks later, the kids came back to watch a cartoon with a commercial break, and answered a number of questions so they wouldn’t be aware they were specifically being questioned about ad content. And, contrary to the assumptions of media literacy researchers and instructors, the group that saw the video was actually more persuaded by the advertising than the group that didn’t.

This may have just been an effect of priming (or some related psychological phenomenon), whereby the kids who saw the video had been thinking more about advertising already (even after two weeks!), and so ended up paying more attention to ads. It wasn’t the result I was expecting, though, and certainly wasn’t the result most media literacy researchers expect, so it was all rather exciting for me.

Respondent Renee Hobbs, a well-known media literacy researcher, noted that this panel shows that media literacy is now out of its “infancy” and into its “toddlerhood,” and remarked that it’s important for media literacy curricula to be more wide-ranging in its messages—not just telling kids “commercials make you want to buy stuff,” but also teaching production skills, for example. I wonder, though, if the effects of an entire curriculum might just be deeper and longer-term than the effects of a single video, like the one Ariel showed. And, of course, we need to ask whether resistance to persuasion should be the prioritized goal of media literacy education, or whether the potential of increased susceptibility to ad messages is a small price to pay for learning other skills and information. It would be interesting to see whether a (relatively) short-term effect of increased susceptibility to mediated persuasion during childhood actually translates into (variously positive or negative) ongoing effects down the line. What if the kids getting media literacy education are a little more easily persuaded now, but much more media-savvy and critical as adults, thanks to the head start? All in all, I see a lot of interesting possibilities for additional research in this area.

The Impact of Visual Communication: Networking the Power of the Visual and Visual Communication Studies Division Business Meeting and Game Studies Special Interest Group Business Meeting. The first of these meetings was a roundtable session that sought to question and best understand the points of commonality and complements between the various disciplines implied in “visual communication studies.” The second was a discussion about that division’s past, present, and (projected) future membership. The third was about an entirely different division, discussing at times what its own membership could agree upon. For me, the resulting discussions were interesting not only for what they set out to discuss, but just as much for what they got me thinking about: namely, how academic communities of knowledge arrange themselves.

Conferences like ICA are organized into divisions (e.g., Mass Communication) and special interest groups (SIGs, e.g., Game Studies). Divisions, by virtue of having more members, are allowed to host more panels, and get more funding from the association. The upshot of this system is that SIGs are generally trying to get approved as divisions, and divisions are trying to maintain membership so they don’t get bumped back to SIGs. Meanwhile, there’s a debate surrounding whether it should be more difficult to start up new SIGs, perhaps because the existing divisions are concerned that having so many new SIGs dilutes membership among existing divisions. Those in favor of allowing relatively easy SIG startup, on the other hand, contend that new SIGs are often the hotbeds for the creative thinking and new ideas in the field at large.

I’m still too new to ICA to comment on this very intelligently, but from what I have seen so far, it’s important to make a distinction between starting new SIGs for the purpose of fostering new ideas, and starting new SIGs that replicate the function of existing divisions. There is a lot of the latter going on in some other academic organizations, surrounded by gossipy tales about political rifts between administrators. I haven’t really noticed this at ICA, though. New SIGs include groups like Game Studies, which often studies media in ways completely ignored by other communication researchers and theorists. (Outside this division, the only papers about games tend to stick to studying whether they make kids violent or whether they can be used to teach lessons about health.) I think it will be a great day when modes of thinking circulating in Game Studies have percolated into the field at large enough that a separate group for just this medium won’t be needed anymore—but for now, it is serving an important purpose.

It can be tricky for some divisions and SIGs to feel like they’re competing for members. I think one short-term solution, at least, would be to host more poster presentations at conferences like ICA. This year’s acceptance rate was a bit low for a conference of this type, I think, at about 43% overall. Visual Communication Studies could particularly benefit from an increased number of poster sessions, given the nature of what folks are presenting. I might have preferred one myself to a high-density session, though there could be a note when people submit about whether one’s presentation is likely to include moving images that would work better projected from a computer. I do applaud ICA for attempting to make poster sessions feel less like the conference ghetto, with such efforts like the cash prize for best poster.

That’s just my two cents for now, anyway. I imagine I’ll mull on this further as I get more deeply involved with certain divisions and attend more conferences.

Digital Mediations of Personal Narratives. This panel discussed “digital storytelling” insofar as online scrapbooking, Facebook, MySpace, and other such services constitute the construction of “personal narrative” online. It should be no surprise, perhaps, that I have more to say now about what I read between the lines than about the original papers themselves (though I do recommend downloading the original papers if you are an ICA member).

During audience Q&A, someone raised a question about what “storytelling” really means. As I’ve alluded to elsewhere on this blog, storytelling and narrative are hotly contested terms in certain disciplines, and referring to a Facebook page as a “narrative” is bound to raise some hackles. I’m comfortable enough, though, with the idea of a “personal narrative” as distinct from an “authorial narrative” (or whatever you call those stories actually intentionally structured as stories), so I’ll leave that debate aside.

What really interested me was the implied follow-up question: What’s so “digital” about “digital storytelling”? I plan to revisit the broader question behind this—what we mean in communication research and theory when we discuss “digital” media—in a paper for next year’s ICA (if not sooner), which will be be investigating the theme of “keywords in communication.” For now, though, I’d just like to throw out a couple quick thoughts.

When we discuss “digital storytelling” with regard to Facebook—or even other web applications that more readily lend themselves to traditional narrative, such as Blogger and WordPress—the “digital” part refers largely to advances in ease of production and transmission. Because digital messages are easily and quickly transmitted over long distances, and simultaneously accessible and copyable from multiple points, it’s relatively quick and cheap for producers to create media and share it widely. For some media forms that actually do seek audiences, such developments do, of course, lead to advances for the consumer as well. Notably, this includes potentially less expensive products (thanks to the lower overhead for producers), and a broader array of consumables to choose from (thanks to the enlarged market of newly-enabled producers).

Contrast this with how we might understand “digital storytelling” in a medium like video games. Here, “digital” does not necessarily invoke images of democratization among producers and the related broadening of markets with countless niches to choose from. We can see this somewhat at work with Flash games and “casual games,” perhaps, but, for the most part, this kind of digital storytelling has yet to be as fully automated; interaction with the code of programs is still at the forefront of considerations for content creators. The “stories” told by amateurs in digital form are still pretty easily distinguishable from the stories told by professionals backed by giant studios, despite how well text-based websites may have blurred this line for books, and online video may have blurred it for film. And, while the internet does indeed broaden access to downloadable and web-based games, these are not necessarily the best representations of “digital storytelling”—computer and console games that are still locked down with DRM and sold via retail do not really match our other understanding of “digital” as connected to the speed and ease of use of the internet.

These are just a couple preliminary thoughts for a more in-depth project, of course, inspired by works like Krippendorff’s metaphors of communication, Downes and McMillan’s article on defining interactivity, and Sterne’s book chapter questioning what’s “digital” in digital music. I’m pretty excited about next year’s ICA theme; leave it to incoming president Barbie Zelizer (Annenberg’s “Raymond Williams Professor of Communication”) to encourage researchers and theorists to collaboratively compile an updated Keywords for the field.

Visuals From an Artistic Perspective. As for my own session at this conference, I presented a paper on experimental comics and visual language alongside presentations about architecture, ethonographic/art films, the photography of Jacob Riis, and electronic color techniques from years past. It was an interesting mix, but I didn’t really get a chance to mull over the conceptual bridges between these because there is no Q&A following such “high density” sessions.

For my own part, at least, I wish I hadn’t lost the last two pages of my notes immediately before my presentation, but I think I recovered gracefully enough. (Hopefully nobody minded me announcing, “And now we reach the uncharted territory of me presenting without my notes,” as a means of gathering my wits and my nerve for the final stretch.) One very pared down version of the paper has already been submitted for journal review, but if you’re interested, you can download the presentation slides and the notes (including the last two pages!) here.

One thing I never really had time to get into in either the presentation or the paper is the contrast between the development of the conventions of comic books and video games. In this paper, you see, I argue that feelings of cultural marginalization have led alternative comic artists to experiment with the basic formal conventions of the medium, rallied behind a common notion of comics as a “visual language,” or, similarly, as “sequential art.” This is a particularly ahistorical understanding of the medium, actively discounting single-panel works traditionally known as comics (like Family Circus and The Far Side) in favor of a formal definition that still leaves lots of possibilities for diverse work. Some comic artists have gone even further, trying to actively cut themselves off from other traditional comics material like superhero stuff, happy to call their work by other terms entirely to suggest different artistic pretensions (e.g., graphic novels).

Video game theorists, so far as I can tell, have attempted no similar feat of rallying behind a common definition that cuts out any “unwanted” crowd. This is interesting to me, as there’s a great deal more formal disparity within this medium than within comics. The line between your average alternative comic and your average superhero comic is significantly less blurry than the line between your average puzzle game and your average video RPG, but at least one journalist still boldly proclaimed at one point that “Maus is not a comic book.” How hard (or even desirable) would it be, I wonder, for some like-minded groups of game designers to suddenly proclaim that they’re working on “progressional art”? Games without a player-guided narrative progression simply wouldn’t count as part of their artistic movement anymore, and the stated goal of this movement would be to explore all the different things one could do with “progression” as the one formal constant to experiment around.

Would we see something like we’ve seen with comics in recent years? The break between these sides of the medium hasn’t been permanent, or even very long-lived. Superhero comics have been welcomed back into the fold of the “graphic novel” shelf eventually, of course, but the break in between arguably gave alternative and art comics the space they needed to get mainstream magazines, book stores, and libraries thinking of the medium as worthy of adult attention. It’s possible that video games would benefit similarly from such a movement, but it’s hard to imagine such a move happening. As my paper presented at ICA argues, after all, this was largely able to happen in comics because of the influence of a few, particularly high-profile creators who were pretty much able to do the work to prove their point, relatively free of the pressures upon more profitable media. There are some influential game designers, of course, but games are much more collaborative products, and the market is much more demanding of blockbusters.

This is the argument I wanted to make in a paper, but it requires so much background knowledge that to get into the nuances of it, I’d need to write one to two other papers first. Such are the minor annoyances of academic brevity, I suppose. And brevity, as this post surely indicates, is a condition from which I have clearly never suffered.

I thought I’d share some thoughts on a few of the panels and presentations I saw, including the panel I chaired in the Digital Games division. It’s not representative of everything I saw, and sadly, I had to miss several things I wanted to catch, but that’s the way things are at a big conference with lots of interesting stuff going on.

Gender Studies I: Performing Gender. I met Heather A. Beasley at an earlier panel, and I’m glad I did; my ears perked up when she said something about geek identity. “Witches, Warlocks, Vampires, and Damsels in Distress: Gender Performance in Live-Action Roleplaying” presents an interesting and challenging question: Does pretending to take on certain traditional (even hegemonic) gender roles actually boost geeks’ self-esteem?

As I’ve written about here before, geek identity is marked for many by an active and vocal rejection of certain cultural norms, including “appropriate” behavior based on gender and maturity. Why, then, do we consume so much entertainment media that seems to affirm traditional gender roles, including the ideals of the heroic man rescuing the damsel in distress? Heather’s specifically studying LARPing, but when you think about it, the same question could be applied to any number of geeky “power fantasy” entertainment media. Come to think of it, I think some geeks get a kick out of seeing the normative gender relations thrown out of whack in such media (e.g., playing a game or seeing a movie with a powerful woman who’s not just a sex symbol), but that makes LARPs and RPGs that much more interesting to consider: Why settle on normative gender roles when you make up the story and characters yourself? The answer, according to Heather, may be that it boosts self-esteem outside the game, remaining separate enough from life to encourage reflection on real-world gender relations (though she acknowledges the flip side, the potential danger of reifying stereotypes). This project is just getting started, so I’ll be interested to keep up with it.

Television I: Gender and Identity. Amber Botts gave a presentation titled “Nerds and Geeks and Slackers … Oh My? Chuck, The Big Bang Theory, and Reaper’s Geek Chic Romantic Heroes.” It was nice to hear someone outside of blogs and Wired magazine acknowledging the slew of recent shows targeting a geek demographic. I especially enjoyed the examples of how such shows cast men in the traditionally “female” role of heterosexual relationships, such as when Chuck (I think?) dances a tango with a woman but needs her to lead (and gets dipped at the end).

Ultimately, Amber suggests that the geeky guys from these shows are being groomed not to keep challenging gender norms, but to show that they can graduate to more traditionally acceptable male roles—if not aggressive “alpha” males, then at least to caring and courageous “beta” males. Is there even a way of depicting a “gamma” male such that audiences know they should feel proud of such a character?

Communications and Digital Culture II: The Mainstream/Data Stream. In “‘We Win at the Internet’: The Definition of Digital Mainstream,” Mirian Greenfield reviewed a successful attempt at Google-bombing a politician’s name to be associated with something vile (something we might call “the santorum model”). Ultimately, though, Miriam rejected this as an example of an idea going “mainstream,” as the success of the Google-bomb didn’t necessarily reflect a broader public consciousness of the issue online (if I understood that right).

This led to an extended exchange among audience members about what “the mainstream” really is on the web. Some suggested that for such an item to be “mainstream” in our culture, it would have to be picked up by other media outlets like newspapers and television. This still leaves the question, however, of whether the web has its own mainstream (recognized among the most dedicated users) much in the same way that “mainstream” comics are much more fantasy-genre-focused than mainstream entertainment in other media. If that’s the case, even this Google-bombing may not qualify: It’s just gaming the system, not necessarily representing web-public opinion. I thought it was an interesting conversation, anyway.

Digital Games V: Drugs and Violence. I also got to chair a panel with Jason Farman and Cynthia Nichols. Cynthia (a co-author with Amy Rask and Ian Turnipseed) presented “Video Games: A Potential Influence on Steroid Use Attitudes and Behaviors.” The study found a positive relation between playing Blitz: The League, which allows you to medicate players on the fly, and a positive attitude toward steroid use. This sounds more like correlation than causation to me, but what I found particularly interesting was in the broader scope of the survey the authors conducted, which found that college students who spend a lot of time playing games (that aren’t Blitz) tend to be pretty anti-drug. Given all the negative hype around the effects of games, that seems like a result reporters might find story-worthy. There’s arguably some displacement effect—people who are home playing games aren’t out doing drugs—but what I find even more interesting personally is the possibility that this reflects some value or ideal in gamer/geek cultures.

Next, Jason Farman presented “Hypermediating the Game Interface: Grand Theft Auto and the Alienation Effect.” He discussed how Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas could potentially act as a critique on gangster imagery and violent content when the protagonist is dressed up clownishly, forcing the player to reflect on what’s happening on-screen. I wonder if the argument could be taken even further—are all games experienced this way by virtue of the various displays and instructions on screen, breaking the sense of immersion you might get in film? As one audience member pointed out, however, it may be a little too hopeful to suggest that every example of such hypermediation is designed to (or successful at) getting people to reflect on narrative content. Personally, I wonder how common such reflection is beyond folks like Jason and myself, who can’t help but think really hard about the games we play because that’s part of the fun for us.

And as for me, I presented “Getting 1UP on Death: Failure and Consequences in Narrative Video Games” (which I’m soon submitting to a journal, following some revisions and a new title). It’s actually less about violence than about storytelling, suggesting that having to die and retry scenes in narrative games breaks a sense of fictional coherence (building off the ideas of rules, fiction, and coherence proposed by Jesper Juul in Half-Real). I didn’t actually show any slides—I forgot the adapter to my Macbook, didn’t feel like loading things off a thumb drive onto somebody else’s computer, and didn’t really need pictures anyway—but the notes indicate that there are slides, and I tend to post both my presentation notes and slides here, so there you go.

Thanks… And finally, I just wanted to close by offering a few specific notes of thanks. Thanks to Heather Beasley and Jessica “J.M.” Frey (whose presentation on cosplay I missed, unfortunately) for some interesting conversation over Irish pub music. Thanks to Matt Byrnie for meeting up to chat about geek research. Thanks to Jason Farman, Cynthia Nichols, and everyone who asked questions in the audience for making our panel so fun to be at. And thanks especially to Tony Avruch, co-chair of the Digital Games division, for taking the time to give me a lot of practical input.

Dr. Anderegg analyzes a variety of statistics and cultural objects in attempting to come up with a comprehensive account of what behaviors get kids labeled as geeks and nerds (sometimes reaching conclusions very similar to those of my own dissertation!). This includes discussion of things like nerds’ interest in “magic” and fantasy fiction, but focuses most of all on why kids might feel like they can’t (or shouldn’t) be good at science and math. His strongest arguments, I think, are those that draw upon his direct experience and knowledge as a child psychologist. His discussion of the connection (or lack thereof) between geek stereotypes and Asperger syndrome is the most compelling I’ve read, and all the quotes from conversations with kids and parents really help give a sense of how non-nerds go out of their way not to be seen as nerds.

With the exception of a brief note in the conclusion about a 17-year-old who considers herself a member of a “Geek Club,” the book mostly considers “nerd identity” as synonymous with “the nerd stereotype”—something negative that we need to do away with. This means, perhaps unsurprisingly, that there isn’t really much consideration of geek/nerd identity and culture as something celebrated among adults; it’s something kids mostly grow out of, the author suggests, before they go on to make tons of money. In some ways, though, this was just a necessary limitation in scope, and I’m hoping to help fill in the gaps in this area myself.

If you happen to read this book yourself, I’d be very curious of your take on it. Please feel free to leave comments on this post or shoot me an email at jason at geekstudies dot org.