I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about Chiptune music lately—in part because it’s something I’m looking to write about in the future but also because I’ve recently started exploring composing music through trackers like MilkyTracker and LSDJ. The sound-visual relations brought up in Rickert/Salvo’s piece has got me thinking about the Demoscene/Chiptune communities and gatherings; in early fall, I went to a small Chiptune and Glitch Art festival in Evansville, IN, where musicians created music with a variety of electronic implements (including, in most cases, the Nintendo Game Boy) while visual artists used various programs to create dynamic, pixely, glitchy art in real time to pair with the music. The whole things was a super low-budget, hacked-together mess and the experience was incredible.

One of the things that struck me about Rickert/Salvo’s article was the part on GarageBand. I find really interesting their dissatisfaction with how unintuitive or difficult GB is to use—which, don’t get me wrong, it definitely is. But compared to the audio/visual trackers that are favored in the Demoscene/Chiptune communities, GB is incredibly user friendly. Part of the reason these trackers are so difficult to use is because they’re hacked together ROMs—with limited resources, it’s really difficult to create a user-friendly interface. And while there are no shortage of more friendly audio production tools that can produce the same kinds of sounds, these communities take a certain level of pride in using these hacked-together music-making programs instead. But even though the interface is not friendly, it still allows for the type of re/composition that Rickert and Salvo point out as being generative with GB.

I feel like I’m in a really weird place after reading Gray’s piece on methods of resistance and protest in online gaming spaces. I think there is a significant challenge in making one’s voice heard in these games and the forums that surround them—especially so if yours is a marginal perspective or identity. With that in mind, I was really excited to hear about how two groups would approach this really unique problem in a way that could potentially affect change. Instead, what I saw was a group of gamers who just liked being assholes. Maybe I’m misunderstanding how these “protests” worked, but from what I gathered from Gray’s description is that the Puerto Reekan Killaz would go into a new game and, apropos of nothing, start team killing of glitching. I guess maybe I could see the value in doing this stuff as retaliation for someone making a racist/sexist/homophobic comment in chat—in that case, there’s a clear connection between stimulus (dudebro gamers being pricks) and response (retaliatory teamkilling of that particular member). But when you go into a game and disrupt it when no one in that game has slighted you, what does it actually do to promote your cause? If I’m playing a game fairly and quietly, and someone starts griefing and talking about how I apparently hate women gamers, is that going to help my opinion of women gamers or harm it? It seems like those tactics would end up doing more harm than good. Honestly, it just kinda feels like finding a convenient and self-righteous excuse for being a dick. Again, this all changes when it’s retaliatory—at least then the offending person can draw a connection between “Oh hey. I was a dick to these women, and they absolutely slaughtered me. Maybe I shouldn’t be a dick.”

I feel really…weird, criticizing someone’s unique form of resistance. Because, I mean, what other ways can they fight back when their reporting of racist/sexist/homophobic behavior goes unheeded? I like the tactic of sharing stories of harassment on the forums, but if those get deleted, it feels like a truly Sisyphean task to keep at it every day. Boycotting games that are massively popular like GTA also doesn’t feel like it would make a huge impact. So, I can see the allure of these disruptive tactics because one can see immediate impact through the gamers’ reactions. But while it’s effective in getting a rise and causing frustration, I have to wonder how much good it’s doing. How much positive change can really be affected in this way?

I find myself a bit torn when reading Delwiche. I love the idea of building a course centered around ethnographic studies in virtual worlds, but I am concerned with the steep learning curve that MMOs tend to have. I would imagine it would be difficult to build out salient research questions about a virtual world when one has only spent a five hours a week for a few weeks playing. To me, that feels like visiting a country for a week and then proposing a research project based on the culture you’ve observed; yeah, that’s probably enough time to pick up on a few surface features of that culture, but it takes considerably more immersion to get at research questions that aren’t grasping at surface-level stuff. But perhaps this isn’t as much of an issue as I’m anticipating?

I’m not a big fan of the idea of using Second Life or other sandbox games for game-creation, however. If you’re going to teach a course on virtual game design, and you’re asking your students to learn a new platform for creating games, why wouldn’t you instead teach something like GameSalad or Game Maker Studio? I just hate the idea of spending a whole class teaching students to create within a platform that likely won’t be used again outside of the course. Yes, there is the possibility of significant transfer of skills between game design in a sandbox game and actual game design, but I guess I just have a hard time justifying teaching how to use a set of tools if those tools are going to be largely useless outside of the confines of that specific class. Considering both game-maker programs and Second Life will likely have some learning curve involved, wouldn’t it be better to teach using the medium that affords students the best chance at continuing their work after the course has ended?

So, I apparently misread the course calendar and read/posted ahead. So last week I posted about part III instead of part II, so I’ll be writing about something in part II today.

I’m a bit torn about Benjamin Miller’s article “Metaphor, Writer’s Block, and The Legend of Zelda.” On the one hand, the metaphor is totally apt, and I can see the connections Miller is making quite easily. I’ve always thought of writing/school in terms of games, because so much of my life is bound up in game-like thinking. So, I’m totally on board in that regard. But I’m not so sure about using this metaphor in the classroom. I already get enough resistance when I try to bring in activities or projects that are games-oriented. I’ve tried using games metaphors before, and I’ve run into some issues with students not having any experience with the games I’m talking about (even games that seem totally common, like Legend of Zelda or Super Mario Bros.) A metaphor only really works when one relates something less familiar to something more familiar; it all kind of falls apart if both items are unfamiliar.

I will say, though, I totally agree with approaches to course “mechanics” and syllabus design could take a few cues from game design. I really like the idea of revisiting readings later on in the semester and having students measure the differences in how they understand it. Then again, games do a great job of making sure revisiting an area is worth the player’s while (power-ups, hidden things, progression through the game, etc). How—if we have a hard enough time getting our students to read things the first time—do we incentivize them reading the same thing once again? Any approach to syllabus crafting is difficult, but this article at least has left me a small problem to solve

I honed in on Lee Sherlock’s chapter right away, because I was hopeful that there would be a greater discussion of embodiment in role-playing games. World of Warcraft was one of a long line of games where I played as a female avatar; it was, for me, a space where I could explore acting in a body that was not my own. Being able to embody virtual female characters was and continues to be an important aspect of playing games for me and I attribute the opportunity to explore gender expression virtually to my understanding of my own gender identity today. Last week, I talked a bit about how I’ve grown less fond of character creation over the last few years. This is mostly because of my growing frustration with the gendering of character creation—you often have two choices swole male body or petite female body, and your clothing choices are then limited based on that choice. And that is deeply frustrating to me.

I was hoping that Sherlock’s piece would talk a little bit more about how the design of game engines limit gender/sexual expression through what players are/are not allowed to do. I do appreciate the attention paid to how LGBTQ players are able to subvert the limited options afforded to them in order to outwardly express their queer identities, however, I wish more attention was paid to how game engines limit expression.

I’m really drawn in by Bogost’s section on rebuttal or raising objections to the arguments made in the design of a game. He responds to players’ seeming lack of ability to raise procedural objections in two parts: 1.) user alteration of a game’s procedures is usually not allowed but one can try to poke at inconsistencies in the design to play it how you will, and 2) since most texts are not dialectic, one can simply create their own game in response (easier said than done, Ian). Response 2 is a bit disingenuous, considering the considerable obstacles that stop the average player from creating and distributing a game that responds in a meaningful way. But I wish Bogost would have expanded a bit more on subversive forms of play; the ability to resist the procedural arguments that a game designer makes is one of the more rewarding aspects of playing and responding to games.

In Mario Maker, there is a sadistic, evil level creator that likes to make levels that are tediously difficult and tricky, but one level in particular stood out as being truly sadistic: a level with a series of puzzles that each necessitated killing Yoshi to proceed. One player was so offended by the design of this level that he found a way to exploit each puzzle so that Yoshi would survive every encounter, while still allowing the player to advance to the next puzzle. The player was able to subvert the will of the designer and completed the level in a way that ran completely contrary to its intended experience.

One of the reasons I have my ICAP students do a rhetorical analysis of games is because of the rich visual/aural/mechanical languages games tend to use to convey meaning to their players. Because most games start with tutorial levels and are designed to scaffold information in an accessible way, games provide an interesting space in which students can quickly become privy to the design language being employed by the developers. Because the teaching of how to interact with a game is part of the game itself, analysis of how the game communicates with the user can be a great jumping-off point for having students critically examine other visual mediums that are not so inherently didactic. It’s also a great way to talk about internal design grammars among genres of games. If a game expects the player of a platforming game to run to the right and press A to jump, these are internal design grammars that are inherent to the genre. Students who are less familiar with games will recognize these assumptions as breaking points, where the in-game instruction fails to consider novice players’ lack of knowledge about these conventions. By talking about how designers make assumptions about what their players know, we can start to identify assumptions that designers in other mediums make about the literacy of their users.

So, I’m really bad at Go. Like, absolutely garbage at playing it. Which is to say, I know how to play better than most people. But compared to people who actively play, my style is absolutely remedial. I make sloppy shapes, I have no sense of pacing, and I make plays that give up initiative on the reg. And, oddly enough, I love losing. Love it. I’ve played 9-stone handicap games against people waaaay above my level and had my score absolutely dwarfed in comparison to the other player. And I had fun.

Huizinga writes that “The spirit of the professional is no longer the true play-spirit; it is lacking in spontaneity and carelessness. This affects the amateur too, who begins to suffer from an inferiority complex” (197). I don’t know if I agree with that. I look back at the unorthodox early-game of the late Go Seigen and see an immense playfulness in his style—his brash willingness to work against convention kicked off an entire movement of crazy opening moves later dubbed the Shin Fuseki (“new opening”) Era. Outside of board games, I think of Magic Johnson, whose finesse on the court Sicart describes as “Dark play,” or “a playful approach to play situations” (Play Matters 31). Perhaps these players are outliers in professional games, but I absolutely see room for playfulness in competitive sport.

Which brings me back to the amateur, to losing against a skillful opponent. I’ve played Go against people twenty years my senior, who have been playing for decades, and had them wipe the floor with me, even with a significant handicap in my favor. But I also never went into those games expecting to win; I went in expecting to learn, to play my best game. The elegance of their moves showed me the ugliness in my own and gave me hints as to how I should improve. And my lack of experience allowed me to play unorthodox moves that would surprise and confuse the more experienced player. In playing sub-optimally, there were moments where I was able to think around all of the built-up heuristics and strategies that the more experienced player was used to, and those moments of brief, fleeting, (and usually fairly insignificant) triumph salved the sting of losing some.

Play is all in how you approach the game, and the standardization/professionalization of competitive sports does not necessarily take that away.

I found Wolfe’s essay particularly interesting, considering her results seemed to contradict the perception that men tend to dominate conversations both off- and online. While the perception remains—and, indeed, women tended to be less argumentative and more likely to agree for the sake of moving the conversation along smoothly—there was a nearly even split in terms of both talking time and likelihood that someone would directly respond. I do have to wonder, however, if the subject matter being discussed had any effect on the study. In discussing something as traumatic and emotional as rape, I wonder if the men talked less because they felt less able to effectively talk about something so emotionally-charged and something that is seen to predominantly affect women. I am left to wonder what this study would look like with different topics of conversation. Maybe even a study that spans multiple class discussions, so as to normalize any affects that the discussion topic might have on the distribution of speakers. An analysis of a single discussion without any kind of control amounts to little more than an anecdote dressed up like empirical research. While I like the idea of the separate pilot study that Wolfe brings up in the conclusion, I would want to see a more robust version of this particular study first, considering the results are so interesting.

Before I get into things, I just need to say that I’m absolutely tickled to see the term “grrl power” in Takayoshi’s journal article. Tickled, I say.

Something that really jumped out at me was how the term “grrl” interacted with the procedures of the popular web searches at the time (Lycos, Altavista, etc…tiny gods, it’s been a while since I’ve used Altavista). Inspired by this, I decided to see how Google handled the search terms listed in the article “breast cancer” and “girl websites,” and was pleasantly unsurprised that modern search has a bit more nuance than early search engines when it comes to finding pages. The term “grrl” was in use before these women’s websites were created, but I wonder how much of the term’s continued popularity and use on the web was driven by the sloppy search procedures of early web indexes.

This gets me wondering about modern indexing procedures and whether there are women’s spaces online now that manipulate those procedures to carve out their own space. One idea that comes immediately to mind is Tumblr, in which the methods of interacting with others is the share, the love, and the embedded comment reply. I’m wondering if there is something about these procedures that makes the site particularly friendly women or if that was driven by some other force. I don’t know enough about the history of Tumblr, but it might be interesting to delve into this a little further.