Author Archives: kreddig

The Limits of Videogames of the Oppressed

At the beginning of Frasca’s article, he asks some rather conceptual questions:

Is it possible to design videogames that deal with social and political issues? Could videogames be used as a tool for encouraging critical thinking? Do videogames offer an alternative way of understanding reality?

After reading Bogost’s book, we all know that the answers to these questions is yes.  As I’ve said before, it’s much harder to find things that you can’t do with videogames.  It’s more interesting to ask the quantitative versions of these questions.  In other words, how useful are games that deal with political or social issues?

The answer to this question is “not very useful.”  I come to this answer by looking at the asymmetry of people who play videogames and people who care about social and political issues.  Other than Professor Sample, what cultured, intelligent adult that you know plays videogames?  (Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t an attack on Prof. Sample; it’d be pretty chill if my Dad liked COD as much as I do.)  Furthermore, what 12 to 22-year-olds (outside of the GMU Honors College of course) develop imformed opinions about social and political issues?  These questions make it clear that games of a socially critical nature have a very limited audience.

My overall point of this post is this: non-entertaining and non-educating videogames are only made to show that videogames don’t have to entertain or educate. Other than that, they’re pretty useless.

Casual Gamer Demographics

http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?1004798&R=1004798

“[G]enerally speaking, the more ‘hardcore’ the gamer, the more likely he is to be male, and conversely, the casual gamer will tend to skew female.”

This article gives a brief description of gamer demographics, specifically the break down of what gender typically plays what game. It was written in 2007 and the statistics are from 2006 – right around the same time A Casual Revolution was written.  I’m wondering how these demographics have shifted in the last five to six years. My speculation is that casual gaming has become equally popular between males and females over time, but hardcore gaming has become more male dominated.

A new, limited dimension to analyzing games

The purpose of the assigned reading, which points out the 17 suicides of Foxconn workers in the last 5 years, is to illustrate yet another dimension of gaming.  As Sample acknowledges in his article, a complete study of videogames doesn’t only include gameplay, soundtrack, and storyline, but also considers hardware and history.

While the articles by Johnson and Sample show us the dark side of producing technology, I’d like to point out that technology helps us.  Even Foxconn, which is nearly demonized in Daisey’s speech, can be viewed in a positive light.  The company employs, houses, and feeds nearly one million people—a fact that seems overshadowed by the suicides.  Furthermore, the inputs needed to make a smartphone aren’t limited to what’s talked about in Phone Story.  The people who design smartphones, write the software for smartphones, and market smartphones certainly have happier stories than the workers at Foxconn.  And finally, Johnson, Sample, Daisey, and Phone Story don’t mention the enormous benefit that consumers of smartphones experience.

I am all for searching for narratives in the production of videogames and videogame platforms.  I think that we can gain indispensable insight when we consider who makes what we play, where it came from, and when it was made.  However, let us remain impartial while examining videogames.  Let’s not make claims that when I play Temple Run on my iPhone, I am responsible for the enslavement of children on the other side of the world.  I hope that class on Tuesday won’t merely be a discussion of subpar working conditions in China, because that’s outside the domain of videogame studies.

A Problem with Galloway and his Moments

After listening to the class discussion on Tuesday and reading through the blog posts, it’s clear that Galloway has challenged our usual perception of video games. His division of Gamic Action into four categories based on who’s playing (the person or machine) and where the playing is done (inside the game or outside the game) is certainly a doable classification, and will help us analyze all aspects of games critically.

However, I have a big complaint about Galloway’s way of classifying games.  Through class discussion, and in some blog posts, people pointed out examples of Gamic Action that didn’t quite fit into a distinct quadrant.  My mind went directly to playable cutscenes that blur the line between Pure Process and Dromenon.  Furthermore, diegetic and nondiegetic acts seem to blur together when the decisions made by the player are not based on just the rules of the game, but also the rules outside of the game.  For example, I play a game differently if the game has checkpoints, or a menu option to save progress.  This nondiegetic action of saving my game has a distinct effect on the Dromenon.  This leads me to my overreaching point:  Gamic Action that exists between two quadrants isn’t an exception, but actually more common than Gamic Action that fits purely into one quadrant.  This fact means that Galloway’s categories, the four moments, are over simplifications of what’s actually going on.  I’m afraid that placing a part of a game into a quadrant will hide more than illuminate.  For example, if we categorize an action as Dromenon, it hides all nondiegetic and machine aspects of the action.  I agree with professor Sample’s insight that there’s more of a continuum rather than four discrete categories.  Rather than place a Gamic Action in a quadrant, we should acknowledge every diegetic, nondiegetic, operator, and machine aspect of the action.