In November 2009, I had the privilege of participating in a roundtable at the American Studies Association (ASA) conference with Anna Everett, Deborah Kimmey, Tara McPherson, Lisa Nakamura, and Kara Thompson on the Digital Humanities (DH). The panel was titled “Neoliberalism, Multiculturalism, and the Means of Digital Humanities Production.” Convened by Kara Thompson, the idea was to intervene in the prevailing discourses of DH and provide a critique of DH’s productive relations from the perspective of Cultural Studies, Ethnic Studies, American Studies, Women’s Studies, and so on. We covered a wide range of topics: labor and racism in games, code studies, activism, violating copyrights as praxis, undergrads at USC designing K-12 curriculum, archiving MMOs, the tyranny of the new in choosing objects of study, and much more. Many of the issues we discussed could be considered standard touchstones of DH but what made the discussion unique was our shared investment in a progressive cultural politics dedicated to interrogating and reworking established structures of power. It also doesn’t hurt that I was the only white dude on the panel.

Significantly, we didn’t just focus on the corporate university but the far more subtle ways technologies reproduce oppressive social relations in everyday life within and without academia. Although left unsaid, our guiding principle seemed to be that, as Carolyn Marvin has argued, technologies do not determine social relationships but enter into already established relations. They can either reinforce or transform them and it’s up to us to do something about it. Without a robust critical apparatus, DH has and will continue to unwittingly remake the world in its old image. (You know, the one that has a whole bunch of white guys sitting around a highly polished oak table comparing business cards.)

I didn’t write about the panel at the time because only now do I understand the significance of that experience to my formation as a scholar. It wasn’t simply that I was able to share an intellectual space with some of my academic idols, but that it articulated my grievances with DH as well as demonstrated to me that I wasn’t alone.

For the past few years I have had, at best, an ambivalent relationship with DH. Since I am primarily trained in Cultural Studies, Critical Race Theory, and Media Studies, I cannot help but take issue with what I see is a potentially technofetishistic obsession in DH with technological transformation via the creation and use of various digital tools/platforms/networks, etc. as agents of social change. These efforts are often performed under the guiding ethos of collaboration which often becomes an uncritical stand-in for an empty politics of access and equity. There are exceptions, but it seems, and I realize I am generalizing here, that issues of cultural politics are downplayed or, more commonly, considered a given within DH. There’s a disposition that the battles of race, gender, class and ecology have already been won, their lessons have been learned, and by espousing a rhetoric of equity everything will fall into place.

DH does have its strong suits:  e.g. the ethics of copyright, privacy and open source, but as an intellectual community its positions on race, gender, class, and the environment are undertheorized and underimplemented even if many practitioners think otherwise. My concern is that when everyone in DH finally builds his/her One Collaborative Widget to Rule Them All, the dust will settle around Mordor and it’ll still be mostly a bunch of white academics at relatively wealthy universities talking about open access and probably around a rather nice table with a few unlocked iPads on it.

To prevent this outcome, DH needs to cultivate an equal interest in critique as in creation. Our play needs a politics. Alongside the creative and practical, we need to have an attendant critical effort that has the license to step in and provoke revision, or, better yet, assist with production. And we need an intellectual community that welcomes this interventionist presence and acknowledges its current lack.

These thoughts were circulating in my mind last weekend during the 2010 THATCamp. Designed as unconference that embodies a more active and dialogic alternative to the traditional conference format, THATCamp is a successful and beloved event in DH which has spawned a host of regional and international offshoots. Hopelessly poor, I enviously lurked this year’s conference, as well as last year’s, and read with interest as some of my favorite Twitter acquaintances offered updates about the happenings. But as it wrapped up and I looked at the final schedule and browsed the Hacking Academia collaborative book project, I considered how fundamentally different the ASA roundtable was from THATCamp. Much of what I am interested in was left unsaid or assumed. There just didn’t seem to be work engaging explicitly with my concerns.

I tweeted a question, “Where’s the race/gender/power/ecology?”, to the #thatcamp and #hackacad communities and Dan Cohen, one of the organizers of THATCamp, told me to check the submissions to the Hacking Academia project. Since I had been following the conference closely I had already read the submissions, noticed the dearth of discussion of these issues, and meant the question to rhetorically expose the investments and exclusions of THATCamp. Admittedly, it was a rather lame and unsuccessful attempt at intervening into the dialogue about the conference, but I was still disappointed in the lack of engagement with what I feel is a legitimate issue with THATCamp and DH. My purpose was and is not to troll or be negative; rather, I would like THATCamp and all of DH to expand and clarify what it is we do and to embrace a vigorous politics of inclusion and provocation because, behind my curmudgeonly tone in this post, I like THATCamp and I like DH.

Most importantly, I believe that critique can do things too and it can do things  even better with the innovations of DH.

So let’s expand the focus of DH beyond what we do and how we do it to whom we do it with and whom we do it for. Let’s do what matters and let’s make that our battle cry.

Time to start work on my THATCamp 2011 proposal.

In particular, this section of Voorhees’ argument struck me:

The games’ narratives and visual representations continue to deploy race, ethnicity, and nationality to construct characters and plots, but – like other computer-mediated neoliberal discourses (Boler, 2007) – only as obstacles to be overcome. They are starting points that players must traverse in order to configure powerful characters that can do anything and everything. These games are only able to propagate this message by expressing a procedural rhetoric that dubiously represents the social by collapsing difference into sameness.

Voorhess is calling attention to one of the reasons that race has not been given much attention in game studies and that’s because games participate in the construction of a transcendent liberal fantasy of post-raciality and universal sameness. Many games attempt to stage race as a non-issue or a simple stylistic choice solved through the robustness of character modification or appropriately diverse catalogs of bodies.  Voorhees ties this to an ideology of neoliberalism which is certainly a strong component of gaming rhetorics of freedom of choice. But moreover, I think we need to look at how this collapse of difference into sameness generally finds its point of reference in a logic of whiteness or in the assumed deviation from a foundational white subject.

Finally, I think what is implicit in Voorhees’ article, and what I would like to make explicit, is that sameness should not be the goal; rather, games should explore forms of productive difference and engage with race, especially given the rhetorical and persuasive power of the medium. Erasing race or believe that race is best foreclosed in gamespace is far too comfortable a solution for whiteness.

But I say in some ways because I think it can also lead to narrow research that avoids difficult – many times political – questions which might otherwise mire the researcher’s beloved object of study. I find this, and certainly found this at GLS, to be the case in relation to World of Warcraft (WOW).

WOW was undoubtedly the game at the conference; that is, it was the touchstone of most presentations and the point of reference for many conversations. If nothing else, you could count on the person you were speaking with to, at the least, be familiar with it and, potentially, be a level 80 with a weekly raiding schedule and a costume ready to go for Blizzcon.

Certainly WOW’s popularity at the conference has a lot to do with its unparalleled success in the computer games market. It also was the first game many people had played. And then when you factor in the timesink that WOW becomes once you’re hooked, it is no surprise that so many people are thinking, discussing, and writing about it.

That being the case, WOW is also simply a great research environment for the questions scholars at GLS wanted to ask. Since the conference was focused on learning with, through, and in games and the impact of that learning on society at large, most of the presentations and poster sessions presented research that speculated about how people learn in games or what they are learning or how to design games for learning, and so on. WOW or similar MMORPGs tended to be focus given their sociality and cultural status.

But it seems to me that, in the wake of the violent video games lunacy and media vilification and skepticism about games as useful, game scholars tend to overcompensate by producing research that repeatedly demonstrates that games like WOW have educational potential and are productive learning environments. I am not trying to argue that this research is useless, but that I think it is operating with some fundamental blindspots to political issues, specifically relating to race and gender, caused by:

• The nature of the disciplines that are producing the work, i.e. the pitfalls so-called of scientific objectivity.
• The concern that critique undermines the hard-fought place of games as valid and worthwhile cultural objects.
• A certain wide-eyed fascination/fetishization with/of the game born from a lack of experience with games.

This is particularly troublesome to me because these blindspots are some of the most interesting aspects about the learning that is going on in games.

To illustrate, let me reference a panel discussing gender ethnography in WOW. The speakers offered some solid arguments that debunked the notion of the typical WOW gamer and demonstrated how and why women find the game compelling. And while I respect and consider myself a participant in the growing section of feminist scholarship in games that is deconstructing the monolithic hardcore gamer or problematizing the idea there is a “girl gamer” who likes “girl games” (both categories often being sexist and reductive), I think we should also look at how games like WOW stifle feminist playstyles or feminist politics.

It was my impression that critical views of the politics of a game like WOW were dismissed because they might disrupt the very notion that there are some rather productive feminine spaces opened up by WOW and how women are playing and using the game.

This is not the case at all.

What I recommend, however, is that if we are to try and locate a feminist politics within WOW we can only do so by being mindful of how the structure of the game might be resistant to those politics. I pointed out specifically how WOW and all other MMOs, while including the progressive mechanic of cooperation, is still primarily about accumulation of material items, competition, prestige, and the cultivation of personal capital. This is antithetical to a feminist politics due to the patriarchal basis of that competitive and capitalist framework.

Therefore, if we are to uncover or fashion a feminist politics within MMOs we need to  identify both the progressive and oppressive circumstances feminism finds itself in.

Those of us presenting on my panel were tasked with offering our thoughts in a micro-presentation format that translated into a provocative but often frustrating six minutes and forty seconds per speaker. Unfortunately, I had prepared a longer talk and had to trim my content down to three minutes since I was co-presenting.

Therefore, I went ahead and recorded the full length version of my talk.

Link to video.

You can also view the presentation itself here.

Near the end of his talk Erik Loyer mentioned how music, although clearly a tool of emphasis in the post-plastic instrument peripheral games industry, still has a lot of untapped potential. One of the holy grails of game design, as most clearly demonstrated by the massive success of the Wii and the recent announcements by Microsoft and Sony, is intuitive control and accessibility. Given the Wii’s success it is certain that any other potential videogame console competitors will need to discover ways to integrate so-called “casual” gamers and make their products more inviting and easier to use. For Loyer, music is a natural tool to  facilitate this transition since music can affect people of any technical ability or previous gaming experience. Loyer isn’t interested in expanding market share, but in developing new kinds of interactions with games; however, the Wii’s success demonstrates these two aims are not incompatible.

While people are often spoken of as having no rhythm or being tone deaf, music, to be as mind numbingly cliché as possible, is a universal language. Although we might not all be able to sing or stay on beat, we can judge when something sounds good or not and this process is deceptively simple yet involves incredibly complex cognitive calculations and judgments. Compare this to a new player of Halo 3 multiplayer who has no possible baseline with which to judge how to play or let alone play well beyond the standard rewards system of killing a lot of people and not dying often. Inexperienced players lack the extensive conditioning to the interface and the genre’s ruleset and expectation in order to simply operate the game. Many games thus have a built in barrier of access tied to technical capability and game enculturation.

But what if the gameplay and operations of the videogame were based on the qualities and functions of music? With some simplistic interface instruction, any player would be able to understand the basic operations of the game and the prescriptions of good/bad gameplay or basic success/failure measurements. This is where Loyer left off and where his games and design philosophy seem to be heading – utilizing the universality of music as intuitive gameplay. 

My interest in this subject is more critical in focus. Loyer’s discussion of music as a form of design shorthand got me thinking about how game developers use race/ethnicity in a similar fashion when trying to create immersive worlds. Just as music can potentially be a progressive prepackaged set of mechanics, race functions often as a reductive cultural cache of signifiers and logics to efficiently explain the various interactions, backstories, relationships, and hierarchies of races/species/ethnicities in games. In MMORPGs, to take one of the more obvious examples, racial semiotic systems are used to explain antagonistic factioning, e.g. orcs vs. humans and the high fantasy split of monstrous/humanoid and primitive/civilized, etc. In this way, race becomes a toolset to signify incommensurate difference to a player familiar with these cultural codes.

This reminds me of Alexander Galloway’s brief but important analysis of race in World of Warcraft (WOW) in “Starcraft, or, Balance” in Grey Room. He suggests we not concern ourselves with determining whether using these strategies makes a game racist or not; rather, what is more important is how race is coded into the gameworld and often, as in WOW, identified as biological..

Extending this critique in light of Loyer’s perspective on music, I would argue that we need to recognize how race in videogames is motivated by the conditions of the design process itself just as it is a product of aesthetic/stylistic/representational choice. In this way, critical race studies in games should include an analysis of the politics and economies of representation rather than just judging the representations themselves as good or bad in order to avoid the pitfalls of reproducing or legitimizing racial formations through such judgmental discourse.

Today N. Katherine Hayles gave a talk as part of a speaker series on Science Fiction at the University of California, Riverside.  It was entitled “Vernor Vinge’s Rainbow’s End and the Macropolitics of Global Spatialization.”

She set up a productive binary between the conservative transhumanist tendencies in theory and art and more progressive posthumanist tendencies. As she argued, transhumanism seeks to extrapolate the liberla humanist subject while posthumanism deconstructs it.

And while Hayles, continuing her project in How We Became Posthuman, pointed out the pitfalls of posthumanism she still, even while claiming to be ambivalent, seemed to favor the deconstructive approach of posthumanists.

However, I couldn’t help but be far more supicious. Posthumanism, while deconstructing the humanist subject, reinforces the historical validity or existence, at some point, of the “human” through its resistance. Simply said: by moving beyond the human it manufactures the very thing it leaves behind. And as we know there were many subjects not allowed access to that label and many who continue to be dehumanized or relegated to a category of bare life. Given these circumstances it is not only foolish but dangerous to make a push into a post mode.

Why not involve a third position into this grid – antihumanism? Antihumanism has a radical politics that seeks to expose these antagonisms and destroy any stable notion of a “human.” It also more effectively describes the blending of animal/man, organic/inorganic, tranformative subjectivities (becomings), and the always already prosthetic presence that are being more clearly brought into relief in the current historical cultural moment.

Crossposted on Gameology.

Read part 2 here.

Interactive media artist Erik Loyer, perhaps most well known to academics as Creative Director of Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology visited the University of California, Riverside earlier this week to give a talk titled “Stories as Instruments.”

Loyer explained his design philosophy that games should break free of the restrictions of plot-centric progression and character focused instrumentality (his recent innovative iPhone game Ruben and Lullaby is a particularly illustrative example of this trajectory). Loyer points to the genre of the musical as an important influence and model for new forms of storytelling in games. Musical arias feature characters that step just outside the world in moments of intense expression. Loyer analogized this as a blend of first and third person perspective. The singing character in the musical is locked into the narrative space contextually yet elaborating that context. The best games, according to Loyer, allow the player to assume this role: doing things as they should be done logically in the world but also knowing what one is doing.

In this way, the best moments in games happen when a player does what the developer wants them to do, without explicit narrative prompting, and does it in a way that fits within the context and expressive aims of the game. He cited an example of his own experience with the N64 classic Goldeneye where, after having just learned to use the sniper rifle, he was presented with a situation where he got to surreptitiously eliminate a few targets from afar in a building. The revelation was that he had done exactly what James Bond would have done and that’s what made it so exhilarating. He was simultaneously doing something and knowing what he was doing. He was character, fan, and player all in one.

Loyer’s central critique is of the obsessive push in game design toward large branching plot-driven stories centered on the freedom and autonomy of a character (think: Mass Effect) which often denigrate the Goldeneye experience. He argues that the focus should be on the potential for dynamic experiences of subjectivity, affect, and emotion rather than thousands of potential choices. Characters and stories should be considered the facilitators of these experiences not the ultimate focus or endgame as in plot-centric design.

I think this point is provocative and worth exploring. In both game design and theory, we are still affected by the nagging myths of cyberspatial freedom (or lack thereof) as well as neoliberalism and its interest in consumer empowerment. In terms of design, each new game or iteration needs to be bigger, more varied, and full of options for story, character, and customization. In terms of game theory, we study the oppressive logics of algorithmic technical objects and theorize methods of subversion and resistance such as cheating, performance, countergaming, and so on. The subtext to politically progressive game theory is often that games need to counteract these power problematics by being as open as possible.

But what about embracing limitation, restriction, and prescriptive design?

Why not create games that box in the player and why not study how restriction can be productive?

Design can constrain space in order to open up new modes of perception and attention as well as expose the illusory nature of freedom in all games – even those marketed as boundless (GTA anyone?). By directly confronting the inherent logics of control, by bringing them into stark relief, we can perhaps finally move past the reductive myths of liberation and empowerment that mischaracterize interactions with digital media and network technology and provide potentially illusory resistant formulations.