Games and x
Today I subscribed to the excellent new blog Versus CluClu Land (thanks, Michael), a heady project from one Iroquois Pliskin which analyzes games from a philosophical perspective. Its unique focus got me thinking that many of my favorite writers often approach games from the perspective of another branch of knowledge.
Leigh Alexander writes about games and sex. Roger Travis writes about games and classics. Michael Abbott writes about games and film. Corvus Elrod writes about games and storytelling. Iroquois Pliskin writes about games and philosophy. (And here at Cruise Elroy, of course, I write about games and music.)
It’s certainly important to study games on their own terms — in fact, I often recommend Mitch Krpata’s series A New Taxonomy of Gamers, in which he argues that our current vocabulary is insufficient for critical discussion and posits new terms to better describe the different types of gamers. At the same time, though, there’s a lot to be said for the multidisciplinary approach of the blogs I listed above. We risk insularity and irrelevance when we only discuss games qua games; Situating our analyses among other well-established fields of criticism lends the discussions legitimacy and perspective, and makes our dialogue richer.
So here’s to you, Iroquois, and all the other writers who tackle video games with a unique frame of reference. I hope to see more from all of you in the future.
Gosh, wish I had a unifying theme like that. Might be better than “games and pretty much anything” ;)
Wouldn’t it be great if the emerging gaming vocabulary could borrow terms from all of these disciplines? Sort of an intermediate step before requiring completely new terms.
Hey, there’s room for all kinds! :-)
I should point out that I don’t mean to pigeonhole anyone — obviously most of those bloggers, if not all of them, talk about games from a variety of perspectives, including just analyzing them on their own terms. I just wanted to specifically call out some of the interesting writing people are doing that is a bit further afield.
I still haven’t crystallized my thoughts on gaming vocabulary, but I’m sure I’ll have more to say about it in the future.
I guess I’m filling the “games and science” niche.
It’s a pretty tight niche. And Wii Fit regrets to inform me that I am slightly too short for my weight.
I just tried Wii Fit for the first time a couple of hours ago, and I gotta say, yours sounds more polite than mine…:-)
and Mark Methenitis blogs about video games and law at http://lawofthegame.blogspot.com/
@Dan: Oh, it initially told me I was a fatty. But I’ve lost some pounds since starting, so I’m getting closer to a good BMI. I’m not sure that the Wii Fit exercises had much to do with the weight loss, but the scoldings I got for gaining weight or failing to weigh in certainly did.
I guess we all come at this from our own perspectives and backgrounds on the receiving ends of games, and that’s part of what makes it so fun for me. Your knowledge, Sparky’s training in science – it all informs my thinking about games a lot.
Now I’d love to see something similar from the design side. I don’t mean to say game designers are a homogeneous blob of one thing, but it does seem to me we lack diversity in terms of perspective, life experiences, etc. Where are the war games made by people who have lived through a genocide? Where are the women designers?
I would be very excited to see how the very phenomenon you describe here (one that serves us well, I think) could be applied to game design.
Michael: I agree with you that we could use more design perspectives. You might like Brenda Brathwaite’s Applied Game Design. She approaches game design from a broader perspective, bringing in ideas from board games and the like and applying them (naturally!) to video games. I’m not crazy about the blog’s “personality,” to be honest, but it’s still a good read.
Thanks, Dan. I’m familiar with Brathwaite’s work, but I didn’t know she had a blog. I’ll head over there forthwith.