CRD701: History and Theory of Communication Technology

As I read Nielsen, Smith and Tosca’s (2008) history of video games, I reminisced about playing with my brothers on our Atari, Commodore 64, Nintendo and then Super Nintendo. Although the Commodore 64 was technically a computer, my family used it only to play games – thus treating it the same as the Atari or Nintendo console. For me, console gaming was a social experience; we would gather around the television and take turns playing. That communal element is missing from PC gaming. When I am playing a game on my computer, it is just the game and me. However, if my roommate is playing a game on our Play Station 2, it involves the game, my roommate as the gamer and me as spectator.

Turkle (1984) makes no distinction between console and PC, calling all video games a window into our intimate relationship with the computer (p. 501). Although it was interesting to read her perspective on computers and gaming, I did not really take a lot from the chapter. What I most enjoyed was little Jarish’s endorsement of open source software, feeling cheated when games are in cartridges so he cannot access the underlying program (pp. 504-505). He probably works for Red Hat now.

“Are computer games just another textual variant ready to be subsumed under the ever-developing and -expanding vocabulary of textual analysis?” asks Liestøl (2003, p. 328). She argues for looking beyond traditional narrative structure, but then spends the bulk of the chapter in descriptive analysis. Liestøl is easily able to separate herself as gamer from the game play, even though Duke Nukem is a first-person shooter game. She easily reconciles her destructive behavior as the title character with the urgent need to destroy the Alien Queen and save the city of Los Angeles, writing, “There is no possibility of retreat in the final episode…. We are denied the experience of freedom and autonomy until the revolt against the omnipotent mother monster and her offspring is successfully completed” (p. 343).

In 2002, U.S. District Judge Stephen N. Limbaugh Sr. sternly declared video games have no meaning and thus do not constitute speech. Wagner James Au from Salon.com called Limbaugh’s decision “wrong, stupid and dangerous.” I probably would have egged his house. Our hero Jenkins (2006) was one of more than 30 international media scholars who signed an amicus brief that helped overturn Limbaugh’s ruling. This put him in a bit of a pickle, as Jenkins describes: “I was arguing that games could be important resources for teaching science and history, yet I was also arguing that games did not ‘teach’ children to kill” (pp. 208-209). If I can learn European history and geography from playing Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego, can I learn how to shoot from Duck Hunt? Or am I just learning how to negotiate a text through repetition?

Nielsen, Smith and Tosca cite 1976’s Death Race as “the end of innocence for arcade games” (p. 55). Despite having the original name Pedestrian, the developers insisted the stick-people relentlessly run down were gremlins instead of humans.  Would it matter if they were gremlins, nuns, Nazis, zombies, kittens or police officers? Liestøl easily managed to denounce the women of Duke Nukem as worthless background noise, distractions from the mission (p. 334). Does this just prove violent texts lead to a society desensitized to violence?

Ultimately, focusing too much on violent content overshadows legitimate video game analysis and critique, which is part of the point Jenkins tries to make. He cites the Web-based game Tropical America, in which “the player assumes the role of the sole survivor of a 1981 massacre in El Salvador, attempting to investigate what happened to this village and why. In the process, you explore some five hundred years of the history of the colonization of Latin America, examining issues of racial genocide, cultural dominance, and the erasure of history” (p. 220). While this is an atypical example, it shows that video games can have the same literary, artistic, political and scientific value as any other medium.