CRD701: History and Theory of Communication Technology

"You can learn more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation." -- Plato

I'd like to start by balancing out what is sure to become a nerd manifesto by speaking to the educational possibilities of games mentioned in passing by Nielsen et al. (2008), specifically Diplomacy. My undergraduate academic adviser and history professor was an avid researcher and advocate of strategic simulation-as-pedagogy, and to better illustrate the principles learned during the Great War, we spent a full 3 weeks playing Diplomacy as a class. My roommate and I were thrilled, as we spent our free time playing Sid Meier's Civilization and Microsoft's Age of Empires II. It took us--playing as Sweden--less than 3 class periods to take over the known world, mostly by convincing lesser interested parties to go along with our schemes. Later, in a course about the American Civil War, we proved quite convincingly that the South would win every time, and still later, in a May term class devoted to historical simulation, we accurately depicted the lessons of the Vietnam War by playing a game called "VietCong Dodgeball." I bring up these analog examples not to boast (well, mostly) but to illustrate Nielsen et al.'s point: the history of gaming does matter, and the manual RPG and tabletop games of my seemingly misspent youth were in fact sophisticated rhetorical exchanges, exercises in inventio and persuasion that positioned me serendipitously for research and coursework in this program and for people like me to impact culture in profound ways.

Reading Nielsen et al.'s history of gaming also made me think of how, like Jason and Zach, I feel disconnected to the gamer's culture I once recognized ontologically. I play occasionally now, but I'm certainly no longer a "gamer." Labels matter to this subculture; all it took for me to go from l33t to n00b was a thesis and a wedding. I find it striking that the public is quick to deride the archetypal "loser in the basement" gamer as operating on the fringes of "accepted" culture, yet as an in-group, they largely ignore this assumption by replacing it with one of their own: people want to be like them, masters of a virtual world, wielding untold power and subjugating others to their will. I'm on the fringes of both, as a passable norm but a closet nerd, a daywalker who still feels the pull (I'm even downloading WoW updates while I write--please don't tell my wife). I think this desire for in-group recognition also plays to Nielsen et al.'s mention of the intertextuality of LucasFilm titles like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, which "rewarded fans for their loyalty" (p. 74). Leroy Jenkins works on a much deeper level for the dank-basement dwellers, and it becomes an object of meta-intertextuality when discussed in-game.

This metatextuality extends well beyond the borders of nerdery. Indeed, I found it odd that Nielsen et al. claim that "it is curious that MMOGs have been mostly confined to their region of origin" (p. 93). I think this ignores a rather substantial phenomenon in online gaming of "players" who aren't in it for the play. I'm thinking here of play-for-pay users--the well-known Chinese gold farmers, for example--who play an integral yet ugly role in gaming culture and who serve, in a way, to propogate the ideal of Western subjugation of the virtual developing world.

I will say little as to how Liestol (2003) impacts this subjugaming other than that she explores the "lady in distress" motivator from an unusual angle. Where she seems most salient to me, my conversation here, and indeed my experience with gaming is that "the safety and regulation of everyday life creates a desire and need to participate in an activity that involves adventure and dangerous challenges" (p. 346), which she attributes to Dahl (1984). I see this as an interesting intersection for further observation about the seemingly diverging role of technology: the more sedentary and unchallenged our lives become through modern convenience, the more natural it will be for us to seek out increasingly "adventurous and dangerous challenges." Liestol may provide a rather uninspiring account of Duke Nukem and an odd insistence on the Boy Scouts, but she does graciously follow those up with a brief one-off about the possible impetus for violence in video games.

This point leads me conveniently into Jenkins (2006), who I had hoped would not resurface again after reading last week's pieces on (or ostensibly on) Web 2.0. The key line of this piece should have been the slightly-longer-than-bumper-sticker rallying cry for gaming advocates everywhere: "Constitutional status has historically rested on a medium's highest potential, not its worst excess" (p. 209). Jenkins redeemed himself for me throughout this argument, especially in his critique of retired West Point instructor David Grossman's attempts to align first-person shooters with intensive military training, a "Microsoft Kill Simulator" of sorts. "Grossman assumes almost no conscious cognitive activity on the part of the gamers, who have all of the self-consciousness of Pavlov's dogs" (p. 211). Jenkins' treatment of the highly influential work of James Paul Gee also circles back nicely to my ruminations at the beginning of this post: games offer us critical learning opportunities, whether those moments are recognized explicitly by the user or not. To this I would add that the greatest moments of personal growth are in games that challenge our comfort levels in the most significant ways, say in the violence aesthetic carried through to excess.

The reaction to video game violence that Jenkins explores is echoed in another chamber by Turkle (2003); she suggests that the backlash to inappropriate gaming content is rooted in a more general uneasiness and ambivalence toward computing technology. And this uneasiness, to borrow language from above, does not translate to younger generations who perceive computers "not [as] a new technology but a fact of life" (p. 500). Much like Liestol, this short quip sheds light on a new argumentative dimension of the anti-gaming advocates' position. Could it be that aversion to violent video games--nay, video games as a whole--stems not from morality but from generational envy? Youth culture appears to internalize the complexities necessary to operate within gaming culture, and these are complexities that become, well, more complex as we age. If video games empower users, as this week's authors (and I) would argue, is the urge to purge them from the child's life really a deeper reflection of fear? Fear both of the technology and of the possibility that technological know-how will be the route to power in the future, and without it the Luddites will fade into the smoothly rendered background? But of course, the more general audience would not accept the imposition of heavy restrictions on video game content on those grounds alone, so the morality issue must be raised instead as a more effective avenue of persuasion. Does anyone really believe that Hillary Clinton even made it to Don Salvatore Leone's treacherous ambush in Grand Theft Auto III before condemning it for "stealing our children's innocence?"

So I return to where I began, at the intersection of rhetorical action and gameplay, and it appears that I'm out of lives to continue. Game over.