Mathematics and politics, ripples in the pond of people; society the surface of human nature, music its denizens, and reading its depth.
Do not disturb my circles.
Archimedes, in Plutarch’s Lives (in Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments [in our Reading on the Ground])
With Miyazaki’s Boy and the Heron, Dante on his pilgrimage, and Don Quixote on his knight-errantry, Alex and I have been circling around ideas for another project on myth in video games of late. More on that to come, I hope! For now, there are a number of other pieces I’d like to curate, to constellate around this resonant sigil of the circle.
Plenty of times we’ve heard about the Inklings, particularly the core duo of Tolkien and Lewis, and maybe the erudite Barfield and the weird Williams. Tolkien of course has his Lord of the Rings, Lewis his lecture on the theme of “The Inner Ring.” But there are many other great literary circles out there, too.
A little while ago I read the lively Magnificent Rebels by Andrea Wulf about Schiller, Goethe, and the rest of their Jena Set. Much further back in college it was the English Romantics, including the ghost story-telling contest that led to Frankenstein. Just now I’d add the excellent Journey to the Edge of Reason, by Stephen Budiansky, on Godel and the Vienna Circle (and subsequently the Institute for Advanced Study). No doubt before long I’ll want to cf. these with the New England Transcendentalists and Bloomsbury Set.
For myself, I’ve been connected with a group we might call the Arizona Seminar, though lately I’m more north by northwest. Our intellectual lineage traces through Santa Fe and Annapolis to Chicago and beyond, roughly along the lines of St John’s College and its formative lights. For another sampling of writing and music in this milieu, see the itinerant Brian Brock. Or just ask for the link to join the online Sunday seminar.
From Moses Norton, a delightful foray into–and sendup of–video game lore videos: Gamelogica.
Between all this and the subject of the latest episode in my own podcasting endeavors, Dylan Holmes’ A Mind Forever Voyaging: A History of Storytelling in Video Games, with all that book contains and all we touch on in our conversation, I’m feeling like a sentence crammed too full of ideas, more replete than complete. A fitting way to end this blog post that’s all outgoing links like those snakes in a can, for completionists still reading: you might also want to look up Chris Perry at Hampshire College, Barry Atkins, Tim Rogers, and the Digital Antiquarian, among others we mention.
A new course taught by Alyse Knorr at Regis University
Alyse has kindly shared the proposal for Video Games and Meaning. If you don’t happen to attend Regis in Colorado, you might also find her teaching online for Hugo House. See our conversation for more on Alyse’s work.
Integrative Core Course Proposal
Our students are living lives within and surrounded by video games. They play them on their phones, on their laptops, and in their dorm rooms. They organize Mario Kart tournaments and connect with friends back home over Xbox Live. They build and play as characters with complicated skill sets, racial identities, and even marriage and families. 72% of men and 49% of women aged 18 to 29 play video games, which are without a doubt the newest, most popular, and most profitable form of art and entertainment. The question at the heart of this course is: why? Why do so many humans love games (broadly) and video games (specifically)? And what kind of meaning—artistic, experiential, even spiritual—do we make out of this form of interactive media?
Through the lenses of art, narratology, ludic studies, business, communication, queer studies, and disability studies, this class will examine the history and impact of video games on American culture. We will consider video games as works of art, as immersive experiences, as educational tools, and as products for profit. We will analyze the political/social arguments that games make implicitly and explicitly, as well as how auteur game designers express their personal experiences in the games they create. We will explore how organizational psychologists are finding ways to “gamify” life and work to make them more enjoyable, and how the idea of “failure” is so essential to both game design and life. Finally, we will consider controversies associated with video games such as video games and violence, gaming addiction, racism and sexism in games and the gaming community, and the ethics of the games industry.
To unpack these questions, students will play games from a wide variety of genres (storytelling games, platformers, sandbox, strategy, role-playing, puzzlers, and first-person shooter) by a wide variety of designer identities (see potential game list below). Students will also read accompanying popular and academic texts or watch accompanying documentaries, then discuss their gaming experiences with the community. We will take excursions (more below) to explore the ways that gaming communities exist in both virtual and physical space.
By the end of this course, students will be able to:
SLO 1: Identify and analyze some of the reasons why many people love playing video games, and some of the ways that players make meaning out of games
SLO 2: Discuss (in oral and written forms) games in terms of narratology, ludic studies, business, and communication theory, using academic and popular sources as well as their own experiences;
SLO 3: Research, discuss, and debate diverse perspectives on key questions and controversies related to video games, synthesizing other’s viewpoints with one’s own. Construct well-supported and sustained critical arguments about these debates, justified by evidence.
SLO 4: Formulate their own creative, sci-fi-themed responses to justice issues and share these with their community.
The primary form of homework for this class will be playing games! I will ensure that everyone has easy access to the assigned (free or very very cheap) games on their own personal devices or through the library—this is easier to do than you’d think. In addition to playing games as primary texts, students will also read articles and watch documentaries related to the course content.
Because the nature of the course is to uncover how individuals make meaning out of games, one major assignment will be a presentation on a game of each student’s choice. They can present about the history, theory, and personal impact of a game that has meant a lot to them, and if they have never played video games before this class, then they can present on a non-digital game (Monopoly, tag, chess, etc.) instead.
The culminating assignment for this class will be for students to design their own game that focuses on themes, questions, gameplay styles, or topics that fascinate them. Students will be able to choose between either literally building their game using free and simple online tools or, if what they envision is beyond the scope of these tools, then they can pitch an idea for a game including its premise, graphics style, and plot, and design the “box art” of the game with a logo. Accompanying this final assignment will be a presentation and a short reflective essay in which students connect their design choices with key texts and ideas from the course.
I would also love to take students on an excursion to an arcade and/or a game store during this class, where we could play arcade games and experience gaming in community together. We could also attend (either virtually or in-person) an eSports competition. Finally, we could attend either the Denver Indie Games Expo (November) or the Colorado Video Games BBQ (April), both of which are exciting expos with presentations, games on display, and game designers to talk with.
Potential games to assign:
“Hair Nah”: a game by a Black woman designer that comments on the ways that white people try to inappropriately touch her hair in public places
“Papers Please”: a game commenting on immigration policies that puts players in the role of immigration authority at the border
“Gone Home”: a game about queerness and coming out, and the fragility of families
“Passage”: a game about life, death, aging, and making meaning out of it all
“Oregon Trail”: an educational game that many of us grew up with that implicitly validated messages of Manifest Destiny and the genocide of Native Americans
“Queers in Love at the End of the World” and “Dys4ia”: games by trans designer Anna Anthropy that seek to put players into the experience of coming out as trans
“This War of Mine”: a survival-based game that explores the civilian experience of war
“Superhot”: a first-person shooter that makes players question the nature of their reality, Matrix-style
It may not look like much. Sorry about that! The lack of new posts around here lately will not, I hope, have discouraged you from browsing some of the archives in the meantime. Reading around in the links, podcasts, and resources we’ve put together over the years, there should be no shortage of secrets to find and people to meet. But I think there’s more going on even now at our humble Video Game Academy than it might appear. And it’s not for nothing that we are still here.
Over a summer extended with paternity leave on the front end and now quickly licking at the heels of fall, I’ve been able to read and re-read some good stuff, that is by listening on Libby audiobooks but occasionally holding an actual book (usually also from the library) with my free hand that’s not holding the child, or more often than either, just on archive.org on my phone. Still threading my way through Spariosu, I subject Ben to my takes on that and Omeros, and Alex and Danny get my thoughts on Ulysses, Lea my questions about Either/Or. So I keep up with a couple of book groups, formal and informal, and I’ve started up again writing reviews, including a couple new ones, on The Pixels. Their push for Hawaii aid is well worth your consideration.
Ben, too, has been pitching in and accumulating wisdom. While preparing a new course in World Wisdom Traditions, the Professor’s rolling along with the Pentateuch piece of his larger hermeneutical-ethical project. Between that and moving house, he took some time out to make a new video: Replaying Assassin’s Creed, 2012-2014. And to go by the site stats, a decent audience is out there awaiting his next journal on Lobotomy Corporation…
As far as Twitch videos, I’ve shifted away from game playthroughs back to more text-based discussions. The current series is on William James’ Talks to Teachers and other foundational books for teachers and students. We’ll look at Douglass’ Narrative of the Life next, still making the connection to video games with the ways in which the theme of learning to read comes through in JRPGs like EarthBound and Dragon Quest.
Podcast-wise, here’s a conversation with Alyse Knorr, ‘achiever’ (to cite her Super Mario Bros 3, where I first encountered her work and reviewed it for The Pixels). In which we discuss:
– Sweetbitter Podcast, with new episodes coming soon about Mary Magdalen and a fourth season in the works
– Switchback Books, which she edits with her wife
– Regis University, where she teaches alongside colleagues such as Russ Arnold
– her poetry, research, and the novel she’s writing
For all you completionists: we talk about meaning and connection, truth and beauty, compassion, collaboration, and community; love poetry; queering religion and the reclamation of faith in a Jesus who speaks truth to power; spirituality and mystery; God (or goodness) as the still small voice; falling in love; taking inspiration from her students’ energy; Annotated Glass and Sappho fragment 31; coming out of the postmodern moment when sincere feeling was the most uncool thing; ‘Bright Star,’ Keats, Eliot, Carson’s Autobiography of Red; Gilgamesh and Enheduanna; ‘Anatomy Exam‘; Garcia Marquez; style and form, lyric and epic, ancient and sacred, emotion and bodily sensation, and finding new ways to render them, borrowing lines without knowing it; how form emerges and helps generate lines and line breaks; checking out legs at the library; respecting the uselessness of her art and the usefulness of her students’ (nursing); the act of naming; birdwatching as a mom of an infant; going from Edenic nescience to that corrupted knowledge place; naming the world; Ardor, a book of eco-queer domestic life and love; Every Last Thing, a book of tantrums and embarrassed apologies…
Does the poet hope for some response? Or is it nothing but a gift, this act of writing and learning from others’ experience and one’s own? To think about love, sincerity, earnestness? To celebrate queer joy as a political, radical act?
Micaela Tore’s MA thesis on Copper Mother; editing women and nonbinary authors; Gandalf the cat; the Voyager Golden Record (and around here you’ll get a musical interlude from moonbowmusic); the poets’ communal economy; editing and publishing poetry vs. prose, ie. at Boss Fight; the contest model; video game books with Gabe Durham, their upcoming Minesweeper, Xenogears, Animal Crossing; being an ideal reader; her SMB3 and GoldenEye 007 projects, memoir and journalism and creative writing; Nintendo interviews and how the limits of poetry, like early technology, feed creativity.
Video Games and Meaning: topics, problems, persuasion and social justice: Hair Nah and microaggressions; Oregon Trail and colonialism; Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin; Passage; citizen science; This War of Mine;Papers, Please;Train; Anna Anthropy’s Dys4ia,Queers in Love at End of World, and ZZT. Her new novel (agents, check it out), a post-apocalyptic story of love and a journey; Dhalgren;Ico; too much stuff, not enough people.
Alyse also recommends Merlin for birdwatching; “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock,” by TS Eliot; “Married,” “Alone,” “In Dispraise of Poetry,” and “Failing and Flying,” by Jack Gilbert.
Teaching-wise, I’m working on a collaborative research project with MG Prezioso, who studies literary enjoyment and understanding. Joe and I still have our liberal arts and leadership segments under the banner of the Thoughtful Dad, just not lately managing to record much.
Life-wise, back from visiting family. The Baltimore Aquarium, crowded as heck. Steve and his wife came down from Philadelphia (congrats you two!). DC museums with crying kids and a flash flood in the streets. Braving it all with the folks and Auntie Oli. Rehoboth Beach for a couple of days. Then back to Spokane, just trying to breathe through the smoke.
PS. On the flight home, I watched Living and Moonlight. Each on its own is very good. Together, they pair beautifully around the theme of play. In the one, a remake of Ikiru (itself based on The Death of Ivan Illich), we get renditions of ‘The Rowan Tree‘ and musings on the metaphor of play, with dying like a mother calling her children home. In the other, a movie that is almost too good to believe it found a way to exist, much like Everything Everywhere All in that at Once though different in practically every other way, we see one of those children who sits out of the game, almost, before being brought back in by a friend and making another kind of play all their own. Their song: ‘Hello Stranger,’ by Barbara Lewis.
Sometimes I hear an argument, or maybe it’s more of a shibboleth; anyway, it runs: Mental health, or lack thereof, reflects the times. In precarious times like these, precarious mental health is basically symptomatic of a clear-eyed view of the world. To which I supply the corollary: If so, then psychology, the science of mental health and illness, must offer a privileged standpoint from which to understand this world and its sufferers–and then to help if we may by availing ourselves of the things that we’ve been studying here, video games and literature. Might games and play, read in the light of the literary tradition, offer something to the psychologist, and to the depressed, anxious, or otherwise world-bearing player?
Sometimes I think about taking up hobbies that require nothing but attention. Bird-watching, mushroom-hunting, tree-identifying. I think about how I should just write a little each day, like the thought-leaders counsel, your Anne Lamotts (Bird by Bird) and Brene Browns (Dare to Lead). I should make the time by jettisoning a bunch of other stuff that gets in the way, a la Marie Kondo, buckle down and write my three pages a day like my idol, Philip Pullman, whose His Dark Materials all but divinizes attention itself.
(Time, knowledge, care, curiosity–all are wrapped up in that “nothing but attention”–whether in the nothing but or the attention I can’t quite decide–and so I persevere in temporizing, zigzagging in em-dashes, putting off doing any new thing, just reflecting on it. Very rarely anymore do I even make it as far as writing down this process, that act of recording being a fraught piece of attention-requisition in its own right.)
And yet I do think about it from time to time. Before other things take their place, these possible, imagined practices do hold my attention, and they recur when the decks are cleared. When I go running, when I zone out listening to something, when I look out the window, when I sit on the porch, I think about learning the names and properties of birds and fungi and plants. I write about it now and then.
Whenever I do manage to write and take the time to post what I’ve written for anyone else, it seems to be about a pastime that has held my attention as long as I can recall: videogames. Of course, given to pattern-seeking and meaning-making as I am, I suspect that underlying all these hobbies and vague interests is some thread that connects them. Observing attention and its ways, wayward as they are, I call the connection salience. Its characteristic note, however multifarious, I would have to call play.
People study this, psychologists and institutes, writers and teachers, and I’ve begun little by little to follow in their footsteps, or at least to imagine what it might be like to do so. I play at understanding play, and through play, everything else.
Here are some recent bird sightings, places where play makes an appearance, rising to the level of salience:
Mysterious threads joining Murakami and Itoi: one essay more about games, another more on books
In the scheme of things, I call them recent, but then this post was started months ago, it shames me to say. I wonder if would have been noteworthy even at the time of its release that Toy Story 2‘s opening sequence takes the form of a video game played by living toys. Did Nintendo and their famously litigious brand managers mind that the mentions they get in Stranger Things Season 4 are all along the lines of a Peter Pan existence, a prize or bribe? Still, for whatever reason, I think these videogamey sorts of things are interesting, rather like the marmots along the path where I run by the Spokane River. I’m always happy to notice they’re there.
From the short book Novelist as a Vocation, by Haruki Murakami:
One bright April afternoon in 1978, I attended a baseball game at Jingu Stadium in downtown Tokyo…
I stretched out with a beer to watch the game. At the time there were no bleacher seats, just a grassy slope…
The satisfying crack when bat met ball resounded throughout Jingu Stadium. Scattered applause rose around me. In that instant, and based on no grounds whatsoever, it suddenly struck me: I think I can write a novel.
This past couple of weeks, we had our in-between-semesters term at The Community School: one week for students to participate in activities outside the school, then the second to present and reflect on their learning from the school year so far in front of an audience of their peers and families. As my activity for the week of MLK Day was a Game Jam at the downtown library, I had the chance to browse and borrow a few books, and to buy a few from the Friends of the Library store, while I meandered from floor to floor checking on the students. So along with making an outing to the local Jedi Alliance arcade for a further community connection, I happened to read Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke; Reader, Come Home, by Maryanne Wolf (though I had to request that one by ILL), and Solito, by Javier Zamora. I finally found a copy of I Ching, and I picked up Binti to read next on the strength of Brenton Dickieson’s recommendation. All this while finishing up the SPACE course on games, based on Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, which was awesome.
The Essays of Michel de Montaigne, admirably introduced here by Guest Professor Sufjan Stevens, are some of my favorite reading, too.
A love that bites and scratches… — apt words for Sufjan’s own, who meant at first to write stories
Because they are about Montaigne and his attempts (essais) to know himself, holding nothing back of all he has ever thought or wondered about, they end up being about everything. The Essays, addressed to a “goal… private and domestic” and “dedicated to the private convenience of my relatives and friends,” speak to everyone and to every possible topic (To the Reader). Usually they wander far afield from what their titles purport to discuss. Prof Suf, understandably, thinks there is one called “On Socrates,” because he often makes an appearance, though he is never the actual topic. Frequently they contradict themselves and end inconclusively, brimming with ideas in tension with one another, much in the fashion of a Platonic dialogue and in line, indeed, with the time of wars of religion in which Montaigne lived and wrote. Individual sentences branch organically, in the same way striving to embrace more and more with each subsequent revision. Paragraphs are blocked off and marbled with quotations from the extensive library that kept Montaigne company in his retirement, including from those books he had inherited from his friend La Boetie, and from those mottos he had inscribed in the rafters of his tower room, overlooking the seignorial estate.
By fireplace nook or snowy windowpane, wherever this finds you, I hope you make some time for a little catching up with us at the Video Game Academy during the holidays.
Browse the post archives, poke around in the course links and resources, and generally stir up some dust revisiting the classic games and books we like to discuss.
Speaking of which: “At the present rate of progress,” Sir Philip Pullman says of Roses from the South (as yet unconfirmed title of his Book of Dust Volume 3), “it would be late next year” that it’s ready to release. That was in September 2022, according to Twitter/Reddit. So we have a while to wait yet. This time next year, perhaps, we’ll have more to say about it, and about the as-yet-imaginary games this and much of his work might yet be made into.
Though given his (and our) history of such prognostications, particularly with third and presumably final books in a series, perhaps not so fast.
In the meantime, there are a few more of Pullman’s stories to tide us over. From The Haunted Storm and Galatea to Serpentine and The Imagination Chamber, along with more reviews of the BBC/HBO adaptation and a playthrough of Undertale to balance things out media-wise, there’s plenty to look forward to in the new year.
So I hope this finds you well. Thanks again for reading, listening, and playing along.
In the world of video game academia, we’re pretty small potatoes. But small as we are, we are!
The next iteration of Video Game Studies will (maybe) be taking place on Signum’s SPACE Program in January. It’s dependent on participant interest, so give it a look here. The long and short of it is, we’ll be reading Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin, and discussing video games a couple hours a week. We’ll look at classic games and genres and considering how they tie into the novel form a variety of critical and imaginative lenses. If all goes well, I’ll follow up with future courses in SPACE. I have a notion I can write something for this CFP on “The Post-Gamer Turn” into the bargain.
Meanwhile, the Twitch stream for younger readers in Signum Academy continues next year with more video game discussions. I’m planning on adapting material from the days of Outschool (which I joined in the first place trying to get traction for SA). More news on that to come.
A couple of notes about other past and current versions of these courses: the Science of Video Games, which Stephanie taught last year, more or less complete, can now be found here, and the Language and Code Cafe iteration of last year’s wellness I’m revamping for The Community School in Spokane got a little write up from the local news.
With all that going on, the time has come for us to be shuttering the patreon. We’re feeling pretty launched at this point, and there’s plenty of other worthy causes out there to support–such as Professor Kozlowski’s lecture series.
Many thanks to everyone who helped us get going. We’re back on this horse, this Rocinante, this quixotic Rocket sim.
Video Game Academy 