School’s out, and the summer of Danganronpa begins!
It’s true that we’ve been here before a time or two at the humble and not-quite-derelict Video Game Academy: see the spoiler-laden analysis from Professor Kozlowski on the game’s approach to Serving and Subverting Tropes, our introductory podcast episode, and other materials on our Intro to Visual Novels page. But summer school, after all, is about making up for lost time, in a not un-Proustian way, and so it’s never too late to begin again learning about this weird and discomforting game of mayhem, murder, and angst; through it, about games as such; and through games, about everything, really.
So get pumped with recommended readings such as Susan Sontag’s Notes on ‘Camp’ and play Danganronpa with us (or watch someone’s playthrough enough to get the gist of it, read the script, etc.)… it’s going to be a beautiful summer’s day.
What else we’re up to:
Professor Ben has been making lectures and videos for his course on the Philosophy of Love and Friendship
For myself, summer-reading Pedro Paramo, The Satanic Verses, The Tale of Genji, and The Beetle Leg with various friends, and playing through Paper Mario games with the fam
What’s new? Find us on discord and drop us a line!
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.
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.
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.
The end of the school year. Remember how much that used to mean? Long days with no demands, the good times rolling like a Katamari, freedom stretching ahead to the horizon.
It means nothing to us now–except for those of us still in some way involved in school. Which of course we are, this being Video Game Academy!
Video Game Academy 