Category: Syllabus

Just to announce, belatedly, that we’re going to be talking about Deus Ex during the regular time, Thursdays at 7PM Pacific, but also that we’ll be making some moves to accommodate more of our Stardew-loving friends. Likely sometime around 1PM Pacific, likely on the occasional weekend, we’ll go tra-la-la-la down there in the Valley. But we’re still getting that together. Check back here for more details!

Additionally, the time has come to bid Dostoevsky a fond farewell for now. Spring is past, and our summer read is here: Mary Ann Buckles’ historic 1985 dissertation, Interactive Fiction: The Computer Storygame ‘Adventure.’ Not only does this one flow nicely with our ongoing look at visual novels, but the relative heavyweights over at Games Studies Study Buddies are going to be featuring it on their next episode. It seemed like a good time to jump on the bandwagon.

Speaking of which, I’ll try to do a better job of keeping tabs on similar projects people might like to take part in around the discord. Retro AM and the JRPG book club are both starting FFVIII, Resonant Arc recently featured the same and are just wrapping up NieR: Replicant, and Moses at The Pixels is reviving his Mage Cast and looking for more guests to talk on all sorts of games. Check the links in the Resources page for more, and do send along your suggestions.

The history of video games is only beginning to be written, making this an enviable time to be a student of the medium. In what follows, we suggest points of entry into the ever-growing tale. Accompanying each capsule review, we throw out a few ideas to help you go further with original work of your own.

Recently Corey recommended the High Score documentary, so I decided to give it a look. Six hours later, here we are. Clearly pitched to a wide audience, if skewing nostalgic at times, the short series provides an inviting starting-point for our tour of history and historiography. Each of the episodes focuses on a particular topic, from arcades to consoles, RPGs to fighting games, and features interviews with a wide range of developers and makers of history. While not pretending to offer a comprehensive or critical dive into the history of games, the series nevertheless shines a light on some overlooked figures and populations in the industry. Engaging personalities, quality sound, and lively visuals make for an enjoyable watch.

• Trace the history of one or more of gaming’s unsung heroes in more detail: listen to The Nod’s episode on Jerry Lawson, Retronauts’ interview with Rebecca Heineman, or find your own long-lost copy of GayBlade to get started.
• Along the same lines, trace the roots of one or more marginalized groups featuring prominently in game history further back than the documentary reaches: Alan Turing and Ada Lovelace would be exemplary figures to include in the larger history of computers, without which video games would never have existed.
• To flip the process around, find an example of an artist or designer today whose work is informed by influences from video games. For instance, the NY Times podcast Still Processing is currently highlighting Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, by Cathy Park Hong, a poet whose earlier collection is intriguingly titled Dance Dance Revolution.

Replay: The History of Video Games, by Tristan Donovan provides a far more informative overview than High Score, while still being aimed at a wide audience. It’s the closest thing I’ve found to a comprehensive, book-length account of video game history. My own biases and the narrative I’m most familiar with, the sort of Nintendo-centric history told for example in Game Over, by David Sheff, is challenged throughout Replay, decentered and filled in by chapters telling the compelling and largely unknown (to me, anyway) history of games in countries other than the US and Japan.

• Choose one of the countries whose video game history comes into the book, and follow up using the sources provided in the notes and bibliography to learn more about it.
• Again, pick up where the book leaves off, writing your best imitation of the style and format which embraces the recent work of a single developer, indie or otherwise, not substantively included in Replay.

Donovan has published a history of board games as well, but in the interest of moving us into more scholarly territory, let’s turn next to Playing at the World, by Jon Peterson. The epithets “nerdy” or “obsessive” had occurred to me, too, but the painstaking research and judicious analysis packed into this volume can in fairness only be called “scholarly” at the end of the day. Taking on the history of role-playing games, with their connections back to table-top war games on the one hand and to fantasy fiction on the other, Peterson weaves together a complex and fascinating backstory for video game RPGs.

• As the book leaves off with only a glance towards RPGs in their video game iteration, continue the story with a case study of the development and impact of one of the major game series, such as Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest.

The new semester gets underway in earnest this week with our opening discussion of NieR: Automata. The weekly twitch stream of gameplay from our very own 3rd Strongest Academician, Steven, represents an important step in making academic discussion of video games more accessible to anyone out there who, like me, lacks the hardware to play this gorgeous game themselves. Other fun videos we’re working on include a deeper dive into visual novels and a few highlights from our discussion of The Hex.

We’ve responded to our students’ calls for more rigorous reading with a Majora’s Mask review and other monthly reading assignments to come. This month, in line with our visual novels kick, we’re revisiting the influential work of Espen Aarseth, particularly Cybertext. Aside from academic theory, there are also new Japanese and programming channels on the discord to start with just a couple of the more practical areas of study video games can launch us into. If I can get my tech together, I’ll report on some forays of my own into the Japanese text version of EarthBound, MOTHER 2.

In response to student demand, too, this time from our younger audience, the new semester of weekly discussions on Outschool is focusing on the JRPG genre, starting with the venerable Dragon Quest series. Text-rich games with simple-to-learn mechanics and irresistible aesthetics, Dragon Quest offers teachers one of the most adaptable and historically influential case studies in all of video games to share with their classes. For all their straightforwardness, they still beguile us with the evidence of an ongoing syncretism between Japan and the romanticized West.

Last but not least, we’d like to build on the analysis in Ben’s latest post on processing horror, not just through what we’re doing here at the Video Game Academy, but by being who we are. Give it a read or re-read and tell us what you think.

As we wind up our discussions of Pony Island and The Hex, the age-old question arises: what should we play next?

Or, to put it another way, quo vadis? Where are we going, reader? What’ll we click on next?

If, as I’ve been arguing in the past few posts, intuiting the answer to that question of larger purpose involves something as superficially unserious as the uses of free time, then we had better give the related question of what to play next some careful thought.

Should we equip our best relics and hop aboard the airship in search of friends, spending our time on another classic like Final Fantasy VI? Should we follow our pet weasel into the rose garden next door and play more indie darlings, a la The Hex? Should we, in short, devote ourselves to breaking out the big guns, or should we take to a trail of bread crumbs, forsaking the beaten path?

To my mind, we get closer to answering this question by appealing to deeply-held principles–the dialogue between us as we play–rather than falling on the horns of the either-or, the alternatives of what we play. There’s no shortage of places to find good commentary on classic games, and we can easily tap into endless streams of critique and analysis on new releases that run the gamut from ubiquitous popularity to niche hipsterdom. It’s not as though we are doing anything new under the sun, providing anything otherwise unsupplied elsewhere, regardless of which route we go. The only difference is that it’s we who go there, carrying on our peripatetic discourse, informed by all we’ve read and experienced. That’s something no one else can do for us. And while our lives may outwardly differ hardly at all from plenty of other aspiring scholars and teachers who podcast, few if any of the people talking about games have the broad and deep reading in literature and philosophy we bring to bear on the new art form. If you happen to feel the same, or if you know of someone like that, we’d love to hear from you. With a Socratic and neighborly love, we certainly would!

Meanwhile, we’ll keep playing both fun little games on our phones and epoch-making urtexts of the zeitgeist. Along the way, contemplating and conferring amongst ourselves, we’ll also keep gadflying about, trying to make inroads by responding to some of the big players:

• Discussions of significant books and articles (just don’t call them a canon) with the wonderfully chiasmus-y Games Studies Study Buddies

• Interviews with game developers, scholars, and youtubers from Critical Distance

• Those intrepid originals, the Retronauts, podcasting on Video Game History Foundation, pop culture, and the history of game history

• As for the bread crumbs, Still Processing addresses them in a recent episode

All of them have their own forums for feedback and discussion, worth checking out. Or you can join us on patreon to help guide our steps.

Our secret Valentine’s Day card goes out, only about five years too late, to the participants in the “Teaching Game Studies Workshop” at the 2015 Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) conference, and to Ben Richmond at Vice, for posting their report and reading list. Thanks to them, here are some thoughts from the professionals about how to get started teaching and studying video games.

Notes from the Teaching Game Studies Workshop DiGRA Luneburg 16 May 2015
Organized by Mia Consalvo and Christopher A. Paul

Embedded in the report are higher-level questions of methodology and concrete suggestions for assignments and course design, but the immediate takeaway, for this amateur scholar, anyhow, is how differently it seems texts and games have been treated in the academy. The recommended (or, as organizers Consalvo and Paul put it, “popular”) readings are specific, suggesting the outlines of a recognizable canon, albeit with a looseness about how much of each text to read; the section of the report dealing with “gameplay in the classroom,” however, does not cite a single specific game. Instead, there’s a smattering of general ideas about ways to incorporate whatever games the instructors might choose, be they “sites with free games, browser games,” “African traditional board games,” or “Tarot cards to teach narratives”–or even just to “have students pick the games to play.”

There’s a remarkably cavalier approach to the selection and incorporation of games for you, and yet, with the right students, as ever, all will be well.

As for what we could end up with, though, allowing too much input from the class, consider the new Sonic movie and its ordeals with fan resentment as a point of comparison. I haven’t seen it yet myself, and don’t know when I’ll get around to it–there’s so much for a lover of video games to read!