Alex and I had a lovely chat with his friend and fellow scholar Otto this afternoon, out now on audio and video:
Please check it out! If all goes well, we’ll be discussing FFVII Remake, spoilers and all, in an upcoming ep.
Otto’s site: https://www.ottolehto.com/
His 2009 piece “The Collapse and Reconstitution of the Cinematic Narrative: Interactivity vs. Immersion in Game Worlds”
Which in turn cites a shortlist of works, some familiar, others less so–besides games like Xenogears and Tetris–the perusal of which would amount to a kind of course in itself; and which would then be of considerable interest to put into conversation with the retrospective Historiographies of Game Studies volume, or with other case studies from other points along our timeline, such as Crawford’s The Art of Computer Game Design and others featured on the GSSB podcast, or again in a splashy new book like Nguyen’s The Score. To list a few I’m curious about now:
Barthes, Mythologies and The Pleasure of the Text
Eco, The Open Work and A Theory of Semiotics
Ndalianis, Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment
King & Krzywinska eds, ScreenPlay
Juul, “Games Telling Stories?”
Loftus and Loftus, Mind at Play
Poole, Trigger Happy: The Inner Life of Video Games
Tarasti, Existential Semiotics… huh.
Barthes… not sure how I feel about that guy. “Death of the author,” my foot!
But that’s only one of Otto’s many papers. The other one that seems most germane to those of us concerned with understanding JRPGs might be “Nothingness as Nihilism: Nishitani Keiji and Karatani Kojin.”
Over email, Otto let me know that he also has an “interview with Jonne Valtonen, the prominent arranger and composer responsible for several orchestrations of Final Fantasy and other video game music, including the series of concerts with the German WDR Radio Orchestra, called Symphonic Shades (2008), Symphonic Fantasies (2009), Symphonic Legends (2010), and Symphonic Odysseys (2011). Unfortunately, our discussion, from over 10 years ago, is only available in Finnish… I have tried allowing for automatic English subtitles/captions, but it has not worked out…”
What a world!
Many thanks to Alex, soon to be Dr Schmid, for introducing us and setting up this conversation with Dr Lehto.
Video Game Academy 