Responses for March 18

8 thoughts on “Responses for March 18”

1. I completely agreed with Bogost’s argument that videogames are increasingly becoming a mode for artistic expression, political expression, and personal expression.
   I remember a time when I was younger that I played a game called ‘Teen Digital Diva’, where I was able to create my own magazine cover and the articles inside. For some reason, I can’t seem to forget playing this game because it had such an impact on me and I couldn’t have been more excited about creating my very own magazine. Of course it is extremely outdated now, but they have only expanded to other artistic/creative fields and made it that much more exciting for consumers. The possibilities are endless.
   A good example of a controversial political videogame that Bogost mentioned was JFK Reloaded. It came out when it marked the forty first anniversary of the former president’s assassination and it is obvious that any game such as this one, is going to have strong political opinions, no matter what the game was originally intended to do.
   Bogost brings up good points in the chapter ‘Digital Democracy’ about life after the internet. It is obvious that the internet has made it much easier for us to shop online and read about new games, free games, and up-and-coming games. Without it, we would have to go out of our way to the stores in our area and try and track down that game we are looking for. Especially around major holidays, it’s almost impossible to find the new release you are looking for. The internet makes it painless to shop, without frantically trying to track something down.
   He also mentions that social software and social networks play a significant role in our society today. Social networks such as Facebook and mySpace allow people of all ages to communicate with one another and exchange notes about the media or other things you have in common. This communication is a type of education. Similarly, social software is a hit with people who are used to gaming by themselves. Their advertisements are appealing because it makes finding another person for multiplayer easy.

2. On “metalevel reflection”

   Bogost’s interpretation of the procedural aspect’s of culture resonated within me. I have began to think about the ways that games challenge us to think about our own interaction with the real world. Games do make us consider new forms of artistic, personal and political expression. Bogost’s argument is bolstered by “Why I Love Bees.” I found this article to be amazing and wished that I had played halo and gotten involved in the subsequent hive-mind. The social experiment showed that with the right incentives it is easy to make people not only interact and cooperate with one another but also delivered a formal method as to how these types of social movements can be explained and predicted. In my response to last week’s question I considered the implications of the use of videogames in challenging the establishment. I can imagine that the sort of Hive presented by “Why I love Bees” would be an extremely powerful superstructural force in changing many of the structural deformities within society.
   While Bogost argued that games can be used as procedural educators, Jane McGonigal showed that they can also change procedures not only through education but simply through their evolution.

3. Bogost mentions in Chapter 5 that advertising in today’s world has become noise that consumers must filter through rather than a series of messages fired off to attendant eyes and ears. It’s a bit of a change from the days of Burma-Shave, which, one might argue, is the original “permissive advertising,” though it’’ really a form of advertising that takes advantage of a traveler by “coming at” him/her as the road “comes at” the car. The noise of advertising can even be seen on a more micro level here at the College, where students are so bombarded by announcements about social events, lectures, student groups, etc. that most of us haven’t actually got a clue what’s going on. In the section of Chapter 7 on anti-advergames, Bogost rearticulates Alyssa Quart’s argument that advergames “overpower the impressionable minds of young people, giving them the false impression that a branded world is natural and even desirable” (223). Based on my experience, it’s safe to say that the concept of a branded world as a part of our conception of the “normal” (which is even more culturally potent than the “natural”) exists and perpetuates outside of advergames and similarly permissive/invasive forms of advertising. I’ll embarrass myself again by mentioning the Nancy Drew game series by Her Interactive. These games are educational in design and purpose, and if anything reject branding and advertising for anything but Her Interactive’s other games. Nonetheless, there exists a brand in the ND games—Krolmeister—that appears on everything from office supplies to carnival games to cookbooks, as ubiquitous (and thus humorous) as ACME. Though the Krolmeister brand, its fictive nature and its bizarre diversity of products could constitute a jab at typical branding and product placement, its appearance still feeds into our image of a branded world as normal. While double-checking the name of the company, I also discovered that ND game fans have made Krolmeister into a twenty-first century, ND-specific kind of Klaatu, an in-joke and a password. Marketing success.

4. I really enjoyed Bogost’s section on advertising because I agreed with the categories he developed to describe the different aspects of advertising, such as games that promote the functionality of a product, and games that feature product placement.

   I really liked the section on the Japanese restaurants Yoshinoya and Coco Ichibanya because I’ve been to both of those chains several times while in Japan. I’m actually disappointed that the games are not available in America because I would really like to try them out. But the point of the games is clear—it builds customer loyalty by attaching game play to an actual product (the restaurant).

   In my own experience I find different types of product placement acceptable in games, while other times I find it ridiculous. I remember when I was younger and I played racing games on my computer, the games that featured real cars (Hummers, Jeeps, etc) seem much more realistic. I really liked the idea of being able to drive these cars, off roads, presumably seeing the differences between the different makes and models.

   On the other hand, I find blatant product placement annoying when it has no actual tie-in to the game. For example, in Madded 2008, there are constant ads that pop up on the screen from time to time. Every you score, there is a “Sprint Drive Summary” and every time you enter the red zone, there’s an “Under Armor: Protect this House” stat box. I find that really annoying. Bogost points out that we endure commercials on T.V. because we are essentially getting the content for free (for network at least) but for games, we actually BUY the game, and therefore should not be subjected to such blatant advertising.

5. First I want to sum up what Bogost is arguing:

   As I see it, he is argument is that in interactive media (he uses videogames merely as an example of something larger) the basic premises and rules of the game or system (its procedural claims) make rhetorical arguments.
   So overall, Bogost’s approach is to take a step back when analyzing games and to look at the underlying assumptions of the games.

   This idea of the fundamental axioms of a game in fact making a rhetorical argument is fascinating to me and in my experience has been very true.

   This is especially true with one of the games I have played the most, Civilization II. Most importantly, the game makes the underlying assumption that civilizations are competing. On some level (and not to bash the game too much–I love it) the game is rooted in ethnic nationalism. The basic construct of the game is to create the best civilization. You can form temporary alliances, but there is no real possibility for peaceful unification, the only effective way to unite the world is through conquest.

   Relating this to Bogost’s section on politics, I think Bogost would see this as a clear example of procedural rhetoric arguing for a certain world view.

   One aspect of his argument that I’m not too sure about is the basic assumption that video games are merely an example of a bigger phenomenon in media analysis and rhetoric. On page 46, Bogost discusses why he chooses video games and states that videogames are merely an example of procedural rhetoric. He fails to give other examples of media that follow with his thesis of procedural rhetoric within videogames. In my opinion this is because there are no other examples quite like videogames.

6. In discussing videogames as tools for “procedural literacy,” Bogost contrasts the behaviorist view, which holds that playing videogames “teaches their content,” and the constructivist perspective, which argues that videogames teach us how to deal with abstract systems. A particular example he gives is Sim City, which I spent many hours of my childhood playing, and I can attest to the constructivist view. Sim City is far too simple an interface to realistically simulate the complicated dynamics of urban planning directly—in other words, we cannot learn how to be city planners playing the game. What we do learn, however, is how to think about cities in terms of a conceptual model. Through Sim City, we understand that cities (and, through abstraction, ant colonies, bee hives, rain forests, and the whole planet) are not simply places where people live. They are systems of multiple streams of causality and interactivity. The smallest change in that system (such as raising taxes 1%, enacting a new city ordinance, or building a single police station in a particular spot) can have widespread consequences for the system as a whole, even if those consequences are not immediately evident. I think that the recent shift among many Americans toward actually believing that global warming even exists is due, at least partly, to widespread experience in dealing with complex systems. The simple notion of abstraction that videogames make so clear to us is not something that is a part of innate human instinct—we tend to see the here and now, and rarely think holistically. This part of Bogost’s argument really struck me.

7. Bogost hypothesizes that video games are becoming more and more involved in political and social culture, and are affecting how we think and the opinions we form. Video games have evolved from simple time-wasters to a complex market and subculture. Games can respond to real events, the player, and each other in ways no other medium can do so.

   War games often respond to real events, like the Vietnam war. My brother plays Call of Duty, and in addition to being fun it is a way to explore the environment of an event he’s interested in. (I have never played, thus I can offer little in the way of analysis here.) For me, Dinosaur Safari was a staple of a dinosaur-loving childhood after my dad snuck me a viewing of Jurassic Park. Being able to “go back” to the Triassic or Cretaceous captured my imagination in an interactive, alterable (heh, somewhat) format the movie couldn’t, and the shiny new games of today continue to do so for all types of people.

   Large game franchises also have the advantage of material to build off of, from the appearance of poor Johnny in Metal Gear Solid to more complex world-building. For instance, in the Final Fantasy series there are often references to previous games that make the experience more rewarding for people who have played those as well. Gilgamesh has been a favorite summoned monster in several Final Fantasy games, and has recently appeared an optional boss contributing to a bonus sub-plot in Final Fantasy XII, complete with voiced lines, a huge graphical upgrade, and some of the best item opportunities in the game. That kind of game-game interaction is part of what makes the franchise so appealing.

   And, just because nothing I’ve said in this has been sufficiently embarassing, I would like to point out that, in response to other media, Warcraft’s Illidan spouts the universal greeting from Transformers: The Movie if you poke him too much.

8. Sorry it took so long to respond. But anyways, I’ll admit that after trying to get my suite mates to play some of the games mentioned in his book that were supposed to function as educational/political artificats (i.e. the howard dean game or the post-madrid terrorist attacks game) or advertisements (i.e. the chrysler Stow and Go game or the game Bogost created for a Jeep 4×4), I failed to get any of them to finish a whole level. The reason? They weren’t fun! I think that this is a key flaw in Bogost’s argument regarding video games in terms of their educational/commercial/political function.
   Take for example the two different Rice bowl games that a couple of Japanese fast food chains commissioned for the PS2 that require the gamer to act as an employee and prepare the food in the same way that employees do at the restaurants. True, they do use the procedural rhetoric unique to the video game well to articulate desirable attributes of their companies (i.e. food is made fast or food is made to order rather than). But there’s a reason the people who work at these rice bowl places are paid rather meager wages – putting together a rice bowl dinner and taking customer orders isn’t very fun! The same could be said of stow and go chrysler game – does anyone actually enjoy folding down their minivan seats and . The point I wish to make here is a rather simple one: there are some procedures that aren’t very fun, and in order to articulate how those kind of procedures work, perhaps graphic or verbal rhetoric is more appropriate. For example, the reason why I think Tax Invaders works is because it articulates (albeit a biased view of) the process by which taxes “steal” unnecessarily from taxpayers using a much more enjoyable procedure than tax collection, that of shooting aliens. The game that involves adjusting the voter districts, for example, might be more fun if were grafted onto a gameplay like that of GTA where you have to force people by gunpoint into a new district or something. Video games, unlike other media, will always be simultaneously burdened and blessed by the fact they are just that, “games.” A video games “fun-factor” is its greatest advantage, and if neglected, can render that medium relatively ineffective.