Via email:
Rando wrote:Alex,
I was having a look at Insomnia and I found your thread on acamedics and videogames. This came at likely time, since today I had a look at a list of academic journals, looking for journals on videogames.
The few I found seem to share the list of problems you point out for "game studies". I felt rather depressed, but given the status of humanities nowadays, I am not surprised.
And, still, I feel that I could be able to write down articles about videogames that make sense, and perhaps even be worth the label of "scientific" or "philosophic" articles.
If everything goes well, some time in the near future I will work as a Linguist/Cognitive Scientist, so I would to cultivate a "side project" of scientific/philosophic research on videogames.
I do not have any idea where to start from, though. That's why I am writing this e-mail. I was wondering whether you would have ideas on two topics that would really help me a lot to start thinking.
The topics are:
1. What topic you would suggest, on a first article? I would suggest "something" on shmups, but would you have suggestions on a specific topic that, in your opinion, would be easy to discuss in 10k words?
2. Background literature? Which are books that talk about games in a rational way, and that must be read, no matter how "basic" they may be?
I appreciate any kind of answers but, if you would like to know more about this "side project", before offering your suggestions, please let me know.
Of course, project "Untold" is orthogonal to this other project.
Francesco-Alessio
1. This... is the wrong question to ask. I am sorry to say this, but it is the kind of question the pseudo-academics I am railing against in this thread would ask. And the clincher is the "10k words" comment, as if it mattered how many goddamn words you use in order to put your ideas down in paper. I see this even in IJBS (The International Journal of Baudrillard Studies), where they have a word limit too. That's not how thinking works, man, you can't put a word limit on fucking
ideas! let alone predict how many words it will take some OTHER person to express ideas that have barely even crossed your mind!
The point, then, is not what
I would like to see YOU write, but what YOU want to write because you FEEL like writing it. I may want to see, for example, a comprehensive article on Rank and Rank control, the entire history of the mechanic, an examination of all the key titles that employ it and an expert's judgement on whether, in each case, its inclusion and particular implementation benefits or hurts the game, as well as prospects for the future and the setting of this mechanic in the context of videogames as a whole (i.e. even
outside of shooters), and ultimately the functioning of the universe -- but the question is not whether I want this, but whether YOU
CAN write it, and if you don't at the very least FEEL like writing it one thing's for certain: THAT YOU CAN'T. Even if you DO feel like writing it chances are that you won't be able to satisfy, or at least fully satisfy, my extremely high expectations, but, like I said, if you don't feel AN UNBRIDLED URGE to write it, whatever you write will in the long run prove worthless (like everything the pseudo-academics write).
So. Start from the inside. The "academic" articles will have to come from the same place the Untold Tales are coming. You NEED to get these out of your head, and THAT is why they are so awesome (and of course also because you know a shitload about games, because there are many little fuckheads who ALSO need to get stuff out of their heads, but if there's barely anything there there's also barely anything to get out). And, in any case, the general articles ultimately come from the same place that criticism (i.e. the Untold Tales) are coming from. That's how I got to where I am today. I didn't set out to become a "videogame theorist", let alone a "philosopher", lol. I set out to write all those things about videogames that had been brewing in my brain over a period of decades, and IN THE PROCESS of doing that, i.e. in the process of writing reviews, I eventually came to identify a series of issues concerning entire groups of games. So, for example, one fine day I realized that the word "gameplay" was not helping me at all while I was writing my reviews, and that it was detrimental to the quality of criticism in the reviews of others. So I gathered all the thoughts about it that had for a long time been SUBCONSCIOUSLY amassing themselves in my head, and wrote them down. Then a little while later I realized that my arcade reviews where presupposing that the reader would play the game on a single credit, whereas the majority of my readers not only did not do that, but would regard such a suggestion as absurd and absurdly elitist. So again, I sat down and unloaded all those thoughts that had been forming subconsciously in my head over a period of years. And so on and so forth with "RPG"s, "values for monies", "videogame parodies", "emergent miracles", "art games", etc.
The main point is: take it slow, take your time, for if you rush it you will bungle it like everyone else. Ideas come when THEY want, not when YOU want them to, and they certainly do not come to order; THAT'S why they pseudo-academics never manage to scribble anything lasting, anything that people might want to read a decade or a century down the line. They first decide that "I WANT TO BECOME A PSEUDO-ACADEMIC", and THEN they look around for topics to write about. But as I explained, that's not how thinking works. Read this essay and all the ones linked on the sidebar, from bottom to top:
http://insomnia.ac/essays/on_authorship_and_style/
and THERE's your starting point for becoming a game academic.
2. We already have a topic on "books on games" here:
http://forum.insomnia.ac/viewtopic.php?t=2359
Short answer is: there aren't any. Seriously -- but by all means do not take my word for it. Make your inquiries, and if you find any worthwhile books let me know (in the above-linked thread).
Basically, regardless of how arrogant this may sound, the only one who has EVER written anything of value on the subject of game theory is me. Everything else so far is either bullshit, or trite and obvious MIXED with bullshit. You can't even so much as find PURE TRITE AND OBVIOUS stuff, at the very least it will be mixed with a small (though usually huge) amount of bullshit, depending on how retarded the writer is and how little he cares about the artform (and none of them really care about it, as evidenced by the fact that they were all taken in by the "art game" scam, which failed to dupe even gamefaqs posters).
So, the basic texts that you are asking me for are all either linked or mentioned on the sidebar of this page:
http://insomnia.ac/commentary/videogame ... e_preface/
When those three books have been released there won't be any other major topic to cover on the subject of game theory; there will just be a huge, in fact
infinite amount of things to be written WITHIN the structure erected by the theory contained in these books. Everyone still working OUTSIDE of that theory will keep churning bullshit, in the same manner that "ethical studies" people have been churning out nonsense for the last century after failing to understand Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, or sociologists for the last forty years after failing to understand Baudrillard's In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, etc. etc.
So... I hope I have helped with all the above. These comments, by the way, will eventually find their way in my "On the Worthlessness of Game Academics" article, so those who read it will get a strong sense of deja vu after having read the above -- but it will also contain a great deal of other points, so it will be a must-read anyway.