Notes on genre.

So I've been thinking about genre - some of this is going to be in a paper I'll be presenting, but I think it deserves being spun out and talked about on its own.

I'm taking as a starting point Rick Altman's paper on a semantic/syntactic theory of genre, and also Mark Wolf's The Medium of the Video Game. Wolf promotes an interactive theory of genre, by which genre is determined by the interactive structure of the game. His actual catalog of genres involves a combination of interactive strategies, simulation targets (by which artificial life games are distinct from resource management sims), and diagetic structure (adventure games are partially defined by the existence of different world-areas.) Wolf does not claim that iconographic genre is irrelevant, he notes that interactivity is a universal aspect of all videogames.

To some extent the practice of the videogame industry and its market/reception community supports his categories (reasonably, since he drew those categories from existing genres, not formally). On the other hand, there's a great deal that it doesn't account for. Games with gangster themes resemble each other in a way that has little to do with interactivity. Grand Theft Auto is interactively more an adventure game like Onimusha, but thematically more like Mafia. Elements of visual aesthetics make Mario Kart more different than alike Gran Turismo. DOA Beach Volleyball is as much a cheesecake game as it is a sports simulation, and in that sense is more closely related to BMX XXX. Of course, no one is expecting set-theoretical, heirarchical models of genre to map the universe of game production and consumption. I just want to note how much is left out by failing to account for thematic (what Altman and film theorists would describe as semantic) content in genre rationale.

Altman posits a mutual relationship between syntax and semantics in genre formation: loosely speaking, that a "stable set of semantic givens" will evolve and change its syntactical expression over the course of time to create new genres (from Stagecoach to The Unforgiven; from Night of the Living Dead to Army of Darkness), or an establish, well-understood syntax will be applied to new semantic material (Blade Runner: film-noir syntax with science-fiction semantics, creating a cyberpunk genre in film which has thrived better than its counterpart in literature.)

It occurred to me that interactive genre in videogames is considerable less stable than film syntax on some levels, although not in others, and that thinking about genre in videogames needs to deal with this. The market expectation for innovation in the interactive elements of game-play is stronger than the analogous expectation for film; while a film audience may be disappointed about the triviality of a film narrative, for the most part they are unlikely to protest that the sequential structure of events in the film has been "done before."

Game audiences, I suspect, expect innovation at either the syntactic or semantic (thematic, simulation-target, or narrative) level, or the visual aesthetic level, and are less likely to be disappointed by failures of innovation at the narrative level than film audiences are. The stronger pressures to innovate mean that interactive genres are likely to be made ambiguous, to conflate, or to become simply obsolete over time. I have reasons for believing that semantic genre will be somewhat more stable - partially because they are more intertextual and cross-media, meaning that they will participate in the genre-formations of film, literature, television, pen and paper games, etc.

On a finer level of analysis, though, games are more stable than film in terms of their syntax, particularly on a cognitive level. Most strikingly, considerably more ambiguity about sequence of events and causality is tolerated in film than it is in games. The fact of player agency makes it difficult to imagine muddying the contract between game and player which maps cursor/avatar motion with cursor motion, that maps the fall of an opponent with the firing of a shot, that maps the death of the player with zeroing-out on a health bar. It is conceivable to play with this conventions to a limited extent: several games have. However, such play is unlikely to form genre in the way that new conventions of editing, filming, and storytelling created the French new wave, or German expressionism. It is at the next level of analysis, about interactive demands on the player rather than the codes that are used to communicate the specific structure of those demands, that the development of interactivity forms genres, and does so at a destabilizing pace.

There may be more about this later ...

War - Games

GamePro.com / Domestic / Feature / Pro Vs. Pro: Vietnam - The popular gaming press starts to look at the issues that Gonzalo was addressing in Ludology.org.

One of the things that's noticeable is how the Vietnam war is seens as uniquely troublesome, because it remains a morally ambiguous and contested memory in the American psyche, unlike any other conflict since the Civil War. I don't think it's a coincidence that war games are more popular in America than elsewhere. War isn't experienced in America (except by combat troops) - it is mediated.

I was just reading Friedrich Kittler's Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, in which he talks about war and simulation (drawing from a comment in Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. He writes:

It is widely known that war -- from the sandbox models of the Prussian General Staff to the computer games of the Americans --has become increasingly simulable. "But there, too," as these same general staffs wisely recognized, "the last question remains unanswered, because death and the enemy "cannot be factored in realistically." ... for death in battle to coincide with cinema would be its own death.

I find it telling that he, a German writer, associated the computerized war game with America. Not surprising, by any means, in light of the way the first Persian Gulf war was depicted as the first videogame war.

I was thinking about the weakness of simulation: that it turns the world into operants, that it is part of the end of interiority as a concern of humanity, that it shares the ontology of nihilism as Heidegger tracked it. If the novel is a form is inextricable from the psychological, modern subject, and film from the subject as a pattern of surface effects and as a body, the game posits the subject as an array of values, of goals and means which subsume history into operations. Of course, it's easy to accept that sort of operational distance when there isn't the memory of pain associated with the object of the model: games and models are as much about what didn't happen or what could have happened or what would happen if... as they are about what did happened.

Coincidentally, I've been playing Advance Wars 2 on the GBA. It does have a different, cartoonish stance towards modern war in it. It's a Japanese game - it's interesting that war in Japanese games (and anime and manga) is usually fantastic, except as tragedy (Grave of the Fireflies). Even for pre-modern conflict in the 16th century, the best simulation is Total War: Shogun - a British production. Only in (non-animated) cinema do we see any depictions of war, as in Shohei Imamura's Dr. Akagi or Masaki Kobayashi's The Human Condition. Perhaps there's a sort of respect for the fragility of memory that makes simulation, rather than depiction, unappealing.

More robots

Following up from the monkey cyborgs, things just get better and better.

Robot, monkey.

I'll admit that I was drawn to this article about monkeys and cybernetic control just because I think that the sooner we develop robot-wielding super-intelligent monkeys, the better off we'll all be. But the way that brain's plasticity that assimilates interfaces into the body's self-perception (the mapping of the driver's body onto the car, for example) is, I think, one of the two core elements of videogames (the database+algorithm materiality of them being the other) that I want to get a handle on. Somewhere in there is the key that links their existence as games, and their shared characteristics with sports and other technologies of skillful play, with their media-textuality.

GWD

This report about Nintendo's strategy for its next generation platform ties in nicely with a thought I had today. Namely, that the real conflict for the direction that videogames as an interactive media should take isn't really that between narrative and ludos: it's about different drives for participating in the media themselves based on the demographics, and in effect is a conflict between videogaming as agon (from Caillois' typology of games and play) and videogaming under all other possible auspices.

This year's E3 supposedly was about "the death of the hardcore gamer." Summed up as the GWD segment ("guys without dates,") the hardcore gamer is the canonical audience/market for the game industry to date: a dedicated fan who spends hundreds, even thousands of hours a year playing challenging videogames, developing skills, besting opponents real and virtual, etc.

The idea that games must challenge, must inherently be at least initially difficult, that the meta-narrative for the game interaction involve developing a kind of mastery over the game-artifact, is an assumption that underlies the more defensive posture of the gaming community in the US.

I think there's a relationship between the function that videogames have in the lives, particularly, of young males, and what seems to me to be the socio-biological foundation for play in general. Play is a mechanism by which the young can develop the skills required for survival and mastery in relative safety, and once those skills are recruited to the needs of survival, the attraction of "playing" at them dissipates.

What I think this means is that the appeal of agon lasts until the instincts for competition, mastery and such are cathected into one's social and/or professional life. If that cathexis never occurs, one could conceivably continue to find games of agon inherently appealing; otherwise, the joy of play migrates from being a realm of mastery to a realm of conviviality, or aesthetic experience.

The "tyranny of agon" seems stronger in the US than in Japan. Perhaps one might attribute this to a more competitive, individualistic culture in the US, but I sort of doubt it. Japanese society has intense competitive pressures of its own and traditions of competition as strong as any culture's. Rather, I think this has more to do with the details of the market in Japan: my casual observation was that there was considerably more intergenerational participation in videogame purchase and play. Most game consoles are located in the family room. Virtually every Japanese household I know that reported having a game console indicated that play occurred with the whole family; parents knew exactly what their kids were playing to an extent that one doesn't see in the US, and often played with them. Rather than this leading to sort of a cleaned-up "family friendly" game culture, it rather seemed to lead to one in which there was a larger market in games that weren't necessarily motivated by the desire to demonstrate mastery over one's peers. Not that those games don't exist (after all, most all of the best fighting games are from Japan); rather, a substantial market for music and dance games, virtual toys, romance sims, and other non-agonistic games co-exists with the games of competition. It's inconceivable, with the current dominant game culture in America, that Boku no Natsuyasumi could ever enjoy the kind of success that it has in Japan.

I think that's going to be the upcoming source of discord: the conflict between the GWD and those whose motivations resemble them, who expect games to inherently be difficult and the pleasure of gaming to be about surmounting difficulty and besting obstacles and opponents, and those whose pleasures could lie in vertigo or simulation. At its root, it is a conflict of pleasures.

Quick note on a Picasso piece.

I've done a quick search for the literature for this Picasso piece, and one thing that struck me is that no one seems to have noticed the relationship between the content of the newsclippings in this piece, and the political activities of F.T. Marinetti. During this period of time, Marinetti was manifesting his doctrine of the hygenic value of war by participating in the First Balkan conflict; it was during the artillery assault on Adrianopoli that he wrote his seminal sound-poem Zang TumbTumb While the work wasn't yet published (it was first published in Milan in 1914) one wonders if the inclusion of the clippings was a dig at the aesthetic nostalgia for war and the violent pretensions of the Italian movement, which were already a known element of the European art scene.