Shyon Baumann, “Introduction: Drawing the Boundaries of Art”

In Baumann, Shyon. Hollywood highbrow : from entertainment to art. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.

Where exactly are films situated in American pop culture?
Active debate throughout their history about their merits
Changes in production, reception and in the films themselves
“the creation of an understanding of the medium of film as a legitimate and serious artistic medium, and a body of film works as being legitimate and serious works of art.”
Change in perception of Hollywood films for a certain segment of the population – art, not light entertainment
Intellectually engage, experience Hollywood films as art
Historically, aesthetically, sociologically interesting
Film as unintelligent, moral deterioration – drastic turn from this perception
“the legitimation of Hollywood films occurred mainly during the 1960s and was a process driven by three main factors”
Opportunity space for an art world of film opened up – changes outside the field of film
“social climate in which the cultural contradictions of film's claims to art were reduced”
Changes within Hollywood brought it closer to established art worlds
Festivals, academia, etc.
Director-centred production, arthouses, relaxed censorship
Creation of a discourse of film as art
Reviews, criticism based on film as “a sophisticated and powerful form of artistic communication”
Social, collective nature of artistic production and consumption
Howard Becker, Art Worlds (1982)
Development of art worlds “is connected to the opportunities afforded by the wider social context”
Not only organizational, institutional achievements, but also intellectual achievements
Sets of ideas that explain and justify film as art (criticism is key)
Absence of clear principles for what is art or not
Authority of “cultural experts” (but they don't all agree)
No guarantee the general public will accept these ideas (abstract art)
“the question of how we decide what is art, and why their judgements are accepted or resisted by the wider public” (and vice versa?)
Tolstoy – art as the communication of emotion
Stephen Davies:
Functionalist definitions (what art does – Michelangelo)
Procedural definitions (process by which art is crafted, rules – Duchamp)
Not seeking definition or an airtight case for Hollywood film as art
Certain films are widely recognized as legitimate art (for diverse reasons)
Beauty (visual usually); innovation/perfection of conventions; communication of messages; personal expression (usually directors)
Art possesses high status and bestows high status on creators and audiences (cultural capital)
Hollywood films can now aspire to this
“How did a body of Hollywood films (though not all) gain this recognition as art?”
Could be a philosophical or a sociological question (quality VS context of art)
“the coalescence of a novel perspective among a large group of people is a social process that lends itself more readily to sociological analysis than aesthetic analysis”
For games, not yet a coalescence – more of a multiplicity of perspectives
“the story of film's valorization as art”
The whole history of commercial American cinema is part of this story
Nickelodeons – working class entertainment
Censorship (MPPDA)
DW Griffith – film grammar
Acceptance of film as art in Europe by intellectuals – conditions of film production and consumption were similar to other arts (not true of Hollywood films)
Mass entertainment (fun, not challenging)
Increasing popularity after sound – middle-brow: picture palaces, prestige, epic scale
For games a this point, the question may be as much about becoming middlebrow art as highbrow, “fine” art;
Breakdown of vertical integration, First Amendment protection – end of censorship
French intellectual attention to Hollywood as an art form (auteur theory), imported via Sarris
1960s: economic uncertainty, social upheaval, different kinds of films being made
Idea of Hollywood film as art gains wide currency
Hollywood films could be approached with an open mind (rather than prejudged as entertainment)
Status of “film literature”
Explain this shift, change in attitude
European scene paved the way for intellectualization of Hollywood films
“Status vacuum” created by TV, drop in film-going – links to working/middle class weakened
Possibility for a cultural redefinition – art world for film developed
Feedback – filmmakers encouraged to create artier films (market)
Blockbuster strategy, conglomeration
The social construction of art
“the categories and definitions we use to perceive and to understand the world are molded by cultural forces” and social processes
Not a denial of objective reality
Art exists even if it happens to be socially constructed
Question the “taken-for-granted” nature of art/not-art
Judgement of quality is normative, not logical (set of arbitrary standards)
Hierarchies are also constructed
Look beyond context to conditions of creation, distribution, production, consumption
“the production perspective”
Peterson: the “aesthetic mobility” of films
“three main factors that sociologists of culture rely on to explain the public acceptance of a cultural product as art”
The Legitimation Framework: opportunity, institutions, ideology
1) an opportunity space
2) institutionalized resources and activities
3) intellectualization through discourse
[Does this preclude un- or anti-intellectual popular aesthetic discourse? Or is this a palpable difference between film-as-art and games-as-art?]
1) “the creation of an opportunity space through social change outside the art world in question”
DiMaggio: “preexisting discursive and organizational resources available for imitation” or adaptation
Film pushed theatre out of the popular middlebrow towards higher status
An already established space by opera, museums, symphonies
Outside factors, new contexts
Likewise, TV pushed film higher
Young people in college – the “film generation” in the 1960s
“Because society had evolved in certain ways, film-going had become a significant cultural activity.”
2) “the institutional arrangements underlying the production, exhibition, and appreciation art, as well as the various activities and practices carried out in those institutional settings”
Becker: creation of art (and thus art worlds) as a collective action
Independent/arthouse theatres
Distribution networks
Academic programs
Changing economics of production
3) “the grounding of value and legitimacy in critical discourse” [and in popular discourse?]
Development of a “cultural field”
Without this third aspect, the other two could apply to any number of other fields/practices
When a field becomes distinct, offers a distinct form of cultural capital
“The development of a field-specific aesthetic both provides a rationale for accepting the definition of a cultural product as art and offers analyses for particular products.”
“academics and aesthetes [and critics] developed a sacralizing ideology to legitimate various forms of high culture” (not usually empirically investigated)
“Intellectualization by cultural specialists helps to legitimate cultural products that entertain as art.”
Content analysis of ideas and linguistic and critical devices that these experts employ
“Masters,” interpreting messages, genres/oeuvres, etc.
Legitmation framework can apply to other media as well
“organize the historical forces at play so that we can understand their respective contributions to the art world for Hollywood film.”
A “researchable phenomenon”
Complex, diverse, wide-ranging – no one single shift
Upward status of all film; canonization of Old Hollywood; differentiation of different kinds of productions; critical communities for “cult” genres; etc.
Historical accidents as well as deliberate efforts play a role
Analysis, not history

Tobey Crockett, “The Computer as a Dollhouse [Exceprts]”

In Andy Clarke and Grethe Mitchell, eds., Videogames and art (Bristol, UK; Chicago: Intellect, 2007).

Dollhouse metaphor opens an avenue for discussing interactivity, digital media in relation to play, imagination, creativity – conjunction between games and art
Play as a creative, artistic act – aesthetics of play, emphathy
Long history of miniatures, models, enclosed spaces with cultural significance
Prefiguring screen entertainments
Automata, Wunderkammer, dollhouses (virtual)
“cabinet-like housing for complex machines with programmatic functions”
Playing with avatars, building worlds – dolls and blocks
Blurring of subject/object when playing one avatar among many (do something to differentiate oneself)
Identity construction in infants (substitute non-differentiated mother's breast with toy as transitional object)
Avatar/VW as transitional object for embodiment in cyberspace
“We use the avatar, like the baby uses the toy, to understand what is subject and what is object as we create our foundation about how [virtual world/cyberspace] reality works”
Avatar is inseparable from the VW as the place of transformational play
Must take place in a social (ie: multiplayer) context – presence of others (rather than human-computer interactions)
Zimmerman: interface as a (social) activity zone
Meta-gaming (Sims family albums, etc) – social context surrounding single-player games
Sims fan objects – dollhouse/doll furniture crafting (but what about the more sinister side of fan production as a marketing strategy?)
Pearce: “emergent authors”
“Participatory play”
Play in free-form VW as artistic self-expression – craft, decorative arts
Different kinds of VW; different kinds of dolls/toys (Barbie VS home-made ragdoll, etc.)
“lay authors are utilizing digital tools and digitized materials to self-express and, perhaps, coincidentally, subvert the status quo” (de Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life)
Escape/release
New technology prompts “urges towards a type of technologically mediated transendence”
Cyberspace/VW should be seen as practical, contemporary, everyday, “down here” social/public spaces, not “out there”
Computer as dollhouse – identity construction + imaginative empowerment
“Substantial social work” taking place in “seemingly innocuous realms of gameplay, persistent environments, MMOs, VW

Laurie Taylor, “Networking Power: Video Game Structure from Concept Art”

In Andy Clarke and Grethe Mitchell, eds., Videogames and art (Bristol, UK; Chicago: Intellect, 2007).

Concept art as ideal – the “real” of a game; the superstructure
“that which each game [in a series] sought to portray correctly”
“the superstructure from which each game unfolds and into which each game enfolds itself”
Quantum physics?!
Metastructure for games
Desire to see structure, continuity makes it “real”
Cohere disparate images within a serial
Significance of paratextual elements
Imaginary underlying system
Concept art is seen as “prime mover” (initial, true, real)
May alter with different iterations
Shows which text is authoritative (the planned-for game)
Concept art has moved beyond planning tool and paratext to become a text in its own right
Early games – concept art is more complex than the final product (the “actual” game world)
Interpret the “real” concept art
Fans accept changes in style/character appearance in sequels as long as their true to the original concept art (?)
All iterations of the “real” structure provided by the concept art
All video game cultures are networked
How does video game culture affect the creation of games?
Cross-generation between players and creators
“The cultures of video gaming all share the emphasis on the importance of concept art as an underlying structure for a particular video game world or universe.”
New games in a series can either be similar to the previous game or to the concept art (no other option?)
“trace of the real”
Game merges with concept art in the mind of the player after using it as the one iteration/unfolding of the concept art “real”
FPS games – avatar is only visible in concept art (or cutscenes, or multiplayer...)
Exists in the culture
Metroid's Samus is known only through gameplay, manual text and concept art
Drastic change in GameCube version to first-person, 3D – “no complaints” about Samus' appearance?
Consistent with concept art/advertising
Nintento Power showed the “ideal” world of a game – early example
Holographic theory – any one particle is a trace of the overall structure
“Concept art [...] is holographic because a single image or set of images are used to represent an entire full world.”
“everything is enfolded into everything”
real/ideal cannot be deviated from without angering players (but it can, surely, in some contexts)
Multiple valid iterations of the same from different perspectives
Continuity can be perceived as long as games “hold to the correct underlying order”
Account for different versions – accepted as existing within the same framework
Presumption of the cohesive whole real/ideal (as shown in concept art) allows for variations in different (technological) versions to be normalized, glossed over
Video game culture suppresses gaps and differences
Concept art as a unifying metaphor
Include marginal aspects, actual gameplay experience, and cultures of gaming in game studies
What is taken for granted, accepted without question/complication?
Taylor makes some interesting points, but her overall theory seems to have extremely limited applicability to very specific contexts

William Huber, “Some Notes on Aesthetics in Japanese Videogames”

In Andy Clarke and Grethe Mitchell, eds., Videogames and art (Bristol, UK; Chicago: Intellect, 2007).

Wil Wright: games will follow the same trajectory as other art (realism, technique -> impressionism, aesthetic freedom)
When realism becomes trivial on a technical level, the next glorious phase begins
A powerful but problematic narrative
Japanese aesthetic tradition doesn't follow this trajectory at all
“When mimetic criteria are mobilized is is as a tactic”
Engagement between classical terms of Japanese aesthetics are the Western tradition (Huber acknowledges these are arbitrarily defined, and gloss over much historical dynamism)
Blurry boundaries
Classical Japanese aesthetics:
Mono no aware (pathos/feeling of things)
Yojo (surplus of meaning)
Yugen (transcendent beauty without representation)
Sabi (poetic loneliness)
These are mobilized self-consciously in contemporary practice (including games)
Contemporary Japanese aesthetic concepts:
Masks and faces (mimesis/charicature/abstraction)
“Superflatness” (adapt isometric/surface to current encounter with the West)
Aesthetics of manga, anime, otaku culture
Simulation as “representation of behaviour in a dynamic system”
Mimesis is “a different kind of problem in Japanese aesthetic discourse”
“A simulation-sensibility that is more supple in its treatment of the game-subject”
Static background-settings (Ozu?) - avatar moves through, but they remain
Gaze, masks and mirrors
Mimetic tradition in Japan does not pursue the essential meaning of the thing represented – always a “mask,” capture the “mask-action” as/in an act of mimesis
Simulate the act of representing
Gaze: “What sees itself as a self can only do so by knowing itself as a knowable by another”
Influence of Sartre?
“stylized language of affect, a repertoire of gestures and utterances”
Aesthetic performance integrated as a criterion for success (dance, music, karaoke games)
Collectible sets in RPGs as an aesthetic performance that is rewarded (very interesting)
Aesthetic field as an axis of play
Double nature of motion as operant and visible
Blurry distinction between natural and ritual movement
Play includes elements of aesthetic performance
Isometric landscapes + menu-driven combat/interactions/events
“Exploded view” that includes apparatus and labour that constructs/produces it (exposed apparata)
Resistance to absolute perspective
Flatness, embrace“contradictory boundaries” of mimesis (2D)
Parappa the Rapper – flatness extends into 3D space (3D technology affirms 2D aesthetics)
Synaesthesia in Rez – expressive performance (mask/face)
Reward improvisation over rote imitation
Dating sims – player is visible as well as being a viewer (stats, responses, etc. - under scrutiny)
Define ones own mask
Photorealistic backgrounds with 2D animated characters (spaces persist)
Baroque in Final Fantasy – mask/face
Aesthetics of apocalypse

Axel Stockburger, “From Appropriation to Approximation”

in Andy Clarke and Grethe Mitchell, eds., Videogames and art (Bristol, UK; Chicago: Intellect, 2007).

Relation between contemporary fine arts practice and video games
Museum/gallery shows featuring games, ontological debates
Huizinga/McLuhan: games as a core element of culture
McLuhan: “Games are popular art, collective, social reactions to the main drive or action of any culture.”
Divergence between art and games with literary texts (individual narratives, inner focus)
Both art and games are spatio-temporal zones set apart from the everyday
Rules/Freedom
Boris Groys “On the New,” - differentiation between profane world and art (traditionally, this line is the gallery)
Stable context of the gallery has become changing and unstable
Create contexts, examine/create/transform the rules governing the emergence of art
Duchamp: player as both artist and audience simultaneously (games as entirely individual aesthetic pleasure)
Two ways games are entering the artworld (museums, galleries): as cultural products worthy of exhibition/as components of fine art practice
Relationship between games and fine art is between appropriation and approximation
Back and forth borrowing (how and why?)
Stockburger only really looks at it in one direction (games -> art)
Many different motivations for incorporating games into fine art
Appropriation of game iconography
Pop art – games are an important part of contemporary media/pop culture
Not concerned with rules, game mechanics, etc.
Usually traditional means (painting, drawing, video)
Removes “active choice of what to experience” (?)
Reference to games/game culture
“Without interfering with or relating to the game technology itself” (I disagree, it's not so totally separate. Removing game iconography from a game context or capturing an instance of gameplay could very much be a way of interfering with and relating to the game technology/mechanics.)
Intervention in the form of Mods and Hacks
Internet distribution (patches)
Skinning, maps, models (origins in fan activity)
Infiltrate game culture
Accessibility of mod tools
“Hacker” culture/image/archetype
Deconstruction of game graphics into purely aesthetic abstraction
Transform profane objects into art spaces
Museum in game (rather than vice versa) – Chris Cornish, re-load.org
Artist games
Low budget, often web-based
Newsgames, artgames, etc. - move beyond entertainment

George Dickie, “A Tale of Two Artworlds” (and Arthur Danto, "Responses and Replies")

George Dickie, “A Tale of Two Artworlds,” in Danto and his critics, ed. Mark Rollins (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 73-78.

Respond to Danto's critiques/misunderstandings in “The Artworld Revisited: Comedies of Similarity” and comment on his approach
Different versions of the artworld
How does the prescribing of artistic status take place?
Artworld is not a homogeneous empowering elite of experts
Dickie stresses the role of the artist
“My basic claim is that the artworld is a structure of roles within which artists create art.”
Artworld relations
Danto: “the Art World as the historically ordered world of artworks, enfranchised by theories which themselves are historically ordered.”
Does Danto actually argue that a group confers the status of art, or is he concerned with “what is required for someone to realize that a certain kind of thing can be a work of art”?

Arthur Danto, “Responses and Replies,” in Danto and his critics, ed. Mark Rollins (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 193-216.  

“a world consisting of works of art, a self-enriching community of ontologically complex objects, often inter-referential [... intertextual ...] and which above all had a historical vector, so that something could be part of that world at one time but not at an earlier time.”
“Discourse of reasons”
Seeing something as art VS being art
“I don't believe any institutional theory gives us a definition of art, simply a certain account of how something gets to be received as art.”
Also, therefore, a factor in the creation of art: “artist and audience are caught up together in the evolving discourse of reasons.”
Historical /cultural factors
Institutionalism =/= ontology, and Danto is more interested in creating ontologies than sociologies
Dickie, on the other hand, attempts to make his institutional theory also a definition/ontology

George Dickie, “A Tale of Two Artworlds”

George Dickie, “Defining Art,” American Philosophical Quarterly 6, no. 3 (July 1969): 253-256.

Descriptive use of “work of art” indicates that a thing belongs to a certain category of objects
“Artifactuality” as the genus of art (but what exactly is artifactuality? Dickie does not elaborate)
Art can be defined even if all or some of its subconcepts cannot be (painting, novel, tragedy)
In addition to artifactuality, a second, social property – non-exhibited, relational
No guarantee that current conceptions bear any resemblance to historical conceptions
What we do with certain objects (ie: works of art)
“(1) an artifact upon which (2) some society or some sub-group of a society has conferred the status of candidate for appreciation.” [Later version: “A work of art in the classificatory sense is (1) an artifact (2) a set of the aspects of which has had conferred upon it the status of candidate for appreciation by some person or persons acting on behalf of a certain social institution (the artworld).”]
Only a candidate, not necessarily appreciated
Can be conferred by a single person (often the artist)? Perhaps in a preliminary, small-scale sense
More broadly, an artifact acquires status within the system of the artworld
The (aesthetic) appreciation characteristic of experiences of artworks: “in experiencing the qualities of a thing one finds them worthy or valuable” (applies to all kinds of artworks)
“Official” status of candidate for appreciation is conferred by the artworld – authority (however scattered, heterogeneous and ambiguous that authority might be)
A certain institutional setting
Artifactuality is acquired at the same time as status of candidate for appreciation (two distinct properties)
“It all depends what is done with the paintings.”
This theory 1) doesn't presume “good” art (value-neutral); 2) is not overloaded; 3) is not based on any metaphysical/unempirical theory; 4) is broad enough to cover all things generally considered art without strain; 5) accounts for the specific practices of the artworld;
“A work of art is an object of which someone has said, 'I consider this object a work of art.'”

Arthur Danto, "The Artworld"

Danto, Arthur. “The Artworld.” Journal of Philosophy 61, no. 19 (October 1964): 571-584.

- Socrates: reflect; Hamlet: reveal
- Socrates focuses his discussion of art on mimesis because at the time artists were engaging in imitation
- Photography - discarding of mimesis in art
- "telling artworks from other things is not so simple a matter, even for native speakers, and these days one might not be aware he was on artistic terrain without an artistic theory to tell him so."
- Art theory does not just distinguish/identify art, it make art possible
- Changes in art necessitate changes in art theory, or else new artworks would be deemed bad or not-art (expand/revise to include)
- "Non-facsimile"
- "To mistake an artwork for a real object is no great feat when an artwork is the real object one mistakes it for." - how to distinguish?
- A bed cannot not be a bed
- Not a bed with paint on, an artwork made up of a bed and some paint (mistaking the artwork for part of itself)
- Different senses of "is" - "the is of artistic identification" - some property or part of the artwork must be designated by this "is"
- "One artistic identification engenders another artistic identification," requires/precludes others
- Making artworks different from one another even if they contain the same real objects
- (Obviously must be linked to the real objects)
- We must master this "is" in order to understand why a work is art
- "To see something as art requires something the eye cannot decry - an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld."
- Context
- [Popular artworlds?]
- Why can't the Brillo company make art, while Warhol cannot but make art? (Has the distinction between art and reality broken down?)
- Cannot separate the work from the (gallery) context - mistake the part for the whole
- The differences is in the theory of art, which supports the work (historically specific, "occasionality")
- "The world has to be ready for certain things, the artworld no less than the real one. It is the role of artistic theories, these days as always, to make the artworld, and art, possible."
- Art as a discourse
- The Brillo box of the artworld is distinguished (if by nothing else) by the "is" of artistic identification
- "Retroactive enrichment of the entities in the artworld" - previous works can now be discussed in terms of new predicates/criteria/theories/works
- "Pure" paintings can only exist in relation to impure paintings - the same predicates apply!
- Perpetual intensification of the matrix of artistic possibility that also enriches the entire rest of the artworld
- Importance of institutions in structuring this artworld/matrix of possibilities (For Danto, this is only of sociological interest...)

Ted Friedman, "Civilization and its Discontents: Simulation, Subjectivity and Space"

(In On a silver platter: CD-ROMs and the promises of a new technology)

- Video games seem to restructure/reorganize perception (driving like a game example)
- New frameworks for interpreting, understanding, mapping the real world
- Games are still new, not yet codified/familiar ("killer apps," rapid technological advancement and demand for novelty)
- Always-ideological ways of seeing -> presented in a fresh light? Radical possibilities?
- Civilization combines radical challenge and conventional ideological assumptions
- Omnipotent, almost omniscient leader-god with many roles (although, all the roles are essentially the same - resource management)
- "Internalize the logic of the program" -> teaches systems of thought -> identify with the computer (I might argue that these systems of thought are already internalized)
- Neither competition nor collaboration: synthesis, being-with, melding
- Immersion as being an extension of the machines (not the other way around)
- Cybernetic circuit/feedback loop
- Player is integrated into the system
- Simulation games create the opportunity to think through/reflect on what it means to be a cyborg
- New kinds of stories based on geography, space (encounter, transform, master spaces) Jenkins and Fuller, "spatial stories"
- Transform places into spaces (Heideggerian summoning forth of nature as standing-reserve?)
- Ther eis never a personal, subjective "tour" experience of Civilization's spaces (it remains abstract)
- "The story of the map itself" (ie: the system itself) -> not just an environment, the hero also
- Maps (and charts, graphs, etc.) are collections of subjective judgements in which subjectivity is ideologically erased (objectivity, scientific "god's-eye view")
- Does the technological aura of computers enable this erasure?
- Felxibility of multiple strategies (war, technology, etc.)
- Underlying truth that "global co-existence is a matter of winning and losing"
- Abstractness oversimplifies the complexities of imperialism, colonialism, etc.
- Transhistorical conceptions of science, religion, nation, etc.
- Purely functional role of religion and the humanities
- Scientific determinism
- Absence of hybridity -> nationalistic destiny (later versions of Civilization mediate this somewhat with the addition of Culture as a quantifiable gameplay element, but this carries with it another set of ideological assumptions)
- Possibility of transcending these assumptions through play -> mastery requires an understanding of how the system works (But can't this "understanding" just as easily take the form of precisely the same transparent, implicit, normalized ideological truth that Friedman suggests it might help to transcend?)

William Uricchio, "Simulation, History and Computer Games"

(In Handbook of Computer Game Studies)

- Sierra's Grand Prix Legends - demands for historical accuracy from fans, source of pleasure
- What are the claims and implications of historical games?
- Interaction between present-day player and representation/simulation of historical moment challenges fact/fixity
- Tension between the ludic and documentation (specific vs speculative)
- How do human subjects encounter textualizations of the past/how are they "written into" the past -> "interactions with the process of historical inscription"
- New ways of understanding history and historiography
- Two extremes of historical computer game approaches - specific events (accuracy, structured by re-created conditions) and historical process (abstract, simulation games, long-term historical development, structured by historical principles/ideology)
- Both extremes paint historiy as a multivalent process, many possibilities, interpretations, outcomes
- Some parallels to filmic representations of history, but the crucial difference is that games also simulate process
- Poststructural turn in history -> historical endeavour as play ("what if?")
- Destabilize heirarchies, subvert master narratives
- Some historical games value both accuracy and opportunities for creative intervention -> play emerges in the space between detail and improvisation
- Non-specific simluation-oriented games are less detailed, more abstract, but encourage broader engagement with historical process
- Civilization: broad epochal development
- Actual complexity of lived historical events vs the mediated snapshot of representation (inevitably partial, deforming, delimiting and presentist)
- Poststructural critique of re-presentation (how?) and of authority/objectivity (by whom?) "question reality, question authority" (Berkhofer)
- Coincides with the new representational possibilities of computers
- How do historical games mediate the past? (As opposed to textual mediations)
- "History as time-bound meaning situated in an ever-changing present"
- Simulation as process guided by certain principles -> pedagogical application
- "Virtual history," speculative
- Problem of a fixed beginning to a historically-specific game (where does an event actually begin?) -> structuring assumptions branch into an array of possibilities (hindsight)
- Simulation approach allows radical reframing -> structuring assumptions about long-term historical development, "ideologically-positioned maxims," organizing principles
- Poblocki: Civilization as the history of the Western state (implicit and explicit)
- Historical games fulfil demands for historical reflexivity, subjectivity and possibility but adhere closely to historiographic status quo in other ways (working against the speculative "freedom" celebrated by the games?)
- Uricchio thinks they succeed more generally as a means of reflecting on the past
- What if historiographic epistemologies were used as structuring agencies for games? Explicit and reflexive rather than underlying assumptions (What would this look like? Civilization could be customized to follow a Hegelian or Marxist theory of history rather than a Heideggerian technological determinism?)

Simon Egenfeldt Nielsen, Jonas Heide Smith, and Susana Pajares Tosca, "What is a Game?"

(In Understanding Video Games)

- Half Life 2 vs poker (both games, so different)
- Importance of specific definitions (not a question of correctness)
- Political dimension to definition
- Wittgenstein: family resemblances (does not actively seek a common feature, uses arbitrary examples, problem of formal/informal games)
- Huizinga: magic circle (ideological agenda to protect play as valuable)
- As special context were specific rules apply, games are not unique (but does Huizinga ever say they are? Why does a definition have to identify specific, unique features? -> exemplification structure?)
- Different to say they are separate than to say they are unique in their separateness
- Castronova: maintain separation or else play will lose its appeal
- Ways games extend into the real world and are not separate: time investment, moods, communication of ideas and values, behaviour, direct impact such as buying in-game items
- Callois: play is voluntary, uncertain, unproductive and make-believe
- Agon/competition, alea/chance, mimicry/imitation, Illinx/vertigo (and many hybrid combinations)
- Paidia vs ludus (not entirely distinct)
- Arbitrary categories? Too blurry?
- What about open-ended/free-form play within rules (SimCity example)
- McLuhan: games are tied to and reveal the nature of culture, and release tention (but can also create tension)
- Bateson: games as meta-communication, communication about communication, play is not taken at face value, communicates its un-reality (link to fiction)
- Sutton-Smith: multifaceted nature of games, definition is determined by purpose
- Games emerge as societies develop
- Finite, fixed, goal-oriented
- "An excercise of voluntary control systems in which there is an opposition between force, confined by a procedure and rules in order to produce a disequilibrial outcome."
- Meade: make-believe as part of the genesis of the self
- Adopt temporary selves (different from animal play)
- Rules enable/require consciousness of other palyer's roles, integration into a group
- Internalize the generalized other
- Jenkins: game as popular/lively art, popular aesthetics, emotional impact (parallels to earlier popular media)
- Infancy argument, still banal, formulaic, but have potential
- Player control, feedback are central
- Parlett: games have ends and means (requires a winner)
- Suits: restrictive rules to inhibit progress towards a goal (ie: inefficient means)
- Crawford: representation, interaction, conflict, safety
- Representation and safety are debateable (abstract games, indirect consequences)
- Formal definitions of digital games...
- Salen and Zimmerman: system, artificial conflict, rules, quantifiable outcome
- Juul: rule-based formal system, variable and quantifiable outcome, different outcomes have different values, players exert effort, influence and are attached to the outcome, optional/negotiable consequences
- Attitude towards the activity
- Digital games do not always match the classical definition
- Formal definitions help identify biases in our understanding of games, clarify whether observations are unique to video games (again, why do they have to be unique? Surely games share many, many features with other things and phenomena, why should a definition have to entail uniqe features?)
- Pragmatic definitions, "tools for action" (not so much pragmatic definitions as game design philosophies... aren't there also pragmatic definitions that scholars use?)
- Meier's "series of interesting choices" is an aesthetic stipulation or personal philosophy, not so much a definition
- Hunicke, LeBlanc and Zubek: mechanics, dynamics, aesthetics (rules/code, gameplay, response); sensation, fantasy, narrative, challenge, fellowship, discovery, expression, submission
- Design tools, not an actual account
- Genre
- Wolf's ridiculous list
- Aarseth's series of genre variables that apply to all games to varying degrees (questionably useful)
- Genres are arbitrary, but create expectations, financial function of genre
- Some systems of genre are more consistent (based on one clear criterion)
- Nielsen et al suggest categorization based on a game's success criteria
- Problem: games without explicit goals -> special category, process-oriented games
- Action games: motor skill, hand-eye coordination
- Adventure games: thinking, solving, patience
- Strategy games: between action and adventure, distant role of the general/god (turn based is closer to adventure, real-time is closer to action)
- Process-oriented games: system to play with for entertainment (toy), player character within (closer to action/adventure), or control over the system (closer to strategy)
- Process-oriented games may still encourage certain types of play over others
- Simulation games (sub-category of process-orienteD) mimic concrete, real-world experiences, so SimCity and SimEarth don't count (uh...)
- Nielsen et al's system of genre is just as problematic as any other system, and is hardly consistent (what exactly is the clear, single criterion? Successful gameplay actions? Then why aren't Strategy games simply divided up between action and adventure? It seems like the categories are also defined by whether the player controls one singular character or commands multiple characters)
- Additionally, the categories are confusing because they use familiar generic language ("action game," "simulation game") but disregard some colloquial understandings of those terms
- As with virtually all other approaches to genre in digital games, Nielsen et al miss the point that genre is a meaning-making discursive construct, not an objective tool and should be approached as such

Simon Egenfeldt Nielsen, Jonas Heide Smith, and Susana Pajares Tosca, "Studying Video Games"

(In Understanding Video Games)

- Financial, cultural, aesthetic significance of games
- Is game research science? Methodologically not necessarily, but in terms of "systematic, rigorous and self-critical production of knowledge," it can and should be
- Raise our standards to gain academic credibility, rather than vilifying other disciplines and the academy generally for not recognizing game studies
- Renewal of interest in popular culture, scholars who grew up with games, growing complexity of games have contributed to the emergence of game studies
- Relationships with game designers are a unique feature of the field (but for how long?)
- Many appraoches to games tackle many different questions
- Game/Rules, Player, Culture, Ontology as the four main perspectives one can take on games
- Simulation community vs game studies community
- Formalist vs "situationist" (poor choice of words) groups within game studies

Simon Egenfeldt Nielsen, Jonas Heide Smith, and Susana Pajares Tosca, "Introduction: Games as a Field"

(In Understanding Video Games)

- Many are no longer satisfied with "passive" entertainment (weird place to start...)
- Distinction between pre-digital/digital games
- Survey most influential/important developments and perspectives in game studies
- Interdisciplinary variety
- Game studies still young, messy
- Unanswered questions: What is a game? Why are there games? Why do some people prefer certain games? How to games affect the player?
- "There is much to be done."

Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern, "Build It to Understand It: Ludology Meets Narratology in Game Design Space"

(In Worlds in Play)

- If game scholars are contribute to game design/the advancement of the form (why would they want to?), they must understand design, rather than only analyzing existing games -> explore the new territory they imagine in their theory (but why should they be imagining new territory?)
- Player agency as the heart of the tension between ludology and narratology
- Mateas and Stern created Façade to explore this tension
- Complexity of game design problems requires the construction of experimental games to map/discover new areas of game design space
- Existing games only represent a small fraction of the possibility of games, so game scholars need to speculate on and explore those spaces to truly understand games
- So, according to Mateas and Stern game studies should be guided by a hypothetical, imaginary gamespace that will somehow reveal to us what games truly are/will be as we explore it? That's dumb. Games are whatever they are at any given moment, and are changing constantly... why would we assume that the true nature of games are in it's hypothetical future development, and not in their actual cultural-historical contexts? And for that matter, why would we assume that games have a true nature that can be revealed by making new games? Absurd.

William Huber: "Fictive Affinities in Final Fantasy XI: Complicit and Critical Play in Fantastic Nations"

(In Worlds in Play)

- How does FFXI generate space/tasks of play and situate the player?
- Altman's genre theory: semantically fantasy, syntactically an MMO (why does everyone ignore pragmatics?!)
- Fantasy as a fictional geography for working out questions of race, nation, ethnos, etc.
- Playable as procedure in games (actualization)
- Fantasy as an episteme created by always-ideological processes of replacement, subtraction and augmentation
- In-game races reference real-world ethnicities, relationships (and hybridize)
- Mechanisms of complicity: relation between nation-state and aboriginal/subaltern enemies; conquest, dominance of regions in the game; necessity of coordinated efforts (ie: partying up) that overshadows individual choice/agency
- This inescapable complicity is revealed through backstories, etc., but there is still no "real" historical agency
- So where, then, is the critical play promised by the title? (Expansive gameplay could be an example of this.)

Clara Fernández-Vara, José Pablo Zagal, Michael Mateas, "Evolution of Spatial Configuration in Videogames"

(In Worlds in Play)

- Spatial configurations from early games to today, how they position the player, how they affect gameplay
- "Cardinality of gameplay," how the player can have in the game (1D, 2D, 3D), distinct from spatial representation (2D, 3D)
- Discrete vs continuous spaces, segmentation (contiguous would be a better word here!)
- Unlikely for more spatial configurations to emerge, but possibly new, impossible cardinalities (Portal, etc?)
- 2D single screen (discrete); 2D space/1D gameplay (discrete or continuous); 2D space/2D gameplay (discrete or continuous); 3D space/1D gameplay (continuous); 3D space/2D gameplay (discrete or continuous); 3D/3D (discrete or continuous);

Stephen N. Griffin, "Push Play: An Examination of the Gameplay Button"

(In Worlds in Play)

- Crawford: simple input devices (button) -> cognition-centred approach to games
- By contrast, long history of games that involve the abilities/idiosyncrasies of the body, no reason why symbolic input is the only way
- Importance/prevalence of the button as the primary means of taking action in digital games
- Buttons on the border of the magic circle (accept limits by participating)
- Transparancy (presumed) of simple input devices
- Reduces gesture and performance to symbolic action, automation, functional value, productivity, efficiency, not expression
- Lack of embodied interaction impedes the medium?
- Importance of physicality of input (example of musicians and instruments)
- It would seem that the Wii (and Kinect, and Move) actualizes this argument, but does it also reduce gesture to merely symbolic action? (Diagonal slash is more or less the same thing as the Y button... or is this just a function of technology not being advanced enough?) Maybe Guitar Hero is a better example - performance, expression

John A. L. Banks, "Opening the Production Pipeline: Unruly Creators"

(In Worlds in Play)

- Ethnography of game developer/fan relationships (Banks worked for the developer in question)
- Changing relationships between users and producers in the games industry
- Fan communities, end-user creativity
- Voluntary fan labour, distributed co-production
- What are the implications of opening the commercial development to voluntary fan content creators? (Not an opposition)
- Lower cost of production by using fan labour (otherwise game could not be released)
- Problems with delays, consistency, support, etc. (logistics)
- Not unwitting exploitation, fan-creators are aware participants in a mode of practice
- What if the development process was actually organized around fan content creation?
- Banks' perspective is very much from the commercial side of things ("how can/are the industry" questions, not "how can/are the fans")

Kenji Ito: "Possibilites of Non-Commercial Games: The Case of Amateur Role-Playing Games Designers in Japan"

(In Worlds in Play)

- Role of users in technology
- Blurs boundary between user/manufacturer -> creative amateurs
- Amateur RPG designers in Japan (RPG Tkool 2000)
- Community network of circulation, interaction outside commercial realm
- Emphasis on story in these games
- Synthesis between socioeconomic and content studies (text and context)
- Textual difference between games made in different socioeconomic conditions
- Amateur RPGs: "old-fashioned" graphics (otaku nostalgia?)
- Versatility (simple to extremely complicated games)
- Low technical threshold
- Accessibility of games (no powerful PC required)
- Free distribution (standalone)
- Active community of users
- Not necessarily computer experts
- Mostly young males
- Pleasurable, not utilitarian activity (fantasy, world-making, imagination)
- Telling stories, sharing
- Fan games/tributes/inspired-by games
- Downloadable resources
- Collaboration is common (if only for beta testing)
- Reviews, evaluation, competitions (distinction)
- After-release support
- Darker or taboo thematic elements, social critique, unconventional narratives, self-reflection, personal expression are possible outside the mainstream (the same old "indie" or "alternative" argument)
- Greater technological sophistication = more homogeneity in the mainstream games industry? (Ito doesn't really offer any evidence of this)
- Amateur designers accomodate this lack and the diversity of personal taste, potential for artistic expression in this context, not just entertainment
- Ito's view of amateur game design is much too rosy-eyed and uncritical

Seth Giddings: "Playing With Non-Humans: Digital Games as Technocultural Form"

(In Worlds in Play)

- Games as everyday technoculture (not just futuristic/cyborg content)
- Technological agency
- Sociology of Science and Technology, Actor-Network Theory: challenge social constructivism
- Problems with encoding/decoding model: limits analysis of materiality of technology (agency, effects, affordances)
- Production, physical form, capabilities are meaningful, have effects , constraints, facilitates certain uses and resists others
- Society and material reality are mutually constitutive
- World and artifacts are both physical and symbolic
- Humans are not the only agents in the world (reject the "object hypothesis")
- ANT: "reciprocal relationship between artifacts and social groups," "networks linking human beings and non-human entities"
- Scoieties are fundamentally technological
- Symmetry of agency between humans/non-humans -> no firm conceptual distinction
- Notion that games both aestheticize and realize the cyborg idea: blurred boundary between subject and object still privileges the human
- Rather, a cybernetic circuit (indissociable)
- Practical, pragmatic to undestand computers as intentional systems (rather than as designed artifacts, too difficult to anticipate: chess programs); side-step question of actual consciousness
- Gameplay as engagement with artificial intelligence (ie: an agent)
- Advance Wars 2 (GBA) example
- Code/simulation, not text/representation
- AI as simulation (automata) -> intentional system we play with/against
- Mundane, playful, everyday, ubiquitous example of relationships between human and non-human actors (technoculture)
- "distributions and delegations of agency between technologies and players in the act of playing"

Holin Lin and Chuen-Tsai Sun, "'White-Eyed' and 'Griefer' Player Culture: Deviance Construction in MMORPGs"

(In Worlds in Play)

- "White-eyed player" = Taiwanese griefer
- Deviancy in gaming societies
- Move beyond individual conception of grief play -> collective recognition/reaction
- Power in social interactions
- Technopower (code); administrative power (GMs); normative power (explored here)
- "Social control mechanisms"
- Labelling as an othering process
- Uncertain age/gender distinctions in online play
- Grief/white-eyed play associated with imagined youngage
- Players can have separate avatars for normative and deviant play (explorative?), transfer benefits (items, etc.) from one to the other
- Stigmatizer/other griefers in order to define/secure normative identity
- "Griefer roles as collective player reactions to a yet-to-be-normalized environment"
- Explicit (identifiable, deviant, self-aware) vs implicit (occasional, fluid, accidental) griefers
- Definition of griefer is ambiguous, changing, subjective
- Blame motivation/experience level; RW identity/characteristics
- Percieved helplessness against griefers (better to ignore, "don't feed a troll")
- Self-aware griefers "professionalize" grief play (clans, notoriety, etc.), while unconcsious, occasional griefers stigmatize along with everyone else, rationalize as mistakes (us/them, cannot be both a griefer and "normal")
- Anxieties about cross-age play enabled on a large scale by MMOs -> griefers are young, kids, immature
- MUDs: gender anxiety, MMOs: age anxiety
- Calling griefers kids is an attempt to define the "right" age to be playing (reject stigma that games are childish by othering percieved "childish" play)

Patrick Crogan, "Playing Through: The Future of Alternative and Critical Game Projects"

(In Worlds in Play)

- Interrogate the critical potential of games
- Relationship of games to their contexts
- Frasca opposes simulation vs narrative, theatrical forms - simulation as the form of the future
- Complicate notion that simulation stands alone/is uniquely suited to face the future (military past must be considered)
- Tekken Torture Tournament, Painstation (theatrical, public exhibition/performace)
- Relation to reality TV -> spectacle of pain and suffering (military training connection?)
- Real-world consequences
- Both made real/actual and theatricalized, made virtual, removed in the staging
- Defining, delimiting, controlling (military "theatre of operations")
- Undermines the suspension of the real/normal
- Games reproduce the "primal scene" of military cybernetics -> in doing so they can modify it, critically in some cases
- Framing/placing/situating, not representing
- Projective, not reflective (future, means of speculation?)
- Frasca: narrative = past, drama = present, simulation = future (projective, experimental, hypothetical)
- Aesthetic development of simulation also future-oriented in Frasca's conception
- Origins of simulation in military technoscience are ignored
- This refusal of the past is echoed in the presumed future-orientation of simulation
- Where is the past in simulation?
- September 12: subvert conventional forms, open critical reflection
- Donkey John: ironic "skinning," references real politics
- Under Ash: inversion/reproduction
- Frasca: simulation as a tool to promote critical thinking and highlight relationship between model and reality
- Narrative can also be future-oriented (produced to be read), tool for arranging/understanding experience
- Simulation reproduces this aspect of narrative, anticipating future
- War gaming, tension between historical record and complexity, unpredictability that created it and needs to be simulated
- Simulation (and narrative, and drama) as mnemotechnic: technologies for the retention of human experiences (Stiegler)
- "Draws on the past with a view to the future"
- Simulation emerges out of narrative, drama, inherits/reproduces them as a process of memorization for orienting the individual/culture in time and space, in the present and towards the future
- Pre-emptive force of simulation is a product of modern rationality
- Its heritage must be remembered as simulation is proliferated, and adopted in the name of different futures

Ian Bogost, "Frame and Metaphor in Political Games"

(In Worlds in Play)

- Political success comes from representation of issues
- Metaphor/cultural construction as an "active conceptual framework that is central to how we understand the world." (Lakoff and Johnson)
- Framing (in Luntz's terms, "context") of the world is central to political discourse
- Words that reflect ideas
- 2004 - first endorsed political games
- Analyze political rhetoric, metaphor and frame as procedural
- Three kinds of ideological frame: reinforcement, contestation and exposition
- Reinforcement: explicitly draw attention to the frame (verbally, outside the game), demonstrate how to think about an issue (Tax Invaders)
- Contestation: rule systems also create frames, challenge apparent ideological frame (Vigilance 1.0) -> satire
- Exposition: expose underlying ideological frame created by the interaction between rules and content (socio-economic disadvantage in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is ignored -> crime as decadence/depravity)
- Exposition is the work of the critic, not the designer
- GTA: SA less stylized than previous GTA games, engaging directly with a cultural-historical moment? I disagree - where GTA: Vice City invokes Scarface and Miami Vice, GTA: SA invokes Boyz N the Hood and Menace II Society, and the now-iconic, highly mediated television news coverage of 1990s race riots, etc. As with other games in the series, the game is engaging with popular culture, not "real" history

Ulrike Spierling, "Interactive Digital Storytelling: Towards a Hybrid Approach"

(In Worlds in Play)

- Approaches to interactive storytelling from film production, HCI, game design, AI
- Virtual autonomous characters vs interactive stories
- Accessibility of authoring tools to actual authors
- Author must take responsibility for outcome/effect of interactive narrative (anticipate?)
- Author must maintain control over autonomous agents?
- "Humans are the storytellers, not 'the computer.'"
- Incomprehensible diagrams
- "Having a conversation" with a computer-based artifact ("agent-based conversation")
- Where exactly is the hybrid approach promised in the title?

Renata Gomes, "The Design of Narrative as an Immersive Simulation"

(In Worlds in Play)

- Attempt to generate cinema-style narrative in games has caused a new form/concept of narrative to emerge: immersive simulation
- Agency allows player to be part of the story universe
- Story is more than just a theme
- Two kinds of narrative game: character-oriented and simulation games
- Presence = greater potential for agency? (Why?)
- Affordances: surface is "stand-on-able," for example (Gibson)
- Character-oriented games have a clear journey/goal, sims do not
- "System history" as narrative in sim games
- "Poetic potential of simulation games"
- Narrative as an index of emergence in a complex system? (Personal narratives/narrativization)
- Eisensteinian ideal of pure formal discourse/communication/rhetoric could be achieved through simulation?

Laura Ermi and Frans Mäyrä, "Fundamental Components of the Gameplay Experience"

(In Worlds in Play)

- Complement game definition/ontology with the player/act of gameplay
- Experience emerges in the "unique interaction process between the game and the player"
- Player and context, take part in the construction of the experience
- Elusive concept of "gameplay"
- Different games, different experiences
- Playing a game as a goal in itself
- Active vs passive (participation), absorption vs immersion (connection)
- Digital games as active, immersive (escapism)
- Immersion as one of the key components of the gameplay experience (is it really? Or is it just desirable?)
- Important aspects for interviewed children: audiovisual quality/style, level of challenge, imaginary world/fantasy
- Gameplay experience/immersion as a multidimensional phenomenon (well, yeah.)
- Sensory immersion, challenge-based immersion, and imaginative immersion (some games combine all three)
- Meaning-making contexts
- Survey to determine levels of immersion, all quite high (people choose favourite games, which tend to be more immersive?)
- Is immersion being confused/conflated with enjoyment, appreciation or aesthetic value? Ermi and Mäyrä say no, but in spite of their efforts to divest it of that value it seems like those connotations remain
- Modality of gameplay experience?

José P. Zagal, Michael Mateas, Clara Fernández-Vara, Brian Hochhalter and Nolan Lichti, "Towards an Ontological Language for Game Analysis"

(In Worlds in Play)

- Game Ontology Project, "framework for describing, analysing and studying games"
- Unified vocabulary
- Heirarchical organization of structural elements, relationships between them
- Not a taxonomy or a classification of types, not design imperatives
- Define, classify "essential" elements of "gameness" in games and gameplay
- Category membership is dependent on context, culture
- "Blackbox analyses" based on what is percieved or experienced by players
- Specific/general/middle or obvious elements, "central" (strong) and marginal/blurry/borderline (weak) examples of each element
- Iterative, adaptive, organic method, grown from the middle starting with the obvious and extending to abstract and specific elements
- Representational elements, fiction, game setting, relationships to other media are bracketed in order to focus on formal/strucutral gameplay elements (Zagal et al acknowledge that more in-depth analyses must account for both and the relationship between them, however)
- Top level abstract categories: interface, rules, goals, entities, entity manipulation
- Each element is described, weak and strong examples are given, "parent" and "child" elements are listed and "part" (compound) elements are identified
- Example: "to own/ownership" (child of entity manipulation) -> saving mushrooms in Super Mario World
- Interface: presentation, input device, input method (hardware and software)
- Rules: framework/model in which game takes place, regulate development and basic interactions
- Two types of rules: gameplay (lives) and gameworld (gravity) - Both determine the possibility space of the game... is this is a meaningful distinction?
- Rules synergies (combinations of rules)
- Goals: objectives, success conditions, whether explicit or not (includes evaluation, feedback, scores, etc.)
- Player imposed goals are not included in the ontology (why? Not concrete?)
- Agent goals, game goals, goal metrics
- Entities: objects, agents, walls, power-ups, etc. (an undeveloped part of the ontology at the time of writing, possibly removed entirely later in lieu of entity manipulation, because actions make entities significant?)
- Entity manipulation: alter the attributes (adjectives)/abilities (verbs) of objects in the game
- To collide, to create, to own, compound actions
- Gameplay space vs gameworld space vs representational space (again, I'm not too sure about the distinction between the first two)
- Levels, waves, checkpoints as sub-elements of the Segmentation of Gameplay element

Janet Murray, "Games as Joint Attentive Scenes"

(In Worlds in Play)

- Problem of rapid development of human cognition and culture
- Understand others as intentional agents (basis of culture)
- "Joint attentional scenes," participants both understand the other as an intentional agent, framework for understanding intentionality and cultural transmission
- Why are games pleasurable if they limit the explorative freedom of play? Perhaps they are joint attentional scenes
- Shared focus, intentionality, symbolic communication
- Understand self as agent, shift perspective, teach/learn
- Games as foundational element of culture, first representational media
- Play as communication (pre-linguistic)
- Games organize behaviour, serve as practice
- Similarity to and separateness from others
- Intrinsically social (spectatorship and performance)
- Unseen intentions -> sense of cause and effect -> narrative sequences
- Link between games and stories at the earliest moment of human consciousness (symbolic communication leading to language, media)
- Episodic culture -> mimetic culture -> mythic culture -> theoretical culture (all endure in one form or another)
- Dance Dance Revolution as mimetic joint attentional scene between human and machine
- Mythic culture: heroic narratives of many games
- Joint attention -> language -> writing
- Ritual -> myth -> theory
- Games (and stories, presumably) as driving force of cognitive/cultural evolution? (Or are they simply a product/side effect?)
- Digital game as mediated consciousness of an implied human programmer
- Both embodied opponent and created (art) object
- Digital games socialize pople into cyborg order, new "symbolic language of interaction"

Julian Kücklich, "From Interactivity to Playability: Why Digital Games are not Interactive"

(In Digital Gameplay)

- "Interactive" has been drained of meaning
- Lowest common denominator definition: "interactivity as a medium's ability to facilitate response" -> tautological, all media are interactive by this definition, old and new
- Digital games are less interactive than non-digital games (fixed rules)
- Games as emblematic of media generally
- Alternative concept: play/playability (also very broad)
- Play as both a mode of interaction and an attitude
- Play as a system that distinguishes between play and non-play (as well as players and non-players)
- Play emerges from tension or friction between different systems (interesting notion!)
- Playing with the rules of a game is outside of the game, but within the realm of play more generally
- Play actions denote/stand in for non-play actions
- Permeable boundaries, crossover between play and "seriousness"
- Tensions in play: constrained freedom; secure creativity; active passivity; voluntary dependence (Silverstone)
- Playability is as much about the player as about the game
- Playability helps understand, identify, model games based on different modalities, pleasures, formal characteristics including openness/closure, freedom/rules, in control/out of control
- Importance of the ambiguity of play

Robin Woods, "Call and Response: Storytelling in the Neverwinter Vault"

(In Digital Gameplay)

- New forms allow us to reconfigure old theories, vice versa (rather than the imperialism argument)
- Narrative emerges between player and designer (not gamer and game)
- All choices made by the player are circumscribed by the designer
- Online forum discussions, fan communities are a channel of communication between players and designers - this is where interactivity is really located, and nowhere else, Woods claims
- "Patching" games as analogous to oral texts, emergent from dialogue, interaction
- Importance of audience to both games and oral performaces
- Neverwinter Nights modding community, feedback between players and designers
- No fixed/final text, always under revision
- Designers cede some authority to players through different versions of the game
- Woods makes an interesting point, but the Neverwinter Vault is hardly emblematic of player/designer interaction more generally

Richard J. Hand, "Theatres of Interactivity: Video Games in the Drama Studio"

(In Digital Gameplay)

- Games have replaced film as the main reference point for students
- Games help challenge hegemony of narrative
- Eperiment: play games, bring experiences into the drama studio
- "Theoretical parallels" between digital games and theatre
- In addition to superficial motifs, a "shared state of being" as hermetically sealed worlds
- Player/avatar ~ actor/character (both cross the threshold)
- Force feedback, gaming implements -> props
- Unpredictability within constraints (free will/preordination)
- Avatar/character as both "I" and "he/she" (shifting)
- Hand has developed theatre games based on survival horror

Katie Whitlock, "Beyond Linear Storytelling: Augusto Boal Enters Norrath"

(In Digital Gameplay)

- Player as performer in virtual world
- Game narratives are still simplistic, formulaic
- Crawford: "designers" vs storytellers
- Ignoring interactivity in lieu of linearity
- MMORPGs as the most narratively successful -> link to Augusto Boal's theatre theory
- Common features of Forum theatre/MMOs: player's time commitment determines length of experience; change and innovation within the game; continual changes; fluid experience; existing guidelines for characters and experiences
- Spectators assume a character, intervening as spect-actors
- Open forum of debate and dialogue
- Begin with a familiar conflict scenario, open up to improvisation
- Avatar as costume for spect-actor
- Everquest as a social, economic, political world
- Clearly defined world, existing social parameters (community)
- Racial tensions in EQ
- Character class (ie: rogue, warrior) does not in any way equal socioeconomic class! (Whitlock is not the first to conflate these two, and it makes no sense to do so.)
- "Ideal place" for Forum-style debate and dialogue (is it?)
- Character creation within parameters, step into any existing role
- Characters "reflect" creators task and psyche (this seems to contradict the previous statement about stepping into any role...)
- Spect-actor directly intervenes in the story
- Quests as "narrative frames" that can succeed or fail based on player action
- Instancing as different versions/performances of a scenario
- Player-driven economy
- "Rehearse revolution" or "rehearse life" through an active relationship to(simulated) models/systems
- The Sims Online as even closer to Boal (real-world, modern setting)
- Do MMOs really try to solve community problems or address political conflicts? Whitlock is unconvincing on this point.
- Importance of physical presence to Boal (Whitlock links this to EyeToy and Dance Dance Revolution... but these are offline games, so where does this leave MMOs?)
- Is a virtual, customized avatar enough to stand in for physical presence?
- Ubiquitous games that bleed into real life
- Whitlock's conclusions seem to leave MMOs behind. All of her arguments and links to Boal, it seems, would be much stronger if applied to offline games or even non-digital games such as tabletop role-playing games. She spends the whole chapter trying to explain that MMOs are similar to Boal's Forum theatre (or is she saying that they would be a good venue for Forum theatre? It's really not very clear), but I'm just not buying it, and it seems like she isn't either.

Aleksandra K. Krotoski, "Socializing, Subversion and the Self: Why Women Flock to Massively Multiplayer Online Games"

(In Digital Gameplay)

- Pre-NES games less male-oriented ("family" games)
- Post-NES "did not appeal to potential female gamers" (that's a pretty bold statement)
- Removes girls and women from computer play
- Failed "girl game" movement (coopted by the industry)
- Renewed interest due to success of MMOs with women
- Community, feedback and play with self appeal to women in MMOs (apparently)
- Expand communication networks into MMOs
- Personalization of characters
- MMOs as less objective-oriented than other games (some, maybe)
- "Relevant setting" (to women) of The Sims Online (as in, the domestic space? Women should stay in the kitchen?)
- Allegiance to online friends/groups
- Feedback from the game/other players = self-confidence
- Choice of (feared/desired) fantasy selves
- Empowerment of women playing male avatars
- Krotoski demonstrates an incredibly shallow conception of gender as a more-or-less fixed concept in this chapter, assuming that there are specific features in games that appeal to women and can thus be used to target games at women... problematic to say the least

Christina Sommerfeldt, "The Embodied Adventurer: Women as Player-Characters, Gamers, and Module-Builders in BioWare's Neverwinter Nights"

(In Digital Gameplay)

- Relation between player/avatar and player/game as "a mode of gendered subjectification"
- Character creation and modding as a performance of gender that draws attention to its construction and contingency
- Gender can be subverted in various ways in mods
- Character creation foregrounds gender as an essential feature of personhood
- Romantic subplot options to attract female gamers (Dragon Age is a more recent, highly successful, example of this... a "girlfriend game")
- Female-created mods often deal with gender, sexuality
- Avoid essentializing male and female gaming styles and simply reifying the categories we are trying to challenge
- Need to highlight the construction of gender, race and other categories in digital games
- Sommerfeldt makes some good points but much of the chapter seems sort of empty, disjointed

Harry J. Brown and Michael Oren, "Living Art: Commercial Modding and Code-Illiterate Gamers"

(In Digital Gameplay)

- Games "animate our interior desires" -> mods actualize these desires in a particularly vivid, personal/customized way
- Modders "make the games their own"
- Inventive new uses for modes (aesthetic, pedagogical, etc.) thanks to accessible mod tools released by game developers
- Modding is also now a marketing strategy
- Cooperation, not friction, between modders and the industry (allows industry to regulate more closely)
- Mods in which learning is entangled with gameplay
- Brown and Oren have a pretty uncritical, rosy-eyed view of things

Nicholas Taylor, Jennifer Jenson and Suzanne de Castell, "Pimps, Players and Foes: Playing Diablo II 'Outside the Box'"

(In Digital Gameplay)

- Emergent interactions that leave the "intended" game behind
- Player is constructed by and constructs the game
- Jenkins: "poaching" game elements for a different purpose
- Acquisition and character customization-oriented practices ("pimping") undermine the "official" quest narrative
- Diablo II community is agonistic and individualistic
- After an ordinary, linear play-through of the game, online non-linear jumping enables/encourages emergent narratives and practices based on better weapons and equipment (this is the primary incentive for prolonged engagement with the game)
- Players in this context don't identify with their avatars, rather they see them as tools and status symbols
- Newman: avatars as "sets of capabilities, potentials and techniques"
- Avatar names tend to be instrumental, indicating use value
- Status gained from inventing or achieving novel character builds (especially those that require require wealth and rare items)
- Experimentation and exhibition with/of items and builds
- Rushing: high level character runs new character through the main quest narrative (in order to get it over with), new player leeches XP off higher-level characters
- Community and collaboration are entirely based on bartering and selling, motivated by the desire to cheat, scheme, betray others and individual gain (contrasts with the usually positive associations with those concepts)
- Farming and hacks as "instrumental non-engagement with the game" for wealth and status ("beating" the game)
- Cutthroat trading practices, "hard lessons" rather than help for n00bs
- Accumulation > play

David J. Leonard, "To the White Extreme: Conquering Athletic Space, White Manhood, and Racing Virtual Reality"

(In Digital Gameplay)

- Importance of sports games to the industry
- A racialized project
- Black coolness as constructed by white ideology (minstrelsy, not in any way transgressive or liberatory)
- Love/hate for blackness is present in sports games
- Black = athletic, white = intellectual
- Extreme sports as an "alternative" white masculine athletic space (rebellious, dangerous), reaction against "pollutant" blackness in "mainstream" sports
- White male athletes conquer urban black spaces (such as the ghetto, absent of black people in digital game versions), or wild natural landscapes (frontier imagery)
- Affirm/reinforce "common sense" notions about race, gender, sexuality
- Naturalized privilege/superiority of whiteness (race = non-white)
- "it is futile and contemptible to treat cultural productions as pure texts."
- White male as victim, subsequent white male backlash (Beck's Loser as an example of this? Seems a bit different than what Leonard is describing, maybe.)
- Risk-taking, sexual prowess, male bonding and small community, rule-breaking, "alternativeness," individual masculine success, performativity are all celebrated in extreme sports
- Non-white male characters in extreme sports games are either tokens or caricatures
- Non-white female characters are exotic sex objects
- Cultural cache of hip-hop authenticity within virtual ghettos empty of black people, existing to be dominated by white male extreme athletes
- Complete erasure of women in some games, hypersexualization as objects of male pleasure in others
- BMX XXX as exemplary, not isolated and unique, in its construction of a racialized, sexualized space for white male athletic superiority
- (Virtual) white male disregard for the law (graffiti, property damage, skater "mayhem") is marked as badass or extreme, while in reality black males are brutalized and incarcerated for the same crimes
- Would have liked more discussion by Leonard of the relationship between "mainstream" sports games that capitalize on black stars and extreme sports games.

John Unger, Porter Lee Troutman, Jr., and Victoria "Tori" Hamilton, "Signs, Symbols and Pereceptions in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City"

(In Digital Gameplay)

- Poor critical reception of Grand Theft Auto 1 and 2
- Theoretical approach to sign/symbol in GTA: Vice City, study of 11 players' use of these signs and symbols
- Signification as both individual and social (in and out of the game)
- A mediated activity
- Avatar as symbolic text "read" by other symbolic texts in the game, informed by real-world player's subjectivity (unorthodox account of what goes on in a digital game)
- Interdiscursive, intrapersonal "planes of development"
- Burke's Pentad: Act/Scene/Agents/Agency/Purpose
- Why do Unger and co. use "agents" and not "actors?"
- Signs become symbols when they are habitual
- Positioning - different ways of being that people appropriate as individuals and members of groups
- How are signs/symbols internalized over short periods of time (microgenetic); how they constitute individual agency (ontological); sharing of strategies, discussion, interaction (sociocultural/historical); large-scale cultural and/or biological changes (phylogenetic)
- All of the above are mutually constitutive, linked through social activity, which is mediated through symbolic means
- Unger and co. overemphasize the interface elements of GTA:VC as if they are the only symbolic elements at play, and treat the actual game-world/space uncritically as if it is more or less equivalent to reality
- Arbitrary condition changes during empirical study? (Why do they choose to use cheat codes to change Tommy Vercetti into a female porn star? No theoretical explanation is given.)
- Wanting your avatar to run in the game as a consequence of knowing that you can run in the game (this is reductive - the desire to run in the game could also come from experiences with other games, or the existence of a running button could be inferred by a novice player based on how slowly the avatar moves without it)
- Knowledge about digital games is distributed (Gee)
- How to use the findings of this study to create games for learning? (What findings?)
- "moments of tension between players (agents) and mediational means (language, symbols)"
- An ongoing process of signification (and of changing conventional systems signification) unfolding in the GTA series and in digital games generally

Shira Chess, "Playing the Bad Guy: Grand Theft Auto in the Panopticon"

(In Digital Gameplay)

- GTA as a scapegoat for real-world violent crime
- Evidently not a game for kids, but is it causing adult violence?
- Player as both criminal and authority, "productive play that reinforces Western moral standards" (Foucault)
- Digital games discipline players using similar tactics to those Foucault describes (both in terms of game mastery and moral values)
- GTA teaches the futility of criminal behaviour by having players judge themselves
- Spatial environments, enclosure, testing in-game limits, space as a reward and a control
- Also the physical space of gameplay (sitting still in front of a screen)
- Temporal control (in-game timed events, real-world time investment/loss)
- Constant, precise movements, attention (repetition is key to producing docile bodies) -> console controller buttons
- McLuhan: games teach us to surrender to collective demands
- Ranking systems, rewards/punishments
- Delinquency as a necessary function of disciplined society
- Player is reminded constantly that criminal actions = harsh punishment
- Delinquency as necessary function of disciplined society
- Interplay of gazes in the Panopticon, invisible surveillance
- Players monitor themselves while playing (they are the invisible authority, watching, judging, even punishing) - the "little voice"
- "Grand Theft Auto," named for a legal term for crime
- Cartoon cover of the game, exaggeration, caricature
- Real vs imaginary (realistic details, exaggerated world)
- Player should not want GTA to be real (people shouldn't want Scarface, Taxi Driver or Fight Club to be real, either, but and they do... problem with anti-heroes, etc.)
- GTA both mocks and reinforces the values it represents
- Control over camera angle can create distance or identification, or both (internal vs external gazes)
- Difficulty condemns violence subtly (violent, extreme losses/punishments for failure)
- 'Crime doesn't pay!'
- Endless cycle of killing/being killed (downwardly cyclical nature of crime)
- Cheating acknowledges the rules (the "wrong" way to play)
- "supporting and reenacting the values of the Western legal system"
- Creates/supports self-monitoring, "inner penal system"

Marc C. Santos and Sarah E. White, "Playing With Ourselves: A Psychoanalytic Investigation of Resident Evil and Silent Hill"

(In Digital Gameplay)

- Fear/desire are the same
- We engage our psychology in confronting horror in survival horror games
- Psychological repression of horror (the death drive, the Lacanian Real) allows us to enter into subjectivity
- Player as defender/preserver of subjectivity, re-asserting stability and the Symbolic Order
- The player as champion of the symbolic order partakes in two kinds of activity/pleasure: Proaretic pleasure in resolving action/threats; hermeneutic pleasure in ordered narration, solving mysteries, linearity and coherence (Barthes)
- Silent Hill, the law of the Father
- Repressed desire for nihilistic assimilation (with the pre-subjective maternal) in the form of zombie/monstrous consumption of the self
- Eradication and repressing of this desire by killing monsters
- Loss of language as key to the (impossible) return to the Real and transformation/assimilation into abject monstrosity
- Monstrous mother-Others as final bosses (maternal phallus: umbilical cord)
- In addition to the proaretic pleasure in destroying the abject Real, players must attempt to provide the ontological meaning/structure and create coherence (hermeneutic pleasure)
- Narration as symbolic killing of multiplicity, ambiguity in lieu of One true self, illusory objectivity
- Gameplay as therapy for the disturbed avatar (player as detached analyst)
- Silent Hill 3 calls into question this distance by suggesting that we have shared our avatar's psychosis and delusions in our attempts to restore the Symbolic order
- Digital games as a safe space to engage with a simulated Lacanian Real and then turn it off and return to an unquestioned (but no less illusory) Symbolic order and social reality

Jonathan Boulter, " Virtual Bodies, or Cyborgs Are People Too"

(In Digital Gameplay)

- Figuration of the body in first-person shooters
- Relation between customized avatar and the "real" body playing
- Gaming experience as "a perfect site for the realization and representation of the cyborg"
- FPS deathmatch "communities of violence" as a space of liberation?
- Simultaneous desire and anxiety over technological/technologized bodies
- Contradictions of deathmatch: real/virtual, present/distant
- Cyber-body as oppressive (McLuhan) and/or liberating (Haraway)?
- Multiplication of cyborg self - player/computer cyborg, fictional player-created cyborg avatar
- Game does not sustain cyborg identities (imagined, temporally limited projection)
- Communal space of online muiltiplayer is a constructed and intepreted resonant space
- Heterotopia: liminal spaces of transformation and contestation (of subjectivities)
- Sublime pleasure in temporal limitation (which nevertheless must be erased by a seemingly fully-realized world)
- Erase its own virtuality
- Competing logics of fiction/real
- Sublime transports/translates/projects the self. To where? The gamespace also defines the sublime experience
- Deathmatch as ritualized, sacred violence that binds a community (which exists nowhere and everywhere as a virtual community) together
- Bataille: ecstasy of death creates the self (always temporary ecstasy)
- "Deathmatch can be read as a reflection of larger philosophical truths"
- Rather than singular, deathmatch is an endlessly repeated ritual (repetition as key to cyborg ontology), simulated violence becomes meaningless
- Deathmatch (so read) as simulation of the sacred, postmodern critique of philosophy
- The game requires the real to be a game, and vice versa
- Loss of the real when we enter the game, loss of the virtual when we leave it
- Spectacularized banality (such as realistic physics) which we cannot carry into the real world (hyperreal?)
- Continual fall from, return to the gameworld (sense of loss/trauma)
- Gameworld as the unconscious of the real world (atemporal, deathless) in which desire is expressed/actualized
- Gameplay as a working-through of anxieties about technology, but simultaneously the game proscribes our freedoms, the possibility space

Will Slocombe, "A 'Majestic' Reflexivity: Machine-Gods and the Creation of the Playing Subject in Deux Ex and Deus Ex: The Invisible War"

(In Digital Gameplay)

- Technological society as both freeing and controlling, dramatized in the Deus Ex series
- Not only Big Brother vs individual freedom; also "Little Brother," internalized ideology (or "programming")
- Digital games as "ideological tools that control how their players think."
- Meat vs machine (contested site of the nanotech-enhanced cyborg avatar)
- Enhancement of "natural" human abilities vs becoming-technological (different kinds of cyborgs)
- Control vs augmentation
- Deus Ex as cyborg game (generic hybridity)
- Player as the animating "soul" of the avatar
- God in the machine (a paranoid fantasy of a man-made machine-god)
- Technology as ideology
- Individual/player is invisibly interpellated as a function of ideology/the game system
- Playing subject is "forced into interacting with the game in set patterns, however loosely defined [...] the program within the player." (Somewhat problematic/partial formulation.)
- Aarseth as narratologist (an accurate assessment, I'd say)
- Games are "never truly interactive" because the computer dictates the rules (or is that the very essense of all interactivity, within parametres?)
- Ideology embedded in gaming extends beyond the game
- Illusion of defeating ideology by beating Deus Ex
- The hacker/cyborg figure seems to represent human freedom to manipulate technology, but in fact this is a function of the technological system (ideology erases itself)
- Deus Ex as reflexive but nevertheless ideological; the player is still constituted as a particular kind of subject

Eugénie Shinkle, "Corporealis Ergo Sum: Affective Response in Digital Games"

(In Digital Gameplay)

- Game studies lacks foundations, but nevertheless has embedded paradigms
- Dominance of a limited structural/semiotic (I would add formalist) angle (taxonomies, definitions, etc.) and a visual bias
- Importance of the body - affect and phenomenology - as part of perception
- Unquantifiability of affect
- Political implications of bringing affect into the discussion of games
- The virtual is part of the real from a phenomenological standpoint
- "Eye, mind and body"
- The virtual as a field of possibility (Massumi)
- Persistance of the decorporealized subject assumed by linear Albertian perspective in digital space theory (has become normative)
- Move beyond perspective to fully-embodied perceptual experience which "cannot be reduced to one sense alone" and is made up of intensities
- Games not only look, but feel real
- Rez deals in affect and intensity rather than content and rationality
- Blur distance between surrounding world and Self (can we see "critical distance" as an ideological construct? As Eagleton notes one can be critical of something from within it.)
- Players "are the game" (not users of a tool), interesting example of Glenn Gould
- EyeToy (just before the Wii)
- Affect is historically specific based on our lived experiences in a culture, not precognitive, pure, primitive or innocent - it is simultaneous and in context
- Digital games "engage the technologized self"
- Distanciation paradigm exonerates us from responsibility, choice, reality (a politically questionable kind of freedom-from, not a freedom-to)
- Political games must challenge the construction of space, logic and not just content, producing intensities, affect "outside conventional meaning and culturally formed perceptions"
- Political change requires an understanding of the relationship between affect and ideology
- "Embodied and affective praxes [...] space for the emergence of new relations between mind, body and technology."

Nate Garrelts, "Introduction: Negotiating the Digital Game/Gamer Intersection"

(In Digital Gameplay)

- Earlier games are more deterministic, creating a fairly homogeneous experience for all (most?) players
- Simplicity (not primitivity) and novelty as key features of early games
- Newer games are more complex and expansive, creating heterogeneous experiences
- Problems with studying such complex objects (no "authentic" version)
- Making meaning through play
- Problems with removing the player from game studies (this volume to serve as a corrective)
- Industry has made "innovation" normative to great economic success (not simply a case of fast technological advancement)
- Diversity of platforms as part of the industry's economic success and ubiquity
- "Copy-cat and keep away" in the markets
- New hardware drives software sales until they slow and new hardware is developed
- Trouble with naming the object of study in digital game studies
- Garrelts locates the object of study in the relationship between games and gamers
- Move past media-affect theory (dominant understanding of this relationship)
- "Interdeterminacy" of gameplay

Janet Murray, "Hamlet on the Holodeck?"

(In Hamlet on the Holodeck)

- "Cyberdrama" need not be meaningless entertainment
- "Narrative beauty is independent of medium."
- Digital media should help us understand the human condition
- Procedurality is the new element that digital media brings; we are establishing the building blocks of how to use it, and getting used to it
- Numerous comparisons to the development of other media
- Fixed, single author vs collaboration, ephemerality
- Distinction between formulaic entertainment and art that reshapes and transcends those formulas (interesting in context of the rhetoric of artgames such as Braid that explore/use conventional gaming elements)
- The promise of the new medium is found in stories about whole systems (the human psyche, the global community), ie: simulation
- Tension between "blasters" (violent gamers) and "builders" (storytellers, artists, etc.) in digital media
- Computers as a representational medium of great power that should be used for our "highest tasks," ie: storytelling and art

Janet Murray, "Transformation"

(In Hamlet on the Holodeck)

- Pleasure of transformation, variety
- How to handle mutability, fragmentation
- Kaleidoscopic narrative, repeated (re)organization of fragments/elements
- Multiple points of view
- Digital narratives can reflect our contemporary conception of the world as always multiple
- Problems of conclusion
- Solving of the narrative puzzle vs saturation
- Transformative power of enacting stories
- Virtual worlds as practice
- Murray dichotomizes stories that are escapist and stories that are "progressive" (ie: that affect the real world)
- Closure as exhaustion (of reader or of possibilities), not completion - understanding the structure, not the story necessarily
- Endless transformation vs finite mortality
- Labyrinths, webs, simulations
- Importance of process
- Repetition, exploration of multiple instances from different perspectives

Janet Murray, "Agency"

(In Hamlet on the Holodeck)

- Immersion leads to a desire for agency
- Agency is not common in narratives
- Activity, participation =/= agency
- Aesthetic pleasure associated with games comes from agency
- How to hybridize game structures with narrative literature?
- Pleasure of intentional navigation
- Solvable mazes vs tangled rhizomes (balance between goals, freedom)
- Some kinds of digital game-stories: multithread stories (navigable different versions of a story); journey stories; symbolic drama; contest stories; constructivism (collective co-creation)
- Games/stories not necessarily opposed
- We narrativize all experience, enact stories
- Distinction between author and interactor who has creative agency within an authored environment (choreographer/dancer; composer/performer)

Janet Murray, "Immersion"

(In Hamlet on the Holodeck)

- Any medium can present an immersive "virtual reality" through narrative, but the effect is intensified by participatory media
- Computers as liminal, like stories
- Immersion must rest on the threshold between real (present) and imaginary (elsewhere/distant)
- Problem of seeing ourselves in the fantasy without disrupting it
- Problem of "finding our way back" (what is the fourth wall of digital media?)
- We just need to get used to new media
- Formalism/formal experimentation as a sign of maturity (Duck Amuck)
- Unlike older media, we are asked to transgress boundaries and enter the liminal space
- Screen/controller as threshold objects
- Active creation of belief (not passive suspension)
- Immersive stories invite participation
- Virtual objects become "real through use"
- Link between spectacle and immersion
- Avatar as mask that allows for participation in/on the threshold
- Move away from "gun-crazy" violent games
- Awareness of others can break immersion, but in MUDs and other similar games we only see the avatar, not the "real" person
- Well-defined rules/roles structure immersive environments and engender belief
- Game mechanics mediate/stand in for other actions/meanings (does that make them linguistic?)
- Experiences that are authentic, if not "real"

Janet Murray, "From Additive to Expressive Form"

(In Hamlet on the Holodeck)

- "Additive art form," ie: cinema as photography + theatre, conception indicates a form in its early stages (foreshadowing remediation again?)
- Move beyond the attraction of the medium itself to interested in the stories it tells
- What are the essential properties of the digital medium?
- ELIZA as the first computer character (believability)
- Essential properties of digital environments: they are procedural and participatory (interactive), and spatial and encyclopaedic (immersive)
- Procedural systems of rules should be recognizable "interpretations" of the real world
- Zork "programs the player" through trial and error
- Pleasure of testing limits of a system
- Dynamic participation, not binary
- Computers are spatial because we "navigate" them (seems like a chicken/egg thing... why do we conceptualize computer use as navigation to begin with?)
- Murray argues that there is transparency/immediacy in screen displays (I disagree, it is always mediated, but a question of degrees), that navigating a digital environment is "real" experience
- "Dramatic enactment of the plot" by the interactor
- Encyclopaedic, expansive fictions
- Tension between seemingly vast possibilities and the limited/ideologically determined roles available to us (importance of interpretation rather than uncritical acceptance)
- Importance of "systems thinking" in the 20th Century
- "The computer allows us to create objective correlations for thinking about the many systems we participate in, observe and imagine."
- Real knowledge can be gleaned from "fake" simulations/games
- Computers are uniquely suited to our era, in which we conceptualize the entire world and life itself in terms of systems

Janet Muray, "Harbingers of the Holodeck"

(In Hamlet on the Holodeck)

- Computers as a hybrid of all previous media/forms (sounds a lot like "cinema is an amalgam of all arts")
- New varieties of narrative entertainment (in their infancy)
- Storytelling as "continuous" throughout history, media
- Distressingly teleological view (earlier media foreshadowing later media as "proto" versions)
- Multiform stories, multiple versions/realities within one linear work
- 20th Century physics engenders a rethinking of narrative time: alternate realities, points-of-view
- 20th Century life as composed of parallel possibilities (computer can capture this)
- Roleplaying as "consensual reality," "holodeck experiences without the machinery"
- 3D movies ready for more intimate stories (definitely has not happened!)
- Tension between spatial immersion and linearity (and control/interactivity)
- Games as the most promising attempts so far
- Loosening of boundaries between game/story, narrative/drama, audience/author
- Murray hopes to determine the native properties of the computer (stop remediating)

Janet Murray, "Lord Burleigh's Kiss"

(In Hamlet on the Holodeck)

- Star Trek holodeck as a storytelling medium (employing familiar literary genres)
- Mostly game-like adventure stories, but the Victorian gothic story demonstrates a more "serious" approach
- Virtual/real distinction anxiety (like all new representational media)
- Huxley's Brave New World, Bradbury's Farenheit 451
- Limitations of print media as a positive thing (makes its illusions easier to resist)
- Computers and video games especially are the new source of anxiety (cyberpunk, etc.)
- Optimistic holodeck vs more dystopic visions
- Control over the medium (being able to turn it off or close the book) allows us to retain our humanity (simplistic understanding of control?)
- Link to the long human tradition of storytelling
- "Safe space" for exploring ourselves
- All media become transparent and irrelevant over time and only the "truth" contained within (ie: content, story) matters (?!)

Janet Murray, "Introduction: A Book Lover Longs for Cyberdrama"

(In Hamlet on the Holodeck)

- Ambivalence towards emerging media (exhiliration/fear)
- Cross-referencing in print media as proto-hypertext (similar to some of Aarseth's points)
- Importance of early hackers, pedagogical computing in the early days of digital humanities
- "Microworlds" as dynamic, fictional universes/narratives represented on computers for exploration and discovery (and learning)
- Digital media as a "thrilling extension" and an analytical, synthetic "tool for serious inquiry" that needs only to be domesticated
- Computer as counterpart, not replacement, for print media
- Pursuit of "a computer-based literary form"
- Digital storytellers: "half hacker, half bard"
- Cyberdrama as a new framework for storytelling

Espen Aarseth, "Conclusions: The Ideology of Influence"

(In Cybertext)

- Persistent myth of co-creation
- Ergodic works include "the rules for its own use" and distinguishes between sucessful/unsucessful users (always?)
- Anamorphosis: hide/code aspects of a work for viewer to uncover (through non-trivial effort) -> determinate cybertexts with a "final state"
- Three kinds of literature: Novels (including explorable hypertexts), anamorphic literature, metamorphic literature (in which the user has real influence)
- Broad issues: users vs creators, old vs new terms/theory, etc.