Bob Rehak, "Playing at Being: Psychoanalysis and The Avatar"

(In The Video Game Theory Reader)

- Avatars in games both simplify and complicate conventional psychoanalytical approaches to technological mediations of identity (such as cinema)
- "Sites of continuous identification in a diegesis"
- Rehak is drawing on 1970s psychoanalytic film theory (so-called "Screen theory")
- Spectatorship/participation
- Player-avatar is the key relationship (a heterogeneous, not 1:1 relationship, similar to hand-glove)
- "games as powerful interpellative systems"
- Avatar as both self and other
- Significance of avatar death and "rebirth" (as well as pausing, saving, quitting)
- Technological staging of ego-confirmation cycle
- Graphical realism, first-person perspective, etc. indicate an obsession with the avatar as a stand-in for a real person
- Avatars map/reflect (bodily) control, if not necessarily actual appearance
- Avatar as acted on object vs acting subject (puppet vs costume?)
- Play with identity, presence, subjectivity
- Violent destruction of avatars = aggressive response to our reflection, as per mirror stage (what about avatars that cannot die?)
- Wolfenstein 3D as the "moment" of avatarial maturity... Rehak sees an evolution towards more human(oid)/embodied forms of avatars, but this is hardly universal. (Presumed teleology towards more life-like avatars.) Other forms of avatars (not to mention games without avatars) remain prevalent if not dominant
- Avatars have been shaped by our psychological needs and by technological possibility
- Avatars become more "lively" over time
- Importance of repetition/cycles in both games and psychoanalysis
- Immediately responsive graphical interface as a reflection of the player/user's agency
- Effacement of the self in order to transfer (a reduced, diluted) agency to the avatar
- Shift from mechanical (Space Invaders) to anthropomorphic avatars (Pac-Man)
- Pac-Man's oral incorporation versus the anal expulsion of Space Invaders (Seriously?)
- Implied body in first-person perspective (this implied body can sometimes only be fully seen by other players)
- "Tourist mouse" aesthetic of Myst and similar games
- Correlation between the lack of a visible/implied avatar in Myst and the absence of player death (this seems dodgy, considering in otherwise very similar games the player can die)
- Rehak claims Quake is centred on the preservation of bodily integrity, but what about when the game elements overtake the fictional/representational aspects of the game, when it becomes simply about gaining points and winning?
- Avatars see and are seen
- Avatarial reflection as a source of pleasure in games, among other sources
- The avatarial relation as a structure of seeing
- Point-of-view camera/first-person perspective as subjective narration
- Games achieve a sense of literal presence where film cannot
- Ideological positioning and suture occurs in games as much as in other media
- Interfaces are ideological and discursive (transparently so), hailing and interpellating the user, who misrecognizes themselves as a whole, unified subject
- Not totally deterministic (more like TV than cinema, many distractions and fragmentations - but these are not universal forms of viewer experience)
- The relation between player and avatar is always already a contested space of potential resistance
- Avatars don't have to have a semblance of physicality, but when they do we are fascinated by them
- We take our bodies with us into the game
- Ambivalence and fragmentation of our selves extends to our media/art and imaginary worlds creating endless cycles of identification and rejection that mirror our real-world psychological existence

Miroslaw Filiciak, "Hyperidentities: Postmodern Identity Patterns in Massively Multiplayer Role-Playing Games"

(In The Video Game Theory Reader)

- "Computers subtly model our way of thinking about the world."
- Affinity between postmodern theory and computers/digital games
- Rules of MMORPGs as analogous to the rules of real life in (post)industrial societies
- MMOs as a communication as well as entertainment medium
- An "experimental arena" for postmodern situations/identities
- We can manipulate, multiply our selves
- Filiciak makes a shifty claim that 9/11 has caused more people to stay at home and thus play online games... evidence, please?
- Character creation: freely creat oneself (especially one's appearance)
- Avatars as a first-person "I"
- MMOs allow us to adapt our selves to meet social/cultural expectations (ie: beautiful, thin, muscular)
- Transference (unconscious) of real-world characteristics to avatar
- Game success/advancement encourages long-term investment in one avatar
- Filiciak greatly overemphasizes the freedom of players in a game and the liquidity of player/avatar identity - these are always already produced within a very specific, rigid system of rules, just like in the real world
- No one self is more "true" or essential
- The self is determined in relation to others
- Masks -> avatars
- "Man cannot be anybody other than what is required by his environment." (Laing)
- Constant construction of the self
- Filiciak overstates the fragmentation of contemporary existence and institutions
- Identity as a rhizome -> hyperidentity
- Games offter the opportunity to play with identity
- A pleasurable, often wilful blurring between reality and the subjective reality of experience
- Menial tasks in-game can be fun (and this is written before World of Warcraft!)
- Fetishization of the screen
- Being visible on-screen = being real
- Internet discourse is akin to public rhetoric (speeches, etc.), we are always aware of and performing for an (imagined) audience
- Filiciak can't seem to decide if MMORPGs are a metaphor for the self, a "playground" for experimentation, or an actual space for the articulation of the self (I've weighed in on the differences between these three possibilities in an essay on Foucault's aesthetic self-creation and expansive gameplay)

Alison McMahon, "Immersion, Engagement and Presence: A Method for Analyzing 3-D Games"

(In The Video Game Theory Reader)

- Shift towards 3D and first-person perspective as the dominant in popular games situates them closer to Virtual Reality (VR) theory and practice
- McMahon will critique the notion of immersion (it's too vague, break it down into specific terms and recast)
- "Immersion" can refer both to diegetic/narrative immersion and nondiegetic/game immersion (in the rules, strategy, etc.) - these are two different things subsumed under the same term
- Related concept of presence, the feeling of "being there" is used interchangeably with immersion
- Realism is not necessary for immersion/engagement/presence
- Conditions for immersion in VR - meets user expectations; allows non-trivial interaction; consistency
- Good quote: "devising a winning (or at least spectacular) strategy" - not all gameplay is geared entirely towards success (expansive gameplay, role-playing etc.)
- Immersion is generally associated with narrative and fiction
- Engagement is generally associated with gamplay, "deep play"
- (It could be argued that these are flip sides of the same coin.)
- Presence (sometimes) involves embodiment
- McMahon wants to judge games according to the degree of immersion, engagement and presence (assuming, therefore, that these are aesthetic ideals for most/all games)
- Mark J. P. Wolf suggests that 3D first-person games follows the conventions of Classical Hollywood Cinema, but this is not at all the case - Classical Hollywood Cinema involves purposive cutting, framing, mise-en-scene, none of which are present in the same sense in 3D first-person games Rather, these games seek to produce the same effects (invisibility, continuity, contiguity of space, etc.) through very different means!
- The first-person shooter "gun-hand" convention is not traditionally relevant to gameplay (serves instead to draw the player in), but more recently the option of aiming down the ironsights of a 3D-rendered gun has changed this
- 3D first-person shooters are often understood to have pioneered immersion, engagement and presence (and are even cited/used/preferred by VR and AI engineers and technicians)
- Presence is the experience of a mediated environment as unmediated
- Elements and factors that contribute to a sense of presence include social interaction, realism, "transportation," immersion, actors and intelligent environments
- Quality of social interaction, the feeling of being "with" other players (communication, interaction, collaboration, togetherness)
- A player might view his or her avatar as "me" or as a character in the world
- Social realism vs perceptual (audiovisual) realism
- (Social realism is not the right term here - McMahon is not just talking about how characters and people act believably in the game, but how the environment as a whole functions in a believable manner - systemic realism? Environmental realism? There's got to be a better way to say that.)
- Presence in a space is constructed via "perceptual opportunities" both designed and emergent
- "Transportation" and telepresence - is the user transported to a place? Is the place transported to the user? Do multiple users share a common place?
- How does teleportation/quick travel affect the sense of presence (as opposed to contiguous navigation/transportation)?
- Perceptual vs psychological immersion (blocking out external stimuli (VR helmet) vs mental absorption)
- Interaction with the mediated environment is important for presence
- Synthetic social actors that act meaningfully within an environment (ie: bots, AI, NPCs) can create a sense of presence (as opposed to "canned" characters that to not seem to act)
- Users tend to respond realistically to synthetic social actors
- An "intelligent environment" - the machine seems to be human or to have personality (beyond simply acting meaningfully)?
- McMahon argues that immersion and engagement are in fact both aspects of the larger concept of presence, the sense of which can be created by many diverse elements and varies greatly
- Presence results from an interaction between form/content/system and the individual player
- This conception of presence can be used to study 3D games both quantitatively/analytically or qualitatively/aesthetically (McMahon doesn't really give an example of the former or explain how such a study might work)
- Surely this isn't limited to 3D games? At least some 2D and text-based games must deal in presence (albeit in a different manner)
- McMahon's example is a brief study of Myst III: Exile
- Non-interactive conversations reduce presence; high social/perceptual realism; environmental intelligence is recognizable in the puzzles (a sort of "personality" that demonstrates intelligent design); teleportation is integrated into the fiction; low perceptual immersion but high psychological immersion; many "attractors" and secrets/surprises that draw the player into the game and onwards
- Contrast to Diablo II, which cultivates a completely different kind of presence made up of other elements
- This isn't so much a method as a theoretical approach or framework - a perspective for the analysis of 3D games that could be integrated into any number of methods

Mark J. P. Wolf, "Abstraction in the Video Game"

(In The Video Game Theory Reader)

- Concerned primarily with abstraction in the visual imagery of games
- Restrictions of early game technology forced designers into abstraction
- Later technological progress allowed for more realism/representation
- Wolf sees an untapped potential in abstraction
- Weak analogy to action painting (assuming a connection between abstract art and early game graphics, highly suspect)
- Implied avatar (invisible or offscreen) vs "surrogate" avatar (visible or onscreen)
- Wolf uses the term "player-character" rather than avatar (still early in the history of digital game studies... when does the term avatar become universal?)
- Scott McCloud's notion that abstraction/simplification allows for identification (creates a vacuum)
- Gradual formalisation of conventions and increasing complexity
- Abstract graphics are not as useful for demonstrating the power of new technology
- Discussion of the medium specificities of the Atari 2600's graphics
- Representational box art contextualizes abstract graphics (Wolf claims this is somehow disingenuous or a betrayal of the more "pure" abstraction of the "real", which is completely ridiculous. Cultural objects are always received in context of other discourses, even the most abstract of paintings has a title, is displayed in a gallery, etc.)
- Throughout, Wolf seems to blur the distinction between "representation" and "realism" (almost all the examples of abstraction in games he cites are examples of abstract representation, not total abstraction)
- Another silly analogy, this time to the Lacanian mirror stage, as if learning the rules of a new game is somehow similar
- Empathy/identification vs abstraction
- Abstract games as a genre (Tetris, other puzzle games)
- Wolf seeks "new possibilities for abstraction" (which in many ways has been realized by indie/artgames movements and renewed nostalgia for 8- and 16-bit gaming culture)
- Bizarre notion that texture maps are abstract, but the 3D models they are mapped onto are representational? The logic being that some abstract art features splatters, rust, corrosion and so on, and so do some texture maps in games like Doom? Absurd!
- Simplicity vs complexity in abstraction (goes both ways, contra McCloud)
- All games, because they simulate rule-based systems, are abstractions
- Perceptual vs conceptual abstraction
- Wolf idealizes abstraction in a very modernist-essentialist-medium-specificity sort of way, and makes some pretty shifty (or just plain strange) claims throughout

Walter Holland, Henry Jenkins, and Kurt Squire, "Theory By Design"

(In The Video Game Theory Reader.)

- Pursuing the function of theory in the (relatively) early stages of digital games as a medium, and as the medium develops
- Analogy to early film theory, articulated by participants/practitioner-creators, not academics
- Abstraction and distance of theory in academic film studies comes later
- Digital game theory at a threshold, what is the relationship between academic theory and design practice?
- Theory emerges from practice at times of change or uncertainty
- "Vernacular theory" of game designer/theorists (Zimmerman, Wright, etc.)
- MIT Comparative Media Studies mandate for "applied humanism," using humanities principles to tackle real-world problems
- Games-To-Teach projects
- Games must be placed in context of learning more generally (no magic bullet)
- Games, as "microworlds" act as a context for learning
- Goal is to enagle the learning that already occurs in games to work with formal education
- The chapter aligns MIT with early experiments in film theory/practice
- Close collaboration with the industry, policymakers, educators, etc. (similarly close relationship is found elsewhere in Jenkins' work on transmedia storytelling, can be problematic)
- Extensive discussion of specific games by MIT students - how useful or interesting are these insights beyond practical educational application and game design? Do we understand what games are, how they work, their socio-cultural function any better?
- Emphasis on forward-looking, somewhat utopian humanistic change, rather than on understanding how things are currently
- Strange/unnecessary use of the word "remediation" - not just a synonym for adaptation
- Suggestion of an affinity between digital gameplay and scientific method (experimentation, testing hypotheses, etc.)
- Claim that these projects are of use not only to practitioners but also to academics, but I don't really see how
- Academics (of the abstracted, distanced variety) serve a fundamentally different cultural function than the theory/design/practice described by Jenkins et all, but this distinction is glossed over

Mark J.P. Wolf & Bernard Perron, "Introduction"

(In The Video Game Theory Reader)

- Perron and Wolf position the volume as a milestone for the discipline, even though it is still emerging, emphasizing the diversity of approaches.
- "Video" versus "computer" games - not identical terms, they choose "video games" because they feel it implies the right things (personally I prefer the more platform-agnostic "digital games")
- The introduction traces a brief history of so-called video game theory
- Early stages: ethusiasts, hobbyists, programmers
- The rise of the arcade and industry writing/reviews
- Home computer magazines and strategy guides
- Early histories of the industry and the medium
- Chris Crawford's design-oriented theory
- Psychology/affect-oriented approaches
- Concepts of new media and multimedia (importance of the CD-ROM)
- Placing games in an industrial context (political economy, franchises)
- Importance of the web, online communities of gamers/game theorists
- The first school for digital game design (DigiPen institute in Vancouver)
- France: LeDiberders on games and art/aesthetics, much attention from the Cahiers de Cinema
- 1990s nostalgia for older games, arcades
- Aarseth is positioned as the first serious academic video game theorist (conspicuously, no mention of Murray as part of the historical survey... she does not appear until later in the introduction)
- Debates about games and gender (both theoretical, industrial and cultural)
- More theoretical approaches to journalistic criticism, aesthetics (Trigger Happy)
- Society for Cinema Studies expands to include Cinema and Media Studies
- Pretty suspect list of essential "firsts" that differentiate video games from other media: algorithmic, real-time play, hand-eye coordination (really?), player-controlled surrogates (an argument could be made that each of these pre-date video games)
- International perspectives (mostly European, apparently little academic work on games in Japan)
- Video game theory as a field, rather than "video game studies" more generally (but nevertheless includes a wide range of approaches, not all of which are theoretical per se)
- Looking to demarcate an agreed-upon, shared terminology for video game theory
- Problems of definition (why does anyone still bother with definition?), irreducibility of video games as a concept
- Essential features of "all" video games: algorithm, player activity, interface, graphics (probably accurate, but who really cares? Different forms and media exist on a continuum and overlap constantly, as they note elsewhere in the chapter)
- Claim that Murray and Manovich are saying the same things with different vocabularies
- Interested in the "possibilities and potential" of video games and recording the history of what games are and have been... is that really all there is to it? I don't really see why the possibilities and potential of the medium matter to video game theory. Shouldn't the emphasis be on understanding them, now, as a (cultural, technological, social, aesthetic, formal, experiential etc.) phenomenon, not pushing them forward towards some grand future or documenting a nostalgic past?
- They end with the notion of "games embodying theories." Worst idea ever - there's a place for theoretically-minded art (although more often than not it ends up being terrible, as evidenced by way too many student films), but it's hardly equivalent to the actual work of theory.

Directed Reading 2010

"The History and Epistemology of Digital Game Studies" starts now.