The Play Research Group, UWE, Bristol
studying the technologies and cultures of games and play
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Guess which Lego-based PS2 game is the new favourite in our house....
Top games scholar Jesper Juul will be a guest speaker for the Game Culture students on Thursday 21st April. His presentation is titled 'videogames in the mind of the player'.
Nearly all the presenters' abstracts are on the site now, as is info. on accommodation. www.playfulsubjects.org
We got our exciting new MA New Media validated before Easter and now, at last, we have a URL for it. So check out the course's nascent website: http://newmedia.uwe.ac.uk.
From Julian Kücklich's blog I was led to his short but thought-provoking essay in Natural Selection, on the notoriously violent game Manhunt. Is the game a brave artistic innovation that re-inteprets the role of violence in videogames, or is it simply a shrewd way of making money from taking speculative violence to the next level? Julian Kücklich, after considering the various instances of intertextual and cultural cleverness in the game, lands on the the latter interpretation. The essay is well worth a read, especially to people interested in games and ideology (that would be us, no?). In any case here follows very briefly the reasons why I disagree with Julian's conclusions on Manhunt.
- He seems to be following Kline et al (Digital Play) in that the ultimate justification for rejecting the ideological content of a commercial game at the end of the day boils down to the fact that the game is, in fact, a commodity and sold for profit. However among the 'discourses of capital' must there not be something more speficic that we are looking for in order to problematize the speculative tendencies? Does it not follow from all commercial cultural products that we can too easily and conveniently assume that their producers must be 'cynical'? The makers of the Sims may well be, as Julian claims, a bunch of irresponsible people, but how is this fact manifested in the game? Why should they be blamed for the fact that The Sims is ideologically ambigious?
- Is not the 'latent authoritarianism' of Manhunt something that belongs to a much more general form (certainly to a very broad category of games)? Is it of no artistic merit how Manhunt brings this dimension of games to the extreme in an innovative though uncomfortable way? Authoritarian lab-rat design is an awful thing and, we may argue, also inherently violent in its nature, and we love it (or in Manhunt lingo: you love it). Anyone?
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