I arrived at the Form, Culture & Video Game Criticism conference in a fog. Not a metaphorical fog but a rolling Transylvania fog so thick that even the locals seemed a bit unnerved by it.

In fairness, there was a bit of uncertainly reflected in the fog. After all, this conference was sponsored by the Princeton English Department. English departments, as you might know, are the natural habitat of those awesome creatures,  "the literary critic." Fearing I'd be structuralized and deconstructed into a hyper -analytic corner and wholly consumed like other wayward wanna-be intellectuals, I pulled my coat around me and dove into a Princeton bar hosting the pre-conference social gathering

In no time at all they surrounded me. Quickly the conversation turned toward video games. and no one seemed to want to leap into Foucault, not even the cheerful Brit, Barry Atkins (who I was to discover liked nothing more than making terribly complex things perfectly understandable).

The next morning, we reached the rich and regal Princeton campus and climbed the stairs to the towering the lecture hall that was all very "Mr. Chips." Dark wood and leaded glass windows created a sanctuary feeling I'm sure it's designers intended while the hard wooden desks must have been designed with the philosophy of "break the student's body and their mind will grow."

Co-organizer Roger Bellin set the tone of the conference with a call to think of games as "interesting and complex things filled with meaning." With that, we were off. The 14 presentations and papers attracted an audience of roughly 100 people scattered through the day, with many sitting patiently through the entire proceedings. The crowd seemed divided by students of culture, literature and computer science, a number of self-described "gamers" curious to see what the academics had to say, a couple of journalists and a few teachers.

The conference provided a compressed picture of some of the intellectual activity going on in video game studies today. In a short summary, it was clear that early attempts to define the discipline or argue against a sort of "academic colonization" were hopeless. The ideas flowing into the area of video game studies from all quarters hold great promise to energize the notion of studying something as banal as video games. The literary critics were not going to leave our beloved game world, I discovered. Then again, neither were the musicians, lawyers, cultural studies folk, computer science departments or anyone else.

The fact I gathered over and over again at the conference, and one I think that has been missed in the past, is that the variety of people studying games--even those who don't happen to call themselves "ludologists"--still share a common passion and pioneering spirit that all gamers have. Yes, even those literary critics care about games. They are not just looking for new flesh to cut into with their surgically sharp tools, new organisms to viciously slash into categories for serious study later.

No, the people at the conference study games because they like games. They are interested in thinking and theorizing about games because they like playing games.

With that perspective as a point, the counter-point was made clear. Some academics want to talk about games as a way of making games, or making better games. Other academics have no real interest in what happens with their insight, once produced and published. This distinction, knowledge for knowledge sake, is the sort of attitude that makes the game industry nervous.  So with no obvious industry presence (well, there as one guy with a Game Developers Conference shirt on) the tone of the talking was more open-ended theorizing. When the conversations turned tactical, it was about appropriateness of method, the limits of discipline and the rashness of talking about games in a tenure-track academic department.

What the conference stood for, and what it signaled, were credibility, quality, momentum and clarity of the field of video game studies. Borrowing the prestige of Princeton's ivy, game's studies took another step away from the dubious shadows of the arcade and parent's basement. Bellin and Dexter Palmer did a commendable job of pulling together a surprisingly diverse and passionate group.

As a  summary of my feelings about the conference, I'm more convinced than before that in our rush to stake out the field of "ludology" we may have left behind some of the necessary tools and personalities from the established disciplines (yes, those lit critics again!).  Likewise, I am more convinced than ever that without a rapid and passionate attempt to form video game studies as something in and of itself, then the area will collapse into something unrecognizable to the people that enjoy the games themselves.  And to keep from ending up there, we need to remember the fun.

As a result, I'd say the best presentation of the conference was final speech, delivered by Atkins. I'll discuss the content in more detail below. But the nut of his speech was actually about the heart of the video game. Why do we play games? Because they are fun. Why did we start studying games? Because they are fun. If we think ourselves up, over and around the fun, then the research methods and conceptual apparatus don't matter. Video game studies will just be an autopsy, the patient having died.

What follows now is a slightly spelled-out set of notes on the conference speakers. You might want to compare my observations to those already logged by Nick Monfort during the conference on his ever present IMac.

Please keep in mind, my notes are almost entirely editorial.  I have not had the chance to read any of the conference papers. So, I'm sure I'm going to get things wrong, or at least not quite right,  But these notes might help clarify what went on at the confernce.

Laurie Taylor: A Ludic Model? Smooth and Striated Space and Sid Meier's 'Civilization' Games

This paper is based on the translation of smooth and striated spaces from other research into games. Smooth space is a type of relational space--like the relationship of two cities in Civilization

She acknowledged that this division of space types is entirely conceptual, so that in practice smooth and striated spaces blend together. This provided a little bit of conceptual confusion for me. As concepts, they make sense independent of one another. But I was not left with a clear picture of how, in practice, you ever had either type of space in a game in any discrete, observable sense.

She also pointed out that checkpoint restarts in a game striate the game space. But this does sound a bit like the striation of time, which is easier for me to think about. Time flows in a smooth procession in a game until you pause, die and/or reload. This breaking up of time seems to fit the notion of striation.

Jordan Hall 540 Polygons and the Men Who Love Them

Her thesis points out that women in cinema, in some respects, can be considered objects placed for men to look at. OK, that makes sense. Then, by using films based on video game characters, she launches into her real point--if women and movies are there for the pleasure of the "male gaze", does that mean you make a video game using a film character for the same reason? Likewise, do video game movies bring the female character from the game to the movie in order to import the pleasure object for further gazing?

Of course, video games combine this voyeuristic aspect with the sort of avatar identification most people assume comes from playing video games.  So, Jordon talked a bit about the role of women characters in games and movies as a different kind of relationship.

I'm not quite sure how Jordan handles the dilemma. So, I'll need to read the paper to pick that up from reading it. Also, I'm not clear how she accommodates other readings of female game characters. I've certainly seen it argued (in Joystick Nation, for instance) that the identification is at the action level rather than the character level. I would assume this unbalances a feminist read of a woman game character.

Nick Monfort Combat in Context

Nick reminded everyone this was a video game conference by having two people play a vintage copy of Atari Combat

His discussion covered a lot of ground and a few points really stuck out for me:

• He noted that the entire Atari VCS/2600 system was based on the idea of two-player play. Combat, as a perfect example, shipped with the system, and while it could be played one-player, was fundamentally a two-player game. For that matter, the game system shipped with two controllers. He didn’t account for the shift in modern gaming to a one-controller, single-player default. But the example made it clear that a shift had occured.
• He emphasized how technical limitations show up over and over in the design of the game. Symmetrical clouds and mazes, for example, were a result of a limitation of 20 bits of information available for each scan line of the television screen. But a “buffer doubler” allowed for one half the screen to be mirrored on the other half at no additional memory cost. To emphasize how small the game of Combat is, he printed out the complete machine code on the back of his 8x11 /12 handout.
• Noted that Combat is a “collection of games” rather than a single game with 27 options. These 27 different games are built out of small variations (directed missile versus straight missiles, tanks versus planes, etc.) He suggested that this made a game like Combat a good critical field to plow since small changes in play mechanics create different games. It allows for the separation and isolation of these mechanics for study.
• Is Combat violent? Of course! You shoot things in tanks and planes. But the simple representational qualities of the game seem to work against the read of the game as violent. To me, this does seem to provide a useful method for thinking about game violence. Typically, the bugbear of game violence is “interactivity”. So, here is a game that it interactive, but the visual style abstracts appears to soften the violence argument into silence.
• Can we study games at the structural level—the code and the platform as well the higher order parts of the game? Nick makes the point pretty clear that he think we can study code by printing the Combat binary on his handout. He even provided a snippet of the commented source code to show that these objects are available for study. I’m not sure if he really said what kind of research would go down this road.

Dennis Jerz You Are Standing At the Beginning of a Road: Examining Will Crowther's "ADVENT"

Jerz has been doing research on the evolution of the early text adventure ADVENT. He has pulled together many previously conflicting historical details into a much more clear picture of how the game evolved, and exactly when. For example, contrary to some reports, Crowther's original game did feature fantasy elements, and was not a simple cave exploration.

One are of special interest to me was that Dennis argued that Crowther's ADVENT design is fully informed by Crowther's caving experience. Although Dennis doesn't seem ready to extrapolate how caving culture shaped video games in the future, just detecting the influence is useful for understanding some of the motives behind this game.

One area he did go into was describing some of the differences in caving culture and hacker culture. For example, cavers are hierarchical in organization, as safety is a primary concern. Hackers tend to be decentralized. Dennis also noted that cavers do a sort of "role playing" to practice rescues.

I cornered Dennis later to get his ideas about the notion of real caving space being a primary influence for video game space. It seems to me that there are two major types of game space'caves and outer space. Cave spaces include every cave, tunnel complex, ancient temple and whatnot while outer space games are those unbounded horizon games such as flight simulators and the X Wing games. He could see the connection, but didn't see caving as defining that distinction as much as simply logically connecting to potential game space. And, as Nick Monfort pointed out, "Hunt The Wunmpus" occurred in a cave as well.

Christy Wampole Electronic Games as Constrained Medium

Using the Oulipo as her central model--the Workshop for Potential Literature--Christy proposed that game designers should think about creating artificially constrained games in the same way the Oulipo created constrained literature. For example, the Oulipo might write a poem that never used a specific letter or where each line of the poem starts with the same letter.

She connects this sort of literary exercise to a type of play.

Her proposal for a "Workshop for Potential Video Games" can be summed up using the examples she provided for what kinds of constraints such a project might use:

• Mix and match characters between games
• Mix and match scores between games
• Rearrange scenes or levels
• Move 2-D program to 3-D
• Covert game across genre'from flight sim to adult game
• Include same game object on every screen
• Build a game with no anthropomorphic or zoomorphic characters

The fellow in the audience with the GDC shirt pointed out that the experimental games workshop already did this kind of work. For each of her examples, I could think of specific fan or artistic work that had already implemented the idea. This seemed to be the real hole in the paper. Her ideas were great. But outside the conceptual apparatus of an Oulipo of games, there are already people doing these experiments.

Robert Bowen Musical By-Products of Atari 2600 Games

This lecture, given by a composer, included video game soundtracks and written music in handouts.

He carefully explained why the Atari chip produces such a distinctive sound by un-naturally inventing sequences of notes that do not fit any musical scale. As a result, game sound programmers and composers are forced to transliterate their music to this format. I liked that. I always assumed the "Atari sound" was a feature of the type of sound, not an inherent "out of tuneness".

He also showed that how simple sound effects, such as in "Missile Command", could be considered a coherent musical score.

His conclusion was that early Atari game sounds could be considered a type of found music, but were not really compositional.

I especially liked his description of "Rez" as a "kaleidoscopic oscilloscope"

David Thomas Video Game Vocabulary: A Lexicon of Experiental Anchors

My speech was pretty straightforward. I explained that we need set of common critical terms for discussing video games so we can connect the various disciplines researching games. I showed the terms I have settled on and used the example of "camera" to illustrate why we could not always borrow terms from other sources without creating confusion. The slides and a worksheet that provides a bit more detail on the critical terms is available in the buzzcut downloads section.

I did get a laugh from my statement that the terms "this song is cool" and "this game is immersive" as being critically equivalent claims that don't say too much!

I didn't get much response from the other researchers. But several of the gamers in the audience came up to tell me how much they appreciated the speech. I took this less as an ego boost and more of affirmation of what I was saying--it's hard to follow specialized research if you don't know the lingo. Getting literary critics for example, to use some common critical game vocabulary would make it easier to share knowledge.

My suspicion is that I have not been able so far to really get across the need for a common set of terms.  This problem is exacerbated by the apparently simple set of terms. That's why I tried to show with term "camera" that we don't always have such a good grip on the vocabulary. When "camera" is used in a cinematic context is not quite the same as the term in a fine art or game context.

So, I left the conference on this account determined to get a long form explanation of this completed.

Peter Bell Hidden ply and the Identities of Mobile Video Gaming

Peter connected the research previously done on portable audio in general and the Walkman in particular to the world of mobile gaming.  In this way, he was able to show that the "in public but being private" qualities of the Walkman were a basis for thinking about portable video games.

More interesting, he pointed out how gaming on cell phones was an inherently subversive activity.  Adults hide play, allowing them to present their public face of professionalism but secretly maintain their childishness. This is similar to how the Walkman allows a person to exist in two spaces simultaneously'public and private.

Peter said that this was his first academic conference presentation. Based on the quality of this presentation, I'd say we have a lot of look forward to from Peter!

Greg Lastowka Virtual Crimes

Greg framed his presentation with a bunch of questions that probably would have required an entire day to answer. Unfortunately, he had a scant 20 minutes (even though I'm sure everyone would have been happy to sit and listen for a day. His presentation was quite interesting.) His key questions were:

• What is a virtual world (answered primarily through a historical review of virtual worlds and the presentation of a couple of definitions)
• What is the basis for law in a virtual world?
• And, are virtual worlds narrative?

In terms of games and laws, he observed that in a virtual world, you could consider the code as the laws of the game. But there are some problems with that. For one, he pointed out that people are better at policing behavior than computer code is. He used an example of "Ultima Online" where the programmers simply took player-killing out of the game. This was not well received by the community who preferred to self-enforce using a human-driven process.

He also pointed that we are very ambivalent about breaking computer code. So, for example, Neo is the hacker hero of "The Matrix" because he can manipulate the program and make it do what he wants. This is a problem if you feel that the law of a virtual world is the code, and you know that people don't particularly respect the code!

I was particularly interested in his further thoughts about cheating in a virtual world'whether that was using code exploits or buying virtual goods on eBay. He concluded:

• If a virtual world is a game, then doing these things might be cheating.
• If a virtual world is a narrative, then it's more like skipping a chapter to get to the good part.
• If a virtual world is a social system, then it's more like social climbing.

His point, it's though to define virtual crime because we really have not thought through the source of rights in a virtual world, much less what a virtual world is in the first place!

As for the "Are virtual worlds narrative" he seemed to think that if they were, they were not very good narratives!

Tevis Thompson But Our Princess is in Another Castle: Towards a 'Close-playing' of "Super Mario Bros."

Lifting the critical approach of "close reading from literature" Tevis placed it squarely on Mario to create what he calls "close playing".

In his example of close playing, he explored the jumping quality of "Super Mario Bros."

This is another presentation where I will have to read the paper before I get a handle on what he was saying. I think the model was quite interesting. But a lot of the critical approach was still left in the literary tradition, un-translated. And I had trouble following that.

James Graham The Resurgence of the Realist Art Form Within the New Cartesian Theatre: Present and Future Directions

Starting from the claims current day video card to deliver "realism" James jumped directly into a comparison of the photo realist painters to show a similarity in urge, technique and, I suppose, philosophical point of view.

I was left wishing he had another 30 minutes to go further into his subject.  His comparisons of "Half-Life 2" screen shots and photorealist paintings were uncanny, They both shared a similar aesthetic and, oddly, even the same subject matter.

I ran into James on the street the next day and told him I wished I could have heard more. He explained more of his ideas. He certainly sees video game art as almost bereft of the kind of influences that inform fine art. He talked about game artists as craftsmen who realized the vision of the game designer in a mechanical or even random manner.

Further research is required on this point, but he talked about the efforts of the realist movement to become the "eyes of God" in observing the detail and beauty of nature. To a degree, he thought that the player (or maybe the game designer) has become the God of the video game and that the game artist was fulfilling the role of the Dutch master's assistant, laboring to produce a "realism" that showed the beauty of the creator.

Eric Hayat and Edward Wesp More on Race and Style in Ergodic Literature

Does "Civilization" raise ugly ethnic questions and stereotypes? This paper explored that question at a very low level of analysis. Digging through signs and signifiers, they described the selection of race in a like "Age of Kings" as "coercive memeticism" defined as (in my abridged version)  "A process in which those who are marginal in culture are reprocessed by a banal conception."

Fair enough. But I wonder if that influence is offset by other factors? For one, it's too easy to choose between sides. You might lead the German tribes to victory in one game and then turn around and oversee the rise of black Africa.  For another, I'm not convinced that people identify with game objects the way they identify with literary objects. This is basically the same argument I would make about Jordon's observations about Lara Croft'I'm still pondering the possibility that the selection of character, avatar or game side is more politically neutered than in other media because of the elastic nature of video games.

With that said, I did find their argument forceful enough to convince me that the narratologists need to stay at the video game table. They may not be "right" in any summative sense. But they have something vital to offer.

Eric Hayat and Edward Wesp Re-Presenting Simulation

Eric took the lead on this paper, which was a broadside against ludology in general, and Gonzalo Frasca in particular wrapped inside a neat argument about a subtle similarity between narrative fiction and video games as well as a call for comparative studies. But let me explain the parts separately.

Rekindling the "ludology versus narratology" debate, Eric used a set of Gonzalo's writings to set up the ludology argument for him to kick and punch at. Clearly, Eric admires a lot of what Gonzalo has accomplished. But this attack on the ludological position was a bit of strawman argument. I left unconvinced that Gonzalo should be left to stand in for all ludology or even that Eric had correctly described Gonzalo's ludological position.

That to the side, Eric made two points that I think are extremely important as the video game theory conversation moves forward. First, he argued for the need for comparative studies'looking at games in terms of literature was as helpful as looking at literature in terms of games. He used an example of how he would talk to his class about narrative point of view in film to help students better understand the concept in literature.

Excellent point.

Using this as a springboard, he showed how you could use the idea of simulation from games in a work of narrative lit. To illustrate he chose an example from "The Deerslayer". The choice was made because the story was written before video games, film or most anything else that would eventually be associated with the avant garde (I also suspect he just really likes this book).

In the example, some of the characters are trying to outrun Indian pursuers in a canoe. The tension of the scene is set up in physical terms: Can the faster Indian canoes catch up and intercept the protagonist's boat before they reach safety? Pulling criteria from Gonzalo as to what makes a simulation, he ticked off the items showing that this scene met the definition. Basically, the action is set up with rules as to how quickly the canoes can travel and how far they have to travel. The action and tension in the scene is physically determined. And, as Eric stated, "The outcome has nothing to do with the moral rectitude of the characters." His point, I believe, was that the scene was not driven on narratological lines, but rather physical simulation.

So, games can act like simulations, like video games. He didn't go into it, but this seemed to fit nicely with some of the fan efforts to run a game like "Quake" with one life or the recorded single-life session of "Super Mario". In these cases, the games have rules, but have one set of actions and outcomes that create the "story'. This is similar to his example where the story has rules and a set outcome.

Now, I would be terribly over-characterizing his point if I pretended that Eric was trying to say "The Deerslayer" and "Quake" were the same thing. Rather, using his comparative studies platform, I think he did show that these two aesthetic objects connect in surprising ways.

This was a real light bulb moment for me!

Barry Atkins Can I Please Reload From Last Save Game?  Getting it Wrong (And Right) In a Nascent Discipline

I'm getting to this summary slowly enough that many words have already been logged on Barry's speech. Let me add a few observations of mine own:

• I found his presentation to be more of waggling finger of reminder that video games are fun. The counter-examples of games that are not fun don't usually fit into our idea of games at all. Economic game theory, mind games and war games may have some common structural thread that ties them to video game. But I assume most of the people that choose to study video games did so because they were fun. Not because they were like things that are not fun.
• His minor barb at what has been described as the "Scandinavian school of structuralism" was really two bits, one about Jesper Juul's game definition delivered at Level Up last year, which did not attempt to create a home for fun in his games model, and Espen Aarseth's term ergodic, from the Latin for "work." I think it would be wrong to inflate these remarks into a full-scale attack of ludology by a narratologist. Again, these examples were a landmark on his tour of the thesis that game studies shouldn't forget the fun.
• He pointed out that the quick forgetting of fun and pleasure in academic discourse might be a bit of a survival tactic. As he noted, "Fun isn't the sort of thing that should show up in a grant proposal or when talking to my dean."
• My note, not sure what words Barry used: "Critics need to explain what it is that gets players involved." And that, he argued, is not work. It's fun.
• A side note: "The Tetris Defense". Barry included a Tetris example in is paper because he noted that a common objection to an observation about video games is to say, "Well, Tetris doesn't do that."
• Another of my notes, "The player is a consumer of pleasures, not a producer of mandatory game endings." Yes. I think that's correct.
• If I were to summarize his speech: He wants to put the pleasure back in game studies, both in doing it and what we describe the player doing. And the focus on work is a red herring. Players don't play to work (an oxymoron, no?). They play to enjoy. One point proposed but left for future development I assume, was that player enjoys a game because of the anticipation and imagination of what is to come. Not the routine clicking and typing into the computer. Structural focus on the machine only reveals the observable behavior'the work of game play. It does not explain the experience, the pure pleasure of playing a game.

The Pictures

Now, if you've read this far, you might want to visit my image gallery for a couple of picture of the event and the campus.