The articles on Eslinger’s list are all worth a read — even for people with little to no interest in gaming particularly; like most incisive pieces of writing on popular culture, they’re about their ostensible topic in a way that allows substantial engagement with other issues, which should be of general interest. Julian Dibbell’s list-topping piece looks at some of the fascinating practices around real-money trading (RMT) practices and businesses, which I’m still trying to wrap my head around.
As to my preliminary thoughts on the article and its subject, I’m most drawn to the fascinating conflation of work and play. At one point, Dibbell quotes Liu Haibin in Jinhua, China, a 26-year old who owns and operates a gold farming shop — Liu says that part of the reason he and his employees stick to the industry is that they also love the game. The slippage between work and play is one of the many things about arcade practices int he ’70s and ’80s that fascinates me. Gaming can often resemble certain kinds of (mostly white-collar) work, when we look at the machines and movements involved and the level of discipline required for success. When notions of what might constitute “work” change, as they do with the advent of RMT as an industry, we need to critically assess practices of play as well.
Some questions I’m currently engaging with:
What does it mean to “play” a game?
Is it still “play” if it is a job task?
How might the professionalization of video gaming tasks relate to the professionalization of sports?
At what point do “virtual” economies become “real” economies, and how should we define “real” in the aftermath of Enron, etc.?
If you have any interest in game studies, you might want to peruse the CFP below. It’s for a panel I am trying to put together for the 2009 American Studies Association Conference.
“Video Gaming, Citizenship, and Civic Engagement in the United States,” panel for the American Studies Association Annual Meeting, Washington D.C., November 5-8, 2009
The Pew Internet and American Life Project has found that 97 percent of children and 53 percent of adults in the United States play video games. These numbers suggest that gaming is quickly becoming ubiquitous. As video games have become a key part of mainstream popular culture in the United States, they have also become key texts through which notions of national identity are developed and deployed. This panel will look at games as sites of articulation for civic engagement, citizenship, cultural values and identity, asking panelists to consider how “American-ness” and “American values” are articulated through and around video games. All disciplinary approaches are welcome.
Potential topics might include:
America’s Army and U.S. military recruiting and training as gameplay.
Guitar Hero as it relates to American popular music
The Sims’ ambivalent capitalist ethic
Urban planning and gaming (Sim City, Scalable City, PlastiCity, etc.)
The transnational nature of online economies and virtual wealth in MUDs and MMORPGs and the complexity of state intervention
American-made video games in global culture
Virtual and real-life crime as it relates to gaming
Other topics are encouraged, as these are included only as a non-exclusive jumping off point.
Those interested in participating should contact Carly Kocurek at carlykocurek at symbol mail.utexas.edu with a brief vita and an abstract of 250-500 words by January 10. Queries are also welcome.
When I was an undergraduate student at Rice U., oh, a while ago, I took a class on the British Romantics from one of the old guard of the English Department, Alan Grob. Dr. Grob was a professor in a very classic sense — tweed jackets, bicycle, and all. (Apparently, he’d been in a car wreck some years earlier that had terrified him out of driving.)
He was also a voracious consumer culture and information, which is why he could rattle off commentary on William Blake just as easily as he could crack jokes about Legally Blonde. Apparently, when the English faculty started getting computers, he was denied one by a department chair who said, “Grob, you can’t even type.” And, so, Alan Grob taught himself to type with Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. He was better at answering e-mail than most of the faculty, which was saying something. I was sad to hear that Dr. Grob passed away in 2007, although he certainly left a legacy both at the Rice campus and with all the folks that stumbled through his classes.
James Dickey looking more docile than usual. [source]
But, the point of this isn’t really Alan Grob, but a story he told in class once about James Dickey. As aforementioned, Dr. Grob was part of the old guard, and had been at Rice for decades. Because of this, he had been at the university when James Dickey was there. And, apparently, was at an event that James Dickey came to give a talk or reading at, for which Dickey in classic fashion stumbled in drunk barely able to support himself at the podium only to slur out, “I … am a sonofabitch.” I was discussing Dickey with a friend of mine, and I suspect this anecdote might be even better than I’d realized: Dickey also, while at Rice, publicly read “Adultery” for the first time, to an audience that included his wife and son.
As an aside, “Adultery” is one of my ten favorite poems, and is the grounds for the only tattoo I’ve ever seriously considered getting.
You can read the poem here, and you can read a story at the New York Times that mentions this reading here.
I particularly like Keith Olbermann’s take on this issue as he goes to lengths to de-personalize his response, which makes his argument that this is a basic human rights issue all the more compelling. (Not that something cannot be both personal and a human rights issue, but, you know, rhetoric and all that.) To say that I have been upset about the passage of Proposition 8 — and of similarly discriminatory laws in Arizona, Arkansas, and Florida passed this election — would be a gross understatement. I spent much of President-Elect Barack Obama’s acceptance speech and Senator John McCain’s concession speech crying because I had made the mistake of looking up the returns for California just before. While I am not idealistic enough to believe that prejudices against members of the glbtq community have been erased, I had hoped, perhaps naively, that we might at least have a raw majority of people standing against this sort of thing.
I have been for a long time ambivalent about gay marriage — fighting to enter into an institution founded on gender inequity that engenders discrimination against those who are unmarried for whatever reason seems like another example of striving not to eradicate inequality, but instead, to enter into the high end of a system that would remain unequal. I still believe that. However, the passage of Proposition 8 and its ilk have driven home to me just how much of a civil rights issue this really is. This is about marriage, sure, but it is, more importantly to me, about blatant, legal discrimination against people, and that I cannot condone in any way shape or form. That is wrong, period. No quibbling, no arguing, it is just flat wrong. Am I pro-gay marriage? Not exactly, but, I’m more anti-discrimination than I am anti-gay marriage. There just shouldn’t be these sorts of discriminating laws on the books.
Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving, pictured in the New York Times.[source]
Last night I was doing some research on the history of miscegenation laws in the United States for a course I am designing. The couple who took their case to the supreme court rather appropriately had the last name Loving. The Lovings fought for years for the right to move back (legally) to their hometown in Virginia. Mildred Loving outlived her husband by a number of years, and she spent her life saying again and again that she was not a political person. She passed away earlier this year, and perhaps she was not political, but she did make a rare public statement on gay marriage in 2007:
Surrounded as I am now by wonderful children and grandchildren, not a day goes by that I don’t think of Richard and our love, our right to marry, and how much it meant to me to have that freedom to marry the person precious to me, even if others thought he was the “wrong kind of person” for me to marry. I believe all Americans, no matter their race, no matter their sex, no matter their sexual orientation, should have that same freedom to marry. Government has no business imposing some people’s religious beliefs over others. Especially if it denies people’s civil rights.
I am still not a political person, but I am proud that Richard’s and my name is on a court case that can help reinforce the love, the commitment, the fairness, and the family that so many people, black or white, young or old, gay or straight seek in life. I support the freedom to marry for all. That’s what Loving, and loving, are all about.
Mildred Loving’s statement is a little hokey, I guess, but it’s earnest. I am glad to hear that someone who was perhaps an unlikely civil rights figure can make the connection to these more contemporary issues. Laws banning black-white interracial marriage were on the books until Loving v. Virginia was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1967; that fact seems appalling now, even knowing the fraught history of civil rights in this country. Perhaps that there were laws explicitly banning the marriage of same-sex couples will seem equally appalling in 40 years.
And, as to my general opposition to marriage, here’s an excellent statement from Dean Spade and Craig Willse that addresses the issue: No To State Regulation of Families!
They also include links to a lot of further reading on the topic. In conclusion, I’m ambivalent as I ever was.
For better or worse, I have to say that the media surrounding the current presidential election has been some of the sharpest comedy I’ve seen in a few years. In the above, Ron Howard, Henry Winkler, and Andy Griffith reprise some famous roles to keep your attention for a few minutes. Be warned: Ron Howard is briefly shirtless, which is disturbing. I mean, he’s just not a shirtless kind of guy. He’s a ballcap and jacket kind of guy. Am I right?
