… grand theft yadda yadda… dance dance doodlydoo… pac manhammina… and other pointless game-title-memes we should abandon… the biff! pow! sock! phenomenon… one of these days it’ll be an art form that nobody bats an eye at anymore. like film. you’ve heard of “film,” right? full disclosure, I saw one of those once. sheesh ;)
The Harper’s Magazine back-to-schoolmarmishness issue this year consists of a panel discussion on video games, literacy, and education… and guess who doesn’t appear in the discussion at all. Despite this oversight, the article has sparked some very lively blog interlinkage among various people whose opinions I respect, among them Raph Koster and my classmate Ulises Mejias. The following is my response to the article, and to comments that appear on Ulises’s site.
OK, now I’ve read the Harper’s piece. A few more off-the-cuff thoughts, which will probably be refined into a letter to the editor and sent in:
They did a piece on games and literacies, didn’t invite Jim Gee, and THAT’S what they gave us instead?! Very, very, very disappointing. I haven’t ever felt this shortchanged by Harper’s before; usually if they say something I disagree with, it’s still a useful exercise to go through the argument being made. Not only did I disagree with a lot of what was said (could someone PLEASE take Steven Johnson off the speaking circuit now?! Why is he considered an expert on video games, or for that matter human cognition? And why didn’t Wasik encourage de Zengotita to speak up more?), I felt like the treatment of the idea of “literacy” was extremely superficial for Harper’s. Almost modernist, to boot.
Of course, I’m having a hard time divorcing my reaction from my wounded dignity as a researcher… the entire field of “new literacies,” in which my colleagues and I have been toiling, has been ignored. There was no mention of this tradition, which is rich in anthropological and social understandings of how people use “texts” to form their identities and societies. This makes for a very different, far more than functional understanding of what “literacy” is, and helps us approach digital, visual, and structural texts in addition to print. Gee’s book comes out of this field; he’s primarily a linguist. While Gee’s book has its flaws — it’s speculative, for one thing, more of a research plan for games and literacies than a summary of findings — he really is the person Wasik should have gotten to fill the fourth chair, not Johnson, who is a journalist and dabbler in “brain chemistry” models of human understanding. (And knowing that de Zengotita is a thinking partner of Frank Moretti’s, I wish he’d had a chance to go head to head with Johnson on that aspect. I’d pay good money for ringside seats to that fight.) I’m guessing this roundtable was formed out of convenience, though — Koster and Johnson were in town for the Games for Change conference a few months ago, and I’d bet it happened then.
If anything I guess it’s a sobering reminder that we as academics really are doing far too little to get our research recognized. Gee’s book was all anyone was talking about in my circle when it came out, but its reach was limited to educators. I’m really not surprised if the folks at Harper’s have never heard of it, but it’s a crying shame. I mean, it’s hard enough to get new literacies recognized by the No Child Left Behind set… the last thing we need to do is be uncommunicative enough that even potential sympathizers have no bloody clue what we’re up to.
(deep breath)
Ooooookeyyyy. What else…
I want to say to Raph that I wish Wasik had given you more of a chance to riff with de Zengotita. He appears to have influences as broad as yours; I believe he holds the title Senior Educational Curmudgeon at the magazine. I was impressed by your talk at Games For Change, Raph, and I’d really like to see what you have to say about games and education when challenged by people who are a better match for the diversity of your experiences.
Also, I wish the magazine hadn’t picked a scenario which was so softball and so gee-whiz. Games to teach grammar and plot? Harper’s chose THAT as the jumping-off point? I mean, I know they tend to get schoolmarmish in their annual September issue, but come on — is that really the center of our concern about education? How about games to teach people how to pick apart White House flak and advertising hooey? Games to understand ecosystem balances? Games to gain a finer understanding of multiculturalism? Games to heal the isolation, cruelty, and malnourishment seeded in human souls by the culture of global capitalism?
I don’t believe the latter is possible, actually. I agree with de Zengotita about the importance of mystery, and with Raph’s assessment that “gamist” thinking risks losing sight of human ineffables. In my view this is the most critical issue when we consider the quality of a life which is more and more caught up in the binaries of machines.
So I was disappointed when Wasik didn’t pick up on this thread and run with it. I talked to him at a reading some years ago, and he told me Harper’s mission was to be “perverse,” which I have come to feel applies to its take on the culture of capitalism. So it seemed a surprisingly tame digression from the magazine’s editorial vision when he went back to the topic of narrative structure.
Back to Ulises’s questions:
Why aren’t people taking advantage of the new technology’s affordances for original creation? Hmmm. Could it be because the genre is spreading through them like they were… a mass?
Ulises, would you really argue that the only way cultural ideas spread is through massification? Are we going back to those classical Greek arguments about written language which Frank had us pound through, and agreeing that point in history is where massification began? Because otherwise, it appears there are other possible reasons for cultural ideas to spread. Could it be because human beings are SOCIAL, and interpersonal communication requires some measure of standardization — even if it arises organically — to function?
ok, ’nuff said. Oh, in closing — I notice they actually *did* mention Typing of the Dead, and at some point the panelists who hadn’t played the game seemed to lose track of the fact that it is played with a keyboard, not a gun. The EGGPLANT Lab has a copy of the game, by the way, including the Dreamcast keyboards to play it with. I highly recommend everyone come down and try it! It’s a hoot.
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