Announcement: Patrick Jagoda to deliver talk, "On Difficulty in Video Games: Mechanics, Interpretation, Affect"

We're excited to announce the first in a series of four talks here in the Department of American Studies at UT Austin. Patrick Jagoda, Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Chicago, Co-editor of Critical Inquiry and Co-founder of Game Changer Chicago Design Lab, will be giving a talk called, "On Difficulty in Video Games: Mechanics, Interpretation, Affect" at 4:30pm on Monday, February 2, in Burdine 436A. Jagoda has been with us this year at UT as a Harrington Fellow, and we sat down with him a while back for an interview, which you can check out here.Here's a description of the talk from Jagoda:

In a 1978 essay, literary critic George Steiner observes that a sense of difficulty in poetry became a major aspect of aesthetic experience in the late nineteenth century and extended, by the twentieth century, to new forms of visual and aural expression. This talk takes up videogames as a crucial medium for making sense of aesthetic difficulty in our time. As a way of mapping the cultural stakes of videogames to the early twenty-first century, I examine three types of challenge that games generate: mechanical, interpretive, and affective difficulty. All three forms of difficulty demand continued analysis, but I argue especially for the importance of attending to the third category of demanding affects and emotions. New media scholarship is already becoming more adept at accounting for elements such as aesthetics, interactivity, software, platforms, and media history. It has not yet done justice, however, to the complicated ways that digital media, and games in particular, generate and alter affects. This talk posits that the types of experiences that register as difficult within cultural consciousness, as they do in a variety of unique ways in the context of gameplay, can help animate the values of contemporary American media and their effects on the sensorium. A fuller sense of affect in videogames is necessary to better understand the ways that games serve as unique ideological forms — and might also structure, limit, and even enable more complex practices of play in the United States.

Alumni Voices: Carly Kocurek

Back on September 12 here at UT, the department hosted a great talk by one of our recent graduates, Dr. Carly Kocurek, who discussed "What We Talk About When We Talk About Ms. Pacman." Before her talk, we sat down with Carly to discuss her current research as well as her time at as a graduate student at UT.What will you be talking about today?Today I will be talking about the nostalgia for what gets called the golden era of the video game arcade, which I position roughly between 1972 to 1985 (there's some wiggle room in there). There's been a real vogue for new arcades and archiving projects both formal and informal, so I'm talking about that, but I'm also talking about what's at stake in this resurgence of interest in arcades, and what people are actually trying to preserve or longing for when we they talk about a kind of arcade that many of us didn't experience firsthand. I'm positioning all of this within the context of the current culture wars of gaming.How did you get interested in this topic? Is it part of a larger project?I'm wrapping up my book, which doesn't yet have a title (that's the last thing that happens in that process), but it's about the classic arcade and the creation of the gamer that happens around the classic arcade. Even though that term is used later, from the 1990s forward, there's already an emerging idea in the 1970s of who plays games. The word "vidiots" is used -- there's actually a little magazine called Vidiots -- that was published for what we would now call gamers and was sold through arcades. I got interested in that because I was interested in gender and games and the assumptions about who plays games and why. I wondered, when did we start assuming that women don't play games, and why did this happen? If we look at media history, especially when we look at how many different media are considered feminized, for example film or television (there's strongly gendered traditions there that we generally think of as feminine) it appears peculiar that we think of games as being something that is "for boys." Looking at that early coverage of games, I wondered, what are we saying about games, who are we saying they are for, why are we worried about who games are for? I argue that there are a lot of factors that influence this, including the Cold War and the Space Race and the technological anxieties of the time, as well as the ongoing crisis of masculinity in the U.S. in the twentieth century and especially after World War II. There's also the story of the coin-op industry itself, which was trying to look respectable and really struggled -- still does -- with looking respectable. They saw these young, clean-cut men playing games as a good way to stake their claim for respectability, saying, "Look, we're doing good things for the kids!" But what happened is that we have all these images of boys playing games, which is powerful and narrows down who designers think they are catering to.There's something at stake here that is important and needs an intervention, needs to be exposed. I think there's a lot of good in gaming, even though we often hear about the terrible misogyny and racism in the gaming world. The gaming industry employs a lot of artists and there's a lot of emphasis on design and teaching social behaviors and imparting important skills which people value and love, and that's why people are so passionate about gaming. But what does it mean when that is not open to everyone? That is the real question.How does your work build on what you did as an American Studies graduate student at UT?This work is an update and expansion of what was at one point the final chapter of my dissertation. It has been a few years, so that work has moved and changed quite a bit in part because of something I started to notice--the recent revival of the classic arcade, with places like Barcade in Brooklyn. I wondered, how come Dave and Buster's is a place that corporations have events? There's Pinballz in Austin, which is a really wonderful arcade, and my neighborhood in Chicago has an arcade called Emporium.This all started when I was working on my dissertation at UT. My original question was, why do we think games are for men and boys? I could ask people why they think that now, but there's actually a historical process that helps us understand this. It's not a "natural" occurrence. I was also really interested in what young women are doing with pop culture and how they are responding to and through pop culture.Do you have any advice for current graduate students about how to get the most out of their time at UT?For me, it was really important to have a hobby or something that I was spending a lot of time on that didn't have to do with school. Sometimes that was volunteer work, sometimes it was sports, it just depended. I think it made my writing a lot better, because I spent a lot of time freelancing and blogging and things like that. I also think it's good to have a backup plan, and that's not just because the job market is terrible, which I think everyone gets told all the time, but also because you might realize that you want to do something else. I think keeping in mind that you are actually a person and not just a graduate student is really great. When I was going through the death spiral of the job market my last year, I was making a plan for what I might do instead. For me, I would have gotten a game design certificate at ACC and looked for a job in the industry. That's not the right fit for everyone, but that would have been an okay path for me. We have alumni that teach at really amazing high schools, or run really excellent nonprofits or make documentaries or work for the state department. All kinds of things. Thinking about how you would apply your interests later is a good thing to do.  

Grad Research: Carrie Andersen publishes article on drones and Call of Duty in Surveillance and Society

Summer may be winding down - it is August, after all - but we still have exciting news to share with you folks about our departmental community and its various projects. Ph.D. student Carrie Andersen has just published a journal article in the July 2014 issue of Surveillance and Society, entitled "Games of Drones: The Uneasy Future of the Soldier-Hero in Call of Duty: Black Ops II." This work comprises part of her dissertation research: her project examines the cultural and political construction of the drone within the post-9/11 milieu.Check out her abstract below. The full article can be found here (bonus: the journal is open-access, so have at it without logging into any databases!).

In this article, I argue that the first-person shooter video game, Call of Duty: Black Ops II, reflects the U.S. military‟s transition as it reimagines the soldier‟s role in war. In the age of drone technology, this role shifts from a position of strength to one of relative weakness. Although video games that feature future combat often “function as virtual enactments and endorsements for developing military technologies,” Black Ops II offers a surprisingly complex vision of the future of drones and U.S. soldiers (Smicker 2009: 107). To explore how the game reflects a contemporary vision of the U.S. military, I weave together a close textual reading of two levels in Black Ops II with actual accounts from drone pilots and politicians that illuminate the nature of drone combat. Although there are moments in Black Ops II in which avatars combat enemies with first-hand firepower, the experience of heroic diegetic violence is superseded by a combat experience defined by powerlessness, boredom, and ambiguous pleasure. The shift of the soldier from imposing hero to a banal figure experiences its logical conclusion in Unmanned, an independent video game that foregrounds the mundane, nonviolent nature of drone piloting. Instead of training soldiers to withstand emotionally devastating experiences of death and violence first-hand (or to physically enact such violence), games like Black Ops II and Unmanned train actual and potential soldiers to tolerate monotony and disempowerment.

Grad Research: Carrie Andersen on Slapstick Comedy and Octodad at Kill Screen

Ph.D. student Carrie Andersen has a piece up over at Kill Screen on slapstick comedy, video games, and Octodad (a video game about a "loving father, caring husband, secret octopus").Here's a taste:

The game centers on the patriarch of an excruciatingly normal family. But said patriarch is secretly an octopus, forced to hide his true identity. Maintaining secrecy is easier said than done: octopi cannot navigate land so gracefully, we learn, and so Octodad wobbles around like a baby deer learning to walk. Think Being John Malkovich meets QWOP meets The Coneheads.

That physical ineptitude is the focal point of Octodad’s comedy. Octodad is a “hard-to-control, awkward mess of a character,” according to John Murphy, a developer for Young Horses, Inc.

According to Murphy, Octodad drew its inspiration from unintentional comedic classics like the PC disaster Jurassic Park: Trespasser, released in 1998. To say this game was overhyped would be an understatement. Meant to be a companion for the 1997 film The Lost World: Jurassic Park, the game’s development occurred in concert with Steven Spielberg himself and Minnie Driver, who voiced the main character. But even Spielberg was an insufficient force to rescue Trespasser from mediocrity and buggy-ness. The game “was supposed to revolutionize AI and games and physics, but it ended up being this weird, accidentally hilarious thing.”

As it turns out, accidental hilarity is ripe for scholarly analysis. Check out the full article here.