Grad Research: Carrie Andersen writes on Call of Duty, marketing, and Eminem

Many of our graduate students have a variety of extracurricular activities and jobs that keep them busy in addition to the scholarly work that they do within the department. Carrie Andersen, currently a doctoral student, is a writer for Kill Screen Magazine, a periodical devoted to video game criticism and cultural analysis. She recently published a piece about the viral marketing strategies underlying the latest release in the popular Call of Duty video game series, an excerpt of which you can read below (and, if you're inclined, the full version can be found at this link).

The threat technology poses to the future of the military also looms in Ghosts, set in 2023. Once again, a sophisticated military technology—ODIN, a weaponized space station—gets hacked by a collective known as “The Federation.” Once again, the hackers turn technology against American soil. The Federation destroys more than a few U.S. cities, leaving the nation open to social disarray and invasion thanks to an almost entirely crippled military. Chin up, though! Although the military has collapsed, a few surviving soldiers band together and create a paramilitary force known as the “Ghosts.” Cue the revenge fantasy; say farewell to the Federation.

Ghosts is thus ostensibly a classic tale of rugged individualism that has its roots in early American mythology. Think vaunted figures like Theodore Roosevelt, a cowboy-style statesman who would put Dubya to shame. Or Davy Crockett, whose brief shining moment in politics as a U.S. Congressman ended with a huffy departure for the wild frontier of Texas. Such figures—again, heavily mythologized—eschewed working within sluggish, stodgy institutions in favor of manly action exercised through aggression and occasional violence.

A glance at the marketing of Call of Duty: Ghosts suggests that the game can firmly be placed in that continuum of individual prowess, but with a more menacing twist. Here’s where Eminem comes in. After meeting with members of the Call of Duty team and catching a glimpse of Ghosts gameplay footage, Eminem purportedly retooled one of his songs, “Survival,” so that it meshed more cleanly with the game’s narrative. The final music video can be seen on the Call of Duty website, where the rapper performs in front of projections of in-game video footage of guns, soldiers, and death.

Grad Research: Carrie Andersen writes on videogame glitches and joy in Flow

Apparently we have quite a bit of publishing going on this month in the American Studies department. Last week, Carrie Andersen published a column for Flow about the joy that arises from discovering absurd videogame glitches, centering on a YouTube personality and gamer named Dopefish. We've posted an excerpt below, and the full article can be found here:

Unsurprisingly, videogame designers and coders have been concerned with creating virtual, realistic, immersive spaces where the glitch is similarly undesirable (although perhaps not as world-ending). As designer Toby Gard writes, “When we are creating worlds in games, immersion is only possible for the player if we can convince the players that the space is authentic (whether stylized or not.).” The code that underlies the videogame holy grail—the authentic, immersive gaming world—is demystified if a character or background looks warped in such a way that players no longer buy into the illusion.In line with Gard’s concern with the immersive virtual space, media scholar Eugénie Shinkle describes how videogames ideally use sophisticated simulations to hide their intricate, sublime technological codes, but failure events—glitches—make these codes visible and thus rupture bonds between player and game space. Consequently, players can lose control, meaning, and their senses of self. The game shifts from being a virtual arena for exercising player agency and posthuman subjectivity back into a clunky object, as lifeless as any piece of furniture.In all of these cases, glitches occupy a space on a spectrum that spans from the minor irritation to the colossal fuck-up. But constructing the glitch so negatively ignores the real pleasure that can arise from encountering a hiccup in the technological system. What happens when failure events, rather than provoking a loss of our post-human selves or the literal end of the world, instead evoke happiness?

Faculty and Grad Research: Dr. Janet Davis and Jeannette Vaught in American Quarterly

Those subscribing to American Quarterly will notice that two members of our community, Dr. Janet Davis and Jeannette Vaught, have both published articles in the September 2013 issue. The special issue, Species/Race/Sex, considers the "interdisciplinary and political challenges to thinking intersectionally about species, race, and sex."A quick abstract of Janet's piece, entitled "Cockfight Nationalism: Blood Sport and the Moral Politics of American Empire and Nation Building":

This essay explores the symbiotic relationship between animal welfare and ideologies of nation building and exceptionalism during a series of struggles over cockfighting in the new US Empire in the early twentieth century. Born out of the shared experience of American overseas expansionism, these clashes erupted in the American Occupied Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, where the battle lines pitting American-sponsored animal protectionists against indigenous cockfight enthusiasts were drawn along competing charges of cruelty and claims of self-determination. I argue that battles over the cockfight were a form of animal nationalism—that is to say, cockfight nationalism. Cockfight enthusiasts and opponents alike mapped gendered, raced, and classed ideologies of nation and sovereignty onto the bodies of fighting cocks to stake their divergent political and cultural claims regarding the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, moral uplift, benevolence, and national belonging.

And a quick abstract of Jeannette's, entitled "Materia Medica: Technology, Vaccination, and Antivivisection in Jazz Age Philadelphia":

During the 1920s, the Philadelphia-based American Antivivisection Society turned to racialized metaphors in its circulating periodical, the Starry Cross, to excoriate the expanding practice of vaccination. Since vaccines were then made from animal-derived serums, the involvement of antivivisectionists in antivaccine arguments is not surprising. However, the Philadelphia society’s strange combination of vaccination, jazz, and vivisection reveals that its motivations to protect animals were deeply bound to broader cultural anxieties about the threat to purity posed by science, race, and sex, and that the stakes of succumbing to vaccination amounted to no less than medical miscegenation. By turning to racialized, speciesist arguments in asking for mercy toward animals against scientifically minded torture, the antivivisectionists’ use of the sound and image of the tortured animal was meant more to protect the human body and keep it white.

Enormous congratulations to both of them! We've linked to their pieces above; go forth and take a look.

Grad Research: Julie Kantor's Poetry Featured in Boston Review

Exciting news from our graduate community: Julie Kantor has just published a series of poems in the latest issue of The Boston Review. We asked Julie about her work; here's what she had to say:

The sampler of poems appearing in the current issue of The Boston Review is a selection from my first collection of poems, The Beautiful West. The voice of these poems is searching for a way to speak to the marks left on the self by the self and others without resorting to the silence, or madness, so often a result of loss. Without even realizing, I reached back into Ancient Egyptian culture--their contributions to quotidian life in conjunction with the ornate rituals and traditions related to death--to intertwine it with modern life, the separation between blurred into one long existence; the way we allow ourselves to be tortured for love, to accept another's pain as our own, to hurt those we love to remain unchanged in the righteousness of our wronging is nothing new.While I keep my art, and my process to myself--separate and safe from influence--my commitment to invention through connection in my writing is what lead me to American Studies. Though I don't often let the two sides run on the same reel, they are concurrent; a mind can be ignored, but not gotten away from.

You can read the full collection here.For more about American Studies at UT, subscribe to our newsletter here.