Thomas Apperley has written a new review of Racing the Beam in the new open-access peer-reviewed journal Digital Culture & Education. Nick and I are delighted to see a review of our book in the inaugural issue.
I was likely delighted to see Apperley trace the steps toward the platform studies project in my earlier writings:
The gestures towards a notion of platform studies have previously emerged in Bogostâ??s work. His early ruminations on platform studies are evident in the chapter â??Videogames and Expressionâ?? from Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism (2006: 55-71); he points out that the use of game engines – like Quake engine – in game design establishes a common material substructure between games. In Persuasive Games (2006: 251) he states: â??the procedural affordances of a computer operating system matter, they constrain and enable the kinds of computational activities that are possible atop that operating systemâ??. Platform studies clearly draws from this interest in the material limits of computer technology, and how programmers respond to these limits.
Apart from the review, the issue includes pieces on Bully, self-representation online, multimodal literacy, and a critique of violent videogame research (not the findings, but the research itself).
Comments
Mark J. Nelson
Thanks for the pointer to the issue. The critique of violent videogame research is interesting and thought-provoking. I somewhat fear, though, that it’s just a symptom of a much larger disagreement that will be hard to resolve. If it’s really just videogames not being taken as seriously as media as they ought to be, that’s one thing. But is it?
I was trying to think of an analogical reductio ad absurdum to another artistic medium, and I’m not sure there is an unarguable one. How about: it would be like judging genres of novels by running studies to correlate childhood reading preferences with measures of adult achievement, like stable family relationship or income level. That seems absurd to me, and I think to most literary scholars. At most, such a study would provoke interesting questions about the structure of society: why would it be that liking certain genres of literature would correlate with higher or lower income?
But I fear a lot of people would actually find that a useful and relevant line of inquiry with normative implications: maybe if liking certain genres of novels is correlated with turning out to be a jobless bum, we ought not to allow children to read those genres. If so, the problem is less with videogames, and more with insufficient interest in a humanistic view of the role of art and culture in society, replacing it with an instrumentalist view of what promotes narrow measures of economic/status achievement.