If game scholars share any intellectual common ground, perhaps it is our tendency to stake claims regarding the scope of game studies. Games are their own cultural form, extending back for millennia, say some. Games are a kind of computational media, say others. Games are a social practice, say others still, or a formal structure, or a kind of storytelling, or a neoliberal ideology made flesh. And on and on.
Such distinctions are sometimes interesting and often convincing. Who can deny that games are different from other forms of human activity? But yet, who too can deny that games share much in common with previous forms of human activity?Â
Perhaps the era of claim staking in game studies is coming to a welcome and overdue close. One signal of such accomplishment is a book like Patrick Crogan’s Gameplay Mode: War, Simulation, and Technoculture (2011). Crogan makes a surprisingly modest if far-ranging argument in the book, which amounts to: computer games owe much to Cold War military technology, both in their construction and in their conceptualization.Â
The book starts with an understated example: EA/Maxis’s famous title Spore. Some of its connections to militarism are explicit: the routinization of entire genres based on military tactics like “realtime strategy” and the ultimate goal of planetary victory and intergalactic expansionism. But others, argues Crogan, are less explicit, namely the various military genealogies that make a game like Spore possible in the first place. Not just the digital apparatuses on which the game was made and is played, not just the global network that makes its “passive multiplayer” sharing possible, but something slightly different: “to model phenomena by hypothetically extending and extrapolating its future to see how that future may be predicted, modified, and controlled” (p.13).
For Crogan, video games don’t just share material features in common with computers, like digitization and procedurality. Nor are they are simply forms evolved directly from military training simulators, nor are they forms entirely separate from such traditions. His caution and ambiguity speaks in a different tenor than we are used to hearing in game studies, which remains largely positive, even euphoric about games (even if its members disagree about the particulars).
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Read the entire review for free online at Game Studies