Simon T. Kaye

The Massachusetts  Institute of Technology, as part of its very friendly ‘let’s share the knowledge’ Open Course commitments, has been publishing the course design and full reading-list and materials for its Video Game Theory and Analysis class online. It’s just a little bit out of date, but intriguing nonetheless. 

Here it is!

They have listed the course as it appeared in Autumn 2006 and 2007, but the difference is really negligable (they had a few guest speakers in 2007).

Apart from making me want to enrol at MIT (ha!), a bit of scrutiny of the outline and reading-list is quite revealing. 

Perhaps they're learning about games RIGHT NOW?!

First of all, I’d like to point out that any course whose requirements include “complete (or play, at minimum, 70 hours of) a single contemporary videogame or a grouping of games in a particular series or genre (example: Civilization III and IV, plus expansions or online play; the Zelda series, etc.)” can only be a source of massive nerd-joy.

I’ve written a tiny bit on why I think we ought to take ‘gaming’ seriously – in fact, it was more of a declaration of why the broader media and public can’t take the hobby seriously as it stands, based on a criticism of the terminology which we seem to have reversed blindly  into over the years. 

MIT’s course – which is by far the most serious and impressive engagement I’ve ever seen with gaming by a big-time university – lessens the kind of outrage I was throwing about in that other article.

Each student on the course seems to be required to complete a project, based, in the main, on their engagement with a particular videogame and their understanding of it. It’s all listed here – so let’s see what the class of 2007 regarded as the most ‘important’ games of our era.

Knights of the Old Republic. Bioshock. F.E.A.R. Half Life. These are just the PC games. 

Okay, so far, so peachy.

But look a little bit further, and it soon becomes clear that the majority of engagement with these titles – with all of the titles they list, and the works they cite – is intrinsically founded in a narrative understanding of art. Games are viewed as “semiotic domains” for the development of stories. 

There does remain an understanding of the origins of videogames lying somewhere beyond narrative, in an Atari-flicker of puzzles, reflexes and technological joy. But most of this  material seems to place the modern, story-driven game (the game as vehicle for story) atop a pedestal, as if everything else has been evolving toward it.

Agency, and the impact of player participation, is an underlying theme of the course. But it’s treated as a kind of enveloping trick, a facade: the tale is as it is, and the importance of your activities is a clever way of immersing you. Even World of Warcraft is seen in these terms. 

This raises a few questions – first of all, are the folks at MIT right about our hobby? Are games simply the latest presentational package for old-fashioned narrative arcs? (Certainly, in the vast majority of cases, this is true?) 

But do we believe that our hobby is capable of more – that there’s more to the collective media and art generation that is modern games development than creating a plausible (or at least cohesive) space within which to tell stories? 

With these questions in mind (and I’m genuinely puzzled by them) I fully intend to read every book on that list. Do you think they’ll give me a certificate afterwards?

First let it be established that I am by no means an expert on comic books. I read few of the super hero serials as I grew up (it’s an aspect of childhood far less common than in the states). I did read a few of Spiderman, quite a lot of Hulk, the occasional X-Men, and a few ‘themed’ graphic novels or one-offs that could be found in my local library. I was initially fond of Peter David, whom I stumbled into from his Star Trek novels, a childhood fascination of mine. Even then, David’s were just a little bit less rubbish to my developing snobrain (new word!)

More recently, I’ve made a point to catch up where it counts- Warren Ellis (in particular Transmetropolitan), as well as classics like Watchmen and some of the more celebrated Batman books (Dark Knight Returns and so on). I’m currently working my way through Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. If only my dissertation wouldn’t keep interrupting me. Oh, and Next Wave rocks. COME TO PAIN MOTHER.

So, as any decent comics fan will tell you, I am very much a newbie. Interestingly, I’m also probably exactly the sort of casual reader that comic books could really do with attracting. I may be a symptom of broadening appeal and pigeonhole disintegration. Which is new for me, I think.

Anyway, Phonogram. I read it yesterday, and it didn’t come out very long ago. It’s essentially a protracted essay on the way that music constructs us, the Britpop movement taken as a particular example. In the vivid, wonderfully pretentious world evoked by writer Kieron Gillen and artist Jamie McKelvie, music is the same thing as magic, manipulated by two groups- phonomancers, like our protagonist, and retromancers, who are to all intents and purposes the baddies. When the semi-deity patron-queen of Britpop, Britannia, disappears, David Kohl is ‘recruited’ to find out what’s going on. But his own intense personal connection with the Britpop era is involved as well, especially when Kohl realises that his own past is at stake…

It’s a quick and very easy read. Gillen subjects us to a niche culture without ever descending into the worst of geekiness, and the book is never less than accessible. The art is very clean and crisp, with a sort of graphic-design sensibility running throughout. The combination is very effective, and will surely sweeten the pill of all the philosophy which the tale carries along with it, as we deal with the nature of personal construction and, implicitly, art itself.

Happily, it all coalesces to a bit of a classic comic-book ending (insane cultists must be STOPPED!). And Kohl himself is pleasingly arrogant, the supporting cast witty enough to keep the whole thing bubbling along nicely. Laugh-out-loud moments are few, I suppose, though I’ve been spoiled by Next Wave lately.

Perhaps the greatest impact Phonogram had for me was strictly personal. I grew up during the height and tale-end of the Britpop phenomenon (I remember Common People being the first time I enjoyed watching Top of the Pops). I was only old enough to start appreciating the whole thing by the very end. I was actually rather fond of Kula Shaker, a band I stole from my older sister and which (amusingly) comes in for a pretty rough ride in Phonogram. But I also remember owning an Echobelly cassette, and my love affair with Blur kicked off pretty early. And, of course, Britpop has informed much of the music I listen to today, and my retrospective approach to many of the classics of that age is more important to me musically than any delving with truly contemporary bands. In short, Britpop was the first cultural phenomenon that I was actually aware of; the first tiny way in which I understood that there was a zeitgeist to be tapped into.

Now look what’s happened. Thanks to this comic, I’ve started digging it all out again. And it’s great.

Part of this is also because I associate Kieron Gillen quite strongly with my mid-teen interests. He’s cut his teeth as an excellent games reviewer. Specifically, he once wrote a Dear John letter to Descent 3. I don’t think I’ll ever forget that.

Anyway, if you want to see the first proper step in imbuing 90s Britain with a character, look no further. A great graphic novel, and especially worth the attention of anyone who’s even vaguely interested in music.

Here’s a nice preview to get you started.

‘The twentieth century saw an average global temperature rise of a little over half a degree centigrade, which doesn’t sound like much- but it is, as the summary explains, likely to be responsible for “decreases of about 10 percent in the extent of snow cover since the 1960s,” and “a reduction of about two weeks in the annual duration of lake and river ice cover… in the northern hemisphere.” Winter, in other words, is now two weeks shorter than it used to be.‘

 I just rediscovered this piece, written by a slightly younger and considerably more earnest yours-truly. It was officially published by a higher-education website that nobody ever reads. So here’s a nice link.

 Stuart Parkinson was actually a great guy to interview, and a man of no small importance in the battle over hearts and minds in the great Global Warming debate.

‘HERO’ is a website designed to benefit students, and often contributed to by students. Which is all well and good, but I’m not mad about some of the little grammatical stretches and typos that have been engineered into this piece between my emailing it off and it appearing, all pretty, on the website. C’est la vie, I suppose.