genre – My Life, or Something Like It

My recent experiences with Fallout 4 and conversations about modding have got me thinking, how we get locked in and invested in the games we do, and why? Further still, why do we play games at all?

Forgive the featured image, but I can’t render the phrase “got me thinking” without picturing Skyrim. That fact alone, is a testament to my questions. I haven’t done a serious playthrough of Skyrim in years and yet there are specific references like this that continue to persevere. While studying or writing, I often find myself listening to the Oblivion or Skyrim soundtracks. I continue to have the game’s map tagged up at my work desk–a testament to the game’s place in my life once, even if it’s there no longer.

Our games, our video games, are cultural artifacts. They are designed with intent for specific outcomes, and yet, like many other games, they tend to develop a path of their own once in the hands of players in the wild.

But why do we play at all?

tennis2bplayers2bby2bhorace2bhenry2bcauty252c2b1885 — I wouldn’t want to run for a tennis ball in those skirts, I’ll tell you.

Last term when writing a paper about Undertale, I looked into some of the ways that video games tap into our minds at a very fundamental cognitive level. Well-executed games like Undertale subvert player expectations in order to create more engaging content. This content goes against RPG-trained gamers’ beliefs about the genre, and further still, about video games themselves. One of the ultimate messages in Undertale is to force players to question procedural narratives, the perceived kill-spare dichotomy, and notions of “progress.” This message is delivered not only through the narrative, but also how the game builds itself around the player’s decisions, even after many playthroughs. Undertale is successful in this way, due to its ability to really get inside the mind of the player (or at least pretend to do so). It too, questions why we play, but does so while you are playing.

In the research for that paper, I considered a number of figures in cognitive stylistics, including the writings of Kenneth Burke (1, 2, 3), Joanna Gavins, and perhaps most importantly for where I’m going with this series’ introduction: Gonzalo Frasca and Michael Kearns. Their notions of “simulation theory” (Frasca 2003) and “predictive play” (1996) are an excellent jumping point for exploring not only why we play, but also why video games as another form of storytellling, are so enticing. Essentially, simulation theory and predictive play suggest that we tell stories (and subsequently write novels, or by extension, make video games), because our brains are literally hardwired to want to do so. Not purely because we find them “entertaining,” but rather, that we enjoy participating in other worlds so that we can better learn how to navigate this one. The theory goes that evolutionarily speaking, the reason we got so good at navigating complex social situations or novel problem-solving was because we got so good at pretending they were happening through stories. Tell enough stories that deal with how to fight a bear in the woods, and you might have a better chance at fighting off a bear in the woods if it actually happens to you.

We’re not here to discuss the validity of this claim per-se, but it’s an interesting point to consider when we look at video games. If novels and storytelling more broadly are ways for us to exercise our minds in order to better manage reality, how much better (or worse) might video games and “real” simulations be at doing just that? Naturally we play video games because we find them entertaining, but perhaps they tap into something even more primal than that? Or at least that’s the excuse you should give someone the next time they say you play video games too much. Heh.

Alas, no matter what the reason we play games at all, there are certainly many reasons we play video games, and further still, why there are so many video game genres to suit almost any need. You have role-playing, shooting, adventure, platformer, puzzle, strategic, simulation, racing, and fighting games–only to name a few. This is compounded by different methods of playing video games–be it mobile, console, computer, or virtual-reality. At every step of the way, we have found a variety of environments to simulate and pass time in. Unlike traditional narratives, video games allow us to explore simulated spaces in previously impossible ways. Hand-eye coordination in particular, is something that is gained by stories-by-gaming environs. Unless someone telling you a tale happens to throw the book at you during the climax, chances are, that this part was missing from traditional mind exercises.

With the genres of video games extending past those of traditional narrative forms, blending with other forms of sport and play, and further splitting off into countless directions–how do any of them manage to keep our attentions at all?

They catch us on the hook.

Academic References All-Posts Compilation

(Non-course):
– Burke, Kenneth (1925) Psychology and Form
– Burke, Kenneth (1968[1931]) Lexicon Rhetoricae. Counter-statement
– Burke, Kenneth (1984) Permanence and change
– Frasca, Gonzalo (2003) Simulation vs. Narrative: Introduction to Ludology
– Gavins, Joanna (2007) Text World Theory: An Introduction
– Genette, Gérard and Marie Maclean (1991) Introduction to the Paratext
– Kearns, Michael (1996)Reading Novels: Toward a Cognitive Rhetoric

(Course):
– Bogost, Ian. (2010) Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Video Games
– De Koven, Bernard. (2013) The Well-Played Game.
– Flanagan, Mary. (2009) Critical Play.
– Gibbs, Martin et al. (2012) Tomestones, Uncanny Monuments and Epic Quests: Memorials in World of Warcraft
– Hart, Casey (2017) Getting Into the Game: An Examination of Player Personality Projection in Videogame Avatars (Game Studies)
– Isbister, Katherine (2016) How Games Move Us
– Juul, Jesper. (2013) The Art of Failure
– Kolo, Castulus and Timo Baur (2004) Living a Virtual Life: Social Dynamics of Online Gaming (Game Studies)
– Krzywinska, Tanya (2008) World Creation and Lore: World of Warcraft as Rich Text in Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader, Hilde G. Corneliussen and Jill Walker Rettberg eds.
– LaRell Anderson, Sky (2017) Watching People is Not a Game: Interactive Online Corporeality, Twitch.tv and Videogame Streams (Game Studies)
– Pearce, Celia (2009) Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds
– Ruch, Adam (2009) World of Warcraft: Service or Space?
– Sharp, John (2015) Works of Game: On the Aesthetics of Art

Before going too in-depth into my reflection on Sci-Fi and genre building, I just have to relay two facts: a) that there was a TV series in the mid-80s called Amazing Stories, created by Steven Spielberg, and b) that somehow I didn’t know this existed. In the same vein as the pulp magazine of the same name, the show apparently covered Fantasy, Horror, and Sci-Fi themes. It’s also apparently looking for a reboot. Crazy. Here I thought I was knowledgeable of these kinds of programs having watched The Twilight Zone (old and new) as well as The Outer Limits. Alas, I digress…

The creation of genre was not really something I had considered before this week’s class. Naturally I had considered that genres had origins — I have even studied the development of Greek and Roman theatre genres extensively — however, I have rarely considered that literary genres too, have origin stories. In particular, that there are more ‘recent’ genres like Sci-Fi that have a much longer legacy than what it feels like they should.

Perhaps it all comes down to definitions, however. We discussed this week how when Amazing Stories first published, the editor basically made it up as he went along. There were no established Sci-Fi pulps at this time, nor, apparently, had the genre been established as a literary area. Romances and Adventure stories are common throughout literary history, but Sci-Fi apparently presented something new. While I’d prefer not to quote Wikipedia, but the first few lines of “Science Fiction”‘s entry rings true, perhaps because they’re quoting Gernsback:

Science fiction is difficult to define, as it includes a wide range of subgenres and themes. Hugo Gernsback, who suggested the term “scientifiction” for his Amazing Stories magazine, wrote: “By ‘scientifiction’ I mean the Jules Verne, H. G. Wells and Edgar Allan Poe type of story—a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision… Not only do these amazing tales make tremendously interesting reading—they are always instructive. They supply knowledge… in a very palatable form… New adventures pictured for us in the scientifiction of today are not at all impossible of realization tomorrow… Many great science stories destined to be of historical interest are still to be written… Posterity will point to them as having blazed a new trail, not only in literature and fiction, but progress as well.”

To me it seems then, more that the development of SF as a genre was more about its kairos than its content. Alongside the development of advanced science and technology, we see something labeled accordingly. But even in the early days of writing (in terms of ancient plays), we see themes of instruction, knowledge transfer, and speculative/imaginative forms. While Gernsback cites Poe et al., we discussed in class the existence of Mary Shelley and other female authors before that also would fit into the SF genre (sadly calling again to those gender issues in scholarship and social acknowledgement). If these themes existed for longer than the existence of the genre, what else can we attribute the development of the genre to other than kairos? Someone surely could have “decided” to do so, as Gernsback did before Amazing Stories, and yet, no one did. Intentionality does not appear to be enough then, but rather, the timing not only of an increase in science and technology, but also the existence of pulp magazines themselves, that allowed for such a thing to develop.

blade-runner-2049-796x398 — *Blade Runner 2049*

Launching a new “genre” within literature would have been too risky. Books take a lot of time and finances in order to be successful, on top of necessary marketing and appeals to readership. Pulp magazines rose and fell seemingly at will — they were willing to take a chance, even if it meant failure — because they weren’t as expensive to produce. All of this explains why SF came when it did — easy to take a chance, lots of technology and science popping up everywhere…but it doesn’t account for all the reasons why they were successful…

I think the key here is the readership engagement. We’ll talk about this more during our presentation, or rather Sue will, but I think it’s worth spoiling a bit here on the subject. SF was successful as a genre due to its kairos as well as its ability to engage its audience. It’s quite a clever advertising move actually. The best way to establish yourself as a genre is to get people interested in your genre, to get them engaged in its development. People always love talking about themselves, and by extension, they love putting their mark on things. The actual amount of influence the readership had on Amazing Stories is up for debate, however, the magazine’s active push for any show of dialogue I think helped to make them boom as long as they did and really helped to engrain SF as a genre as a result.

One might argue that any genre could have been created in this way, which is true I suppose, but SF latched on at the exact right nexus of context to blossom into what it became–further evidenced by how much SF developed after Amazing Stories gave it a label. We see the first SF film Metropolis hit theatres as early as 1927. Then in 1938, Orson Wells converts his then-40 year old book The War of the Worlds into an infamous audio drama that briefly causes real panic and fear in the populace (The Smithsonian has a good piece on that and kairos/”an magnificent fluke” for the record). Meanwhile Astounding Stories kicks off in the 1930s as well. From this point forward, we see an increased basis for Futurism taking shape in art and design, especially leading through the 1950s and 1960s. Something we see revisited and taken to the extreme in the Fallout series.

In the end, I wonder what would have happened without this nexus of readership engagement and appropriate timing? Where would Sci Fi have started without pulp magazines? For how popular and how fast SF spread like wildfire in the last century, I feel fairly confident that simultaneous invention would have happened somehow, give or take a few years. But isn’t that all what SF is about anyway? Speculating the unknown?

Tag: genre

On the Hook & Engaged: Why do we play games?

Generating Genre: The Legacy of Early Pulp SF