Upcoming Video Game Work

So I'm a little busy today, trying to work on a paper and prep for a job interview I have tomorrow.  This is particularly difficult because the paper isn't due for almost a month, which goes completely against my normal method of motivating myself through recognition of a fast-approaching deadline.  However, April will be a killer in terms of grading and exams, so I'm trying to finish as many of my more flexible assignments as possible now.  We'll see how it turns out!

In the interests of being at least a little exciting today, I decided to give you a brief peek into what the topic I'm currently working on is.  For my quantitative research class, we basically have to do the background research for and design a study.  If it turns out to be interesting, we might even conduct it later on.  So far, I've gotten good feedback on mine.

Which, I'm sure, means you're all wondering what this amazing project of mine could be.  Well, I'm afraid I can't write too much about it here for now, especially if I'm actually going to run the study.  Wouldn't want any of my more enterprising students (who make up the research pool we often use for exploratory studies) to discover my hypotheses and end up giving me skewed results.

What I can say is that it deals with (surprise!) video games, and more specifically their influence on public opinion.  Check out some of the material here to see some of what I'm working with.  We'll see how it goes!  If I don't end up taking it to the study stage, I'll probably give another update soon, but if I do, it'll be awhile before I manage to run all the data and can report back with my conclusions.

The Art of Video Games

When I was teaching my class on video games, we ended up in an interesting discussion one day that I had not foreseen or put on my syllabus-- whether or not video games could count as art.  To be honest, I hadn't even thought of this as a topic, and now I can't say whether it was because I assumed they did, assumed they didn't, or hadn't really thought about it.

My students mentioned an interesting editorial Roger Ebert wrote last spring, where he declared that "Video Games Can Never Be Art".  It was an interesting statement to make, considering that he later admit that the last video game he played, and which he didn't have the patience for, was Myst, released in 1993.  Ebert later issued another blog post, after further thought and after reading the very extensive comments left on his first post, saying, "I may be wrong, but if I'm not willing to play a video game to find that out, I should say so. I have books to read and movies to see. I was a fool for mentioning video games in the first place."  Personally, I think this was the only way for him to get out of the conversation gracefully, and I respect him for being willing to admit that his first post was a mistake, although the post title "Ok, kids, play on my lawn" does still have a bit of a crotchety ring to it.

I don't critique film because I don't know film, and Ebert's attempt to critique video games when he hadn't played one in over fifteen years was poorly thought out.  Especially because it now appears that The Smithsonian American Art Museum disagrees.  They are currently putting together an exhibition that will air in March 2012 on "The Art of Video Games" and, even better, they are looking for fans to vote on the artwork they think should be included in the exhibit.  I'd definitely encourage all of you to go check it out!  You can vote for up to 80 games, separated into 5 eras by the Smithsonian organizers.  They only ask for games that demonstrate "a focus on striking visual effects, the creative use of new technologies, and the most influential artists and designers... Remember, this is an art exhibition, so be sure to vote for games that you think are visually spectacular or boast innovative design!"

Personally, I can't wait for this to open and will definitely try to see it sometime next year.  I really love that the museum isn't focusing solely on the games themselves but also on the people behind them-- the artists and designers-- and on the relationships between video games and other aspects of culture like film and television.  I can only hope that the exhibition meets the high hopes I'm sure gamers will have for it, although if it's up to the Smithsonian's normal standards, I'm not too worried.

Video Game Records

I get very different reactions when I tell people that I basically study video games for a living, ranging from extreme jealousy to complete disbelief, and sometimes even to offense.  Some people apparently do not believe this is a legitimate way to be spending my time or something for which you should be able to go to graduate school.

This means that I often have to justify or at least explain my interest and why I think what I do is worth it and worth being paid for.  I've got a couple brief one-line responses, like "If culture and social values aren't created in the media forms people use every day, where are they made?", but sometimes I need more ammunition for a longer fight.

Today, I got a little bit more to add to my arsenal (sort of) when I found a Wired article on video game-based records in the Guinness Book of World Records.  Some of these really only matter within the context of video games themselves, such as "Longest Survival on a 6-Star Wanted Level in Grand Theft Auto IV", but others speak to the wider implications of video games that I look into in my work.

For instance, did you know that Sid Meier's Civilization V had an officially recognized day?  According to the article, "Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley declared Sept. 21, 2010, "Sid Meier's Civilization V Day" to honor the game's release and celebrate the strength of the game-development industry in his state, which developer Firaxis calls home."  In my mind, this speaks volumes about the economic impacts of the game industry.

Another interesting record is "First Facebook Game to Cause a Lawsuit", which is held by the game Scrabulous, sued by Scrabble owners Mattel and Hasbro for copyright infringement.  Scrabulous lost, to no one's surprise, showing the ways traditional power structures and legal systems are being applied to the (relatively) new technology of video games.  

Apparently there's an entire Guinness World Records: Gamer's Edition.  I'll have to check it out and see what they've got.  Hopefully they've improved upon the list of "Best Games" they released in their 2009 Gamer's Edition.  I love Mario Kart as much as the next person but best game ever?  I think not.

(Also, as a side note, I love that the #8 bullet in that last link turned into an emoticon. How very Internet-savvy.)

Movable Type-- Quality Undergrad Media Studies

I am in graduate school.  By definition, this makes me kind of (really) a nerd about my field of study.  Possibly one of the most nerdy things I've done, and also one of the best, was joining together with a few of my awesome fellow Media Studies majors as an undergrad to found Movable Type, an undergraduate media studies journal for the University of Virginia.

The reason I bring it up today is because the journal didn't close down when the original staff graduated in May.  In fact, it's still going strong, and the second edition is in the process of being released now.  As an online journal, new editions of Movable Type are released a few papers at a time, to keep postings more current.  Even better, all the content is archived and searchable, as well as sorted by keyword.

If you've ever been interested in exactly what media studies majors and scholars write about, Movable Type can give you more than enough insight.  One of my papers on gender and video games, a topic I covered briefly in an earlier post, is up on Movable Type, as well as some of the best work I've read by my fellow undergraduates.  If you're interested in hackers, crafts, Glee, Harry Potter fandom, political campaigns or more, I'd encourage you to check it out, read some material and leave your comments.  It's great to get feedback on work, especially if you're planning to go anywhere with it.

Because the articles and the journal can be a little heavy at times, however, I'll also leave you with "A Media Studies Love Story", a video created by one of the original Movable Type staffers, demonstrating not only her own nerdiness and love for media studies, but a bit of insight into what it is.



In case the video looks familiar, it was inspired by the follow advertisement, "Parisian Love", released by Google for the 2010 Superbowl.  Enjoy!

Gender in the History of Video Games

For today's post, I don't really have time to grab anything out of my old notes-- the end of the semester is packed with things that need to be done, and as fun as it is to keep my blog up to date, it's not really essential to progression in my Ph.D. program. But fear not! What you get instead is an excerpt from a paper I'm writing for my qualitative methods class. A lot of people write about video games and gender, usually not in a complimentary way. They dislike the way female characters are represented and the fact that video games tend to have more male than female players. I'm interested in seeing if these academic perceptions of gender and video games translate to gamers themselves, so I decided to do my research and the required interview for this project around video game consoles, to see if they were conceived of in terms of gender. In short, do gamers view some consoles as more acceptable for girls than others?
 
I'm still hashing out my own conclusions, but the following is an extract from my textual analysis for the paper, where I address what people have said about gender and games, what is going on now, and where my work fits in. This is the "Gender in the History of Video Games" section, focusing specifically on the narratives academics construct around games. Enjoy and let me know what you think! Sorry if it's kind of long, but I couldn't think of a better place to cut it off.  The formatting is also being all wonky on me, so sorry for that.

Modding "Fair Use"

As I've mentioned a few times, my main area of interest is in the study of video games.  My undergraduate thesis, however, was about the Internet and some of its many legal issues, so an article that came out yesterday on Wired really caught my eye when I saw that it dealt with copyright law and video games.

The article, "Citing iPhone Ruling, Xbox Defendant Says Mod Chips Are Fair Use", deals with the case of Matthew Crippen, who is scheduled to face copyright violation charges in court any day now.  He could receive a sentence of three years in prison for-- get this-- modifying an Xbox.  Well, a couple of them, but it's still quite a novelty.

 The prosecution is arguing that Crippen's console modding violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)'s clause against hardware circumvention.  Which seems pretty cut and dried (although I am not an expert on this act by any means)-- he definitely was circumventing Microsoft's attempts to keep the console limited to their approved games and software. 

The whole case just got complicated, as copyright issues normally do, by Crippen's defense, which hopes to get him off on a "fair use" claim.  Fair use is a special caveat in copyright law that says the way in which you are using copyrighted material does not infringe upon the copyright or require special permission.  For instance, using a film clip for educational purposes in a classroom generally does not require permission from the copyright holder.  Parody and news reporting are generally covered as well, as are a few other things.

To support fair use as a defense for Crippin, his lawyers have cited July's iPhone discussion (Wired article here), where copyright lawyers were all trying to determine whether or not it was legal to jailbreak an iPhone, allowing it to operate on a different network or to use unauthorized apps.  Eventually, it was determined that this was allowable.  To quote a court filing, "The Copyright Office cited the fact that the only way for consumers to exercise their fair-use rights by running non-Apple endorsed applications was through circumvention of access controls."  If the court allows the defense to use this, Crippin might be off the hook.  However, he was charging people to mod their Xbox for them, which might mean he's still in trouble-- non-commercial use is generally considered "fair", but making a profit off circumvention might be going too far.

I'm probably going to follow and see how it turns out, and I recommend you do the same if you're interested in either video games or copyright.  This could be a landmark case for console freedom in particular or technological freedom in general.  Giving the growing trend of proprietary technology that comes with limitations built in, this could be remarkably important.  But perhaps I'll detail that trend a bit more at a later time.

Ludology

I believe I've mentioned this a few times, but in case I haven't, I am going to grad school for Media Studies or Communication Studies, as my program calls it.  I am interested how media affects people and also what it says about individuals, society and culture.  More specifically, I want to look into how the Internet and video games fit in with or challenge traditional concepts of community.

Happy Birthday Mario!

For those who don't know, Monday marked the 25th anniversary of the Super Mario Brothers franchise.  Can you believe it's still so successful after such a long time?  In honor of this event, and because of my own academic interest in fan culture, I've decided to post links to two of my favorite Mario fan creations.

Sticky Note Super Mario is a stop-motion animation made entirely with sticky notes by students in Japan.  Sort of wish I could take that class, but I wish even more that I had this much spare time!

The second one I've decided to post is the adorable Mario Kart Love Song.  I find it to be incredibly creative and, of course, sweet in a very nerdy way (arguably the best way).

Have a favorite of your own?  Share it in a comment!