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In the blog post “Gamification is Bullshit,” Ian Bogost lays out an argument that the perniciousness of gamification is rooted in its coercive or concealing nature. He draws on Harry Frankfurt’s writing on bullshit to distinguish it from outright lies or deceit, making the point that it is just another example of spin dreamed up … Continue reading Experiencing Gamification

Following the substantial ethnographic themes in the works that we read for last week and the sort of ethnographic attentiveness that is demanded by the material for this week  (and me being an anthropologist-in-training—hammer, meet nail), I thought I would write a bit about ethnography and games this week. Something that first struck me in … Continue reading Ethnography & ‘Reading’

The games we play this week offer richly textured experiences. They also—as Patrick argues in the other article we read for Monday—manufacture world-creating, potentially subversive concepts. I want to see where the affective turn we've taken this week can take me in understanding some of these experiences and concepts.  Patrick and Peter McDonald put forward … Continue reading Some notes on affect and tedium in this week’s games

I am doing my thesis on queer game studies, so a lot of that is resonating with these two weeks. Since we have been talking about identification, I want to bring in a term, Lisa Nakamura's Identity Tourism, which then derives into Queer Tourism. Nakamura originally defines this in correspondence to the male Asian characters … Continue reading Identity (Queer) Tourism in Videogames

I’m interested in the concept of meaning making in games and the boundaries for meaning in regard to the game and the world. In “Game Mechanics, Experience Design, and Affective Play,” Patrick and McDonald discuss two theorists on opposite sides of the spectrum: McKenzie Wark and Steven Jones. For Wark, the procedural rhetoric of a … Continue reading Make Meaning, Look at a Landscape, Take Down Capitalism

In "Does Anyone Really Identify with Lara Croft", Shaw struggles to unravel the complex process of identification between video game players and their in-game characters/avatars, clarifying the commonly employed yet seldom clearly defined notion of "identification". Shaw points out that numerous scholars have recognized the enormous potential of video games to generate “true” identification, due … Continue reading Identification or Not in Video Games

In Jagoda and McDonald’s piece, I was a little stunned and more than a little troubled to learn of the game PeaceMaker. I wondered: Did Jared Kushner play this game during the prolific research process that informed his recently unveiled “peace” plan? I decided, due to self-hatred, that I would sacrifice my morning to it. After … Continue reading PeaceMaker

In her essay analyzing games as palimpsests through Aveline in Assassin's Creed, Soraya Murray answers cultural studies theorist Stuart Hall's call for a "politics of identity" that is to be differentiated from "identity politics," arguing that Stuart Hall's anti-essentialist turn allows for a contingent, anti-essentialist analysis of identity (p. 53). In attempting to demonstrate how … Continue reading The Problem with “Identity”

A commenter on the last card in McKenzie Wark’s article seems to throw in the towel, asking with exasperation, “what do you mean when you say [Sims and other video games are] an allegorithm? The whole concept of allegorithm throws me off, whats the meaning of this passage?” I very much felt that comment. Wark’s … Continue reading “The Whole Concept of Allegorithm…”