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"Ruggill, Judd Ethan"
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Gaming Matters
Normal0falsefalsefalseMicrosoftInternetExplorer4 In his
2004 book
Game Work , Ken S. McAllister proposed a rigorous
critical methodology for the discussion of the “video game
complex”—the games themselves, their players, the
industry that produces them, and those who review and market
them. Games, McAllister demonstrated, are viewed and discussed
very differently by different factions: as an economic force, as
narrative texts, as a facet of popular culture, as a
psychological playground, as an ethical and moral force, even as
a tool for military training. In
Gaming Matters , McAllister and coauthor Judd Ruggill
turn from the broader discussion of video game rhetoric to study
the video game itself as a medium and the specific features that
give rise to games as similar and yet diverse as Pong, Tomb
Raider, and Halo. In short, what defines the computer game itself
as a medium distinct from all others? Each chapter takes up a
different fundamental characteristic of the medium. Games are:
• Idiosyncratic, and thus difficult to apprehend using the
traditional tools of media study • Irreconcilable, or
complex to such a degree that developers, players, and scholars
have contradictory ways of describing them • Boring, and
therefore obligated to constantly make demands on players’
attention • Anachronistic, or built on age-old tropes and
forms of play while ironically bound to the most advanced
technologies • Duplicitous, or dependent on truth-telling
rhetoric even when they are about fictions, fantasies, or lies
• Work, or are often better understood as labor rather than
play • Alchemical, despite seeming all-too mechanical or
predictable Video games are now inarguably a major site of
worldwide cultural production.
Gaming Matters will neither flatter game enthusiasts nor
embolden game detractors in their assessments. But it will
provide a vocabulary through which games can be discussed in
academic settings and will create an important foundation for
future academic discourse.
eBook
Playing to Death
The authors discuss the relationship of death and play as illuminated by computer games. Although these games, they argue, do illustrate the value of being--and staying--alive, they are not so much about life per se as they are about providing gamers with a playground at the edge of mortality. Using a range of visual, auditory, and rule-based distractions, computer games both push thoughts of death away from consciousness and cultivate a perception that death--real death--is predictable, controllable, reasonable, and ultimately benign. Thus, computer games provide opportunities for death play that is both mundane and remarkable, humbling and empowering. The authors label this fundamental characteristic of game play thanatoludism. Key words: computer games; death and play; thanatoludism
Journal Article
An Academic Bestiary for the Intrepid Job Seeker
It's common knowledge that college campuses can be wild and woolly places, with all manner of strange creatures roaming the hallways, quads, and classrooms. Less well known is the fact that this menagerie is seldom experienced in toto; the campus ecosystem is such that most of its creatures never cross paths, let alone act in singular purpose. The one exception is the campus visit, when predator, prey, and pedant alike come together for three days of nonstop job interviews, presentations, tours, bruised egos, sore feet, and some generally decent eats.
Journal Article
Straight, Queer, or Academic?
In this article, the authors talk about research relationships in higher education. Research partnerships are generally inexpensive and highly productive (their synergies produce much more work than the sum of the parts). The two partners are generally honest about their collaborations and their roles within them; rigorous in their cross-disciplinary efforts; politically benign (they become so used to working with others that their sense of turf and ego is greatly diminished); and thoroughly nonromantic. Indeed, these academic couples really ought to be the least scandalous members of the faculty. The authors discuss scholarly couplings from their experience: Two of them work together on issues of youth, sexuality, and rights, while the other two study computer games.
Journal Article
Game Over
In their joint search for tenure-track appointments on the same campus, Ruggill and McAllister have discovered that hiring committees seem to think that only a fool (or a foolish department) would hire them both. Folks just seem to have a difficult time wrapping their minds around why two nonromantically involved people would actually want to go on the job market as a dual hire and work together at the same institution.
Journal Article
Alchemy
Of the many types of magic at work in the computer game medium—and we have discussed several in the course of this book—arguably none is more potent and pervasive than alchemy. Commonly (though not necessarily accurately) understood as a pseudo-science focused on discovering a way to convert lead into gold, alchemy can be traced back to ancient Egyptian and Greek words that refer either to the cadaverous black silts that form the bed of the life-giving Nile River or to the hazardously transformative arts of early metallurgy. Tellingly, neither the geological nor metallurgical etymology is definitive; the word
Book Chapter
Duplicity
Like many diligent scholars who study phenomena and artifacts that lack glister of maturity and rectitude—magic, board games, sports, zines, toys and autoerotic devices, to name a few—computer game scholars routineley lie about what it is they do.¹ Caught red-handed running a prostitute over with a milk truck in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, the typical game scholar’s reply (tinged with thinly veiled embarrassment) is “Oh, this? It’s just research.”
The lie here is not that using a game world’s industrial vehicles to down virtual streetwalkers is research. Anyone who has read a news paper or watched the
Book Chapter
Anachronism
Like all media, the computer game medium has a peculiar relationship time. Just as the medium’s instantiations are ineluctably rooted to particula technological, industrial, and cultural moments—even in emulation, Cryst Castles and Congo Bongo cannot help but be conjoined to the arcade aesthet and materiality of 1983—they are also always far outside these moments an their trajectories. Play—the consummate process by which a computer game (and by extension, any game) becomes a game—is beyond time altogether As play theorist Johan Huizinga explains, civilization “does not come from play like a babe detaching itself from the womb:
Book Chapter