I was all ready for more unnecessary italicizing of ideas that seemed important to Manovich whenever we moved on to Ian Bogost's "Unit Operations"....excuse me, I apologize.
Anyway, Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism has proven to be much less hateful than Manovich, precisely because it's about something that I think we can all relate to and something that was made possible by software...sorry, won't happen again. Bogost explores the idea of videogames, and how they relate to other media, in a pretty interesting way. And it's well-deserved.
We as a society are slow to embrace the idea that something we grew up with (and something that is so seemingly "current" that we're at a loss to consider that it has a history beyond our chronological introduction to it) could be worthy of scholarly discussion. Well, maybe it's just me; I never found myself thinking (in the midst of screwing up yet again to get beyond the basic beginner level in Super Mario) "hey, I wonder what this says about society, and about our interaction with the game versus our interaction (or lack thereof) with other mediums." Cut me some slack, I was a pre-teen.
But I did grow up with videogames, we had the old-school Atari and I recall fondly the badly pixilated thrills of games that required a joystick and which featured one button besides the one on top of the joystick, and if there was such a thing as "cheat codes" back then, I didn't know it (I've always felt like cheat codes were, ahem, cheating, both by you of the game and of the code by you by reducing your enjoyement of the game to figuring out ways to beat it that went off the beaten path. I was a bit more law-and-order then, I guess). There was still a filter, of sorts, between the videogame onscreen and your real life, the one going on around you (and the one in which cheat codes were probably used against you, to be honest. It was the Reagan/Bush era, and the nostalgia/homoerotic love-fest Republicans have for that time bewilders me). The concept of an "immersive gaming experience" consisted of Tron, which is confusing as hell when you're a little kid and what you're watching is basically Jeff Bridges in a suit made of Nite-Lites. But nowadays, of course, the game interacts with your real life, in ways that would've seemed impossible to artists back then. I have never played a Wii (there's a fantastic Key & Peele sketch about that, it veers into NSFW territory towards the end so I didn't post it to the group's Facebook page), but I have played Rock Band: it's reducing the musicianship of people I admire (and Gene Simmons) to controls on a panel, albeit a guitar-shaped one. The experience of playing live music is turned into a game in which you collect points based on how "well" you "played," and the quotation marks are appropriate. However, the italicizing could be considered excessive on my part.
I thought the discussion of non-game games (i.e., simulations like The Sims or Star Wars: Galaxies) was interesting because those games seem to re-define the purpose of videogames (i.e., the escape from reality that is such a conducive force for much of the stereotypical gaming set, the ones that aren't good with basic social interactions). Games have gone from fanciful journeys (hero-quests, to borrow some Joseph Campbell because I too have seen Star Wars and will get around to The Hero With a Thousand Faces at some point) to almost blah recreations of the real world (or in the case of Galaxies, a mundane rendering of what was originally a more cosmic idea). At what point does the idea of "life as a game" cross over from "wow, this is exciting, I get to collect points and do things in real life that I could only do in games" to IRS Audit:The Game, in which you have to navigate the legal and fiduciary respobsibilities that come with real life situations.
Scott Pilgrim Versus The World, to my mind, is the best of the "videogame brought to cinema" movies because it's not actually based on a game; the source material is a graphic novel (which, like videogame movies, is a hybrid of two things: the comic book and the novel-like narrative structure, because a lot of comic books are one-and-done affairs while a graphic novel has the potential to grow over many issues. This is a gross simplification of both comic books and novels, of course, but it works for the example). In the film, Scott has to "battle" the ex-lovers of his current flame, Ramona, in videogame-style contests that recall for me the battles one would encounter in Mortal Combat (all they needed to complete the illusion was the final "Finish him!" that confirmed MC's bloodlust in the eyes of concerned parents who, as usual, overreacted to something they didn't understand, much the same with violent rap lyrics or over-the-top slasher films). The rules of real life (you can't go around fighting people, when they die they don't increase your own chances of living nor turn into coins) are broken throughout the film, because otherwise the film is just a typical romantic comedy with a pretty good soundtrack. In a game world, Scott can defeat the evil exes and inch closer to becoming the kind of guy Ramona can live with. Complications arise, of course, as in games. But the overall feel of the movie, hyper as it is, suggests a videogame with only one outcome: Scott gets the girl. In videogames, there are multiple ways the narrative can end, and even points where it can end before you reach the supposed conclusion (as I've learned when trying to tackle Tetris, you can't really win, you can only hope to keep going).
I've never really looked at videogames as being "worthy" of such critical approaches, but that's not because I overwhelmingly think they don't deserve it. I'd just never considered it, and while I don't buy into the premise that they are always worthy of such discussion (c'mon, Donkey Kong could probably be read as a Marxist text on the fetishization of empty barrels used to crush Italian plumbers, but that's a really awkward stretch), I do think it opens up a new world for serious discussion. I think, in true High Fidelity fashion, that we can be defined by our tastes in pop culture (though in HF it's more about individuals, not groups), and as a group we can be defined by the games we embrace as much as we can the cinema, music, or (increasingly less likely) literature. Videogame studies also embrace the notion that I think we've been ignoring throughout the course, that the humanities isn't just literature. There's a philosophy behind even the simplest games, and I think we can try to discuss it (ahem, sorry) try to discuss it as seriously as we take the philosophy behind Moby-Dick or Star Wars. I just hope Manovich isn't there to italicize everything...
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