{"id":1252,"date":"2008-06-11T10:35:28","date_gmt":"2008-06-11T10:35:28","guid":{"rendered":"\/ifbookblog\/?p=1252"},"modified":"2008-06-11T10:35:28","modified_gmt":"2008-06-11T10:35:28","slug":"ifbook_review_1_game_culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/2008\/06\/11\/ifbook_review_1_game_culture\/","title":{"rendered":"if:book review 1: game culture"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve chosen ‘game culture’ as the theme for this first review post, for all that many of these posts could just as easily be tagged another handful of ways. But games have always hovered at the fringes of debates about the future of the book.
\nConsideration of serious video games; repurposing of existing games to create machinima, and cultural activities arising out of machinima. Dscussion of more overtly cross-platform activities: pervasive gaming, ARGs and their multiple spawn in terms of commercialization, interactivity, resistance to ‘didactic’ co-optation and more. There’s a lot here; as per my first post on this subject,<\/a> I’d welcome comments and thoughts.
\nIn February 2005, Sol Gaitan wrote a thoughtful piece<\/a> about the prevalence of video games in children’s lives, and questioned whether such games might be used more for didactic purposes. In April 2005 Ben picked up an excerpt from Stephen Johnson’s Everything Bad Is Good For You<\/a>, which pointed to further reading on video games in education. In August 2005, four British secondary schools experimented with educational games; someone died after playing video games for 50 hours straight without stopping to eat<\/a>; and Sol pondered whether the future of the book was in fact a video game<\/a>.
\nBetween February<\/a> and May<\/a> 2006 the Institute worked on providing a public space for McKenzie Wark’s Gamer Theory – not strictly a game, but a networked meta-discussion of game culture. Discussion of ‘serious’ games continued in an April analysis of why some games should be publicly funded<\/a>. In August 2006, Sino-Japanese relations became tense in the MMORPG Fantasy Westward Journey<\/a>; later the same month, Gamersutra wondered why there weren’t any highbrow video games, prompting a thoughtful piece from Ray Cha<\/a> on whether ‘high’ and ‘low’ art definitions have any meaning in that context.
\nMachinima and its relations have appeared at intervals. In July 2005 Bob Stein was interviewed in Halo<\/a>, followed later the same month by Peggy Ahwesh in Halo-based talk show This Spartan Life<\/a>. Ben wrote about the new wave of machinima <\/a>and its relatives in December 2005, following this up with a Grand Text Auto call for scholarly papers<\/a> in January 2006, and a vitriolic denunciation of the intersection between machinima, video gaming, and the virtualization of war<\/a> (May 2006). In September 2006 McKenzie Wark was interviewed about Gamer Theory in Halo<\/a>. Then, in October 2007, Chris mentioned the first machinima conference to be held in Europe<\/a>.
\nPervasive gaming makes its first appearance in a September 2006 mention<\/a> of the first Come Out And Play festival (the 2008 one<\/a> just wrapped up in NY last weekend). It’s interesting to note how the field has evolved since 2006: where pervasive gaming felt relatively indie in 2006, this year ARG superstar Jane McGonigal <\/a>brought The Lost Game, part of The Lost Ring<\/a>, her McDonalds-sponsored Olympic Games ARG
\nEarlier, overlap between pervasive gaming, ARGs and hoaxes was foreshadowed by an August 2005 story <\/a>about a BBC employee writing a Wikipedia obituary for a fictional pop star – and then denying that they were gaming the encyclopedia. I wrote my first post about ARGs and commercialization<\/a> in January 2007, following this with another about ARGs and player interaction<\/a> in March. The same month, Ben and I got excited<\/a> about the launch of McGonigal’s World Without Oil, which looked to bring together themes of ‘serious’ and pervasive gaming – but turned out, as Ben and my conversation<\/a> (posted May 2006) to be rather pious and lacking in narrative.
\nSince then, both marketing and educational breeds of ARG have spread, as attested by Penguin’s WeTellStories (trailed<\/a> February, launched<\/a> March 2008), and the announcement of UK public service broadcaster Channel 4 Education’s move of its £6m commissioning budget into cross-platform projects<\/a>.
\nI’m not going to attempt a summary of the above, except to say that everything and nothing has changed: cross-platform entertainment has edged towards the mainstream, didactic games continue to plow their furrow at the margins of the vast gaming industry, and commercialization is still a contentious topic. It’s not clear whether gaming has come closer to being accepted alongside cinema as a significant art form, but its vocabularies have – as McKenzie Wark’s book suggested – increasingly bled into many aspects of contemporary culture, and will no doubt continue to do so.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve chosen ‘game culture’ as the theme for this first review post, for all that many of these posts could just as easily be tagged another handful of ways. But games have always hovered at the fringes of debates about the future of the book. Consideration of serious video games; repurposing of existing games to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[84,87,725,727,1602],"tags":[3125,3127,2457,3257,3429],"class_list":["post-1252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archive","category-arg","category-games","category-gaming","category-review","tag-archive","tag-arg","tag-games-2","tag-gaming","tag-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1252"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1252\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}