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Chris Milando

»Highlights for Chapman's: Privileging Form Over Content: Analysing Historica... - 0 views

journalofdigitalhumanities.org/...m-over-content-by-adam-chapman

video games digh5000 digital humanities experience information accuracy history form content

shared by Chris Milando on 11 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • At this early stage in the serious study of historical videogames, we must be sure to adopt an approach that privileges understanding the videogame form (and the varying structures this entails) and its integral role in the production and reception of historical meaning, rather than solely, or even primarily, on the content of specific products as historical narratives.
    • Chris Milando
      Chris Milando on 11 Mar 14
       
      This is super important and defines the idea of the form (the experience) as what we look for in a video game.  This is what the genre will be used for in learning about history.
  • Content cannot be separated from its form, just as history cannot be understood separately from the modes in which it is written, coded, filmed, played, read, or viewed.
  • ...27 more annotations...
  • This last concern is integral to understanding games because, unlike the majority of historical forms, videogames have an additional layer of meaning negotiation because they are actively configured by their audiences
  • In essence, when we play we may well be “reading” (i.e. interpreting and negotiating historical signifiers and narrative) but we are also “doing” (i.e. playing).
  • To do so requires an analytical approach that fuses Salen and Zimmerman’s three schemas of games: play, rules, and culture, while allowing the consideration of the player’s role in the negotiation and fusion of this triad.
  • This article calls for academic work on historical videogames to move beyond the examination of the particular historical content of each game (i.e., historical accuracy or what a game ‘says’ about a particular period it depicts) and to adopt an analytical framework that privileges analysis of form (i.e., how the particular audio-visual-ludic structures of the game operate to produce meaning and allow the player to playfully explore/configure discourse about the past).
  • Simply focusing on the accuracy of the game often re-informs us about popular history rather than recognizing the opportunities for engaging with discourse about the past (and the nature of this discourse) that this new historical form can offer
  • the notion of “accuracy” or “truth” is collapsed with and thus taken to mean, “in alignment with the narratives of book-history.”
  • Critiques of particular historical films were assumed to be indicative of some kind of basic structural inability of film to function as a mode of historical expression. Many scholars concluded that film could not constitute “proper history.”
  • historical videogames mostly relinquish the telling of the experiences of specific historical agents, and favour instead typical historical environments, characters, scenarios, and experiences.
  • Obviously the aim of the developers of historical videogames like Civilization or Brothers in Arms (in addition to create an entertaining game), is to create history, not as it can be represented in a book but as it can be represented in a videogame.
  • Analysis on the basis of content alone almost invariably involves comparisons with historical narratives constructed and received in book form, which is often problematically understood as the only form capable of producing “proper” history
  • Most often these narratives are used as the benchmark for establishing truth or accuracy and thus, the examination of content
  • These written interpretations are taken to be history (or more accurately, the past) itself, rather than history as it can be written, which naturally cannot be bluntly compared to history as it can be played
  • The benefit will be more than just increased knowledge of a particular historical representation, but also insights about form (a particular game-structure’s operations) that are transferable to an understanding of games with similar ludic (and audio-visual) elements.
  • Games will likely never produce the same opportunities for discourse as a book, but then why should they?
  • Each form utilizes different structures that, considered alongside one another as part of a larger transmedia meta-discourse, create much more interesting collaborative opportunities for establishing historical understanding than one or the other alone.
  • Examining only content also necessarily involves asking questions about what is included or left out of a particular videogame’s representation. This is rarely a useful question beyond the basis of a general common sense. Historical videogames are, like all histories, mimetic cultural products
  • history on film must be considered on its own terms.
  • how much is to be actually gained by knowing, for instance, that certain shoes were not genuinely available until the 1490s rather than the 1470s, or that a particular character, though historically typical, did not truly exist? Relatively little, compared to the “feel” of a period or location, the life, colour, action, and processes (with which the book can struggle) and which can be easily communicated in games.
  • It is only by focusing on form that we can understand how the game can produce meaning in these, arguably, new ways, that neither book nor cinema can effectively utilize, whilst still remaining engaged with a larger historical discourse.
  • Historical videogames must be understood on their own terms, without relinquishing our understanding of the basic tenets of historical theory as they universally apply to history as a practice within any form (e.g. history is referential and representational).
  • Accepting this challenge requires a new approach to historical videogames, one that involves analysing the structures that produce meaning.
  • These are structures which create opportunities for players to negotiate meaning in the ways that we are familiar with from other more “passive” media but also allow them to actively configure their own historical experience through play.
  • the agency which the player wields and the challenges they confront, which allow a somewhat unique form of engagement with historical discourse.
  • though written logically, are still subjective aesthetics that attempt to represent historical experience through reactively producing signs to be read and responses to be acted upon.
  • In short, in any historical videogame, the aesthetics of historical description also function at a ludic level, producing a form of “procedural rhetoric” that, depending on a particular game’s (or genre’s) structures, can influence virtually all of the other historical signifiers through which the game produces meaning.
  • Having identified combinations of these audio-visual-ludic structures, we can then approach other games that operate similarly with an understanding of what opportunities for historical meaning-making they are likely to offer
  • When we look at the videogame form in this way we can, I hope, begin to create a cohesive understanding of how games represent the past and what structures create particular playful opportunities for players to explore, understand, and interact with these representations.
  • Chris Milando on 11 Mar 14
     
    Quick Summary: Do we need to look to games for historical accuracy? Chapman argues that we don't really - instead, we need to look to them for a historically accurate experience. This is what helps us to understand the context behind the information we get from books.
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