Gaming and the liberal arts

You’re told that Animal Farm is a commentary on Socialism, told where Bhutan is. Games don’t work that way; they are experiential.

You leveled up and rolled the dice in Dungeons & Dragons because it was impossible to run such systems under the game's hood. You know why? Because there wasn't a hood. Video games not only have hoods but also engines, and all manner of delightfully invisible computation can be dealt with and handled there. So I ask: Why isn't it invisible more often? Why this useless Gamification of what are already games? Why do we tolerate it? What do we actually get out of it, other than some mouse-brain satisfaction of knowing exactly where we are in the maze?4

I recently asked a game-designer friend if one of the reasons these skill-tree and leveling-up systems actually show up in games is due to the fact that some poor bastard actually had to work for months and sometimes years refining them and planning them and gaming them out, so that everything made sense and demonstrably kept players from getting too powerful too quickly. He said, with a sigh, "Pretty much." Which means that one problem with game design today is the game designer's emotional inability to hide his or her hard work. Oh, the humanity.

Techland consulted some real geniuses of nomenclature in coming up with Dead Island's weapons' subclass names: We have the Flimsy Cleaver, the Tiring Knife, the Frightening Mace, the Spiteful Pistol. It all sounds like the work of two Poles with a big bag of weed and a thesaurus. What's next? I wrote in my notes. The Recalcitrant Hoe? Two minutes later, no joke, I found the Languid Pistol.

The best part of that scene, and what was so affecting about it, was, as Clint Hocking (the game’s designer) pointed out, it wasn’t scripted. It was something that grew organically out of the systems they put into place. And it was wonderful: upsetting, funny, bizarre, intense. What other form of entertainment can do that for you? Provide a series of systems that you poke and prod and walk around in and explore, to the effect that, sometimes, you have something happen right in front of you that you made happen by virtue of being a virtually present within the system. You think about it long enough and your brain begins to melt, doesn’t it? It’s not storytelling, actually, but it allows a story to happen.

Scholars need to make more kinds of things

I also question whether traditional academic distance may not often be as lazy, as simple-minded, as the kind of "vulgar aca-fandom" you are critiquing. It seems to me that it often comes from a refusal to engage with texts and the people who consume them. It often starts from an easy dismissal of the value of the work, a disdain for its fans and creators, and a desire to signal one's distance from anything commercial or popular. It often does not ask the kinds of hard questions you are claiming for the virtue of skepticism. For me, then, there is no special virtue from either starting place -- only the need to be honest about where you are starting from and your own stakes in the analytic process and to be unsettled and multivalient in constantly questioning the texts in which you are engaged. To me, this represents the virtues of the best fan criticism and it represents the virtues of the best outsider criticism.

I'm not suggesting that fans of pop culture artifact X (for any X) are wasting their time and ought to read Chaucer instead. Rather, I'm just not sure I agree that intense fans are sharp critics. I think they are pedantically detailed and vehement investigators, but I don't know that such digging leads to criticism. Let's take this further: it's a criticism I would extend to most academics too... many "careful readers" of whatever (Chaucer, even!) aren't really any better. In that respect, I agree with you that traditional academic distance isn't a salve (as I begin to suggest above, most "traditional" academics suffer from the same negative fandom that concerns me).