On Thursday March 15th, the winner and honorable mentions of the 2018 SCMS Central/East/South European Media Essay Award were announced. The $500 award goes to an exemplary essay published in the field of Central/East/South European Cinema and Media Studies during the 2017 calendar year.
We had 19 submissions this year, which shows the robustness of scholarship in our field.
The Awards Committee consisted of: Ana Grgic, Larson Powell, Natascha Drubek, Lars Kristensen, and Evan Torner.
WINNER
“Soviet Estonian animated science fiction: Avo Paistik’s mischievous universes.”
Eva Näripea (Film Archives of the National Archives of Estonia, Tallinn, Estonia)
This theoretically ambitious essay focuses on the paradoxes of “developed socialism” through the example of the technophobic animated sci-fi works by Avo Paistik. Näripea demonstrates how to integrate film history, ideology, and genre studies with precision and intellectual heft.
Full citation: Eva Näripea (2017) “Soviet Estonian animated science fiction: Avo
Paistik’s mischievous universes.” Studies in Eastern European Cinema 8:2, 160-173.
HONORABLE MENTIONS
“Remembering Socialist Entertainment: Romanian Television, Gestures and Intimacy.”
Alice Bardan (University of Southern California)
An admirable overview of Romanian television with respect to post-1989 nostalgia and the afterlife of communist broadcast culture.
Published in: The European Journal of Cultural Studies. January 20, 2017. 1-18.
________________________
“Youth, Nomadism, and Claustrophobia in the Argentinian and Romanian New Waves: Stuff and Dough and Pizza, Beer, and Cigarettes”
Raluca Iacob (Astra Film Festival)
An innovative comparative analysis that seeks a broader generational dialogue regarding contemporary global cinema.
Published in: New Romanian Cinema 41.2. October 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/fc.13761232.0041.207
________________________
“War rape in the face of heroic narrative. The case of Polish cinema”
Magdalena Podsiadło-Kwiecień (Jagiellonian University)
Published in: TransMissions: The Journal of Film and Media Studies 2.1. 2017. 132-149.
A clear and moving description of the relationship between sexual violence, oral history, trauma, and the possibilities of cinema narrative.
________________________
Please join us in congratulating the authors of these articles, and consider submitting your work next year.
We will be holding elections for the new SIG co-chairs for SCMS 2019-2021 in June. Stay tuned for the announcement.
Best wishes,
-Evan Torner and Ana Grgic
Co-Chairs, SCMS Central/East/South European Cinemas Special Interest Group
More Game Quests You’ve Been Waiting For (2017)
March 28, 2017
Well, they’re finally here. Here are some more to choose from.
Attendance Poll Analysis
Quest: To clean up, analyze, and visualize the dataset of attendance poll data across 2 semesters.
[DIGITAL SCHOLARS]
Procedure: Procure a copy of the Excel file containing the Poll Responses from both semesters and read them with an eye on how the data might best be analyzed and represented. Then schedule an appointment with our Digital Humanities specialist James Lee (lee6jj@ucmail.uc.edu) who will show you how this data can be cleaned up and made ready for analysis, and then visually presented. Analyze the data and see if you can find 1-2 major points of interest. Present these 1-2 points using compelling graphics.
Points: Cleaned Up Datafile in Excel format (10), Research Question (10), Articulation of Findings (10), Data Visualization Quality = 40 points.
Board Game Adaptations
Quest: To play a board-game adaptation of a certain property and concept, and then think about what it means.
[ANALOG GAME ENTHUSIASTS]
Procedure: Pick a board game –– any board game. I have quite a few in the UC Game Lab that might be of interest. Play it as close to the rules written as possible with a group of friends and/or fellow students. Make sure you take notes about your experience, especially given what play options you have at any given moment in time. Then research the topic the game is presumably about (Example: Monopoly is about real estate, Ticket to Ride is about the expansion and development of train travel across the USA), picking at least 1 or 2 high-quality scholarly sources in doing so (and consult a librarian if you have questions about that). Afterwards, write a 3-5 page response essay to your play experience with respect to the actual material on which it is based.
Points: Writing Style (10), Grammar and Citations (10), Quality of Secondary Literature Sources (10), Persuasiveness of Argument (10) = 40 points
The Cocktail Machine and Its Depths
Quest: To find several unsung “gems” among the various games available on the UC Game Lab cocktail cabinet.
[ARCADE GAME ENTHUSIAST]
Procedure: Arrange at least 2 meeting times with Dr. Torner to set up the cocktail machine and play several of the titles available. You will learn how to use the machine, as well as experiment with numerous games. Write notes about which games you choose to play and what your play experience on each is like. Then write a 3-5 page essay closely analyzing your experience, paying particular attention to how long you tended to play each game, and why a more obscure title you found is nevertheless worthy of our attention. You will likely have to do some background research to make your argument.
Points: Writing Style (10), Evidence of Reflective Play Sessions (10), Persuasiveness of Argument about Obscure Title (10), Precision of Description (10) = 40 points
Deck Building FTW
Quest: To teach me about deckbuilding games
[DECKBUILDING AFFICIONADOS]
Procedure: I’ll be honest –– I hate deckbuilding games, but I’ve got a whole collection of them in the UC Game Lab, and I’d like to be able to articulate their value to others. Describe at least 2 deckbuilding games in detail, using terminology from the course, and defend their aesthetic value. Bonus points if you actually convince me.
Points: Writing Style (10), Persuasiveness of Argument (10), Precision of Description (10), Uses Course Terminology (10) = 40 points
Everyone’s a Gamer
Quest: To give us a sense of everyday individuals’ interactions with games
[VIDEO JOURNALISTS]
Procedure: Interview on camera at least 3 different individuals about the games they play, how they play them, and those games that seem to be most “artistic” to them. Edit the footage into a 5-8 minute videoclip that also features video-captured recordings of the games discussed. Make sure that what you are producing is somehow in dialog with Adrienne Shaw’s work; that you do not assume certain individuals from certain demographics will appreciate certain games. Try to get at stories that run against the grain of established narratives. Upload the resultant video file on UC Box.
Points: Interviews of at least 3 people (10), Editing (10), Overall Polish (10), Subtle Underlying Argument (10) = 40 points
FATE and Afrofuture!
Quest: To play an RPG with respect to its socio-political content.
[D&D DUNGEON MASTERS]
Procedure: Get a copy of Afrofuture! the RPG from Dr. Torner, and run it for several friends or fellow students. Write up some notes about your experience afterward. Then do some research on afrofuturism as an aesthetic and socio-political movement, finding at least 1-2 high-quality scholarly sources. Write a 3-5 page essay relating your actual experience of playing Afrofuture! to the socio-political movement, paying particular attention to how the game mechanics themselves emphasize and/or undermine specific dynamics in that movement.
Points: Writing Style (10), Precision of Description (10), Persuasiveness of Argument, Drawing on a High-Quality Source (10), Grammar and Citations (10)
Game Lab Research
Quest: To look at the wide world of university game labs and talk about the future of our own.
[BUDDING ACADEMICS AND ADMINISTRATORS]
Procedure: Do some serious Internet searching, after consultation with Dr. Torner, on various game labs at universities around the world. Start with MIT, Tampere, UC Santa Cruz, Concordia University, but then branch out to find places and archives that maybe are under-represented. Call them or e-mail them and talk about their mission, how they fit into their university, and their main activities. Write up an annotated, comparative tour of at least 3 of these labs, assessing (in your language, not theirs) what they ostensibly do and how it fits into the larger picture of both their own institution and game studies in general.
Points: Writing Style & Organization (10), Evidence of Thorough Research (10), Informed Opinion about The Labs in Question (10), Presentation (10) = 40 points
Kill Screen
Quest: To evaluate quality games journalism.
[JOURNALIST AND GAME SCHOLAR]
Procedure: Purchase an issue of Kill Screen and read it from cover to cover. Then pick out 2 articles and evaluate everything about them: how they’re written, how they describe the games in question, and who their target audience appears to be. Consider the strengths and weaknesses of their presentation, and how you might cover this game yourself. Consider also how these essays might apply to course concepts. Write 4-5 pages with your evaluation and findings
Points: Writing Style (10), Precision of Description (10), Evaluation of Journalism (10), Incorporation of Course Concepts (10) = 40 points
Larping The Dream
Quest: To play the larp The Dream by Jason Morningstar & produce a final product on it
[LARPERS AND FILMMAKERS]
Procedure: Procure a copy of The Dream from me. Read it through and then gather 5-9 players to play it, as well as the materials. Run through the game, and write down your thoughts about it after the debrief. The game will have produced a recording, which you will edit and then compare to the game’s source material. Send me a 1-2 page essay reacting to your run of the game, paying particular attention to how your labor role in the game affected your play, and upload your video you produced to UC Box (or YouTube).
Points: Evidence of Actual Play (10), Writing Style for Reflection (10), Insights into the Game (10), Final Video Product – Whatever It May Look Like (10) = 40 points
Open Sorcery
Quest: To play Sorcery and have informed opinions about it
[INTERACTIVE FICTION FANS]
Procedure: Play the Inkle game Sorcery! and take notes while you do so. Examine in particular the impact of the player-character choices you make in the game. Then write a 3-5 page essay comparing the choice impact in this game with any other game you have played, especially BioWare, Bethesda, or other Inkle Games. In your comparison, advance an argument about what the game’s accomplishments are with respect to player impact. But don’t forget our course materials as well!
Points: Writing Style (10), Persuasiveness of Argument (10), Precision of Description (10), Relationship to Course Concepts (10)
Pokémon Go Panel Wrap-up
Quest: To edit and enhance some Pokémon Go panel footage
[MEDIA EDITORS]
Procedure: Procure the raw video of last fall’s Pokémon Go panel held by the UC Game Lab from Dr. Torner. Cut out the bits that, in your discerning opinion, are not as interesting as others. In fact, see if you can cut it into a 5-minute “highlights” reel of the most important points for you. Introduce actual gameplay footage captured wherever you think it fits. Upload the resultant video file on UC Box.
Points: Editing (10), Curation of Highlights (10), Overall Polish (10), Subtle Underlying Argument (10)
Text Analysis of RPGs
Quest: To take a digital-humanist look at RPG texts
[DIGITAL SCHOLARS]
Procedure: I have a large collection of role-playing game texts, and I’d like to see if there are any patterns across them you can discern. Procure the PDF collection from me, and see which parts you would like to analyze: the Character Creation sections, the Combat Sections, the Index of words, etc. Then make an appointment with our Digital Humanities specialist James Lee (lee6jj@ucmail.uc.edu) about using programs such as R to sort the text into data chunks that can be interpreted: most common words, most common words found next to each other, and so forth. Analyze the data and see if you can find 1-2 major points of interest. Present these 1-2 points using compelling graphics.
Points: Cleaned Up Database of PDF data (10), Research Question (10), Articulation of Findings (10), Data Visualization Quality = 40 points
X-citing Art Projects
Quest: To contribute artwork to a forthcoming game project being developed on campus, and write a reflection on the process.
[ARTISTS AND DESIGNERS]
Procedure: Find a game designer (or talk to Dr. Torner about finding one) who needs art desperately. There are many! Speak with him/her/them about their needs and come up with a few design sketches that address them. Write 1-2 pages about the game, the art that you designed for the game, and why you made the choices you did. Make extra sure you tell us how the player is intended to interact with the art, and if that influenced your creation at all.
Points: Precision of Description in Written Essay (10), Writing Style (10), Discussion of Player Interaction (10), Scans of Completed Artwork Sketches (10) = 40 points
You’re On TV
Quest: To depict gaming in a positive-yet-analytical light on film
[JOURNALISTS AND VIDEO EDITORS]
Procedure: Attend a gaming event, be it a convention, bridge night, game day, or evening at the arcade, and shoot video there. Edit it into a coherent report of no more than 10 minutes in length. Note in your introductory sequence of the final product the circumstances of you attending this event, etc. Talk to people at the event, but also observe at least 1-2 instances of play closely, and then analyze those instances in retrospect in the final segment of the final product. The final product is, of course, an edited video. Upload it to Box.
Points: Editing (10), Curation of Highlights (10), Overall Polish (10), Subtle Underlying Argument (10)
26 Game Studies Quests (2017)
January 17, 2017
Here are the updated quests for my Film 2008 course at the University of Cincinnati this Spring 2017. Each student must complete 3 quests and a Final Boss Challenge.
A is for Affordances
Quest: To describe and theorize affordances in games, and their various functions
[ARTISTS AND DESIGNERS]
Procedure: Read the short text by Norman on affordances under Quest-Related.
Also, watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCSXEKHL6fc
Then pick a game you’d like to analyze, preferably one that has what you consider interesting affordances: Dance Dance Revolution, Jenga, and Doom would all be equally interesting on this point. Write 4-5 pages on your experience of the affordances of the game, beginning with your subjective experience thereof and moving out to general principles of game and material design. Cite at least 3 outside sources in your analysis, using proper MLA 7 formatting.
Points: Writing Style (10), Conception of Affordances (10), Grammar and Citations (10), Persuasiveness of Argument (10) = 40 points
B is for Bungie and Blizzard
Quest: To detail how studios preserve a certain style or type of narrative over time, even between game universes.
[PROSPECTIVE GAME HISTORIANS]
Procedure: Play at least three games by a single game studio, attending to the span of time between the studio’s origins and the present. Good examples would be Bungie (Marathon → Halo → Destiny) or Blizzard (Warcraft → World of Warcraft → Diablo 3). One game must be from the origin era of the studio, the second game from somewhere in the middle of its history, and one must be recent. In a 3-5 page paper that includes a comparison chart, describe to the reader the salient aspects of the studio’s style that distinguish it from other studios, and what continuities seem to persist across distinct titles. Cite studio-related secondary literature if pertinent, using proper MLA formatting.
Points: Writing Style (10), Comparison Chart (10), Grammar and Usage (10), Persuasiveness of Argument (10) = 40 points
C is for Conventional Wisdom
Quest: To describe and theorize how conventional wisdom and reflex often define game patterns and decision-making, and what can be done to break its grasp.
[BUSINESSPEOPLE AND DESIGNERS]
Procedure: Watch this video of Greg Costikyan talking about “natural” game design.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGKPirk5wdQ
Then look up the word “isomorphism” with respect to sociology. Make sure to incorporate that word’s connotations into the project. Play a game Costikyan has not discussed, but in terms of his overarching points about game design patterns.Write 4-5 pages on what counts as “original” game design and what could be seen as “copying” or “re-skinning” other games, beginning with your subjective experience and moving out to general principles of game and material design. Cite at least 3 outside sources in your analysis, using proper MLA 7 formatting.
Points: Writing Style (10), Conception of Isomorphism (10), Grammar and Citations (10), Persuasiveness of Argument (10) = 40 points
D is for Diplomacy
Quest: To describe how analog board and card games function with respect to ideology.
[GAMERS]
Procedure: Read Bruno Faidutti’s essay “Postcolonial Catan.” Then play either Settlers of Catan or one of the other eurogames discussed in the article. Write a 4-5 page response to both your own play experience, as well as to the issues that Faidutti raises in the article. Try to see the issue of representation from as many angles as possible; there is no right answer, but the critiques raised cannot be easily dismissed.
Points: Writing Style (10), Self-Reflection (10), Grammar and Citations (10), Incorporation of Course Concepts (10) = 40 points
E is for Exploration
Quest: To take a closer look at a video-game character and its form and functions.
[GAME DESIGNERS]
Procedure: Read the Isbister text in “Quest-Related Materials” on game characters. Now pick a character from a video game, preferably one with enough ambiguity to offer us something to discuss. Write a 4-5 page paper relating that video-game character to principles in Isbister’s text.
Points: Writing Style (10), Relationship to Isbister’s texts (10), Grammar and Citations (10), Persuasiveness of Argument (10) = 40 points
F is for Failure
Quest: To describe how a game uses failure to drive play.
[PHILOSOPHERS]
Procedure: Read (or re-read) Jesper Juul’s Art of Failure and keep in mind his points about the rewards of negative affect. Pick a game that has a particularly interesting relationship to failure: Flappy Bird, Track & Field II, and Space Invaders would all be good examples. Write a 4-5 page paper relating Juul’s ideas to this particular game.
Points: Writing Style (10), Relationship to Juul’s text (10), Grammar and Citations (10), Persuasiveness of Argument (10) = 40 points
G is for Good Filmmaking
Quest: To evaluate how filmmaking effects are used in contemporary game design.
[FILM AND MEDIA STUDIES]
Procedure: This quest involves some very specific media products. Watch Blade Runner (1982) and Ghost in the Shell (1996), and then play Deus Ex (2000) or Oni (2001) and Remember Me (2013). Using the first two cyberpunk films as a baseline, write 4-5 pages on how the video games appropriate and/or deviate from specific cinematographic techniques and film practices from the 2 films. Note also how Remember Me builds on or deviates from the films vs. Deus Ex and Oni.
Points: Writing Style (10), Precision of Description (10), Grammar and Citations (10), Persuasiveness of Argument (10)
H is for History of Game Studies
Quest: To understand certain fundamentals of the game design field through the narratology vs. ludology debate
[FUTURE GAME STUDIES SCHOLAR]
Procedure: You will have to read a lot for this assignment, namely Espen Aarseth’s Cybertext, Janet Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck, Gonzalo Frasca (http://web.cfa.arizona.edu/art435a/readings/frasca_ludology.pdf), and Edward Wesp (http://gamestudies.org/1402/articles/wesp). Using evidence from these texts and any others you find, take a position in the debate and supply a way we might use the resulting methodology in games analysis. 4-5 pages will be sufficient, but you may want to write more. Please cite as many sources as you need (probably 5+), using MLA 7 standards.
Points: Writing Style (10), Summary of Positions (10), Grammar and Citations (10), Persuasiveness of Argument (10)
I is for Interview
Quest: To conduct an interview with a game designer, professional or amateur, who has a playable game in public circulation.
[JOURNALISTS]
Procedure: Make contact with a game designer (ask me if you need some help there) and, if s/he is willing, interview them about their craft. The interview should be at least 5-7 questions long, and submitted in written form or decent-quality video or audio recording. Make sure the focus in the interview is on not only the design of the game, but its production and circulation in the real world.
Points: Thoughtful Questions (10), Interview Structure (10), Grammar and Citations (10), Overall Interest (10)
J is for Just Choose Already
Quest: To explore what interactive literature has to offer and write about it persuasively
[LITERARY SCHOLARS]
Procedure: Sit down and actually play through Andrew Plotkin’s Spider and Web (http://eblong.com/zarf/zweb/tangle/) and Crowther and Woods’ Colossal Cave Adventure (http://www.amc.com/shows/halt-and-catch-fire/exclusives/colossal-cave-adventure). If you’d like, play through a contemporary piece of Interactive Fiction such as 80 Days (2015) or something from Choice of Games LLC. Use FAQs or walkthroughs if you get stuck. Consulting sources such as Anastasia Salter’s What is Your Quest? or Nick Montfort’s Twisty Little Passages, analyze your experience in playing these games in literary terms. What make these games “literature” to you, and how do their actual game elements intensify or complicate this relationship? Use MLA 7 for your citations.
Points: Writing Style (10), Evidence of Play (10), Grammar and Citations (10), Overall Argument (10)
K is for Kriegsspiel
Quest: To understand the basis for modern military board games through Reiswitz’s Kriegsspiel
[GERMAN STUDENT]
Procedure: Read the overview article from Philipp von Hilgers (https://www-alt.gsi.de/documents/DOC-2009-Jun-114-1.pdf), Vego’s overview (https://www.usnwc.edu/getattachment/900b6d3c-bcc8-4ff0-8c17-9ad22c448799/German-War-Gaming.aspx) as well as relevant passages from Jon Peterson’s Playing at the World and Kriegsspiel News (http://www.kriegsspiel.org.uk/index.php/articles/origins-history-of-kriegsspiel/3-origins-of-the-kriegsspiel). Now play through a modern descendent of the Kriegsspiel: either an Avalon Hill game (of which I have a few), an HPS Simulation, etc. Now write 3-5 pages in English or 2 pages in German about your play experience with respect to what you have read. Be certain to include how specific game mechanics constrained your options or permitted you to engage in specific play behavior. Use MLA 7 citations.
Points: Writing Style (10), Grammar and Citations (10), Precision of Description (10), Relationship to History and Course Materials (10)
L is for Libraries
Quest: To go through recent game studies scholarship of interest.
[LIBRARIANS AND READERS]
Procedure: Find 5 game studies publications published within the past three years: articles, books or otherwise. Choose publications that work on one topic: role-playing games, platform studies, first-person shooters, etc. Write a 4-5 page paper with an argument detailing what is preoccupying these publications. What are the main issues at stake in these articles? Who are they in conversation with? What games seem to be cited frequently? Use MLA 7 citations, and have at least 5 of them!
Points: Writing Style (10), Insightful Reading (10), Grammar and Citations (10), Precision of Argument (10)
M is for Making Games
Quest: To create freeform games based on literature to use in the classroom.
[LITERATURE STUDENT / GERMAN STUDENT]
Procedure: You will first need to do some background research on what freeform games are. Look to Lizzie Stark’s Pocket Guide to American Freeform, the Golden Cobra Challenge (http://www.goldencobra.org/), or Gizmet Game Poems (http://gamepoems.gizmet.com/about/) for clues. Then pick a canonical German text below (if a German student) OR one from the English-language canon. Come up with a short freeform game (20 min. – 1 hour) that could be played in a classroom to convey specific material related to the work in question. Be creative! Resultant works may be adapted or used later in the classroom.
• EXCERPTS: Das fliessende Licht der Gottheit (Mechthild von Magdeburg)
• POEM: “Es ist alles eitel” (Gryphius)
• NOVELLA: Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (Goethe)
• DRAMA: Maria Stuart (Schiller)
• POEMS: Various poems (Eichendorff)
• DRAMA: Einen Jux will er sich machen (Nestroy)
• POEM: “Des Biedermanns Abendgemütlichkeit” (Scheffel)
• NOVELLA: Krambambuli (Ebner-Eschenbach)
• EXCERPTS: In Stahlgewittern (Jünger), Im Westen nichts Neues (Remarque)
• DRAMA: Die Dreigroschenoper (Brecht)
• NOVELLA: Schachnovelle (Zweig)
• ERZÄHLUNG: Nachts schlafen die Ratten doch (Borchert)
• NOVELLA: Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. (Plenzdorf)
• DRAMA: Der Tod und das Mädchen (Jelinek)
• ERZÄHLUNG: Mutterzunge (Özdamar)
Points: Clarity of Instructions (10), Understanding of the Original Text (10), Presentation (10), Overall Game Design (10)
N is for New Games for YOUR Major
Quest: To create (or at least start) a game related to your major
[GAME DESIGNER]
Procedure: If you’re looking to get into game design, then one of the best places to start is to create a game. Find a topic or complex related to one of your majors and come up with an idea for a game related to it. Run the idea by the instructor before you get too far into it. Then plot out the game rules and, if possible, make a playable prototype or proof of concept in Sploder, Twine, InDesign, Gamemaker or some other relevant game software.
Points: Presentation of Final Product (10), Overall Game Design (10), Clarity (10), Relationship to Source Material (10)
O is for Other Language
Quest: To play a board / card / role-playing game in German and reflect on the experience.
[GERMAN STUDENT]
Procedure: Come talk to your instructor about getting a copy of a German-language board / card / role-playing game, and then play it for at least 1 session auf Deutsch. Then you will write a 3-page reflection paper on the experience, and playing games in a foreign language.
Points: Successful Playthrough (20), Quality of Self-Reflection (10), Grammar (10)
P is for Platform
Quest: To assess the field of “platform studies” from a scholarly and play perspective
[GAME DEVELOPER AND SCHOLAR]
Procedure: Platform studies involves the examination of a specific piece of hardware and its impact on the games it produces. Read at least 2 of the books in the Platform Studies series at MIT (http://platformstudies.com/). If you can, track down a working version of the platform in question and play a few games on it. Write a 4-5 page reflection paper answering the question: how is platform studies useful in assessing games? How might we understand a particular game thanks to its platform? Use MLA 7 citations.
Points: Grammar and Citations (10), Persuasiveness of Argument (10), Precision of Description (10), Writing Style (10)
Q is for Quarters
Quest: To visit an actual arcade environment and reflect on it anthropologically
[COLLEGE STUDENT]
Procedure: Gather together a group of 2+ students from this course and go to a local arcade or board game café: Tabletop Game Cafe in Columbus, The Rook, 16-Bit, The Place, Gameworks, etc. Spend at least $5 on games, paying close attention to each game you play: how the game is presented, what it promises you, how much it costs, what you actually get when you play it, and how long it takes for you to go before you have to feed the machine more quarters. Also observe your classmates as they play, if possible. Write a 4-5 page reflection paper on the experience, specifically attending to both the social context (i.e., being in an arcade) and the games themselves. Bring in concepts from the course useful for your description, such as affordances, constraints, representation, and others.
Points: Grammar and Citations (10), Relationship to Course Materials (10), Description Details (10), Writing Style (10)
R is for Role-Playing Theory
Quest: To look at contemporary role-playing game theory and take a position within it
[ROLE-PLAYING SCHOLAR]
Procedure: Read through Sarah Lynne Bowman’s The Functions of Role-Playing Games, Markus Montola’s “On the Edge of the Magic Circle” (https://tampub.uta.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/66937/978-951-44-8864-1.pdf?sequence=1), The Foundation Stone of Nordic Larp (http://nordiclarp.org/w/images/8/80/2014_The_Foundation_Stone_of_Nordic_Larp.pdf), and the most recent issue of the International Journal of Role-Playing (http://ijrp.subcultures.nl/). Find a topic that interests you. Then write a 4-5 page paper with MLA 7 citations that responds directly to recent arguments in RPG studies. Draw on your own experiences with RPGs if you can.
Points: Grammar and Citations (10), Persuasiveness of Argument (10), Relationship to Source Material (10), Writing Style (10)
S is for Sexuality and Gender
Quest: To examine broader implications of gender and sexuality to be found in games
[CRITICAL THEORIST]
Procedure: Drawing on Adrienne Shaw’s Gaming at the Edge, find at least 2 other articles – academic or otherwise – that deal critically with the issue of gender and/or sexuality and gaming. Be specific as possible, and try to play the games that are mentioned. Now write a 4-5 page paper responding to the issues raised, being attentive to critical theories of representation and game mechanics. Use MLA 7 citations.
Points: Grammar and Citations (10), Persuasiveness of Argument (10), Relationship to the Secondary Literature (10), Writing Style (10)
T is for Travia GmbH & Co.
Quest: To look at the German video games industry from a critical perspective
[GERMAN STUDENT]
Procedure: Read this document positively appraising the German games industry (http://www.gtai.de/GTAI/Content/EN/Invest/_SharedDocs/Downloads/GTAI/Fact-sheets/Business-services-ict/fact-sheet-gaming-industry-en.pdf) and consult the Wikipedia page on the German video games industry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_gaming_in_Germany). Track down and play one of the games on the list. Now write a 4-5 page paper in English (or a 2-page paper in German) explaining the game as a product of German industry forces. What company made it? What are their sales like? What could be considered “German” about this particular game? Pay attention to transnational and European-level markets, and come see your instructor if you need more details. Any citations shoudl be in MLA 7.
Points: Grammar and Citations (10), Persuasiveness of Argument (10), Precision of Description (10), Writing Style (10)
U is for Uncertainty
Quest: To apply Costikyan’s theories of uncertainty in games to a specific game object
[GAME DESIGNER]
Procedure: Now that you’ve read Uncertainty in Games, it’s helpful to apply it to a game object. Pick a game that you think has a particularly interesting balance of uncertainty factors. Imagine telling some game designer how the game uses uncertainty to work. Write a 4-5 page paper articulating precisely what aspects of the game’s design contribute to this uncertainty, particularly looking at affordances, incentives, and constraints. Use Costikyan’s terminology and cite (MLA 7) as you write.
Points: Grammar and Citations (10), Persuasiveness of Argument (10), Relationship to Source Text (10), Writing Style (10)
V is for Valor
Quest: To enlighten the rest of the class with respect to some specific game topic
[FUTURE POLITICIAN OR PROFESSOR]
Procedure: Are you a public speaker extraordinaire? Would you like to work on those skills? First, sign up for a 10-minute spot to present on a topic of your choice related to games and the course material. Then come up with an engaging 10-minute presentation on your particular topic to give in front of the gathered students. Please make it engaging!
Points: Clarity (10), Structure (10), Delivery (10), Persuasiveness (10)
W is for What is a Role-Playing Game?
Quest: To play through a game that serves as a theoretical intervention, and assess it
[GERMAN STUDENTS AND OTHERS]
Procedure: Find 2-3 fellow players and play Epidiah Ravachol’s What Is a Role-playing Game? in English (https://dig1000holes.wordpress.com/what-is-a-roleplaying-game/) OR in German (http://pihalbe.org/sites/default/files/Was-ist-ein-Rollenspiel–Raumraeuber.pdf) if you are a German student. Then discuss the play experience afterward. Take notes on both the play and the discussion. Then write a 4-5 page paper describing the experience, what happened in the game, and how the game made an impact on what you thought a role-playing game was. Speculate about what you would do if you had to make a similar intervention.
Points: Grammar and Citations (10), Persuasiveness of Argument (10), Precision of Description (10), Writing Style (10)
X is for Xenophobia
Quest: To look at racial and/or race-related dynamics in a game with a critical lens
[CRITICAL THEORISTS]
Procedure: Minorities are vastly underrepresented in video games. This structural racism is largely attributed to lean market demographics, when in fact people of color play games just as much as white people. To do this assignment, read the Mou & Peng article (https://www.msu.edu/~pengwei/Mou%20Peng.pdf), A.A. George’s Tor.com article (http://www.tor.com/2014/08/13/gamings-race-problem-gen-con-and-beyond/) and related materials to be found in the library or online databases. Pick and play a game which offers us clear insights into this particular dynamic. In a 4-5 page argumentative paper with at least 3 sources (MLA 7 citations), tell your reader about the constructions of whiteness and racialized figures in the game.
Points: Grammar and Citations (10), Persuasiveness of Argument (10), Relationship to Theory (10), Writing Style (10)
Y is for Your Ideas Are Not Your Own
Quest: To understand how ideology works through game mechanics
[CRITICAL THEORISTS]
Procedure: Game mechanics are persuasive and rhetorical instruments that one can use to further specific political and economic arguments. Almost every game implies how humans ought to behave and how systems ought to work: Monopoly justifies the bootstrapping entrepreneurial mentality as well as (paradoxically) demonstrates how having wealth and property just gives one more wealth and property, Pong implies that a game of pure physical skill is possible, Undertale rejects normative gender and sexuality perspectives while also reassuring us that kindness will save the world. In this assignment, you will play a game of your choice and discern the general ideological implications of its aesthetic and mechanics. After playing the game for a significant period of time, write a 4-5 page paper answering the following questions: What are the players incentivized to do in the game? How could these incentives be read in terms of political and economic profit motive? What mentalities are considered “optimal” in the story universe of the game. Citing (using MLA 7) Ian Bogost or cultural theorists from the Frankfurt or Birmingham School couldn’t hurt.
Points: Grammar and Citations (10), Persuasiveness of Argument (10), Relationship to Theory (10), Writing Style (10)
Z is for Zelda
Quest: To do an in-depth analysis of a specific level of a specific game
[GAME DESIGNERS]
Procedure: Pick a level of a video game, and play through it at least 3 times. It could be a controversial level like “No Russian” in Modern Warfare 2, or the opening dungeon of The Legend of Zelda. Pay close attention to the following aspects, among others: how the level begins/continues/ends, what emotional high points and low points it offers to you as a player, what characters you meet and how you are expected to deal with them, the potential outcomes of the players’ actions within the level, the layout of the landscape, its soundscape and artistic inspirations. Now write 4-5 pages advancing a specific argument about the level. Be as precise in your description as possible, and relate its various points to concepts you learned in the course.
Points: Persuasiveness of Argument (10), Precision of Description (10), Writing Style (10), Relationship to Course Concepts (10)
FINAL BOSS FIGHT
During the final two weeks of the semester, students get to try out their game analysis skills against a worthy opponent. They will select a game and play it, taking notes. Then they will locate no less than 3 reviews of or academic articles on the game. Citing these reviews and/or articles, they will then write their own review that somehow affirms, refutes and/or responds to the 3 reviews, while also arguing their own position on the game. Assignment length is somewhere between 2000-4000 words (the length of a decent game review) and should be written with popular game criticism standards (i.e., those of Fernández-Vara) in mind.
In Defense of Public Education
November 27, 2016
All of the public schools in the United States of America, from kindergarten through doctoral programs in higher education, should be free of charge and open to anyone with sufficient intellectual curiosity and merit.
Instead, the Republican establishment has doubled down on school privatization efforts, and our president-elect looks as if he will continue this form of despotism.
I admit it: as faculty at a public research university, I have a vested financial interest in preserving public education. Last year’s salary was $58,790, about the same as a fully certified high school teacher in the state of Ohio. Nevertheless, my conflict of interest cannot remotely compare with those of the “reformers” who want to bring profitability into a sphere that cannot function well under for-profit conditions. For-profit operations drive up costs for the consumer, while driving down quality and breaking yet another source of income for our dwindling middle class.
As Diane Ravitch argues:
“There is no evidence for the superiority of privatization in education. Privatization divides communities and diminishes commitment to that which we call the common good. When there is a public school system, citizens are obligated to pay taxes to support the education of all children in the community, even if they have no children in the schools themselves. We invest in public education, because it is an investment in the future of our society.”
We are hardly “cartels,” as Paul Ryan has described us. Google “cartel” and you see the violence of Mexican drug lords. There can be a comparable analogy drawn from when our schools are weak –– students drop out, join questionable organizations, crime increases, and the teachers burn out one way or another. It is, indeed, a crime against American-style democracy to underfund and thereby slowly snuff out the public schools that make democratic thinking and voting possible.
The 21st Century offers too many complex challenges to then have schools and universities abandon their fundamental mandates in favor of religious-tinged “science” or sub-standard services while corporations make profits.
We as a country have foolishly put too many wolves in charge of our hen houses. It is time for us to intervene. Indeed, the future of critical thought and action, of class mobility and non-violent pursuits, in this country depends on it.
Teaching Gramsci and Arendt at Wizard School
July 31, 2016
“Jeglicher Zauber geht verloren, wenn du versuchst, ihn einzufangen.”
–Helga Schäferling
What role does “magic” play in our lives? Is magic already suffused with the powers of the mundane? How does magic duplicate and comment upon the logics of neoliberalism already governing us? To what extent can “rebellion” be realized within a left-leaning institution, and how do such institutions cull and herd their ranks? Is being a wizard the new “it” thing?
These questions have all popped into my head over the course of the past week, thanks to the latest live-action role-playing game (larp) with which I took part. In this post, I will outline the game itself, talk a little bit about its design, go over some of my character’s arc, and conclude with a discussion of the content of this post’s title: introducing major figures of social thought into the curriculum of a magic school. And, of course, royally rocking out while doing so.
Overview
The past weekend (July 21-24, 2016), I had the pleasure of attending the third run (NWM3) of New World Magischola (NWM) at the University of Richmond. If you’ve been keeping track of my exploits (or outright stalking me), you’ll note that this was my third multi-day larp experience ever – following the first run of Inside Hamlet and the fourth run of Just a Little Lovin’, which I documented extensively here. Those were Nordic larps over in Denmark, and were a departure for me after I started down the road of Nordic freeform in 2010.
NWM is the American adaptation of the hit European game College of Wizardry, a highly successful blockbuster larp which is to date scheduling its 11th run, not including sequels. Contrary to popular belief, NWM is not the first weekend-long Nordic larp in the United States; that honor belongs to Lizzie Stark’s 2012 run of Mad About the Boy.
Each run of the Harry Potter-esque magic university runs from Thursday afternoon until Saturday at midnight, immersing players in a magical version of the United States known as the Magimundi invented by co-organizers Maury Brown and Ben Morrow and co-created by the player-characters themselves. Thursday evening mark the parties of the 5 student houses and the initial gatherings of the school’s many clubs and secret societies. Friday is the first day of classes coupled with the first-year initiation ceremony into their respective houses. Saturday is the second day of classes, and ends with a spectacular ball and the announcement of the winners of the house cup.
The design of this game focuses on player imagination, co-creation, 360-degree immersion, and emergent plotlines. Overall themes (as far as I could tell) were inclusivity vs. exclusivity, vulnerability vs. coldness, the consciousness and rights of non-human/non-wizard creatures, freedom vs. security, and rebellion vs. control.
Design
Brown and Morrow have deliberately created a larp environment around building empathy and empowering others. When we think about the last 25 years of entertainment larp history, we know that’s often not the case. Vampire: The Masquerade-based larps, the centerpiece of the medium and hobby for many years, famously revolve around player vs. player (PvP) conflict. Baalman and Barchmann (2014) write:
Conflict is the basis of the game – the reasons for conflict are a multitude – and the conflicts are never fully resolved or forgiven, any step towards resolution is simply a further step towards new conflicts. (22)
To be sure, conflict is what drives most narratives, and in theory driving for hardcore antagonism in a larp space is a good thing. In practice, however, a larp culture of PvP can produce many nasty side effects as well. Participants trust each other less and, as Sarah Lynne Bowman (2014) has argued, PvP can lead to long-term community schisms that only hurt the larp ecosystem overall. In fact, PvP games too often instinctively draw upon cultures of scheming and conflict that, in fact, are only endemic to the western world.
In contrast, Brown and Morrow advocate for a larp design that includes rather than excludes, that empowers rather than constrains, and that encourages ignorance of social hierarchies rather than deference to them. In their words: “The rhetoric the characters [use] is invitational and not the agonistic or command-and-conquer rhetoric that is programmed into so many games.” Empowerment therefore stems from players being able to have information at their disposal, decide to opt in or out of play situations, easily create alibis to cover certain plot points, and let them negotiate the outcome of emergent fiction. As any expert of improv theater can tell you, the First Rule is to say “Yes, and…” to any fiction or action thrown your way. Information circulates thanks to a state of transparency unheard of in most larps (Brown has said my own essay on transparency helped her formulate design on this front), and then player-characters choose to engage or disengage using a variety of techniques.
Thus the “magic” of a magic school comes from the collective imaginations of the participants, rather than carefully balanced sets of rules and gamemaster-centered meta-plots. Actually, the latter part – the relative deficit of meta-plot – proves an integral part of this design. In cooperative board games such as Pandemic or Ghost Stories, for example, the reason to cooperate can be found in the relentless external threats pounding down on the player-characters from all sides. In NWM, cooperation stems from player-created drama that is often not directly PvP. A student has an unresolved relationship with their monstrous father, and needs fellow students to help summon him. A professor gets into an unprofessional fight with another professor over methodology. A disruption in the ley lines has brought in more vampires, shadows, and werewolves to campus, meaning that the non-human-sapience advocates suddenly have a whole bunch of wandering actual creatures on whose behalf they must now advocate. Each plot thread stems from situations that offer personal or social drama, rather than drama on an epic or worldwide scale. Countering the usual genre fiction trope of the world always being threatened and the PCs always being entrusted with saving it, NWM instead explores the day-to-day weirdness of being at a magic school and the HBO-style drama of powerful-yet-inexperienced wizards figuring out their lives, finding romance, reconciling with their pasts, and taking action against the social injustices around them.
Speaking of social injustices, I should mention the progressive ambitions of the larp. Gender pronouns defaulted to “them/they” rather than “him/he” or “her/she.” Romance plots were presumed to be agnostic of sexuality. Most of the student organizations available had some sort of activist component to them. All of the Magical Theory & Ethics faculty, myself included, were encouraged to instruct students to question authority and rebel against it. Real social issues around the marginalization of certain populations and the investment of large institutions in criminal corporate enterprises emerged in metaphorical form throughout the game. In other words, NWM created a space in which we might enact our own pedagogy of the oppressed and imagine alternate realities in which our own education system encouraged students to speak out, rather than conform.
NWM’s design had us build a temporary edifice of trust – a heterotopia, if you will – so that we could explore both personal themes and themes much greater than ourselves. By turning conflict toward the extant social system, the game’s design had us form real empathy relations with our fellow players as we then began to address social problems all around us. Those characters who exacerbated these problems also demanded our empathy: we needed to figure out why they were prejudiced against chupacabras, or why they chose to defend the evil Foresight Corporation, or why they dabbled in the dark arts, and then make difficult decisions as to what to do about it. The game gave us the necessary information, and then let us figure out what to do with it all. It felt like a breath of fresh air with a whiff of emotional maturity. It created an environment that, like any good classroom, afforded the players to take appropriate risks.
And that’s where I come in.
Professor Kai Hassinger
The character I was given was “K. Hassinger, Professor of Magical Theory & Ethics, 3rd Year.” He’s a Mundane-born (“muggle”) weirdo from Mishipeshu (the Magimundi Midwest) who happens to be a former New World Magischola student. This character opens with the line “You’re a rebel and proud of it” and later continues:
“As a professor, you’re valued for your brilliant, outsider’s grasp of arcane ethics. You’ve tempered a bit, but you still have a hot streak and you delight in challenging expectations and forcing students to re-examine what they’ve learned.”
This was basically a gift to me as a player, because I’m often playing the quirky, outsider character with left-leaning ideologies. Fit me like a glove. And then I thought: “What if Robert Smith from The Cure was my fashion template?”
Thus Kai Hassinger was born.
Kat did my make-up and showed me how to rat my hair, and it took some planning to find goth-y clothing that would also breathe well in the extreme Richmond-in-July heat. I was very proud with the result: an arrogant agitator and rock star with a heart of gold.
My personality came from both former UMass professors (“Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will!”), as well as my general impression of impassioned iconoclasts throughout history. Also as an iconoclast: he was thrown out of 2 of the 5 houses in his 3 years as a student, and never really graduated as a practitioner of a specific “major.”
For this run, my character had been given leadership positions in the Fellowship of the Hydra, a do-gooder vigilante group, and the monitorship of the Maison Du Bois, the most upstanding house and one of the ones that threw him out as a student. I attributed Hassinger’s membership in the former to his impulse toward action over mere philosophizing, and his possession of the latter as a mysterious form of punishment handed to him by the Chancellor thanks to political maneuvering by his institutional arch-enemy, Jurisprudence Professor Taggart. So I was grappling with a fairly complex character that, at the same time, needed to provide play for others as faculty. But I otherwise had zero character connections listed on my character sheet.
I attempted to reach out to fellow players on Facebook before the game with some limited success. The Mundane players certainly wanted an ally on the faculty, and I desperately wanted – thanks to prior larp experiences – to be situated in some social situation other than “You’re an outsider and a weirdo.” I chose then to double down on my character’s responsibilities to his networks – Faculty, Hydra, DuBois, Mundane-borns – as well as scheduled a rock concert to happen for ~30 minutes on the Saturday of the game (more on that below). At the game itself, I reached out to several professors for more solid relationships. Prof. Alfred Contreras became Hassinger’s former advisor who also was the reason why someone as outlandish as him even had a job. Prof. Kane, the other ethics faculty, also had a very progressive, leftist approach to ethics, so Hassinger immediately formed a tight bond with him. Prof. Taggart became his arch-nemesis, “The Man” he wanted so desperately to take down (but with whom he secretly agreed on many topics). Prof. Barber, a cryptozoologist, became Hassinger’s equally unconventional frenemy… with whom he later found much affinity. Prof. Barlow in alchemy became a fellow disaffected person from Mishipeshu, and eventually his date to the ball. Prof. Ziegler became the other outsider, whose avocation of necromancy intrigued him. Slowly, the pieces began to fall together, but only with much proactive effort on my part.
But no proactive efforts would outrank the feat that was my course preparation.
Classroom Prep
How do you teach a “magical theory & ethics” course? Let me count the ways…
Seriously, the topic is so, so broad. And it’s so easy to get wrong.
I didn’t know where to begin, so I thought about what I myself as a German professor and graduate faculty member at the University of Cincinnati would be interested in teaching. What I came up with was a valorization and discussion of the works of several of my intellectual heroes: Hannah Arendt, Antonio Gramsci, and Giorgio Agamben. Basically, those strains of continental philosophy that deal with the politics of demarcating an “enemy” and what we actually do with human (and non-human) bodies subjected to systems larger than ourselves. I wanted to smuggle these thinkers into the larp, even through their own words, with the serial numbers filed off. In other words, I wanted to teach the players something that I myself was actually an expert in, so that they could then feel like they as characters had also learned something.
The faculty are basically gamemastering their own mini-larps, and I wanted mine to A) overwhelm the students with that “out of my league” feeling you get when you first get to college and B) let the students know that they could comprehend the basics and learn to act on what they’ve learned by the end. I also wanted to model how to disagree respectfully with someone with different – perhaps even repugnant – opinions from oneself.
So I invented a worthy straw man: Prof. Joffrey Leadwale (played to a T. by Chris Bergstresser), a well-established Unsoiled professor from the 19th and early 20th Century whose work Arcanium narum was considered a classic at NWM. My first lesson had an intended three-Act structure. Act I was introducing the students to the Arcanium and letting them swim around in its complexities. Hassinger asked them if they could find a passage that made them angry, and one that intrigued them. Hoo boy, did that get them riled up. And just after the students reached the point when they wanted to tear the argument to shreds, in walks the spirit of the guy who wrote it. (It’s kind of an academic’s dream come true, actually). Act II is an act of tense negotiation in which Hassinger tries to mediate Leadwale’s ideas about the semantics of magic to the students, while also questioning the classist and racist presumptions underlying the text. Students have to figure out how to voice their critiques to a worthy opponent. Act III involves Hassinger sending away Leadwale and then revealing his own school of thought and ethics, called the Alternium. The first page of the Alternium is Hassinger’s radical leftist intellectual statements regarding how magic is integrated into societal power politics. The second and third pages are then quotes from philosophers of interest to those looking at the ethics of power: “C. Schvitt” is Carl Schmitt, “The Q” is Malcolm X, “H. Ardenta” is Hannah Arendt, “M.M. Foqua” is Michel Foucault, and “A. Gambon” is Giorgio Agamben. The fourth page contains Hassinger’s rants against other content in the textbook, again reinforcing his “outsider” status. Discussion then launched into the very nature of power and our capacity to act within larger, exploitative social systems. The students finally had to form groups and tackle one of these 18 simple sociological projects, which involved observing class and power dynamics around NWM. So suddenly, magical school students had to take Antonio Gramsci’s concepts of hegemony and interregnum seriously, or look for signs of discrimination and political economy in NWM. Hassinger helped drive play by suddenly having the player-characters critically analyze the environment around them. The second lesson was mostly about taking their lessons from the projects, and then applying them back to concepts in the Alternium.
The classes were exhilarating to teach, to say the least. Students came in not knowing what to expect, and wound up having to take real-life power dynamics articulated by real-life theorists seriously. He found instant affinity with a host of students who held similar opinions: Hebe Hathaway, Beowolf Gonzalez, Katerina Rosener, Tatiana Bradford, Jasper Creed, Rafael DuPont, and the list goes on. Philosophical questions that directly concern contemporary social politics were foregrounded, as well as a kind of polemics that one usually only sees in graduate-level coursework. Hassinger could behave as responsibly or as irresponsibly as he wanted, a liberating feeling for me as real-life faculty who is otherwise beholden to student evaluations. His class began to swell with auditors from other class years, who had heard a rumor or two about Hassinger’s teaching style.
It was in the Magic Theory & Ethics classes that I felt closest to the vision of this larp: social progressivism in wizard school and presenting students with no easy answers (or an “evil” threat to eliminate).
Scenes
The out-of-class scenes were not as enjoyable as teaching the classes, at least for me.
Many of the recaps and entries related to NWM often tell the tale in a long character arc spanning the whole weekend. Truth be told, Hassinger didn’t have much of an “arc” – more like a series of vignettes and small arcs. Here are a few to satisfy your interest in “what happened” during the game:
• Hassinger attends the Maison DuBois house reception as reluctant house monitor. He openly reveals his fraught history with the house (having been thrown out as a student) and casts public doubts about the viability of the group to compete for the House Cup. Later: He realizes at the moving House DuBois initiation ceremony conducted by Emily Dwyer and Meridia Hayers that he actually still believes in their causes of “truth and ethics,” and rallies to their support.
• Rafael DuPont, a 3rd-year Lakay Laveau, solicits Hassinger’s advice regarding Avernus prison. He’s got a relative imprisoned there, and knows of the atrocities. Hassinger brings him into the Faculty Lounge to discuss things further, where DuPont also gets to overhear all the drunken faculty gossip. Hassinger advises DuPont to gather the signatures of as many Marshalls as possible, to send a clear message that the next generation of law enforcers oppose this for-profit hellhole. Later: DuPont delivers the petition with 14 signatures. The motion to disinvest from Avernus prison is dismissed by the Chancellor out of hand, and the faculty move to table it for the next (contentious) budget meeting. Hassinger flies off the handle when Taggart’s name is mentioned as being pivotal for the petition to get off the ground, and he throws a temper tantrum at the faculty meeting.
• Hassinger spends much of the weekend debating with his mentor Contreras on the point of acting “principled” in contests such as the house cup. Hassinger takes the side of the pragmatists, advocating House DuBois to be “crafty,” should they want a house victory. Later: DuBois wound up coming in 2nd place.
• During the first meeting of the Fellowship of the Hydra, Hassinger and Faith Myczek look for a direction for this vigilante society, and find in one in sapience rights. One member says it is a pity for us to be holding our meeting at the exact same time as the sapience rights, so we just decide to merge our meeting with theirs. At the end of the major-league activist meeting led by Moxie Brack and Eva Sheridan among others, the gathered group is suddenly faced with a dilemma that Hydra members had to help deal with: a scared chupacabra being hunted down for having killed a wizard’s 12 year-old son. Thanks to the quick thinking of several students led by first-year Sloane Lanczek and the assistance of Profs. Hassinger and Barber, the students heal the chupacabra, conceal it in robes, and smuggle it to safety. Later: On the second meeting of the Fellowship of the Hydra, we discussed the outcomes of our previous struggles and then re-joined the Sapience Rights Advocates for their plans to speak in favor of vampires, chupacabras, and others.
• Because the Chancellor was otherwise indisposed, Hassinger had to take over taking the house cup points for about 3 hours.
• Hassinger witnessed several rituals on behalf of the students: one that brought a greycloak in from its quasi-existence between dimensions (don’t ask), one that permitted the poltergeist Johnny to possess the body of this other guy, and one that brought Alfie the ghost back from the dead.
• Hassinger notices first-year Jasper Creed has been attending his third-year classes and being of a similar anti-establishment mindset. He randomly asks him at dinner if he could be his TA. Later: At the ball, Creed and Hassinger find themselves awkwardly dancing together… and hatching future plans.
Rock On, Everyone
Of course, I also did mention that concert that I had scheduled. I used an impromptu, weird-ass flyer to advertise it…
Looks pretty hip, right?
In actuality, it looked something more like this:
That thing on the left? It’s a gremlin. That thing on the right? It’s a faun.
They both rocked. Hard.
And it didn’t hurt that the Chancellor himself was really into punk music and down with me dominating the Faculty Lounge with a bunch of loud rock songs for half-an-hour. He hauled in more students to see the spectacle. Thanks, Fortinbras!
For those who know my recent larp creations, you know Kat and I’ve put together a wonderfully debauched game called Slayer Cake, which lets you live out your Brütal Legend dreams of being in a magical rock band vying for the title of Overlords of Rock. The relevance here is that I effectively introduced one of the karaoke, fake-guitar-playing sequences from Slayer Cake into NWM so as to introduce an “event” for other characters to participate in. Since I genuinely love playing fake guitar in front of everyone and screaming “Metal!!” then the deal worked out for people on all sides.
The important thing about blockbuster larps is the dispersal of various random events, some of which drive plotline, and others become empty vessels for plotline to fill. The concert was one of the latter: as Hassinger was rocking out to “Wishmaster” and “Paranoid Android,” there were people next door trying to conduct a ritual, others hiding in the concert from their opponents, and others still launching into new character arcs thanks to the music and lyrics. Player-characters projected what they wanted into Hassinger’s own small act of permitted rebellion, and were rewarded for it.
And there was even an encore permitted during the ball, for those who wanted to keep rocking!
A Few Summary Points
NWM3 afforded me an opportunity to be the rebel, rock-star professor I’d always wanted to be, as well as experience some minor pathos around Maison DuBois, my mentor Contreras, my antagonist Taggart, and student-led activism on behalf of issues that they cared about.
• The game’s design encouraged the players to use the wizard school as an allegory of modern liberal arts education and social justice dynamics.
• Professors being allowed to design their own curriculum gives player-characters in faculty roles the ability to steer the game through their lessons.
• Putting some real content that you are passionate about teaching into those lessons is a pretty good idea.
• My character didn’t really experience a life-changing arc during the game, and that’s OK.
• But I got to rock out and help make the experience an enjoyable one for my fellow players.
I send out much love and thanks to everyone who made NWM possible, and hope to be part of this continuing drama as it unfolds.
26 Game Studies Quests
January 27, 2016
For my Film 2008 course at the University of Cincinnati this Spring 2016, each student must complete 3 quests and a Final Boss Challenge. Here are 26 distinct quests for them to choose from. (Can you tell I’m a German and RPG scholar?)
A is for Affordances
Quest: To describe and theorize affordances in games, and their various functions
[ARTISTS AND DESIGNERS]
Procedure: Read the short text by Norman on affordances under Quest-Related
Materials: Then pick a game you’d like to analyze, preferably one that has what you consider interesting affordances: Dance Dance Revolution, Jenga, and Doom would all be equally interesting on this point. Write 4-5 pages on your experience of the affordances of the game, beginning with your subjective experience thereof and moving out to general principles of game and material design. Cite at least 3 outside sources in your analysis, using proper MLA 7 formatting.
Points: Writing Style (10), Conception of Affordances (10), Grammar and Citations (10), Persuasiveness of Argument (10) = 40 points
B is for Bungie and Blizzard
Quest: To detail how studios preserve a certain style or type of narrative over time, even between game universes.
[PROSPECTIVE GAME HISTORIANS]
Procedure: Play at least three games by a single game studio, attending to the span of time between the studio’s origins and the present. Good examples would be Bungie
(Marathon → Halo → Destiny) or Blizzard (Warcraft → World of Warcraft → Diablo 3). In a 3-5 page paper that includes a comparison chart, describe to the reader the salient aspects of the studio’s style that distinguish it from other studios, and what continuities seem to persist across distinct titles. Cite studio-related secondary literature if pertinent, using proper MLA formatting.
Points: Writing Style (10), Comparison Chart (10), Grammar and Usage (10), Persuasiveness of Argument (10) = 40 points
C is for Constraints
Quest: To describe and theorize how constraints work to narrow and control player options and movement – both in the positive and negative sense.
[ARTISTS AND DESIGNERS]
Procedure: Constraints limit user interaction with any given game to delineate their options and available maneuvers. Pick and play a game that you think has interesting constraints: Mysterium, Waco Resurrection, and Desert Bus all have interesting ones to consider. Write 4-5 pages on your experience of the affordances of the game, beginning with your subjective experience thereof and moving out to general principles of game and material design. Cite at least 3 outside sources in your analysis, using proper MLA 7 formatting.
Points: Writing Style (10), Conception of Constraints (10), Grammar and Citations (10), Persuasiveness of Argument (10) = 40 points
D is for Diplomacy
Quest: To describe how player unpredictability and the removal of randomness as an alibi affect a board game’s aesthetic.
[GAMERS]
Procedure: Borrow or buy a copy of Diplomacy (board game) and play it with 6 other people, including other players from the class doing this assignment. Be attentive to the rules, especially regarding secrecy and troop movement. After the game is over, debrief with your fellow players for about 15 minutes, talking about the various strategies that worked and – most importantly – how everyone felt during gameplay. Now write a 4-5 page paper describing your experience, focusing on your available decisions and moments of drama, and apply Greg Costikyan’s “player uncertainty” concept from his Uncertainty in Games book.
Points: Writing Style (10), Self-Reflection (10), Grammar and Citations (10), Incorporation of Costikyan’s Concepts (10) = 40 points
E is for Exploration
Quest: To take a closer look at a video-game character and its form and functions.
[GAME DESIGNERS]
Procedure: Read the Isbister text in “Quest-Related Materials” on game characters. Now pick a character from a video game, preferably one that offers us much to discuss. Write a 4-5 page paper relating that video-game character to principles in Isbister’s text.
Points: Writing Style (10), Relationship to Isbister’s texts (10), Grammar and Citations (10), Persuasiveness of Argument (10) = 40 points
F is for Failure
Quest: To describe how a game uses failure to drive play.
[PHILOSOPHERS]
Procedure: Re-read Jesper Juul’s Art of Failure and keep in mind his points about the rewards of negative affect. Pick a game that has a particularly interesting relationship to failure: Flappy Bird, Track & Field II, and Space Invaders would all be good examples. Write a 4-5 page paper relating Juul’s ideas to this particular game.
Points: Writing Style (10), Relationship to Juul’s text (10), Grammar and Citations (10), Persuasiveness of Argument (10) = 40 points
G is for Good Filmmaking
Quest: To evaluate how filmmaking effects are used in contemporary game design.
[FILM AND MEDIA STUDIES]
Procedure: This quest involves some very specific media products. Watch Blade Runner (1982) and Ghost in the Shell (1996), and then play Deus Ex (2000) or Oni (2001) and Remember Me (2013). Using the first two cyberpunk films as a baseline, write 4-5 pages on how the video games appropriate and/or deviate from specific cinematographic techniques and film practices from the 2 films. Note also how Remember Me builds on or deviates from the films vs. Deus Ex and Oni.
Points: Writing Style (10), Precision of Description (10), Grammar and Citations (10), Persuasiveness of Argument (10)
H is for History of Game Studies
Quest: To understand certain fundamentals of the game design field through the narratology vs. ludology debate
[FUTURE GAME STUDIES SCHOLAR]
Procedure: You will have to read a lot for this assignment, namely Espen Aarseth’s Cybertext, Janet Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck, Gonzalo Frasca (http://web.cfa.arizona.edu/art435a/readings/frasca_ludology.pdf), and re-read Edward Wesp (http://gamestudies.org/1402/articles/wesp). Using evidence from these texts and any others you find, take a position in the debate and supply a way we might use the resulting methodology in games analysis. 4-5 pages will be sufficient, but you may want to write more. Please cite as many sources as you need (probably 5+), using MLA 7 standards.
Points: Writing Style (10), Summary of Positions (10), Grammar and Citations (10), Persuasiveness of Argument (10)
I is for Interview
Quest: To conduct an interview with a game designer, professional or amateur, who has a playable game in public circulation.
[JOURNALISTS]
Procedure: Make contact with a game designer (ask me if you need some help there) and, if s/he is willing, interview them about their craft. The interview should be at least 5-7 questions long, and submitted in written form or decent-quality video or audio recording. Make sure the focus in the interview is on not only the design of the game, but its production and circulation in the real world.
Points: Thoughtful Questions (10), Interview Structure (10), Grammar and Citations (10), Overall Interest (10)
J is for Just Choose Already
[LITERARY SCHOLARS]
Quest: To explore what interactive literature has to offer and write about it persuasively.
Procedure: Sit down and actually play through Andrew Plotkin’s Spider and Web (http://eblong.com/zarf/zweb/tangle/) and Crowther and Woods’ Colossal Cave Adventure (http://www.amc.com/shows/halt-and-catch-fire/exclusives/colossal-cave-adventure). If you’d like, play through a contemporary piece of Interactive Fiction such as 80 Days (2015) or something from Choice of Games LLC. Use FAQs or walkthroughs if you get stuck. Consulting sources such as Anastasia Salter’s What is Your Quest? or Nick Montfort’s Twisty Little Passages, analyze your experience in playing these games in literary terms. What make these games “literature” to you, and how do their actual game elements intensify or complicate this relationship? Use MLA 7 for your citations.
Points: Writing Style (10), Evidence of Play (10), Grammar and Citations (10), Overall Argument (10)
K is for Kriegsspiel
[GERMAN STUDENT]
Quest: To understand the basis for modern military board games through Reiswitz’s Kriegsspiel
Procedure: Read the overview article from Philipp von Hilgers (https://www-alt.gsi.de/documents/DOC-2009-Jun-114-1.pdf), Vego’s overview (https://www.usnwc.edu/getattachment/900b6d3c-bcc8-4ff0-8c17-9ad22c448799/German-War-Gaming.aspx) as well as relevant passages from Jon Peterson’s Playing at the World and Kriegsspiel News (http://www.kriegsspiel.org.uk/index.php/articles/origins-history-of-kriegsspiel/3-origins-of-the-kriegsspiel). Now play through a modern descendent of the Kriegsspiel: either an Avalon Hill game (of which I have a few), an HPS Simulation, etc. Now write 3-5 pages in English or 2 pages in German about your play experience with respect to what you have read. Be certain to include how specific game mechanics constrained your options or permitted you to engage in specific play behavior. Use MLA 7 citations.
Points: Writing Style (10), Grammar and Citations (10), Precision of Description (10), Relationship to History and Course Materials (10)
L is for Libraries
[LIBRARIANS AND READERS]
Quest: To go through recent game studies scholarship of interest.
Procedure: Find 5 game studies publications published within the past three years: articles, books or otherwise. Choose publications that work on one topic: role-playing games, platform studies, first-person shooters, etc. Write a 4-5 page paper with an argument detailing what is preoccupying these publications. What are the main issues at stake in these articles? Who are they in conversation with? What games seem to be cited frequently? Use MLA 7 citations, and have at least 5 of them!
Points: Writing Style (10), Insightful Reading (10), Grammar and Citations (10), Precision of Argument (10)
M is for Making Games
[GERMAN STUDENT]
Quest: To create freeform games based on German literature to use in the classroom.
Procedure: You will first need to do some background research on what freeform games are. Look to Lizzie Stark’s Pocket Guide to American Freeform, the Golden Cobra Challenge (http://www.goldencobra.org/), or Gizmet Game Poems (http://gamepoems.gizmet.com/about/) for clues. Then read one of the books in the list below. Come up with a short freeform game (20 min. – 1 hour) that could be played in a classroom to convey specific material auf Deutsch related to the work in question. Be creative! Resultant works may be adapted or used verbatim in Fall 2016.
• EXCERPTS: Das fliessende Licht der Gottheit (Mechthild von Magdeburg)
• POEM: “Es ist alles eitel” (Gryphius)
• NOVELLA: Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (Goethe)
• DRAMA: Maria Stuart (Schiller)
• POEMS: Various poems (Eichendorff)
• DRAMA: Einen Jux will er sich machen (Nestroy)
• POEM: “Des Biedermanns Abendgemütlichkeit” (Scheffel)
• NOVELLA: Krambambuli (Ebner-Eschenbach)
• EXCERPTS: In Stahlgewittern (Jünger), Im Westen nichts Neues (Remarque)
• DRAMA: Die Dreigroschenoper (Brecht)
• NOVELLA: Schachnovelle (Zweig)
• ERZÄHLUNG: Nachts schlafen die Ratten doch (Borchert)
• NOVELLA: Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. (Plenzdorf)
• DRAMA: Der Tod und das Mädchen (Jelinek)
• ERZÄHLUNG: Mutterzunge (Özdamar)
Points: Clarity of Instructions (10), Understanding of the Original Text (10), Grammar (10), Overall Game Design (10)
N is for New Games for YOUR Major
[GAME DESIGNER]
Quest: To create (or at least start) a game related to your major
Procedure: If you’re looking to get into game design, then one of the best places to start is to create a game. Find a topic or complex related to one of your majors and come up with an idea for a game related to it. Run the idea by the instructor before you get too far into it. Then plot out the game rules and, if possible, make a playable prototype or proof of concept in Sploder, Twine, InDesign, Gamemaker or some other relevant game software.
Points: Presentation of Final Product (10), Overall Game Design (10), Clarity (10), Relationship to Source Material (10)
O is for Outer Space
[GERMAN STUDENT]
Quest: To play an intensive starship game in German
Procedure: If there are at least 4 German students interested, a German-language game of Artemis can be arranged. Artemis is a multi-player tactical ship simulation game that’s a lot like crewing a starship. Once we get through the logistical hurdles, you will meet for a 2-hour session of the game, and play it only in German. Then you will write a 1-page reflection paper on the experience, and playing games in a foreign language.
Points: Successful Playthrough (20), Quality of Self-Reflection (10), Grammar (10)
P is for Platform
[GAME DEVELOPER AND SCHOLAR]
Quest: To assess the field of “platform studies” from a scholarly and play perspective
Procedure: Platform studies involves the examination of a specific piece of hardware and its impact on the games it produces. Read at least 2 of the books in the Platform Studies series at MIT (http://platformstudies.com/). If you can, track down a working version of the platform in question and play a few games on it. Write a 4-5 page reflection paper answering the question: how is platform studies useful in assessing games? How might we understand a particular game thanks to its platform? Use MLA 7 citations.
Points: Grammar and Citations (10), Persuasiveness of Argument (10), Precision of Description (10), Writing Style (10)
Q is for Quarters
[COLLEGE STUDENT]
Quest: To visit an actual arcade environment and reflect on it anthropologically
Procedure: Gather together a group of 2+ students from this course and go to a local arcade: 16-Bit, The Place, Gameworks, etc. Spend at least $5 on games, paying close attention to each game you play: how the game is presented, what it promises you, how much it costs, what you actually get when you play it, and how long it takes for you to go before you have to feed the machine more quarters. Also observe your classmates as they play, if possible. Write a 4-5 page reflection paper on the experience, specifically attending to both the social context (i.e., being in an arcade) and the games themselves. Bring in concepts from the course useful for your description, such as affordances, constraints, representation, and others.
Points: Grammar and Citations (10), Relationship to Course Materials (10), Description Details (10), Writing Style (10)
R is for Role-Playing Theory
[ROLE-PLAYING SCHOLAR]
Quest: To look at contemporary role-playing game theory and take a position within it
Procedure: Read through Sarah Lynne Bowman’s The Functions of Role-Playing Games, Markus Montola’s “On the Edge of the Magic Circle” (https://tampub.uta.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/66937/978-951-44-8864-1.pdf?sequence=1), The Foundation Stone of Nordic Larp (http://nordiclarp.org/w/images/8/80/2014_The_Foundation_Stone_of_Nordic_Larp.pdf), and the most recent issue of the International Journal of Role-Playing (http://ijrp.subcultures.nl/). Find a topic that interests you. Then write a 4-5 page paper with MLA 7 citations that responds directly to recent arguments in RPG studies. Draw on your own experiences with RPGs if you can.
Points: Grammar and Citations (10), Persuasiveness of Argument (10), Relationship to Source Material (10), Writing Style (10)
S is for Sexuality and Gender
[CRITICAL THEORIST]
Quest: To examine broader implications of gender and sexuality to be found in games
Procedure: Drawing on Adrienne Shaw’s Gaming at the Edge, find at least 2 other articles – academic or otherwise – that deal critically with the issue of gender and/or sexuality and gaming. Be specific as possible, and try to play the games that are mentioned. Now write a 4-5 page paper responding to the issues raised, being attentive to critical theories of representation and game mechanics. Use MLA 7 citations.
Points: Grammar and Citations (10), Persuasiveness of Argument (10), Relationship to the Secondary Literature (10), Writing Style (10)
T is for Travia GmbH & Co.
[GERMAN STUDENT]
Quest: To look at the German video games industry from a critical perspective
Procedure: Read this document positively appraising the German games industry (http://www.gtai.de/GTAI/Content/EN/Invest/_SharedDocs/Downloads/GTAI/Fact-sheets/Business-services-ict/fact-sheet-gaming-industry-en.pdf) and consult the Wikipedia page on the German video games industry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_gaming_in_Germany). Track down and play one of the games on the list. Now write a 4-5 page paper in English (or a 2-page paper in German) explaining the game as a product of German industry forces. What company made it? What are their sales like? What could be considered “German” about this particular game? Pay attention to transnational and European-level markets, and come see your instructor if you need more details. Any citations shoudl be in MLA 7.
Points: Grammar and Citations (10), Persuasiveness of Argument (10), Precision of Description (10), Writing Style (10)
U is for Uncertainty
[GAME DESIGNER]
Quest: To apply Costikyan’s theories of uncertainty in games to a specific game object
Procedure: Now that you’ve read Uncertainty in Games, it’s helpful to apply it to a game object. Pick a game that you think has a particularly interesting balance of uncertainty factors. Imagine telling some game designer how the game uses uncertainty to work. Write a 4-5 page paper articulating precisely what aspects of the game’s design contribute to this uncertainty, particularly looking at affordances, incentives, and constraints. Use Costikyan’s terminology and cite (MLA 7) as you write.
Points: Grammar and Citations (10), Persuasiveness of Argument (10), Relationship to Source Text (10), Writing Style (10)
V is for Valor
[FUTURE POLITICIAN OR PROFESSOR]
Quest: To enlighten the rest of the class with respect to some specific game topic
Procedure: Are you a public speaker extraordinaire? Would you like to work on those skills? First, sign up for a 10-minute spot to present on a topic of your choice related to games and the course material. Then come up with an engaging 10-minute presentation on your particular topic to give in front of the gathered students. Please make it engaging!
Points: Clarity (10), Structure (10), Delivery (10), Persuasiveness (10)
W is for What is a Role-Playing Game?
[GERMAN STUDENTS AND OTHERS]
Quest: To play through a game that serves as a theoretical intervention, and assess it
Procedure: Find 2-3 fellow players and play Epidiah Ravachol’s What Is a Role-playing Game? in English (https://dig1000holes.wordpress.com/what-is-a-roleplaying-game/) OR in German (http://pihalbe.org/sites/default/files/Was-ist-ein-Rollenspiel–Raumraeuber.pdf) if you are a German student. Then discuss the play experience afterward. Take notes on both the play and the discussion. Then write a 4-5 page paper describing the experience, what happened in the game, and how the game made an impact on what you thought a role-playing game was. Speculate about what you would do if you had to make a similar intervention.
Points: Grammar and Citations (10), Persuasiveness of Argument (10), Precision of Description (10), Writing Style (10)
X is for Xenophobia
[CRITICAL THEORISTS]
Quest: To look at racial and/or race-related dynamics in a game with a critical lens
Procedure: Minorities are vastly underrepresented in video games. This structural racism is largely attributed to lean market demographics, when in fact people of color play games just as much as white people. To do this assignment, read the Mou & Peng article (https://www.msu.edu/~pengwei/Mou%20Peng.pdf), A.A. George’s Tor.com article (http://www.tor.com/2014/08/13/gamings-race-problem-gen-con-and-beyond/) and related materials to be found in the library or online databases. Pick and play a game which offers us clear insights into this particular dynamic. In a 4-5 page argumentative paper with at least 3 sources (MLA 7 citations), tell your reader about the constructions of whiteness and racialized figures in the game.
Points: Grammar and Citations (10), Persuasiveness of Argument (10), Relationship to Theory (10), Writing Style (10)
Y is for Your Ideas Are Not Your Own
[CRITICAL THEORISTS]
Quest: To understand how ideology works through game mechanics
Procedure: Game mechanics are persuasive and rhetorical instruments that one can use to further specific political and economic arguments. Almost every game implies how humans ought to behave and how systems ought to work: Monopoly justifies the bootstrapping entrepreneurial mentality as well as (paradoxically) demonstrates how having wealth and property just gives one more wealth and property, Pong implies that a game of pure physical skill is possible, Undertale rejects normative gender and sexuality perspectives while also reassuring us that kindness will save the world. In this assignment, you will play a game of your choice and discern the general ideological implications of its aesthetic and mechanics. After playing the game for a significant period of time, write a 4-5 page paper answering the following questions: What are the players incentivized to do in the game? How could these incentives be read in terms of political and economic profit motive? What mentalities are considered “optimal” in the story universe of the game. Citing (using MLA 7) Ian Bogost or cultural theorists from the Frankfurt or Birmingham School couldn’t hurt.
Points: Grammar and Citations (10), Persuasiveness of Argument (10), Relationship to Theory (10), Writing Style (10)
Z is for Zelda
[GAME DESIGNERS]
Quest: To do an in-depth analysis of a specific level of a specific game
Procedure: Pick a level of a video game, and play through it at least 3 times. It could be a controversial level like “No Russian” in Modern Warfare 2, or the opening dungeon of The Legend of Zelda. Pay close attention to the following aspects, among others: how the level begins/continues/ends, what emotional high points and low points it offers to you as a player, what characters you meet and how you are expected to deal with them, the potential outcomes of the players’ actions within the level, the layout of the landscape, its soundscape and artistic inspirations. Now write 4-5 pages advancing a specific argument about the level. Be as precise in your description as possible, and relate its various points to concepts you learned in the course.
Points: Persuasiveness of Argument (10), Precision of Description (10), Writing Style (10), Relationship to Course Concepts (10)
FINAL BOSS FIGHT
During the final two weeks of the semester, students get to try out their game analysis skills against a worthy opponent. They will select a game and play it, taking notes. Then they will locate no less than 3 reviews of or academic articles on the game. Citing these reviews and/or articles, they will then write their own review that somehow affirms, refutes and/or responds to the 3 reviews, while also arguing their own position on the game. Assignment length is somewhere between 2000-4000 words (the length of a decent game review) and should be written with popular game criticism standards (i.e., those of Fernández-Vara) in mind.
“Hat ein einziges [Werk] seinen Zweck erreicht? Haben sie das Rad aufhalten können, das unaufhaltsam stürzend seinem Abgrund entgegeneilt?”
–– Heinrich von Kleist
When we finish a book, exit a movie theater, let the record needle hit the center label, we might ask ourselves: What did this experience mean? Am I moved? Did the work of art “do its job,” so to speak? Did I “get my money’s worth?”
Regardless of the capitalist-consumer ideologies underpinning these questions, I find them fair and valid in some cases. Our time on this Earth is precious, and we must process what we have done with it.
Photo by Åke Nolemo, JaLL 2013
So I say with utmost seriousness that Just a Little Lovin’ (JaLL), a five-day live-action role-playing (larp) event about AIDS and cancer in early 1980s New York communities, counts as one of the best aesthetic experiences I have ever had in my life.
The content was meaningful and moving, the form elegant and carefully conceived. In a time of mediocre, mass-produced entertainment, we occasionally encounter such gems as Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) or China Mièville’s The Scar (2002) that deploy well-worn tropes in new and spectacular configurations which can still reach beyond our media-disciplined masks of irony. As a product, JaLL certainly ranks among them. But as a larp, JaLL also has the capacity to exceed them. Finding the words to describe that excess has been the task of the past 2 weeks after the game. Annika Waern offered a few after her experience 3 years ago:
“The level of rich and complex storytelling that went on in JALL was amazing. Almost all players have stories similar to mine, or even more powerful. The characters became rich and complex, far from any stereotypes, even though most of us had spent rather little time preparing them prior to the larp. Our relationships were equally complex and varied, ranging from uncomplicated or conflicted friendships, over the loving jealousy between myself and my former boyfriends true love, to intense passion.”
–– Annika Waern (2012)
When writing reflection pieces, we may feel that they do not take a specific position, but simply neutrally “self-express.” But this is a comforting lie we tell ourselves to get the words out. Our testimonies always have a telos. We write with purpose. I am placing my purpose on the table, out here in the open. My words below contend that JaLL – a work that has now been produced 4 times across 3 different countries – is a game of exceptional quality design, that it created a character arc for me that mirrored socially realistic decision trees and emotions, and that this arc became what it became thanks to a persistent dialog with the other players and characters, which the design forced upon us. The result was a conversion from an artificial community into an actual community, the kind that so many movies and other media promise us and also frequently fail to convincingly deliver. The game was designed for care and justice. I will start with my design remarks, then move into my particular character’s story (yes, I will be telling you extensively about my character), and conclude with discussion of the important feedback loop between the event, player, character and actual events beyond the mere diegesis of the larp. This will be a long, possibly unforgiving read. You were warned.
JaLL’s Design
Here is the vision statement for JaLL:
- All participants will experience the three main themes of the larp; desire, friendship & fear of death.
- The organisers shall make the participants feel safe enough to step outside their comfort zone, both as larpers and as human beings
- The larp will be of high and professional quality both practically and artistically
By “design,” I mean two different equally important elements: scenario design and production design. The former refers to the written scenario work done by Tor Kjetil Edland and Hanne Grasmo, the latter to the real-world, logistical implementation by Flemming H. Jacobsen, Anna Emilie Groth, Helene Willer Pilronen, Petter Karlson, Rasmus Teilmann, Sarah Cederstrand, Alex Uth, Jakob Ponsgaard, Naya Marie Nord, Nicolai Steffensen and so forth. Neither really functions independently of the other: workshops and character orientation content can only be done if time and space allow for it, players can only play if they’re fed, the decorations and configuration of the site make sense when they fit with the July 4th “feel” in the design documents, etc. And JaLL is a well-oiled machine in part precisely because its mechanisms work so well in tandem with each other.
The JaLL scenario design is widely known, and borders on being completely transparent. The players take on the roles of attendees of three consecutive July 4th parties held in Saratoga, NY in 1982, 1983, and 1984 — NYC gay marketing magnate Mr. T’s guests, the guests of his lesbian secretary Pen, and the Saratoga Friendship Pact, a hippy community of cancer survivors. This motley crue must then face together three nights of partying and mutual pleasure… each followed by a Lottery of Death the next morning, a meta-scene that determines who is infected by or dies of the incoming pandemic known as AIDS. Tears are shed in abundance at the characters’ collective funerals, and the support networks within the gay community re-shape themselves around fighting the disease. We all know from history that this would mark the burial of the 60s utopias and a whole generation of leftist gay performers and activists who might have otherwise helped repel the toxic advances of Reaganism.
The production design in the Denmark run actively supported the scenario design. A full day of workshops and warm-ups helped the group of strangers adjust to the culture shock of the 80s and pretend to be longtime friends. Sound design was carefully attended to in each space: the discotheque, the dining room, the black boxes, the funeral field. Fourth of July decorations could be left up between acts, their gawdy candor testifying to us that this summer camp in Denmark was, in fact, the ever-patriotic United States. Pepper’s Diner, catered by larpers in character, worked around the clock to keep the dinners fresh and distinct across each year and the dietary needs of the players quietly addressed. The dance party every night was an actual dance party, with character attractions otherwise replacing player attractions on the dancefloor.
Several aspects of the design have been (and should be) mentioned as exemplary. Actual sex and drugs were forbidden during the larp, meaning that players had to own responsibility for every action their character took. Breakfast at Pepper’s Diner was sometimes an awkward affair. Every character was embedded within a core, intimate group and a broader social group, along with a network of potentially non-superficial relations. In play, a player-character who had a drama-filled core group could then lean on her/his social group for stability or vice versa, whilst drawing out new emergent connections from the party itself. This permitted us to form clear social goals for the party – “I’d like to get to know Reginald better!” “If Beverley brings up my past affair, I’ll bring up hers.” – while also affording us a safe space.
Structured, ritualistic events and black boxes helped maintain a sense of player agency. Every night of the party, one could count on the raising of the flag, the drag show, the dancing, the green drink at midnight that may intensify or reverse character behavior, the awkward late-night heart-to-hearts. Though anything could happen within it, such structure permitted players to plan their evenings and react to subtle changes over time accordingly. If players wanted to reinforce or explore certain elements of their characters’ stories, they could wave a feather and invite others to a “black box,” rooms outside of the diegesis that permitted one to play out the past or one’s fantasies. Players were invited to read all the characters before the larp if they wanted, permitting vital information to be communicated even before the absolutely transparent player workshops began. In end effect, one had no excuse to sit around and look bored, despite a general lack of intrigue, mystery investigation and violence – staples of most larps.
The gestalt effect of the game’s design promoted player agency, risk-taking, and mutual care. We produced an approximation of the 1980s with all kinds of anachronisms, and that was OK. Players could steer their plotline the way they wished, but always in dialog with the other players as co-creators. The physical safety of the game let players take emotional risks, which then came back to haunt them at the character funerals. The constant stream of information between players and characters led to an environment in which everyone could take care of both player AND character without fear of in-game consequences. After all, we were playing to lose… and then be uplifted. Let me use my character’s story as one example of the above.
Tony, 1982. Still rocking the disco.
The Ballad of Gay Tony … the DJ
Originally an organizer character in the first three runs of the game, Tony was my top pick among the characters on offer for this run of JaLL. I do DJ work on the side, and know generally how to move crowds with music. This would offer me a chance to finally reckon with the music of the 1970s and 80s — to get to know how that historical transition from disco to Duran Duran. I wanted a character who could draw on my natural tension between playing what the crowd wants and my personal, fairly esoteric taste.
As a character, Tony both fit me like a glove and posed me a number of challenges. The character rewarded me for deep study of the gay New York and popular music scenes, having me download and listen to over 300 tracks from ABBA to Yazoo. My own knowledge and appreciation of music for its own sake could be sated. The character’s challenges came in the form of his personality and social being.
Tony was designed as a melancholic introvert, something I generally don’t play, who also is supportive of others but not emotionally communicative – he likes to pretend everything is cool when it really isn’t. It’s fairly straightforward for me to play a character who lies to himself, but ultimately such characters are sometimes of limited utility in reaching out and providing others play opportunities. I’m used to telegraphing my thoughts and intentions far and wide, so that other larpers can hatch their plots and act on the information they’ve been given. As far as his social being was concerned, Tony starts the game as a gay man in an open relationship with a younger gay man, Francis, and his sexual history with the others at Mr. T’s party runs fairly deep. Though I’m bi, I have been in a monogamous heterosexual relationship for 13 years and thus had to come to terms with being in an open relationship that was at least meaningful as we both went off and hit on men. My lack of interest in a jealousy plot around said relationship actually became a major driver of Tony’s narrative, as you’ll read below. Finally, Tony’s longstanding presence in the club scene meant that he consumed a serious amount of drugs, also something not in my own lifestyle, which caught up with him as the 1970s faded into the cold, hard 1980s.
The music is weaving
Haunting notes, pizzicato strings
The rhythm is calling
Alone in the night as the daylight brings
A cool empty silence
The warmth of your hand and cold gray sky
It fades to the distance– Ultravox, Vienna
Who is Tony? Born in 1950 in Manhattan and raised in the Village by liberal parents who worked at NYU, Tony experiences a fairly cushy upbringing, such that his coming out at 16 is seen as “no big deal.” He finds himself watching from down the street as the Stonewall protests took place, and becomes accustomed to playing the Velvet Underground and Jimmy Hendrix everyone was requesting at the emerging gay bar scene. In 1971, Can’s Tago Mago hits the shelves and Tony is now obsessed with crazy European avant-garde music, experimental electronic soundscapes, and Krautrock. After some time spent shooting heroin while listening to outrageous music, he cleans up a bit and plunges some gathered funds into his record collection. By 1975, he owns his own store, Tony’s Records, on Bleecker St.: pop hits in the front room, bizarre and psychedelic imports in the back room. Pepper’s Diner, another gay-run establishment, is located just down the street and is his favorite dive to grab an omelette and meet interesting men. During this extroverted period, he befriends Daniel, one of many lost new gay arrivals to the City, and shows him the scene. They are best buddies briefly until Daniel meets and starts dating Larry, another local. The relationship does not seem healthy by Tony’s standards, but Daniel abandons Tony as a friend instead of listening to him. Around the same time, Tony finds Artie, a flirty idealist who turns out to be not the best of boyfriends but is the greatest of close friends. Hook-ups within the gay club and nascent drag ball scene describes Tony’s sex life through the 1970s.
In 1978, Tony begins filling in as a weeknight DJ at the hottest nightclub in New York: Studio 54. All the drugs, money, attention and cock he wants are suddenly there for him, and he certainly takes advantage of it. New gigs spring up for him, from small-time basement clubs to hip parties held by Mr. T. This employment (thanks to club promoter Sorrento). These gigs boost the ego of an otherwise sullen, gay record peddler, and he gets increasingly ambitious in his sets and purchases for the record store. His risks are rewarded. Business booms. So does the drag ball scene, and it is there where he meets the energetic Francis, a modern dancer from a rough background and aspiring queen. After Francis loses his mother to heroin in 1980, her death propels him into Tony’s arms. Tony is unused to keeping a long-term partner, but his undeniable empathy for Francis pushes him to commit to him as part of a supportive, open relationship. Francis in turn brings Tony into the fold as a volunteer counselor for gay youth at a local shelter, which means talking to teenagers about suicide prevention and finding gay-friendly places in New York to live and work. Daniel, who reappears in Tony’s life as part of the drag troupe Club Diamond in which Francis sang, helps get them an apartment together in Soho across the hall from him (as well as the dancer Reginald and the misfit Trevor). Success seems to reign in Tony’s romantic, artistic and commercial lives. Life is good.
1982: Mr. T invites Tony to DJ his July 4th party in Saratoga, NY. Tony, Francis and Artie had attended the previous year’s party and remember it as an orgiastic event with lots of drugs and hook-ups. They are definitely up for it again, even though there were a bunch of Saratoga cancer-survivor hippies also in attendance. Nevertheless, the Studio 54 crew gets right to business at the start of the game by doing coke on the cabin’s tables and setting up an awesome disco party. After hanging out at dinner with the band Urban Renaissance (containing Tony’s crush for the first night, Rain) Tony and Francis go on a “date” to the tantric workshop, a hippy affair which leaves them unimpressed but mutually amused. They have to part ways early in the evening to do their respective jobs: Francis preparing the drag queens and Tony readying the stage for the queens and the party afterward… while also doing coke with the writers Eli and Jerrod, among other things.
The evening’s performances include music from Mary Lou, a singer-songwriter, a striptease by the go-go dancer Chain, and a poetry reading by Abner, a pretentious professor who had been dating Eli, one of Tony’s old flames. Urban Renaissance take the stage and rev up the party for Tony, who then brings on all the Studio 54 classics. During this initial phase of dancing, Francis comes up to Tony to ask for permission to sleep with the neighbor Reginald, who just rocks the evening with his interpretation of Irene Cara’s “Flashdance.” Tony gives them his blessing, and they disappear. At midnight, the party collectively imbibes green drink, a weird herbal concoction that (mechanically) forces JaLL players to intensify or reverse their play. Francis comes to Tony with guilty feelings after his hook-up with Reginald: he may have inadvertently damaged Jerrod and Reginald’s supposedly monogamous relationship. Tony spends the rest of the evening keeping the party stoked and introducing other party-goers to coke. At one point, he asks for a piece of paper from Abner to use for snorting, and Abner gives him a poem… which Tony gladly uses. Nevertheless, along with Tony’s debauchery comes the suspicion that disco is dying, that these days will not last. Melancholy sets in.
Music playlist for 1982:
• Earth, Wind & Fire – “Let’s Groove”
• Sister Sledge – “He’s the Greatest Dancer”
• Gloria Gaynor – “I Will Survive”
• Sylvester – “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)”
• Musique – “In the Bush”
• Shalamar – “Right in the Socket”
• Man 2 Man – “Male Stripper”
• Miquel Brown – “So Many Men So Little Time”
• Modern Talking – “Brother Louie”
• Donna Summer – “I Feel Love”
• Yellow Magic Orchestra – “Rydeen”
[DRAG SHOW AND PERFORMANCES]
• Donna Summer – “Bad Girls”
• C.J. & Co. – “Devil’s Gun”
• Vicki Sue Robinson – “Turn the Beat Around”
• Blondie – “Call Me”
• Donna Summer – “Love to Love You Baby (Giorgio Moroder Mix)”
• Yazoo – “Goodbye 70’s”
• Prince & the Revolution – “Erotic City”
• The Pointer Sisters – “He’s So Shy”
• Madonna – “Borderline”
The next morning, Tony is up with several of the monied gay men, Bruce and Artie among them, gossiping. They reach the conclusion that most of the relationships they had known of the previous night had dissolved or were severely on the rocks. Breakfast see Artie, Francis and Tony recruiting potential volunteer counselors for the shelter, including Chain and a quiet young guy named Ike, whom he also interviews for a potential job at his record store. Then he sits listening to his more experimental records in the empty disco with a rotating cast of other listeners: the spiritual Joani, the gay father Lester, the art photographer Micky.
The Lottery of Death hits on schedule after breakfast. It gives many a brush with the afterlife, and takes two of us — Max and Sinclair — away. Tears begin to flow already, even though we as players barely know each other. It all seems so very unfair.
Between July 1982 and July 1983, more knowledge of the “gay cancer” that took our friends’ lives becomes available and the volunteer counselors, Tony included, become the de facto people disseminating it. AIDS is now known as a CDC-recognized epidemic that doesn’t just affect gay people. Yet few in the community respond rationally to this information, which makes for intense awkwardness. Tony abruptly turns from counseling 16 year-olds away from suicide to conducting full-blown youth HIV prevention seminars, a process which slowly takes its psychic toll on Tony. It pains him to watch the adult New York gay community not listen to the latest medical data as the teenagers did.
In the fall of 1982, two crackheads mug Tony within a block of his store. They only take $20 and rough him up a bit, so Tony never tells anyone about it. But the city that had given him so much suddenly assumes a darker look. Tony’s style changes to suit it: black leather, studded gloves. His taste in music also shifts: Italodisco replaces disco, British new wave and synth rock putting the 1970s to rest.
Tony keeps the party going. Now in leather.
1983: Tony, Francis and Artie come to Mr. T’s party as the HIV crusaders, armed with data on how the disease spreads and whom it kills. No one wants to talk about it, however, and arguments quickly erupt. Much of Francis and Tony’s social interactions revolve around how busy they’ve been this year and how much they still have to do to keep afloat. But old habits die hard, and Tony is soon back to snorting lines, popping amphetamines, and trying to forget his troubles.
Club Diamond has a bigger line-up this year, also with more complicated acts. During the show, Tony fumbles a bit on account of having done too many drugs and being under high pressure from all sides. Many of the acts bring down the mood, such that Urban Renaissance has a tough time sustaining the party –Tony later gets chewed out by Urban Renaissance’s manager for permitting such downer acts. Tony, Daniel, and Francis abscond to a lounge to engage in a post-drag show threesome. This sexual retreat turns out to be the high point of Tony’s story arc – a moment of reprieve with two handsome men about whom he cares deeply. Due to Tony’s DJ responsibilities, such a moment had to be carefully pre-planned and pre-arranged, but when it happens, time seems to stand still and the intimacy shared makes a lasting impression. It is a good thing that he’s enjoyed a moment of quiet, however, because the party itself has become very tense in the meantime. Intense arguments flare up on the patio outside the discotheque, and Mr. T testily demands that Tony get back behind the decks and get the music flowing again. Tony complies, though adding a touch of darker music (Coil, Soft Cell, Depeche Mode) to reflect the overall mood. After the party’s participants imbibe the green drink after midnight, Francis tells Tony with rapture to play whatever music he wants, which takes him to New Order and The Smiths, as well as to stripping off his mesh shirt (as “Topless Tony”) and tearing up the dancefloor with Soft Cell’s “Sex Dwarf.” Studio 54 bartender Enrique hands him a pile of uppers, and he switches to disco again. A particularly moving moment is aging disco star Leon’s reprise of his only hit single “I Was Made For Dancing,” in which the singer collapses in despair two-thirds of the way through the performance and Tony has to prop him up.
Music Playlist for 1983
• Klapo – “Mister Game”
• Giorgio Moroder – “Chase”
• Michael Jackson – “Smooth Criminal”
• Salt N Pepa – “Push It”
• Afrika Bambaataa – “Planet Rock”
• Silly – “Mont Klamott”
• Ultravox – “The Voice”
• Fleetwood Mac – “Go Your Own Way”
• David Bowie – “Suffragette City”
• Tangerine Dream – “Phaedra”
• Duran Duran – “Hungry Like the Wolf”
• Freeez – “Pop Goes My Love”
• Sylvester – “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)”
• Chaka Khan – “I’m Every Woman”
[DRAG SHOW AND PERFORMANCES]
• DDR TV – “Aktuelle Kamera=Titel”
• Coil – “Clap”
• Devo – “Whip It”
• Michael Jackson – “Beat It”
• A Flock of Seagulls – “I Ran (So Far Away)”
• Prince – “When Doves Cry”
• Jessica Williams – “Queen of Fools”
• Mr. Flagio – “Take a Chance”
• Frida – “I Know There’s Something Going On”
• Patti Smith – “Gloria”
• The Smiths – “Handsome Devil”
• Soft Cell – “Tainted Love”
• Yazoo – “Don’t Go”
• Talk Talk – “Talk Talk”
• Adam & the Ants – “Whip In My Valise”
• The Cure – “Lovesong”
[GREEN DRINK]
• Joy Division – “She Lost Control”
• Man 2 Man – “All Men Are Beasts”
• Gary Numan – “Metal”
• Duran Duran – “Save a Prayer”
• Dead or Alive – “You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)”
• Depeche Mode – “Master and Servant”
• Soft Cell – “Sex Dwarf”
• New Order – “Blue Monday”
• The Flirts – “Danger”
• Leif Garrett – “I Was Made for Dancing”
• Donna Summer – “Hot Stuff”
• Musique – “Keep On Jumpin'”
• The Weathergirls – “It’s Raining Men”
• Madonna – “Like a Virgin”
• Gloria Gaynor – “I Will Survive”
• The Village People – “Y.M.C.A.”
• Duran Duran – “Girls on Film”
• Marvin Gaye – “Sexual Healing”
• Donna Summer – “Last Dance”
• Bauhaus – “She’s in Parties”
The next morning, Tony awakes, still high and out of sorts. Fortunately, the drag queen Marcus is ready with a joint and a kind word, and Francis, Artie, Ike, and Chain are there to keep pulling counselors into the fold, though it’s an intense, uphill battle. To loosen everyone up, Artie, Francis and Tony make public plans for an awesome party trip to San Francisco. Hope crawls its way back into the room, a bit.
During the second Lottery of Death, Francis’s name is called, and Tony tears up and can’t stop bawling for the next 20 minutes. Thankfully, Francis is spared Death’s cruel scythe (meanwhile: Reginald, Rain, Barbara and Lawrence are not). Tony suddenly feels hollow inside. I realize that something must have come between Tony and the others in San Francisco. As a player uninterested in a jealousy plotline who also wanted Francis to explore a budding relationship with Daniel, I steered Tony into the nascent drug addiction hell he was already headed. What better way to shield one from the psychic pressures of dealing with the AIDS crisis?
Tony’s 1983-84 is the hardest year of his life. The caseload at the volunteer clinic becomes insane. Studio 54 is still a hip spot, but its days are numbered. The record store presents its usual hurdles. The San Francisco trip turns into a nightmare – Tony reconnects with an old acquaintance heroin dealer at a party, a transaction happens, the pain vanishes, and Tony is nearly comatose on the plane ride home. Francis, whose mother was taken from him by heroin, is dumbstruck. Within the next week in November, Tony leaves his old life and responsibilities behind in favor of glorious heroin: he closes up the shop, squirrels away the records he likes, and vanishes from the lives of everyone around him. What happens over the next 6 months is fairly hazy, but predictable. He puts his remaining things in a storage unit under a pseudonym, takes up residence in a basement with 3 other men, and they spend their days shooting up and making sure everyone’s fed and not dead. Needles are shared, and frequently. Tony hits rock bottom in a drug-fueled vision of his own creation, a dark city under the waves called Black Atlantis ruled by African slaves who jumped overboard en route to America. There he moves slowly, compressed by great weight, listening to distant music through the wall of water.
The day when Tony swims up from Black Atlantis is when one of his fellow addicts sent out to get food doesn’t make it back, instead dying in a Burger King. Tony receives a vision from Black Atlantis releasing him from its bondage, and promptly moves into his storage unit with his records and starts the detox and rehab process. Part of Tony’s rehab process is apparently to scrawl cryptic poetry with his shaky hands.
Unsure of re-approaching Francis out of fear of traumatizing him, he instead turns to Sorrento and his contacts at Studio 54 for work. Sorrento obliges him, and Tony is back to spinning disco hits on weeknights, although now clean of drugs and totally dependent on the DJ gigs and occasional incognito bussing of tables at Pepper’s Diner to keep himself afloat. In exchange, Sorrento has his ex-flight attendant sister Ellie apprentice under Tony, so she can learn the trade of DJing. He complies, since he is thinking of exiting Studio 54 for Club Diamond anyway, assuming he and Francis would be able to patch things up. Ellie is a proper “fag hag” in the nicest sense of that derogatory term: a straight woman who adores hanging out with gay men like Tony, and an enthusiastic protégé. To pad the Studio 54’s meager earnings, both Tony and Ellie are dealing coke and amphetamines despite Reagan’s “War on Drugs,” made all the more ironic now that Tony doesn’t do them anymore. Somehow word gets to Tony that Mr. T would like for him to do the July 4th party again, and he finds the necessary garb and records among his remaining belongings to throw a proper party. But before he heads up with the Sorrentos to Saratoga, NY, Tony reconnects with Artie and goes with him to get an HIV test.
Tony sits in a darkened waiting room surrounded by other nervous people, his hand in Artie’s. The wait is excruciating. The risk factors are damning: unprotected sex with many different male partners over the last 15 years, and recent sharing of needles with fellow heroin addicts. The verdict: Tony is HIV-positive. 2 days later, Mr. T’s 1984 party begins.
Tony and Ellie
Tony shows up to the party with his DJ assistant Ellie, already full of trepidation about seeing people whom he abandoned for drugs during the past year. Immediately, Daniel and others seize him and ask him how he’s been. Tony is evasive, but assures those in the know that he’s on his methadone and ready to put the past behind him. And hey! he’s still at Studio 54, right? Everything is as it should be. He takes Ellie aside and talks about how they will deal drugs to their potential customers, and to make sure to ask for some kind of payment later (earlier, the drugs were always free). Meanwhile, he pulls out his little black notebook every now during this awkward first hour and jots down a few unrhymed lines of poetry from “Black Atlantis.” Embarrassed at the introvert he’s become, he leaves them around the party for others to find, and disavows their creation.
A Black Atlantis poem that Tony wrote and placed somewhere.
With awful secrets bubbling up inside of him, Tony finally takes aside Ellie and Chantelle, the Hi-NRG singer, and spills the beans. He tells them he is HIV positive, that this might be his last party, because next year he would be dead. They immediately comfort him and give him some advice: make this night a night to remember AND take care to do some drugs, but just not downers like heroin. Then Ellie and Tony snorted some coke, and Tony got his groove back. Still avoiding Francis (while sharing longing glances with him across the room many times), he also tells Artie about the situation, which means that word travels fast about Tony’s condition. Suddenly, he feels the embrace of a community that he didn’t even know he had envelop him.
The drag queen (and other) performances in the 1984 party are both fantastic and compelling. Everything from a Sappho poem to a lesbian fisting demonstration to a group sing-along to “(Sing If You’re) Glad to Be Gay” and “I Will Survive.” A guest Claire reads a statement about HIV and Tony follows up by asking the crowd to safely get laid, in a way coming out about his own HIV condition. As Francis (“Lady Francesca”) gets up to perform, Tony interprets his address to “his love” (now Daniel) as meant for him and starts to sulk. The dancing that erupts after the Urban Renaissance concert is intense and heartfelt. Everyone out on the dancefloor wants to be there, and stays there. Sorrento and the other Studio 54 associates do their job to keep the party rolling.
After the green drink is imbibed, Tony cautiously approaches Francis and then breaks down sobbing in his and Artie’s arms. “Can you help me find a place to sleep?” he asks without a hint of dignity. “I live in a storage unit and I barely make enough to eat.” Artie and Francis embrace their estranged friend in his sorry state, and encourage him to keep up the good DJing. He and Ellie do some more coke, and then Tony throws down a set to remember from the various records he brought with him. Bruce tears down the house with his singing to Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now.” At one point, Tony approaches the mic and sings along with Shannon’s “Let the Music Play.” Anyone will give Tony a hug, anyone who needs to cry or celebrate with him, does so.
Music Playlist for 1984 (Reconstructed from Memory – Sorry!)
• Casco Presents BWH – “Livin Up”
• Michael Zager Band – “Let’s All Chant”
• Bananarama – “Venus”
• Madness – “Our House”
• Queen – “I Want to Break Free”
• Creedence Clearwater Revival – “Have You Ever Seen the Rain”
• Bananarama – “Cruel Summer”
[GREEN DRINK BREAK]
• Cerrone – “Supernature”
• Laura Branigan – “Self Control”
• Miami Sound Machine – “Dr. Beat”
• Deniece Williams – “Let’s Hear it For the Boy”
• Shannon – “Let the Music Play”
• Pat Benatar – “Love is a Battlefield”
• Cyndi Lauper – “Girls Just Want to Have Fun”
• Madonna – “Everybody”
• Diana Ross – “I’m Coming Out”
• Nena – “99 Luftballons”
• Rocky Horror Picture Show – “Time Warp”
• Queen – “The Show Must Go On”
• Patti Smith – “Summer Cannibals”
• Fleetwood Mac – “Go Your Own Way”
• Shannon – “Give Me Tonight”
• Amii Stewart – “Knock on Wood”
• Sister Sledge – “We Are Family”
• Genesis – “The Brazilian”
• ABBA – “Thank You For The Music”
• Tangerine Dream – “Speed”
• Teenage Jesus and the Jerks – “Red Alert”
• Negativland – “Track 10” from Negativland
The final five tracks of the night, well after 1 am, contain their own story. Tony announces the last track, and then shocks the party with an entirely instrumental piece by Genesis: “The Brazilian.” Shaking from a night of mixing coke with methadone, green drink and his fear of dying a lonely death, Tony walks onto the dancefloor and begins a sort of gyrating vogue dance. At a climactic point in the song, he is suddenly overwhelmed by the moment and collapses in tears. But Daniel is there to catch him and lift him up, hoisting him aloft and giving him strength to pull himself together. This moment was likely the closest I’ve ever come as a player to experiencing something “transcendental” in larp, and the song will never be the same for me again.
Ever the party master, Sorrento addresses Tony: “Come on – you can’t just end the night with an instrumental song! Try ‘Thank You for the Music’ by ABBA.” Tony obliges him. The gathered company almost immediately links arms, sways back in forth in a circle and sings the melody in unison. The magic continues, as if we had become a collected bundle of raw nerves ready to be moved at the slightest prompt. Intimacy and fear of death fade into the kind of collectivity so many musicals and dramas seek to emulate, yet fail to achieve.
Once the song ends in a round of applause, Tony sends away the crowd with three avant-garde tracks representing his personal taste. Micky, with whom he had listened to similar tracks on a prior morning, comes to sit on the couch with Tony and bask in the sonic pleasures of Tangerine Dream, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, and Negativland. Eventually, Ellie sees the HIV-diagnosed DJ overindulging himself, and orders him to bed. He obliges her too: lifting the record needle, stopping the decks, cutting the power, packing up his records, and walking out the door, briefcase in hand.
The next morning, Tony is his usual social self and gets to go through his usual routine: picking up cans, gossiping with Bruce and Artie, eating the delicious breakfast from Pepper’s Diner, talking to Ellie about the art of DJing, and getting some more words to Francis and Daniel, listening to his music in solitude before attracting Chantelle over to him and having a moving heart-to-heart conversation. Having made his peace with both losing his friends and death itself, Tony sits down with Ellie and Sorrento and waits for the Lottery of Death. Hank, Enrique, Leon, Evelyn, and Ike are taken, Tony and all the others are spared, though many, many partygoers bear the lethal sentence of the HIV virus. Tears flow all around, and we close the curtain on the game itself as Dusty Springfield’s “Just a Little Lovin'” plays in the background.
A Feedback Loop to Die For
Why go through the thousands of words to tell you Tony’s first-person experience of the game’s events? Above, I wrote that the game helped me create
“a character arc for me that mirrored socially realistic decision trees and emotions, and that this arc became what it became thanks to a persistent dialog with the other players and characters, which the design forced upon us.”
I’d like to talk about these socially realistic decision trees and emotions and the persistent dialog among the participants. The decisions trees and emotions emerged from the very well-written characters, whose lives resemble those of people you might know and who are integrated with each other in such a way as to provide ample story options for the players. Usually, one found oneself between a drama-filled sub-group and a comforting other sub-group, and one could reliably go to each to experience those particular emotions. For Tony, his friends Artie and Francis were his safe haven, and Studio 54 was full of drug addicts and party-heads. Ritual and repetition within JaLL form an important foundation stone for player immersion, as argued by Sarah Lynne Bowman. But so does the predictability that such repetition brings. The players could anticipate future decisions, and play their characters accordingly, without shutting out options for emergent play (i.e., Francis and Reginald’s tryst, Tony’s crazy heroin binge) that lets one be surprised. Getting HIV in the game, for example, was a gift that changed all the decision trees in the third Act for the better – suddenly, I felt like I was experiencing the denouement from a 1980s melodrama or romantic comedy in my own flesh. Suddenly, I felt human and alive.
The persistent dialog among the players formed a feedback loop that cemented the players, characters and whole larp collective into a cohesive unit. Between acts, players could talk to each other about where their character was headed and the possibilities for action. Meta-level negotiation was encouraged, which also meant that one knew that as a character, one was being supported by the players around her/him. Especially in the third Act with the theme of “Friendship,” the player support and the character support began to merge, the intimacies of the earlier acts fading away into a jouissance of togetherness and raging against the dying of the light. Constant negotiations and dialog produced the feeling at the end that we all had known each other for a very long time, that we could probably accomplish great things together beyond this larp… if only we didn’t all have to go to work on Monday morning.
Aesthetic experiences can seep into our lives and change us in unexpected ways. For many people, this may take the form of Beethoven’s 7th Symphony or hearing the Thug Life album for the first time or seeing Inside Out (2015) and feeling understood. For me, JaLL and its participants have become a part of me, a fake Saratoga whose propositions produced real feelings, real community and real ideas.
Thanks for coming with me on this journey.
The Digital Baroque and Recent Mainstream Cinema
May 27, 2015
[This post constitutes me thinking out loud in a forum not as ephemeral as social media. If you want to start a fight, the comments here or elsewhere would not be the place to do it. E-mail me instead.]
In 2008, this scholar Timothy Murray published a book on the “digital baroque,” in which he’s arguing for a Deleuzian connection to early modern aesthetic forms in contemporary art films by Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker, and Peter Greenaway, among others. Murray argues that cinema has both helped structure modern perceptions and has simultaneously “folded in on itself” along with other, earlier art forms such as painting. This has led to a shift in cinematic and new media creations toward manic, quasi-mystical meditations that conflate technology and spirituality in a glorious aesthetic mess.
Timothy Murray’s book. He’s at Cornell, I think.
Sure.
Fine.
Alright.
In 2015, there was this Australian/American/Namibian/South African co-production called Mad Max: Fury Road that – in my mind – actually exemplifies what I’m calling the “digital baroque” Maybe one could call it the “21st Century baroque?”
Publicity shot for Mad Max: Fury Road. You’ve probably seen this sort of thing all over the Internet this month
Anyway, this Mad Max film is an absolutely important entry in our contemporary film-theoretical discourse, crossing between media history, nerdy world-building, and socio-political activism without sacrificing its own integrity as a simple production that remains legible to any audience. It stands next to sci-fi works such as Dredd (2012) and Snowpiercer (2013) in this respect…. though we can debate as to how.
Dredd (2012) may be seen as a precursor to Mad Mad: Fury Road
It bridges between the paranoid and socially critical sci-fi of the 1970s such as the Parallax View (1974) and Silent Running (1972), the greatest of American and Italian westerns, and the possibilities afforded by digital painting and editing tools. It models rigorous, consequential writing and storyboarding, even though many of the names and visual concepts might very well have come from a 14 year-old boy or girl’s private sketchbook.
I am aware that many posts have been made on Mad Max: Fury Road, especially with regard to its aesthetics and openly feminist social politics. It has been called “the future of pulp.” Our massive data aggregators Google and Twitter have been so bombarded with information about this film made by 70 year-old director George Miller that even they are struggling to keep up with The Conversation about this film. My speculation is that the film is re-opening specific debates that were shut down in the transition between the wild and weird Hollywood experimentations of the 1970s and the blockbuster-formula quests of the 1980s: How much punishment can be dealt to male figures? Is there world-building that transcends the marketing of products? Should women link together into a grand sisterhood with their male allies to fight the heteropatriarchy? Questions, questions.
Or one could frame it like this: Most audiences do not remember or discuss the 1st or 3rd Mad Max films, but rather Road Warrior (1981), which this popular fourth entry most resembles. The first film is filled with male-charged sexual violence in the same way as its predecessor A Boy and His Dog (1975), while the third film Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985) has been continuously accused of being “clunky” and ambiguous at best. This Australian film series has incited thoughts and discussion about societies of absolute scarcity, but has also received askance looks from the film community for its bizarre qualities. Simply put, Miller has (rightly) turned toward a more “baroque” pulp production aesthetic and unambiguous political program in order to bring the woolly elements of the 1st and 3rd films into the blockbuster formula of the 2nd.
Why “baroque?”
Wikipedia tells us baroque things use “exaggerated motion and clear, easily interpreted detail to produce drama, tension, exuberance, and grandeur.” Mad Max: Fury Road is a film relentlessly edited and adjusted to fit a lay audience, with frame-rates tweaked on individual shots and careful attention paid to continuity and physics of otherwise utterly ridiculous car creations. Exaggeration and excess pour out of every pore of the skin of this film, but care has been taken that the basics – can I see this character’s eyes? what is happening in this shot? who is in control here? – are not overwhelmed. The gender politics, which have received a well-deserved heap of attention, at least give us a breath of fresh air with regard to the agency and capabilities of specific marginalized groups. (Although don’t get me started on the race politics of the film.)
Such technique is how a film so batshit crazy on so many levels can also seem cool, collected, disciplined. Moreover, Mad Max: Fury Road makes many of its peer genre films seem ponderous, phoned-in, mired in artistic and fiscal conservatism.
Mad Max’s sci-fi cousin?
How are Dredd and Snowpiercer also related to Mad Max: Fury Road?
Well, for one thing – Hollywood seems less involved in their creation than usual. Dredd is a British / South Africa co-production, Snowpiercer a South Korean / Czech co-production. Such sci-fi films have permitted their directors and crew relative free rein over their resultant content, meaning creative experimentation beyond the Hero’s Journey-driven, Chosen One SFX vehicles that any film budgeted above $150 million usually become. Another aspect would be their direct, careful engagement with the basic tools of filmmaking. These are serious films that do not take themselves as deadly seriously as those of Christopher Nolan or J.J. Abrams, who pride themselves on adding random plot twists to otherwise pat genre narratives. They reference earlier productions without screaming from the hilltops like Tarantino that THEY KNOW EARLIER FILM HISTORY DAMMIT. The lay viewer can “get” the film – and be challenged by it – without previous fan buy-in or loads of film-history background. This is a good thing for a culture genuinely ignorant of such meta-level details and expecting their apps, hotel-room-ordering and video-game tutorials alike to be immediately user-friendly. All three films structure their action around a concrete dystopian scenario that a 5 year-old could get, and then pack them full of immediately persuasive cinematic details. Slo-Mo makes your life like an awesome, colorful music video. There’s an Ax Gang protecting this train. Nux has a V-8 engine tattooed on his chest. The redundancy becomes both necessary and an art form in of itself. Finally, each film offers a genuine digression from dominant paradigms of gender and social representation: Curtis and Edgar can have a queer relationship, Furiosa can be competent in charge, Dredd can sincerely respect his female colleague. Racial and ethnic diversity as found in several of the recent Fast and Furious films has become increasingly visible across these productions, although this area is need of improvement.
So yeah, “baroque” is the word I’ll continue to use and develop.
Digital baroque?
Dystopian baroque?
21st Century baroque?
Who knows?
As a German instructor and an alumnus of the Iowa City School District (’00), I feel obliged to post this open letter of protest against the closing of the German program in the Iowa City Schools.
April 11, 2014
Dear Superintendent Stephen Murley and the Board of the Iowa City School District,
We the undersigned request that you cease plans to phase out the German program in the Iowa City School District starting in the 2014-2015 school year. We understand that the district has a temporary budget shortfall, but can assure you that the disastrous effects of phasing out German would be permanent.
German is a language widely recognized as a foundation for excellence. There are economic, cultural and historical reasons for this fact. Germany remains not only one of the most robust economies in the European Union, for example, but also one tied into a productive international network of innovations and ideas. Over 1 million Americans work for German companies. A March 11, 2014 editorial in The Economist argues that students who choose to learn German are better positioned to supply their skills in a market over-saturated with Spanish and French-language speakers. German-speaking cultures have significantly contributed to modern thought and, with only 3-5% of contemporary German works being published in English translation per year, volumes of new research and fiction are being overlooked by an English-language-only market. Given the fact that not only 15% of Americans are of German ancestry but also that German is the fourth most frequently spoken language (other than English) in American homes, the relevance of German to our local and national heritage is indisputable.
Phasing out German is akin to directly denying economic and academic opportunities to your students from the Iowa City area. Numerous German-speaking alumni have gone on to successful careers in academia, law, medicine and finance. The primary author of this letter has just become an assistant professor in German Studies at a research I university. Alumni have been able to immediately major in the language in institutions of higher education, and create active intercultural connections while studying abroad on grants or other programs. These opportunities simply would not have been available, had the Iowa City School District not provided the baseline support for German language education from 7th through 12th grade. Students learning German in middle school, high school and college have an incredible advantage in securing a job in our global society over students who possess no foreign language skills. It is a well-known fact that the study of German at grades 7-12 exposes students to numerous higher-order thinking and study skills they urgently need to prepare them for a successful college experience and an enhanced quality of life. All evidence points toward this program remaining a good investment.
Lean times usually cause us to re-assess priorities. Yet German language education remains a fairly inexpensive and reliable way of keeping the Iowa City School District “child-centered” and “future-focused,” as advertised on the website. Indeed, money should be invested in opportunities for children and their future, and keeping German is a solid investment. Canceling the language signals a move within the district toward other priorities, namely the support of the administration over the needs of the students. It also signals a most regrettable neglect of foreign language skills needed by our students to stay competitive with the worlds’ economies. In many, if not most, countries outside the USA, most children start learning foreign languages at age 10. The US simply cannot afford to deprive our children of the same advantages most students receive in most European countries as well as in China and many other countries.
Thank you in advance for considering our letter, and we hope you make the right decision to maintain support for German language education in the district.
Sincerely,
Dr. Evan Torner
Gabriele Auerbach
Pam Peters
Heidi Galer
Margy Winkler
Bev Humphrey
Neva Christensen
Dr. Johanna Schuster Craig
Dr. Glenn Ehrstine
Dr. Vance Byrd
Dr. Dan Reynolds
Dr. Berna Gueneli
Dr. Sigmund Barber
Dr. Jennifer Michaels
Dr. April Eisman
HeeJin Lee
Dr. Mary Larew
Dr. Lauren Stefaniak
Dr. Felicia Kruse Alexander
David Gerlits
Susannah Lewis
Kara Kimm
Cindy Opitz
Eleanor Price
Gary Shullaw
Kate Hawkins
Ben & Carolyn Van Zante
Linda Muhly
Phillip Rademacher
Lizzy Ronana
Ute Brandenburg
Hannah Twitchell
Stephanie Ettinger de Cuba
Sonia and Ronald Ettinger
Jeneane O’Toole Stepan
Justin Preuschl
Brian Burkhardt
Nancy Pacha
Kimberley Swanson
Robin Torner
Jay Torner
Dr. Jonathan Skolnik
Dr. Larson Powell
Dr. Henning Wrage
Jenny Gringer Richards
Dr. Caroline Kita
Jenny Hilsenrad Graff
Christine Øien
Eirik Fatland
Lisa Anne Scism
Andrew Evans
Natoshia Askelson
Dr. Erin Alice Cowling
Dr. Carrie Shanafelt
Beth Richards
Denise Tiffany
Maryann Askelson
Melissa Villamil
Sarah Karniski Rasch
Shannon Toomey
Lilly Brown
Stanley P. Nuehring
Sara Neymeyer Eisenberg
Laura Hoffmann
Keith Collins
Lauri Deninger
Anne Hesse
A.K. Traw
Jean Dobyns
Carilyn Gardner
Margaret Clancy
Carla Durkee
Suzanne Soderberg
Reingard Jordan
Horst R. Jordan
Patricia Gauron
Susan Soderberg
Mary Jo Hockmuth
Nathan Gibbs
Gedankenspiel III: The Facebook
November 25, 2013
After being carefully steered through our existence by others, it should come as no surprise that we are granted legitimacy only as nodes of a social network much larger than ourselves.
Facebook is what you might call a vulgar expression of that network, a vast human information-gathering service that interpenetrates business, art, personal, and public spheres with equal impunity. In this respect, Facebook is not unique: Google, Microsoft, Apple — these are all companies that have built business models around the harvesting and control of global information flows. The recent NSA scandal has only sharpened global interest in these for-profit surveillance industries, but only the naïve could have earlier thought that all the personal information supplied to these industries was simply being tucked aside somewhere, unexamined and encrypted. On the contrary, the dot-com crash of the late 90s more-or-less drove market models specifically toward the following end state: users are brought in with “free” products, and then the users themselves become the product. James Schirmer has recently described such “services” as “institutionware.” Here I excerpt his argument:
Institutionware is software that supports and maintains traditional ideas under the guise of providing a service. … The aims of institutionware: decrease user agency, increase user dependency, preserve market dominance, contain “features” … Institutionware decreases user agency and increases user dependency by demanding and reinforcing user compliance. … Institutionware preserves market dominance through a blanket of equivalence in systems and users. Even limited use propagates further use. … Instititutionware is about preserving the institution as it is and has been, enhancing/supporting rather than challenging/threatening.
To return to the idea of the network: there is an overdetermined quality to how we are seen today as being “plugged in.” What if the voluntary nature of our being interpenetrated by digital networks is fundamentally flawed? That is, Facebook would rather see us never log out, than see us engage in other forms of networking (face-to-face conversation, letter writing, reading each other’s books, etc.) What if, given our consent to be plugged into just a little, we have consented to a whole-scale strip-mining of our digital identities for profit? But this is not Facebook’s fault; it is, rather, a company “merely” trying to survive in an exceedingly regressive, reactionary business climate that privileges only establishment ideas and passes the consequences of “social change” onto the consumer, as per Ian Bogost’s idea of hyperemployment.
So many of us depend on Facebook, not only for information but also employment and familial contacts. So much of Facebook relies on such co-dependency, and our present-day obsession with the service (before it is replaced by something even more megalomaniacal) should give us pause about the kinds of drugs peddled here in the 21st Century. Why rely on chemicals, when the digital can give each and every one of us our fix for free?
Free for a price, of course.
The Guy in the Black Hat 