Now, using a terrific third-party app called Tectonicus, together with Google Maps’ framework, *nix workhorse rsync, and a few custom-built client-side scripts, I’ve managed to create a site where our Minecraft world (“Flatgrass”) is mapped daily. You can see it at minecraft.colophon.org.

This fall, I’m offering a new graduate-level course about videogames and critique, inspired in part by a course I taught last year on the death (and reanimation) of critical theory: CCTP680, Videogames in Critical Contexts. I am still working on the syllabus, but here are the four texts we will read in their entirety. 

Dyer-Witheford, Nick, and Greig de Peuter. Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games. ISBN 0816666113

Galloway, Alexander. Gaming: Essays On Algorithmic Culture. ISBN 9780816648511

Gee, James Paul. What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. Second Edition: Revised and Updated Edition. ISBN 1403984530

Wark, McKenzie. Gamer Theory. ISBN 0674025199

Addition (August 7)

Codrescu, Andrei. The Posthuman DADA Guide: Tzara & Lenin Play Chess. ISBN 0691137781

Exploring Synthetic Worlds

Synthetic worlds — persistent, networked 3D spaces that mimic certain aspects of reality — are increasingly popular sites for work and play. This course investigates the social, cultural, scientific, and political implications of virtual worlds and persistent massively multiplayer environments.

Hacking Critical Theory

This course will examine the practice of critical theory in the 20th and 21st centuries, especially as it relates to technology. We will consider a broad swath of Western thought, ranging from Marx and Nietzsche to Avital Ronell and Slavoj Zizek. Drawing on their individual interests in contemporary digital technologies and associated cultural practices, students will engage the praxis of critique by reverse-engineering critical theories of their own.

“21st Century Skills in Starcraft is an 8 week entirely online course that uses the popular real time strategy (RTS) game Starcraft to teach valuable 21st Century Skills through a hands-on approach. With society becoming increasingly technology-based and fast-paced, it is important for professionals to be highly proficient in skills such as critical thinking, problem solving, resource management, and adaptive decision making. These skills are fundamental in Starcraft and therefore make the game a highly effective environment for students to analyze and take action in complex situations. Computer and video games of all types have become a major part of today’s entertainment and technology worlds. Also, online education is an area of intense growth with many employers and professions using online courses and workshops for career development. This course synthesizes the three threads of 21st Century skill development, gaming, and online education into an innovative and experiential approach that encourages students to identify, learn, and practice crucial skills and apply and relate them to real-world situations. It does not teach about Starcraft, but rather aims to utilize the game and the complex situations that arise within it to present and develop the important skills professionals will undoubtedly need in the 21st Century workplace.”

There’s clearly a lot of Gee’s thinking at work here, at least in the remove, and, by extension, a tradition of American pragmatist philosophy that goes right back to Dewey.

However, from another angle, isn’t this really just a course in remedial computational literacy? With really sexy, 32-bit reinforcement?

Via CrunchGear.

A propos of this, Robert Overweg, whose “Glitches Turn Video Games Into Sublime Art”:

Most people throw their controllers when a glitch ruins a perfectly good game of Half Life or Grand Theft Auto. Robert Overweg loves it; he turns it into art.

Overweg is a self-proclaimed “photographer in the virtual world.” In his “Glitches” series, he captures whacked-out characters and snafued buildings in screenshots that look like what René Magritte might’ve produced had he been a big ol’ gaming nerd. These are absurd apocalyptic landscapes rendered even more absurd by shooters suspended in mid-air, as if leaping off a trampoline, while a skyscraper burns ominously in the distance, or, our favorite, by two characters fleeing the zombies of Left 4 Dead 2 and pausing for a homoerotic embrace

A story in the Fairfax Times reports that the school has already enrolled around 200 students into the program, besting an internal goal of having 110 students in the program by 2012. As Scott M. Martin, Assistant Dean for Technology, Research and Advancement at the school stated, ‘We’ve been overwhelmed. Our anticipated enrollment for the fall is 500 percent higher than we expected.’

One of US News and World Report’s top “Up and Coming” national universities, GMU has an especially solid reputation in all sorts of tech-oriented studies. In particular, their Center for History of New Media is giving important thought to bettering our digital future (even though they now must do that thinking without Roy).

So a Game Design degree at George Mason makes some sense. Bioware Mythic (owned, like everyone else, by EA Games) is right next door: Their studio is responsible for a number of world-class MMO’s, including Warhammer Online. Bethesda Softworks, developers of Fallout 3 — and CEO’d, curiously, by Wonder Woman’s husband — is just over the Potomac and to the north of GMU. And AOL — current host to a sizable collection of extremely popular, if uninspiring, online games, but at one time a real hub of innovation — is just a scenic bike ride to the north.

Still, I am filled with misgivings about a degree like this. Others have weighed in on this issue at some length, generally citing a concern that by training undergraduates exclusively on contemporary platforms with of-the-moment toolsets, the students who emerge from BFA game design programs will lack a conceptual core — something upon which to fall back when those platforms become irrelevant and those toolsets outdated.

That makes some sense to me, but I see a different danger. Most significantly, I worry that for this generation of codeworkers, we are framing game and simulation design exclusively as the province of creative expression and technical achievement, rather than understanding them as inherently political forms of techne.

Case in point. When GamePro magazine presented Princeton Review’s wrap-up of the top 8 game schools in the United States, this is the way they summarized the growth of interest in game design programs:

Time was to be a game designer, all you needed was a computer and a basement or garage owned by your mother. The only education you needed to be a truly great game designer was a stack of Atari 2600 games and maybe a few issues of Popular Science magazine. Those days are done.

If you want to be a game designer in the maturing market we have today, you need a lot more than your mom’s basement and some magazines. You need imagination, determination, and preferably a job with a major game publisher or an indie game developer. And before you can have any of those things, you just might need a formal education.

Intense personal experience and ambitions to engage with the market; imagination, determination, and an “in” with a publisher: These might also describe those qualities required to start a band or make it as a comic book artist. “Formal education” as I read it here does not signify a critical-analytical liberal arts background, but instead stands roughly to large-scale corporations (i.e., EA) as a guarantor of employee quality and uniformity. Is the candidate familiar with the conventions of code documentation? Does she understand the difference between a class and an object? Does he know understand the premise of Software Quality Assurance?

Look: There’s little doubt that students from GMU will find ample employ in the industry when they graduate. That job market is only going to expand (although I’m not sure that it will expand on American soil). But while a BFA is implicitly about expression and craft, those jobs are unlikely to be about either: Programming at giant corporations like Mythic or BioWare is increasingly compartmentalized and institutionalized. There’s frequently little about the everyday tasks of a low-level Programmer to distinguish “game programming” from, say, “accounting software programming” or “warehouse inventory programming.”

But, at the end of the day, there is an opportunity cost here that I really worry about. There’s no doubt that many of the young people who enter GMU’s program will be brilliant, but how much effort is being devoted to the development of critical thinking skills? We’re busy teaching American Studies majors to think critically, but I imagine that few of them will be involved in building next-generation interfaces or scripting online reputation systems or administering community governance databases.

It seems to me that we need at least to find ways of integrating the critical-analytical conventions of a liberal arts degree with a Game Design BFA. We need to be worrying about procedural literacies; about the anthropology of gaming; about sacrality and the ludic; about the politics of simulation. We need to ask: What kinds of worlds are you building? For whom? And to what end?

You can read (a little bit) more about the program, as well as see a list of course requirements. And — my anxieties and misgivings aside — good luck to the new Program and everyone involved.

“I’m worried that students will take their obedient place in society and look to become successful cogs in the wheel,” writes Zinn. Liszkiewicz points to Farmville, that scourge of networks, and sees some very successful little cogs.

Perhaps it seems a waste of time to discuss video games at a moment like this. After all, this is a serious discussion, and games are supposedly frivolous things. Most any concerned parent might say, “Play is an occasion of pure waste: waste of time, energy, ingenuity, skill, and often of money….”[1] So said Roger Caillois in his book, Man, Play, and Games. Of course, Caillois went on to praise games as a source of joy, as well as a healthy means of “escape from responsibility and routine.”[2] For Caillois, as for Aristotle, games are in fact essential to citizenship: they allow us to refresh and renew ourselves, help to socialize us, and afford us opportunities to cultivate our imaginations and reasoning skills.[3]

While it will not be the sole topic of interest to Arcade Theory in the fall, the politics of the procedural will figure prominently in our conversations. So take a look at Liszkiewicz’s talk, and spend some time lingering over some of his recent digital poetry, Count As One.

And then, if you’re interested, read more about CCTP 628, Arcade Theory. Be sure not to miss the latest addition, a suggested summer reading list of ready-to-print essays and articles (nothing too heavy, I assure you).

Visit arcadetheory.org