Games and Culture
DOI: 10.1177/1555412005281824
横店2006; 1; 72 Games and Culture Patrick Crogan The Question of Computer Games /cgi/content/abstract/1/1/72
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Patrick Crogan
Adelaide University
A short,speculative account of the state of play in the formation of a discipline or field of
computer games studies.The process of academic teaching,rearch,and institutional positioning in regard to computer games are viewed from the perspective of wider cur-rents and cris influencing knowledge formation today.It is argued that the different approaches to computer games cannot ignore the differences in their conceptions of the object of study in a naive pluralism.The different conceptions of games as parts of the technocultural milieu must encounter each other in the name of the struggle against the avoidance of critical thought concerning the nature and forms of technoculture that often prevails in the production of specialist “knowledge” today.
Keywords:computer games;disciplinarity;reason;technoculture
用心去爱
Freud more or less says that all the questions impulsively pod by children rve as relays for the one they do not po,which is the question of the origin.In the same way, we interrogate ourlves about everything,in order to sustain and advance the passion of the question,but all questions are directed toward one question alone—the central question, or the question of the whole.
—Maurice Blanchot(1993,pp.11-12) The discipline of a short text to say what should be done in(or by)the study of com-puter games,what it has yet to do,and what it has done poorly allows for only an allu-sive,speculative respon.Limitation is of cour rightly acknowledged as an agent of effective and creative accomplishment,so I should accept this word length restric-tion as a gift rather than as a liability for at least giving me the opportunity(if not the guarantee)of accomplishment.1Paradoxically however,such a restriction inevitably caus the scope of my speculations to expand in inver proportion to the shortening of word length,away from a reasonable,limited“intervention”in one or two areas of computer game rearch and toward the whole field of games studies—including the question of the possibility of the unified field—in its encounter with the young life of computer games.This dynamic and its paradoxical nature however are cloly related to the question of computer games that I want to frame here for the community of re-archers anticipated by the launch of this journal.
72
Crogan / The Question of Computer Games73 Computer games have been a significant cultural form for about30years.The scholarly,critical study of computer games is maybe20years old,and to argue for this figure(over ,Espen Aarth’s announcement in2001of“year one”of com-puter game studies),we already need more space to explore the histories and compet-ing patrimonies of game study in different disciplinary fields such as simulation and gaming,education,social science,computer science,human-computer interaction, and video game theory.2“We”—and as we will e it is a question precily of the nature and identity of the we—are therefore concerned with a“new”form of entertain-ment,expression,learning,art,community,and so forth,a form that has more recently provoked attention in academic networks of knowledge production,marketing,and dismination.3The novelty of the phenomenon or rather,phenomena of computer games,and the variety and increasing volume of descriptive,categorizing,critical,and applied rearch directed toward the phenomena make it very difficult to make broad summative statements about the merits and shortcomings of existing games studies work.
What is happening today is that a plurality of game studies is developing in which different conceptions of the object of study operate in the various disciplinary and regional configurations of a
cademic communities interested in computer games.We e the emergence of multiple conference circuits,publication opportunities,rearch funding avenues and interdisciplinary rearch center collaborations,different in-dustry affiliations and community linkages,and so on.At the recent Digital Games Rearch Association(DiGRA)conference hosted by Simon Frar University in Vancouver,Changing Views:Worlds in Play,this process of the multiplication and division of games studies was in evidence both within the conference program and in the areas of inten activity on games rearch not reprented(or underreprented) there,such as work from the older gaming and simulation field,game programming and artificial intelligence rearch,and so on.The point is not that this is a failing of Changing Views or of DiGRA,an organization that es itlf as promoting a catholic, inclusive approach to the variety of games rearch.It is rather that no conference could include the diversity of games rearch in any coherent fashion becau the diversity of“computer games”as objects defined by different disciplinary frame-works of pertinence tends toward Babel and not toward a synthesizing perspective on what underlies this diversity.
“We”should,many may respond(as some have in e-list discussions and el-where),celebrate this diversity,respect the different beliefs and conceptions of the nature of computer games and the stakes of rearching them.There is in this view no single esnce of computer games,such is the v虾仁菠菜的做法
ariety of genres of games,game-playing hardware and contexts of u,and modes of game play.Or at least we should be realistic and accept that this is the way the institutional context of knowledge pro-duction is today,that it will unfold in a manner that will take care of itlf,that the work of real value in the various versions of game studies will ri to the surface,that there will be some productive interchange between ludic Weltanschauungs,and so forth.I am one of the,one of“us,”insofar as this means I identify with the illusion of this future community of scholars.One of the most heartwarming experiences I had at粤教云
74Games and Culture
Changing Views was at the panel where Shanly Dixon’s and Bart Simon’s critical theoretical and ethnographically rearched critique of the“third space”figure in-fluencing games studies was juxtapod with Dmitri Williams’s and Constance Steinkuehler’s social science–bad exploration mobilizing this very figure in a totally different disciplinary perspective.4Having said that,this panel did not so much evince a communicative interchange across epistemological frames as an encounter in good faith between incommensurables,an experience not so much of productive exchange as of the sharing of unworkable difference.
On the other hand,I have a problem with this,with this“we”that imagines diversity and plurality will eventually constitute the“we”for the best,for the good of knowl-edge,for the community at large.This problem and its elaboration have a history.It was identified by Edmund Husrl(1936/1970)in his last book,The Crisis of the European Sciences,in which he examined the fragmentation of knowledge produc-tion into so many specialized compartments of the academy,each asrting its own objective validity.In Husrl’s view,the conflict between the notion of reason as uni-versal principle underlying all human understanding and the multiplication of specific and therefore individual,unique,and incommensurable rational programs across the different disciplinary fields of the modern university lies at the heart of this crisis.Spe-cialized applications of reason that resist and conflict with other expert knowledges undermine the universality of reason as foundational principle of human knowledge. In Rogues:Two Essays on Reason,Derrida(2005)reads Husrl’s asrtion of a sov-ereign principle of universal reason ambivalently,exploring the aporia between the productive development of different knowledges,a situation problematic for universal notions of truth and communicability(and hence of community),and the transcenden-tal notion of reason,a notion allowing for the possibility of commonality,community, and universality,but itlf always harboring a relation to partiality,and to a violent imposition of a particular order of thought(of the universal),traceable to its appeal to sovereignty,that is,to an auto-foundation in its own intrinsic powe
r and authority.5 Derrida’s(2005)answer to the crisis is typically infuriating for tho eking cer-tainty in an unequivocal“answer”as such,including for mylf as reprentative of the“we”of game studies.He said one can justly neither simply reject the specialization of knowledges nor abandon the idea of a universal rationality with its promi of truth and human commonality and community.Nor can one simply avoid this paradox of the general and the particular by proposing a relativist acceptance of multiple truths,a position blind to its own internal contradiction inasmuch as relativism becomes the new and only nonrelativizable principle.The aphoristic solution he leaves us with here is that it is necessary instead to“reason with reason.”What would this mean?This is another“bridge too far”for this little text,but more particularly,what would it mean for“us”here,faced with the proliferation of game studies,of which this new journal is reprentative and in respect to which it is aiming to provide effective orientation for its readers?
Here I have the time and the inclination to propo one answer,and no doubt both of the preconditions reveal something of the problem of partiality and totality that I have been outlining here on behalf of“us,”as if I have the authority to speak thus
Crogan / The Question of Computer Games75 (which of cour I do,prospectively,inasmuch as I am published in this journal of the scholarly community of game studies rearchers envisaged during it
s production).To acknowledge reflexively that my scholarly meditation on the state of game studies is not impartial,not a product of pure,disinterested reason,but bears the marks of my predilections and my(and“our”)career aspirations does not of itlf guarantee a transparency through which the universal can be discerned behind the particularities of my take on the question before“us.”It does at least foreground the positionality of the position I am asrting in and through my answer to the question of how to reason with reason in describing what is to be done in game studies.
九牛二虎是成语吗
My answer therefore follows the lead of Bernard Stiegler’s(2001)challenge to fight the undermining of critical thought today(and it is for him a lutte,a contest or a struggle).In“Our Ailing Educational Institutions,”Stiegler develops an account of the malai affecting university education in France and elwhere,an account with strong parallels to Husrl’s1930s discussion of the state of the European sciences.6 His respon is to insist on the necessity of proposing synthesizing accounts of phe-nomena rather than to remain mired in a state of dinchantment with the viability of interpretations capable of providing an integrated comprehension of diver phenom-ena and events.The integrating accounts can of cour,he argued,be challenged, questioned,modified,or rejected—indeed they must be—but it is the increasing abnce of the theoretical ventures that is paralyzing for critical thought.What results is what he calls a disorientation,function of the increasing
failure of contempo-rary knowledge production to provide an orienting perspective(or at least the possibil-ity of one among others).Such a perspective interprets the origin—the“dawn”of the orient out of which“we”have come to be—of the existing state of things so that the nature and potentiality of the future provided to“us”precily in and as the factical heritage of things(including computer games)are accessible through spatio-temporal coordinates that open up some way of adopting the things and not simply adapting to them.7For this is the alternative tendency today,one that I e across many aspects of games studies rearch inasmuch as it issues from the“ailing institutions,”a ten-dency that is provided by a kind of“default”orientation to the things of contemporary technoculture,one involving instrumental acclimatization,uncritical subscription to projected innovations in computer and communications technologies,extension of the purview of information networks in the regulation of cultural,economic,and military process,and so forth.
I would argue then that the questions pod in academic rearch about computer games are“relays”as Blanchot(1993)would say for the question of the origin,the whole of computer games,that is,of the nature of computer games as part of techno-cultural“life”today,its origin and therefore its telos or endpoint.This question ani-mates all computer game rearch,however specific,specialist,conditional,and qual-ified its parameters,purview,and methodology.Conquently,I
would call for a more rigorous and reasoned addressal of the dynamics of this animating process by“we”game studies experts.This would allow“us”to reason with the diver“reasons”ani-mating the proliferation of games studies rearch and development.
