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    review essay
    
    British Game Studies? An Extended Review of Two New Publications
    David Surman
    
    Jon Dovey and Helen W. Kennedy, Game Cultures: Computer Games as New Media. Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2006. 171 pp. ISBN 0–355–21357-X Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska, Tomb Raiders and Space Invaders: Videogame Forms and Contexts. London: I.B. Taurus, 2006. 264 pp. ISBN 1–85043–814–5
    
    From animation to games
    Until relatively recently, games have not been taken seriously as cultural artefacts, and this has impacted on the perceived legitimacy of committed research into their culture, form and development. Cracks in the edifice of distinctions between high and low culture have meant a variety of scholarly work has emerged, in the past decade in particular, around the discordant mix of pop-cultural forms that circulate in mass-mediatized society. As the readers of periodicals like animation: an interdisciplinary journal will recognize, those championing the specificity of animation have carved out a suitably eccentric and fractious space from within the established research fields of film, media and cultural studies. Importantly, research is not limited to those dominant fields; issues of animation arising in medical, scientific and technical contexts offer profound insights into animation (for example, Mori, 1970). This diversity of applications gives research into ‘ubiquitous’ media such as animation and games its defining interdisciplinarity.
    animation: an interdisciplinary journal (http://anm.sagepub.com) Copyright © 2007 SAGE (London, Los Angeles, New Delhi and Singapore) Vol 2(2): 273–282 [1746-8477(200707)]10.1177/1746847707078284
    
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    Game scholarship is of considerable importance to animation studies for a number of reasons arising from their contiguity as disciplines. Both share from the established pool of critical and cultural theory generated in and around the departments of film, literary and cultural studies that achieved substantial prominence in the 70s and 80s. Beginning with practice, the contemporary method of commercial animation production differs little from that of videogames, with PC workstation hardware and production software for the creation of art assets being completely the same. Likewise, if we look to the movement of the essential human resource of skilled individuals, there is a fluidity of workforce – animators, illustrators, background artists, programmers – between the animation and games industries. The means through which so much contemporary animation is archived and distributed is indebted to the culture of games, interaction and new media. High-resolution Fleischer classics can be accessed in a matter of seconds on YouTube.com, the many fan appreciation sites can be browsed on MySpace.com; such shifts in the culture of distribution are an exploitation of the new techno-literacies that have arisen from the widespread dissemination of interactive media and internet use through gaming. Moreover, as this review essay will explore, some of the concepts arising from research into videogames are having a significant bearing on how we might understand the viewing practices and attitudes of the contemporary animation consumer. In the hyper-mediatized spectatorship of the web browser through which so much contemporary animation is accessed, how does the form necessarily affect the appreciation of the content? In tandem with animation and the comic book, the videogame has received renewed and sustained interest from academics, journalists and an increasingly techno-literate public. Substantial new claims have been made for a theory of digital games since the year 2000. Espen Aarseth (2001) writes in his editor’s introduction to the first issue of the online journal Game Studies that
    2001 can be seen as the Year One of Computer Games Studies as an emerging, viable, international, academic field. This year has seen the first international scholarly conference on computer games, in Copenhagen in March, and several others will follow. 01–02 may also be the academic year when regular graduate programs in computer game studies are offered for the first time in universities. And it might be the first time scholars and academics take computer games seriously, whose value is hard to overestimate. (original emphasis)
    
    Since the turn of the millennium, academic game studies has crystallized into something more or less coherent through the launch of research hubs such as the Digital Games Research Association (see http://www.digra.org). Since Aarseth’s elected moment there has been a considerable focus on disciplinarity in game studies. These debates have not however expressly centred on the game artefacts,
    
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    but have also incorporated the researchers of those games, in sometimes highly personal exchanges indicative of the intense feelings roused by games. A marked distinction has been made between Scandinavian and North American centres of research. In particular, claims have been made for ‘Ludology’, a sovereign discipline of game analysis that eschews the influence of film, media and cultural studies and instead attempts to recuperate a formalist appreciation of ‘games-asgames’, through focus on the ways they deploy rules to bound and structure the play experience over (simulated) time. The first question and the source of Ludology’s oft-cited opposition to narrative theories (Frasca, 2003: 222) is where do we locate the seat of meaning within the game: in its capacity to tell stories, or through the complex ways it simulates and structures a play experience through rules? For the Ludologist it is not significant that when playing one of the many Tomb Raider games your player-character is the young, agile and highly sexualized British aristocrat Lara Croft, since in the cognitive experience the player loses sight of such representational coding in favour of a way of looking that is instead focused on discerning those Ludic dimensions: goals, pathways, enemies, pick-ups, rest points. The question here is: representation or simulation? The blurriness of this distinction is recognized by Frasca (2003) who does, however, endorse the emphatic formalism for its benefits to a disciplinary and structured Ludology. He writes that ‘certainly, formal approaches are limited – and Ludologists should always keep that in mind – but they are probably the easiest way to uncover the structural differences between stories and games’ (p. 222). Perhaps when games researchers saw themselves as players competing for territory in an unmapped field, such theories acquired a Ludic quality in themselves. Aarseth (2001) writes that:
    Games are not a kind of cinema, or literature, but colonising attempts from both these fields have already happened, and no doubt will happen again. And again, until computer game studies emerges as a clearly self-sustained academic field. To make things more confusing, the current pseudo-field of ‘new media’ (primarily a strategy to claim computer based communication for visual media studies), wants to subsume computer games as one of its objects. There are many problems with this strategy, as there is with the whole concept of ‘new media,’ and most dramatically the fact that computer games are not one medium, but many different media.
    
    Where in the games research mix is the British contingent? Is there such a thing as British game studies? Through two recent publications, Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska’s Tomb Raiders and Space Invaders (2006) and Jon Dovey and Helen Kennedy’s Game Cultures (2006), the subjects of this extended review, we have a point from which to examine the development of a discursively led British games research culture, which on the surface seems markedly less concerned with disciplinarity than its Scandinavian or even North American counterparts.
    
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    As major contributions to a ‘new research field’, these books seek to navigate and supersede the anxieties around disciplinarity that are reflected in the previous discussion of Ludology – in particular its discontents with a coercive colonization of virgin game territories by film, media and cultural studies scholars. It is interesting to reflect on Paul Ward’s (2003) analysis of the disciplinary organization of animation studies which, like game studies, resides at the perceived ‘margin’ of mainstream media criticism as a new field focusing on an ostensibly popular entertainment form. Contemporaneously with the work of Frasca, Ward (2003) writes that ‘such marginality can perhaps hamper the development of a “new” discipline, to the extent that very real and potentially useful connections are resented or, even less usefully, treated as if they do not exist’. Ludology’s disassociation with the interpretation of games through film, literary and cultural lenses – and its chosen allegiance to anthropological theories of play (cf. Huizinga, 1955; Caillois, 2001) to claim a disciplinary prehistory – may take once moderate formalism into the dangerous and counterproductive territory of claims for a grand theory of digital games, in which ‘rule bounded play’ is asserted as an ontology true to all game variants.
    
    Game Cultures
    Some of the earliest and at the time most comprehensive work on videogames emerged from the humanities departments of British universities in the mid-to-late 1980s. Concerns presented for the first time in the work of Skirrow (1986) and Haddon (1988) about games and technological agency, games and gender, and the performance aspect of play have enjoyed a renewed focus in contemporary research, though little mention is often made of those early pioneers in the field. The correlation between the tones of these articles, in particular Skirrow, and that of the two books under review here is significant, and it is interesting to return to those primary justifications made by Skirrow and Haddon for the academic critique of videogames beyond pure formalism. In her essay ‘Hellivision: An Analysis of Videogames’, Skirrow (1986) reflects that she is ‘fascinated by the control involved in being able to relate to and interact with a text on the video screen, but at the level of the content of the games I am repelled’ (p. 115). It should be remembered that her critique relates to the games of the late 1980s, not long emerged from almost abstractions, which used pixellated sprite-based 2D graphics radically simpler than the computer generated imagery of contemporary games design. Specifying her interest she asserts that ‘the pleasure of video games is gender-specific – women do not play them – and it seems important when studying popular culture to examine not only what pleasures arise at different historical periods, but for whom’ (p. 155). The particular frustration felt over the gratuitous nature of the game text
    
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    in general – fascinating for its interaction, banal in its subject matter – describes perfectly the necessity for a game scholarship which tackles not only the form but also its content, Lara and her core gameplay mechanisms. Most importantly, because it is through the form and apparatus that players are inculcated into the reception of the imagery and sounds of the game:
    The materiality of the relationship between text and spectator is nowhere clearer than in video games, where the spectator is also the performer, and performance involves learning a skill which will give the player an advantage over the non-player in the market for creative computer jobs as opposed to clerical, key-punching work. (p. 155)
    
    Skirrow’s opening paragraph is fascinating for its scope in anticipating and mapping some of the primary concerns of contemporary game studies. In her final suggestion about the transmission of play skill to work and its currency as a form of cultural capital, her thoughts foreshadow what Dovey and Kennedy call ‘technicity’, the concept which unites the various research avenues comprising Game Cultures: Computer Games as New Media (2006). They write that ‘the significant aspect of the new term of “technicity” is to encapsulate, in conceptual terms, the connections between an identity based on certain types of attitude, practices, preferences and so on and the importance of technology as a critical aspect of the construction of that identity’ (p. 17). Technicity is identified here as the potential techno-literacies have of becoming a kind of cultural capital in the knowledge economy, and this is intimately reflected in the games industry and its artefacts. Observations of this made by Skirrow (1986) still hold relevance today when she writes that:
    The games industry does not emphasise its own autonomy, but relies on realising elements of popular culture in its own specific form. It recirculates meanings in such a way that the meanings simply seem to have arisen from the spirit of the times. Its image is not that of an industry making products for passive consumers, but of a people’s technology which encourages and enables participation by all who wish to participate. The process of production is well understood by most of the consumers. (pp. 120–1)
    
    The concept of technicity will no doubt become a central tenet in the understanding of not only the subjectivity of the games player but, beyond that, the particular experience of the techno-literate media subject in general. This is of particular interest to those studying animation, and the fan practices that surround the appreciation and consumption of anime for instance, with its intense and ritualized codes of fandom, reliant on internet file-sharing and distribution of rare and essential artefacts, including artwork, films, photos of memorabilia and so on. Through technicity we may well begin to develop a language with which to articulate the experience of the otaku generation, remembering that otaku (obsessive fandom,
    
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    collecting, usually associated with long periods at home) extends to animation, videogames and the comic book; three media colliding through their complementary consumption. We see games used to make animation in machinima, flash animations which riff on the complexities and idiosyncrasies of games culture; we need theories which articulate the connections forged at industrial as well as fan levels. To this end, Dovey and Kennedy’s most recent work devotes considerable time to the disclosure of details surrounding the activities of players in the context of the theories and literature surrounding fandom, consumption and authorship that abound in the cultural studies of the past decade, indebted to the work of Henry Jenkins and the other theorists of ‘fan’ and ‘convergence’ cultures. Divided over seven chapters, Game Cultures devotes its most substantial energies to the explanation and application of technicity. Forays into the political economy of games in chapter 3 serve as excellent empirical grounds for a book which is unapologetically conceptual in its particular emphases on relating the game text to literature arising from studies in cyberculture. Observations of the gameplay experience as having direct correlations to the cybernetic circuit, and of games as a kind of mass-mediatized incarnation of the theories of Donna Haraway, are political in that they imply the connective power of the gaming experience for feminist and queer ends, providing avenues to the experience of new technicities: subject formations born out of the conditioning experience of gameplay. The closeted power of the gaming experience revealed, Dovey and Kennedy pay particular attention to describing those cultures in which people are taking game form and applying it in new and inspired ways to create political and subversive ‘mods’ with the ‘engines’ of familiar titles, or entirely new works which aspire to the status of art objects. In the fifth, sixth and seventh chapters of the book, Dovey and Kennedy shift their focus to the gaming ‘text’, its reception, and its specificity in contrast to prior media forms. Their research emphasizes ‘hybridizing methodologies for hybridized media forms’ (Dovey and Kennedy, 2006: 84). The last two chapters delve deeper into qualifying the concept of technicity, the core of the publication, through explication of the cyborg’s relevance to understanding the play experience, and second to mapping the ‘user-led content-generation cultures’ in which techno-literacies and play abilities converge in the system of cultural capital described as technicity. The fifth chapter does however tackle the subject of disciplinarity in game studies head on, profiling a variety of approaches taken by prominent scholars in the field, and describing in detail the particular opposition to literary and film approaches denigrated by the Ludologists. Reminiscent of Ward’s call for a discursive attitude in the disciplinary scope of animation (and here game) studies, Dovey and Kennedy summarize:
    
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    As the field has developed we have observed both traditional and radical scholars adapting existing approaches at the same time as they fashion new methodologies. We find ourselves gradually hybridizing methodologies in ways that are entirely familiar to those of us who have already spent considerable time trying to understand the operations of the new media in general. Our readings of game analyses suggest that the position taken by the London University Institute of Education team at the end of the twoyear study into game textualities is typical in their necessary mix and match methodologies to understand the game. Here they describe their hybrid approach as a combination of their ‘expertise in media education, semiotics and multimodality; social psychology and psychology of learning; film and literary theory, and textual analysis’ (Carr et al., 2004). This recognition of methodological hybridity allows us to expand and develop an understanding of the computer game that includes both the structuralist analysis so dear to ludologists and an understanding of the way that the game is mediated through cultures in the form of representation, narrative and intertextuality. (pp. 85–6)
    
    In this summary reference to the work of Diane Carr, Caroline Pelletier and others at the Institute of Education there is perhaps the best representation of what might be an emerging British game studies. Eschewing the polemical and purist approaches of the first wave of scholarship in and around game cultures, Dovey and Kennedy elect to take a passionate-yet-moderate line that pragmatically negotiates a hybrid field of critical methodologies entirely appropriate to the eccentric and multifarious culture of games. This is first and foremost a work of cultural studies, yet at the same time representative of what works in game studies should aspire to be, radical in its lateral connections and proposals, moderate in its scope, and consciously avoiding the lure of totalizing statements about the culture of games. Alongside Atkins’s More Than a Game (2003) and Newman’s Videogames (2004), Game Cultures will no doubt prove to be an essential part of the British contribution to games research, evidenced in the reading lists of all those games courses that have sprung up since 2001.
    
    Tomb Raiders and Space Invaders
    Published in tandem with Game Cultures is Tanya Krzywinska and Geoff King’s Tomb Raiders and Space Invaders: Videogame Forms and Contexts (2006); this writing partnership previously edited Screenplay: Cinema/Videogames/Interfaces (2002). With particular vitriol against film and literary scholars entering into the game studies debate (and reminding readers that King and Krzywinska reside in the film and television studies department of Brunel University), Aarseth writes:
    The sheer number of students trained in film and literary studies will ensure that the slanted and crude misapplication of ‘narrative’ theory to games will
    
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    continue and probably overwhelm games scholarship for a long time to come. As long as vast numbers of journals and supervisors from traditional narrative studies continue to sanction dissertations and papers that take the narrativity of games and confuse the story-game hybrids and games in general, good, critical scholarship on games will be outnumbered by incompetence, and this is a problem for all involved. (Aarseth, quoted in Dovey and Kennedy, 2006: 85)
    
    Tomb Raiders and Space Invaders is something of a curiosity since it is first and foremost a work of formal criticism. It is dedicated to unpacking the primary category of ‘pleasure’ in games through close analysis of the ways in which games produce meaning through structured experience:
    Our major point of focus is on key formal aspects of games – the way games are structured and realized – and the kinds of experiences offered by the activities they require or encourage of the player. We also consider the contexts in which these experiences are shaped and deployed, including cultural and industrial dimensions. (p. 4)
    
    Like Game Cultures, King and Krzywinska go beyond Ludology and its discontents, and disciplinary wrangles, to tackle some of the most pressing questions in this most recent wave of games analysis. We go from the specificity of the game artefact in chapter 1 through a total of four chapters, the last of which deals with the ‘Social, Cultural and Political’ dimensions. The book’s organizing logic thus begins with the formal specificity of games and then gradually opens out to the broadest positioning of the game within our mass-mediatized culture. The authors’ methods are clearly indebted to film and television studies, and the book makes considerably greater use of close textual analysis than Game Cultures. In chapters 2 and 3, with their respective focus on virtual spaces and realism, spectacle and sensation, King and Krzywinska articulate the shift beyond concerns for the definitives of games to the condition and experience of gaming, with a particular focus (that runs throughout the book) on the category of ‘world’. Much like the concept of technicity articulated in Dovey and Kennedy, King and Krzywinska’s core suggestions, in particular the notion of ‘functional realism’ (realism associated with the scope and depth of available interaction), begin to formulate what we might see as the corollary of film studies’ apparatus theory: a combination of both the material and imaginary relations between player and game that produce the gaming subject. This relationship is again foreshadowed by Skirrow (1986) who writes that:
    In the games, ‘audience’ disappears as the distinction between ‘doer’ and ‘viewer’. The viewer is in a separate space but appears to be in the position of co-creator, or subject to which everything else is the predicate. And yet the emphasis, or at least all the interest, is in that predicate, the paranoiac environment . . . It is the game that controls, as the ‘dungeon master’ or
    
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    ‘Destinateur’, with the performer only as a function of its flow. You perform in it. It performs for you. It performs you. So the enigmas for the performer are of the order of ‘where am I?’ rather than ‘who am I?’. (p. 130)
    
    The concept of functional realism raises questions of the agency implicit in interaction design and the compulsive effects of videogames and their associated realisms. Functional realism foregrounds something of the nature of the conventional ‘non-interactive’ realism available to animators, the degree to which utility is read and figures into our horizon of expectation as we watch an animated character negotiate its world. Recalling those Saturday morning cartoons, part of the ‘game’ of viewing animation involved scouring the frame for those cels which clearly stood out from the background: the dustsheet covering Scooby and Shaggy; the scissors awaiting the hand of the brave little tailor. Their imminent animation distinguished them from their passive backdrop – we knew they had function, though weren’t sure of exactly when that might happen. Nonetheless the inconsistency provided something of a sense of interaction, a ripple in the animated realism, which would be the root of subsequent onscreen action. King and Krzywinska’s argument for a theory of realism which relates to the consistency and quality of the interaction is perhaps the most important and substantial claim in the book since it underpins their initial ambitions to account for the pleasure implicit in the gameworld. Fundamental questions of causality and agency are broached by the concept of functional realism.
    All game-worlds are arbitrary and limited constructs. They have nothing remotely like the complex functionality of the real world. But a greater depth of functional detail can contribute to the relative degree of immersive illusion that is created, although it can also be a novelty that draws attention to itself. (King and Krzywinska, 2006: 144)
    
    Through the functional realism of elements of the gameworld, games anticipate interaction, and through the process of interaction, we develop an eye for interactive elements set against or within an otherwise neutral backdrop. This eye for detail that is integral to the spectatorship of games and our subject positioning as players is of course concurrent with what Dovey and Kennedy call technicity. Tomb Raiders and Space Invaders is the first major contribution to a formal critique of games for their worldliness and the complexity with which they deploy familiar media qualities such as realism since the publication of Barry Atkins’s More Than a Game in 2003. The consistent focus on examining textual complexity in its aesthetic and historical context is admirable, given that current trends veer toward the sociological critique of players and their activities as social networks. Coming back to the specificity of the game, without recourse to the unnecessary bulwark of Ludology, Tomb Raiders will become a classic in the formal critique of games. Scholars coming from film, literary and cultural studies are not hammer-wielding iconoclasts
    
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    bent on dismembering formal games analysis for their own sake. Rather, with a discursive and hybridized approach to the discipline, we make the most of the fundamental knowledge bases that circulate in those contiguous fields and which are relevant to the understanding of the game artefact, whose production increasingly converges to resemble that of contemporary animation, film or television.
    References
    Aarseth, E. (2001) ‘Computer Games Studies, Year One’, Game Studies 1(1). URL: http://www.gamestudies.org/0101/editorial.html Atkins, B. (2003) More Than a Game: The Computer Game as Fictional Form. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Caillois, R. (2001) Man, Play and Games. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Frasca, G. (2003) ‘Simulation versus Narrative: Introduction to Ludology’, in M.J.P. Wolf and B. Perron (eds) The Video Game Theory Reader, pp. 221–36. London: Routledge. Haddon, L. (1988) ‘Electronic and Computer Games’, Screen 29(2): 52–73. Huizinga, J. (1955) Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Mori, M. (1970) ‘Bukimi no Tani (The Uncanny Valley)’, Energy 7(4): 33–5 (trans. from Japanese by K.F. MacDorman and T. Minato). Newman, J. (2004) Videogames. London: Routledge. Skirrow, G. (1986) ‘Hellivision: An Analysis of Videogames’, in C. MacCabe (ed.) High Theory/Low Culture: Analysing Popular Television and Film, pp. 115–42. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Ward, P. (2003) ‘Animation Studies, Disciplinarity and Discursivity’, Reconstruction 3(2). URL: http://reconstruction.eserver.org/032/ward.htm
    
    David Surman is Senior Lecturer in computer games design at the University of Wales, Newport. With interests in animation, videogames and digital media he has written a number of essays and articles on these subjects, and has written for periodicals including Edge, Gamasutra and Hardcore. He is author of The Videogames Handbook (Routledge, 2007) and co-edits the Reviews section of animation: an interdisciplinary journal.
    Address: Department of Computer Games Design, Newport School of Art, Media and Design, University of Wales, Newport NP18 3YG, UK. [email: david.surman@newport.ac.uk]

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