User:Jason Wilson

Jason Wilson 14:45, 6 Aug 2004 (EST)

Jason Wilson is a tutor in CIF and a PhD student in Griffith University's School of Arts, Media and Culture. His research is focussed the aesthetics of video game play, and he has spoken and published in his area of interest in a number of national and international forums. You can read examples of stuff he's written [here] or [here]

He was born in Townsville, NQ, but has been in Brisbane since the early 1990s. He really likes videogames, especially vintage games, and he wants you to know that you can play one of the first, Pong (Atari, 1972) [here] in your browser, learn how to build a muti-user version of it in Macromedia Flash [here] and learn a lot more about Pong and pongalikes [here]

mailto:j5.wilson@qut.edu.au

Annotated Bibliography: Indie Game Design

Lister, M., Dovey, J., Giddings, S., Grant, I. and Kelly, K. (2003) New media: a critical introduction, Routledge: London, New York. ISBN 0415223784

Lister et al offer a broad, critically engaged survey of new media technologies, their uses and the cultural practices that surround them. Particularly relevant to my subject area is their extended discussion of the practices and technologies of gameplay. In part, the discussion summarises a long tradition of pessimistic accounts of video games as troublesome cultural objects. Lister et al suggest that the reason that videogames have been alternately ignored or scorned by some strands of critical and cultural theory is that they often function in critical discourse as "new media's other":

Doom is only one of the more notorious of an often-vilified new medium, which, since its introduction, has been the focus of fears of cultural and social change, particularly around childhood and youth. Seen as encouraging antisocial play in violent and morally dubious computer environments and narratives, videogames become everything that threatens an idealised children’s culture… In popular and academic discourses, videogames are often explicitly posited as emblematic of the troubled status of our understanding of the real world in media culture… [Games are] the ‘repressed’ of the cybercultural enthusiasm for interactivity – losing oneself in the medium can be creative and liberating, but is haunted by the possibility that this immersion can be hypnotic, seductive, ‘mindless’ as well as bodiless.(261-263)

For Lister et al, fears about videogames are related to broader worries about the accelerating pace of change in modernity, children's interactions with media culture, and about the disappearance of the real in a plethora of simulations. they also suggest that some critics put games at the troublesome margins of an increasingly interactive media culture. Here, games are the objects onto which worries about the potentially negative aspects of new media technologies are projected. Lister et al go on to suggest that more nuanced critical work needs to be done, and they themselves present a more diverse picture of games and game culture.

For Lister et al, since some critics see games as having little cultural value, and maybe even as having threatening or morally and politically deleterious "effects", they often miss the sophistication of game aesthetics, and the richness of game cultures. Contact with Indie Game design tends to confirm Lister et al's arguments about the poverty of some games criticism in that: (1) Here we find game designers making critiques of social and political inequalities and injustices and game culture itself - this is hardly "mindless" design or play, is certainly creative and perhaps liberating; (2) indie design is too diverse to fit with simplistic accounts of game culture that reduce it to violent images in games like Doom; (3) indie game design shows the aesthetic traditions of video game play beinf turned to critical and creative purposes, and thus shows that the uses and impacts of media images are unpredictable, and not reducible to harm; (4) (often amateur) indie designers' blurring of the lines between media production, fandom, activism and consumption shows that the model of the hypnotised player upon which critical pesimism seems to be based is flawed. In combination with other sources, Lister et al's work will assist in exploring Indie Game Design as a challenge to some pessimistic theories of gaming.

Oliver, Julian (2003) "Developers in exile: why independent game developers need an island", www.selectparks.net. Online. Available: http://www.selectparks.net/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=23 Accessed 19th July, 2004

mailto:j5.wilson@qut.edu.au Jason Wilson

Jason Wilson 16:55, 17 Jul 2004 (EST)