Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 216

November 3-4, 2018: October 2018 Recap

[A Recap of the month that was in AmericanStudying.]October 1: National Park Studying: Yosemite: On the anniversary of its establishment, a National Park series starts with six figures who narrate Yosemite’s history.October 2: National Park Studying: Blackstone River Valley: The series continues with two comparisons for one of our newest National Parks.October 3: National Park Studying: Everglades: The very American story of Marjory Stoneman Douglas, the woman who helped save the Everglades, as the series rolls on.October 4: National Park Studying: Mesa Verde: Two distinct but complementary effects of a foundational AmericanStudier National Park moment.October 5: National Park Studying: Acadia: The series concludes with a few telling moments in the Maine park’s strikingly French history.October 6-7: National Historical Parks: A special weekend addendum on one impressive thing at each of three wonderful National Historical Parks.October 8: American Gay Studies: Walt Whitman: A National Coming Out Day series starts with vexing questions of textuality and sexuality with one of our greatest poets.October 9: American Gay Studies: Boston Marriages: The series continues with three examples of a complex and inspiring historical relationship.October 10: American Gay Studies: The Society for Human Rights: Three contexts for the history of America’s first gay rights organization, as the series rolls on.October 11: American Gay Studies: Harvey Milk: A key detail that complicates our histories of a tragic assassination, and the overarching story that holds in any case.October 12: American Gay Studies: Mark Doty: Three genres in which one of our best contemporary writers considers identity and sexuality.October 13-14: American Gay Studies: Pop Culture Representations: The series concludes with three 90s pop culture texts that continue to echo into our present moment.October 15: Whaling Histories: New Bedford: A series inspired by Moby-Dick’s anniversary starts with three stages in the history of “The Whaling City.”October 16: Whaling Histories: Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard: The series continues with the divergent whaling and cultural histories of two neighboring islands.October 17: Whaling Histories: Writing about Whaling in 2018: The perils and necessities of writing about disgraced histories, as the series sails on.October 18: Whaling Histories: Moby-Dick: On its anniversary, why we can’t skip the whaling sections in Melville’s messy masterpiece.October 19: Whaling Histories: Contemporary Whaling and Greenpeace: The series concludes with contemporary histories and responses, and why I’m writing about them here.October 20-21: Whaling Histories: Akeia Benard’s Guest Post on The New Bedford Whaling Museum: My latest Guest Post, from the museum’s Curator of Social History!October 22: Video Game Studying: Grand Theft Auto: On GTA’s anniversary, a video game series starts with three sides to games GTA helps us analyze.October 23: Video Game Studying: Pong: The series continues with two telling moments in the history of the first blockbuster arcade game.October 24: Video Game Studying: Pac-Man: Three of the many ways the 1980 smash changed the game, as the series plays on.October 25: Video Game Studying: Doom: Two strikingly, controversially communal sides to the influential first-person shooter.October 26: Video Game Studying: App Games: The series concludes with a couple takeaways from a decade of app gaming.October 27-28: Crowd-sourced Video Game Studying: I didn’t get to create this post (too busy book-finishing, on which more in a few days!), but wanted to mention here that I’d love your video game thoughts on any of the week’s posts!October 29: GhostStudying: The Turn of the Screw: A Halloween series starts with two cultural fears lurking beneath Henry James’s ghost story.October 30: GhostStudying: Beloved: The series continues with the psychological and historical sides to Toni Morrison’s haunting masterpiece.October 31: GhostStudying: Haunted Sites: Three exemplary haunted sites from around the U.S., as the series tricks (or treats) on.November 1: GhostStudying: Ghostly Contacts: AmericanStudies lessons from three films about contact with the afterlife.November 2: GhostStudying: Ghost Stories: The series concludes with psychological and historical reasons for the enduring appeal of ghost stories.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. Topics you’d like to see covered in this space? Guest Posts you’d like to contribute? Lemme know!

November 2, 2018: GhostStudying: Ghost Stories

[For this year’s installment in my annual Halloween series, I’ll be AmericanStudying ghosts in American society and popular culture. Boo (in the best sense)!]On a more psychological and a more historical side to the enduring appeal of ghost stories.There isn’t a lot of overlap between this AmericanStudier’s favorite books when he was a ‘tween and those of my two ‘tween (although soon to be teenage!) sons, but one series that does feature on both of our lists is Alvin Schwartz and Stephen Gammell’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark . Featuring three total books, from 1981’s original through 1984’s More Scary Stories to Tell in the Darkand 1991’s Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones, and soon to be a major motion picture (if one that from the description I’m quite sure will be loosely adapted at best from the books), the Scary Stories series has been an enduringly popular spooky presence for young audiences for nearly four decades now. And while the books feature scary stories in a number of different genres and forms, I would argue that the ghost story is consistently at their heart, from the original’s “The Ghost with the Bloody Fingers” to the sequel’s “The Guests” to the final book’s “The Dead Hand” and many more. As most of this week’s texts and topics likewise illustrate, there’s clearly just something about ghost stories that we keep coming back to, that keeps them firmly and squirmingly in our collective psyche. On one level, I think ghost stories and the discomfort and fears they invoke appeal to different elements in our psyches than do other horror tales. Much of horror is about external threats, bogeymen or creatures clearly distinct from us; certainly some of them can turn ordinary humans into threats as well (such as vampires and zombies), but nonetheless the fundamental threat in those kinds of stories comes from something overtly not-us (and thus easy not to believe in). Whereas ghosts are entirely us, our fellow humans with whom we know for a fact we share this world—and given the belief across religions and cultures in some form of an afterlife, it’s not difficult to imagine that we likewise share the world with humans we can no longer see but who remain in some form. Even for someone who does not believe in either an afterlife or ghosts (as I will admit I do not), I guess it would be more accurate to say that I’m pretty sure those things don’t exist—but there’s a level of uncertainty compared to, for example, my certainty that vampires and zombies do not exist. To put it simply, it’s difficult if not impossible to separate the concept of ghosts from other forms of spirituality that define much of human society and existence—and the individual and collective needs for those spiritual beliefs thus help explain the scarier flipside represented by ghost stories.At the same time, to live in the world in 2018 in particular means that we’re surrounded constantly by layer upon layer of history. Even a relatively young nation like the United States has centuries of such histories layered beneath us, to say nothing of the Native American histories that extend back much further still (and help explain ghost stories like those about the wendigo, of course). Yet much of the time, at least in the U.S. as I argued in comparing it to Rome in this post, we act as if history is something that can be localized to particular sites or spaces, something we can visit and learn about but not necessarily a constant presence in our communities. Deep down I think we know better though, and perhaps the continued popularity of ghost stories also reflects a recognition that the past isn’t dead, it’s not even past—and thus that at any moment it can rise up from the ground or out of the air and grab hold of us. That’s a pretty scary thought to be sure, but as the more complicated and even friendly ghosts in many of this week’s stories illustrate, it doesn’t have to be, not if we first admit the ghostly but real presence of the past and then see where those stories and ghosts might lead us.October Recap this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Other ghost stories or histories you’d share?

November 1, 2018: GhostStudying: Ghostly Contacts

[For this year’s installment in my annual Halloween series, I’ll be AmericanStudying ghosts in American society and popular culture. Boo (in the best sense)!]On quick AmericanStudies lessons from three films about contact with the afterlife.1)      Ghost (1990): I bet you could stump a lot of movie buffs with the fact that the Patrick Swayze-Demi Moore-Whoopi Goldberg romantic thriller was the highest-grossing film of 1990, and indeed if we adjust for inflation is in the top 100 highest-grossing American films of all time. Box office isn’t a measure of quality or enduring importance, of course, but it does at least indicate a film that both reflected and influenced the cultural zeitgeist. And while that much-parodied pottery scene has lingered the most, I would argue that it’s the casting of Goldberg that’s particularly significant—Swayze and Moore as romantic leads was quite expected, but in many ways the film belongs to Goldberg’s psychic/medium character, which fundamentally shifted perceptions of the largely comic actress and won her a Best Supporting Actress Oscar. Of course the character could be located in the long and problematic tradition of the “magical negro” trope (in cinema and otherwise), but I would argue that Goldberg brings enough depth and dimension to the role to make her a meaningful and indeed central character in her own right.2)      The Sixth Sense (1999; SPOILERS in what follows): The ghostly medium at the heart of M. Night Shyamalan’s smash hit (itself the second-highest grossing film of its year and I would argue even more of a zeitgeist-changerthan Ghost) couldn’t be more distinct from Goldberg’s character. Played by the preternaturally (supernaturally?) talented young Haley Joel Osment, just eleven years old when the film was released, Sixth’s Cole Sear is a profoundly troubled and sad young boy who, with the help of Bruce Willis’ equally sad and troubled child psychological Malcolm Crowe, finds a way to make peace with his ability to see and communicate with the dead. While Cole’s character is thus partly in conversation with the kinds of troubled and possessed children long featured in texts like Monday’s focus The Turn of the Screw, he’s actually revealed to be far more proactive and powerful than them, not subject to the film’s horrors so much as a hero who can respond to and even conquer them. One of many ways that Shyamalan’s wonderful film changed cultural narratives and images.3)      The Gift (2000): This supernatural thriller might have the best pedigree of all these films: directed by horror legend Sam Raimi, written by Billy Bob Thornton (and supposedly based on his mother’s own supernatural abilities), and starring an all-star cast including Cate Blanchett, Hilary Swank, Keanu Reeves, Greg Kinnear, and Katie Holmes (as a murdered girl into whose death Blanchett’s psychic protagonist begins to gain unwanted but crucial insight). Yet it thoroughly flopped (making only $12 million at the US box office, against a $10 million budget), and so has largely disappeared from our collective cultural memory. I’m not here to rehabilitate the film, which I saw once on home video and made virtually no impression. But I will say that in its Georgia swampland setting, The Gift does represent a minor but interesting contribution to the larger genre of Southern Gothic, and Blanchett’s tortured widow Annie Wilson is defined at least as much through her relationships and roles within that rural Southern community and society as by her titular abilities to see and communicate with the dead. Last GhostStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other ghost stories or histories you’d share?

October 31, 2018: GhostStudying: Haunted Sites

[For this year’s installment in my annual Halloween series, I’ll be AmericanStudying ghosts in American society and popular culture. Boo (in the best sense)!]First, no post on American haunted sites should fail to acknowledge Colin Dickey’s wonderful book Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places (2016). Dickey’s book is the gold standard for all things haunted sites and AmericanStudies, and you should check it out! Here, I just wanted to highlight briefly three examples of representative, telling such haunted American spaces:1)      San Diego’s El Campo Santo Cemetery: No post on haunted sites should fail to include at least one cemetery, and San Diego’s El Campo Santo is a good choice, not only because it’s old (first used in 1849) and reported to be haunted, but also and especially because those hauntings, like San Diego itself, reveal the region’s and nation’s truly multiethnic history. Both Native American and Hispanic ghosts have been reported in El Campo Santo, and that would only be fitting for a city in which the multi-century multi-cultural histories that include those among other cultures are both officially minimized at times and yet ever-present and impossible to escape. Nothing scary about that, unless you find yourself in El Campo Santo after the San Diego sun has set…2)      Savannah’s William Kehoe House: Savannah has long been known for its mysterious and supernatural sides, as illustrated by the popular 1994 John Berendt book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (and its successful 1997 film adaptation). The city has lots of supposedly haunted sites to choose from, but the 1892 William Kehoe House is certainly a good example: haunted by the apparently friendly apparitions of Irish immigrant turned iron magnate (and, yes, Confederate veteran—this is postbellum Georgia we’re talking about) William, his wife Annie, and a few of their ten children; and now turned into a popular bed and breakfast, because who wouldn’t want to spend the night amongst the ghosts? If El Campo Santo is the yin of haunted sites, the Kehoe House certainly seems like the yang.3)      Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary: And then there’s Eastern State, which is kind of a combination of those two types: a ruined prison that’s supposedly hauntedby the lost souls of many of its former inmates; and yet a commercial enterprise, one that particularly makes money come Halloween season by marketing those haunted souls as a tourist attraction. The line between history and tourism, supernatural and commerce, is always somewhat blurry when it comes to these haunted sites, but Eastern State just steps all over that line and asks us to cross back and forth freely to explore these different American histories and stories. Which, come to think of it, doesn’t sound scary at all, so much as important and fun!Next GhostStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other ghost stories or histories you’d share?

October 30, 2018: GhostStudying: Beloved

[For this year’s installment in my annual Halloween series, I’ll be AmericanStudying ghosts in American society and popular culture. Boo (in the best sense)!]On the psychological and historical sides to Toni Morrison’s haunting masterpiece.A couple weeks back I wrote about (and, fortunately if belatedly, corrected) the shame of not having covered Moby-Dick in my first eight years of blogging in this space. Well, I could certainly say the same for Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), one of the most acclaimed American novels of the 20th century and a hugely important work of historical fiction, African American literature, postmodern fiction, and more. (I did write about it in a paragraph of this post on representations of the Middle Passage, if that counts for anything!) It was largely thanks to Belovedthat Morrison became in 1993 the first black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, a truly groundbreaking moment in world literary and cultural history (and one, to be clear, that she deserved well before Beloved’s publication, but that was likely cemented by that book and moment). I’ve also had the chance to teach excerpts from or the whole of Morrison’s novel in many different classes, and have found that it’s one of those rare works that is both tremendously dense and demanding and yet entirely rewards all effort put into it. Beloved is quite simply a magisterial novel.It’s also, at its heart, a ghost story (sorry, NYT, but I don’t agree with that piece!). Yet without minimizing the actual horror or thriller sides to Morrison’s novel (I hope by now it’s beyond clear to any consistent reader that I have absolutely no problem with genre fiction), I would argue that Beloved’s titular ghost is at least as symbolic and thematic as she is scary. Perhaps the clearest element to that symbolism is psychological: the novel’s protagonist Sethe, like her historical inspiration Margaret Garner, has killed one of her young children rather than allow her to be captured into a state of slavery; and it stands to reason that she would be haunted by the spectral presence of that lost child (or, more exactly, of the woman she might have grown up to be, and a symbolically pregnant woman at that). The historian Kidada Williams has researched and written powerfully about the psychological effects of racial violence; while of course Sethe’s and Garner’s acts of violence are far different from those committed by the Klan against African Americans, they are inspired by the same kinds and systems of racial terrorism and would certainly produce their own forms of psychological trauma. Of course it is Schoolteacher (the novel’s hateful slaveowner) who truly deserves Beloved’s ghostly presence and wrath, but it stands to reason that a sensitive and thoughtful character like Sethe would be far more haunted than a villain like Schoolteacher.But as Slavoj Zizek (back when he was just an edgy psychoanalytical literary critic, rather than some sort of strange post-postmodern performance artist) argues in his reading of Beloved as part of his book The Fragile Absolute (2000), both the guilt and the haunting past symbolized by Beloved are as much communal as they are individual. That is, slavery was already by the late 19th century setting of Morrison’s novel a ghost, literally past but still haunting America in the present so fully and potently; and it’s fair to say that it was no less present and haunting in the 1980s moment of Morrison’s writing, nor in the 2010s one of mine here. To frame a historical novel of slavery as a ghost story might seem to lessen the realism and perhaps the significance of the historical representations; but Morrison’s novel proves that the opposite is true, that the ghost story metaphor offers a pitch-perfect form through which to confront the legacies and effects and presence of our darkest collective (as well as individual) histories. Which, in turn, makes the ghost story all the more scary and compelling.Next GhostStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other ghost stories or histories you’d share?

October 29, 2018: GhostStudying: The Turn of the Screw

[For this year’s installment in my annual Halloween series, I’ll be AmericanStudying ghosts in American society and popular culture. Boo (in the best sense)!]On two cultural fears lurking beneath Henry James’s gripping ghost story.If you had told me back when my teaching career began that Henry James’s 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw would be one of the texts I would teach most frequently, I’d likely have reacted much like Mrs. Grose does when the Governess tells her about seeing the ghost of Peter Quint (inside Turn of the Screw joke, my bad—that means incredulously). But because Turnworks so well as a foundation onto which to stack literary theories and critical frames, I’ve taught the ghost story/psychological thriller/potboiler/Victorian class study/metafictional masterpiece numerous times in both my undergraduate Approaches to English Studies and graduate Literary Theory: Practical Applications courses (as well as in my Major Author: Henry James course). It’s a fun and engaging book, with so many layers that I’m continually discovering new ones along with the students in each such class. But it’s also a horror story (whether the horror is supernatural or psychological, which depends on how you read it), and as I’ve argued in this space many times, horror stories almost always reveal shared cultural narratives and fears.In the case of Turn, many of those embedded cultural fears focus on the story’s two young children, Miles and Flora, and what might be (as the governess-narrator sees it, at least) corrupting their innocent minds and souls. The more obvious (of the two I’ll highlight in this post, anyway—nothing is truly straightforward in James’s tortured text) corrupting forces have to do with sex and sexuality. The ghosts who may or may not be haunting or possessing Miles and Flora are of two former servants: Peter Quint, a manservant of whose sexual perversions we hear repeatedly but vaguely; and Miss Jessel, a nanny who was apparently pregnant (perhaps by Quint, perhaps by the children’s uncle) at the time of her mysterious death (likely a suicide). A number of Victorian fears overlap in those details, from worries about working-class influences on upper-class children to mores about sexual freedom. But I would argue that by far the most damning fears at play here have to do specifically with homosexuality, and with the possibly that Quint has corrupted young Miles in that vein (Miles finally admits, if still vaguely, that he “said things” to male friends at school that he should not have said, leading to his expulsion). In an era when Oscar Wilde was imprisoned for homosexuality, it’s fair to say that James is not overstating the cultural panic over such “perversions.”There’s another 19th century cultural fear potentially buried within the stories of Miles and Flora, however. In the novella’s complex prologue/frame, we learn that the children had initially lived with their parents in the British colony of India; it was only after they were orphaned that they returned to England to live with their bachelor uncle. That’s the last we hear of India in any overt way in the text—neither Miles (10 years old) nor Flora (8) seems to have any memories of their childhood there, or at least none that they share with the governess. Which is, of course, an important distinction to make—the entire novella hinges on the question of what the children are hiding from the governess, and so it’s entirely fair to imagine that there might be secrets other than those of their prior servants that they do not divulge to her (and thus to us, since she’s our narrator and sole perspective). In any case, in an era when James’s home country of the United States was debating seriously the possibility of becoming an empire, and when his adopted country of Great Britain was considering whether and how its empire was worth sustaining, it’s at least important to note that James decides to include this imperial history within the children’s backstory, to make it a part of the heritage and identity of these two troubled young people.Next GhostStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other ghost stories or histories you’d share?

October 26, 2018: Video Game Studying: App Games

[On October 21st, 1997, DMA Design and Tarantula Studios released Grand Theft Auto , the controversial first game in what would become one of the most popular (and even more controversial) video game series of all time. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy GTA and four other seminal video games. Share your thoughts on these and any and all other games for a crowd-sourced weekend post that requires no quarters or tokens to play!]On a couple of takeaways from a decade or so of app gaming.The lives of my two sons, now 12 and 11 years old, have correlated almost exactly with the rise and dominance of the smartphone, so it’s probably no surprise that it is through them that I have experienced the brave new video gaming world of app games. Indeed, I’ve listened to my boys excitedly go through phases focused on most of the games on the top ten lists of both the most downloaded and the most spent-upon app games of the last decade (among other games they’ve loved that didn’t quite make those lists, such as their first app game addiction Spy Mouse ); and for a solid year or so they got me similarly obsessed with one of the games that ranks high on both lists, Supercell’s smash hit Clash of Clans . While it would be easy to see app games as occupying a fundamentally different genre (and even perhaps a different medium) than other video games, I think that would also be largely if not entirely inaccurate: every gaming console or system has its differences, but every one still allows gamers to play video games; and most app games have direct parallels to other popular and more traditional video games (#1 download Candy Crush Saga to prior shape stacking games like Tetris, Clash of Clans to prior worldbuilding games like Civilization, and so on). Thinking of app games as video games allows us to consider a couple of interesting 21stcentury gaming trends that they both reveal and have helped popularize. Perhaps the most obvious is seeing video games as a constant activity and part of the regular flow of our day-to-day lives, rather than a distinct or separate use of our time. That is, to game on a system or computer generally requires turning on that console and game, and thus making a conscious choice to enter into that space for some particular period of time; whereas an app game is present on the device on which we’re already spending so much time, and generally requires barely a second to open and play (and a similar second to stop playing or pause in order to do other things, on or off that device). Of course some past games have already been able to serve that purpose—I used to play at least one game of Minesweeper religiously before starting any writing work—but I would argue that those were one small subset or niche of the gaming world, rather than the central category that app games have become. Obviously it’s not just the games that have become utterly tied to our moment-to-moment lives; but this particular change in gaming both reflects those broader technological shifts and represents an interesting specific effect within the world of video gaming.The other thing I want to highlight about app games is less of a definite trend and more of a question, and one tied to broader questions about smartphones, social media, the internet, 21st century society, and other such small issues. It’s possible to see app video gaming as one more way we’ve become more isolated from each other, linked more to what’s happening on these devices than to those around us (as, for example, we’d be if we were playing a video game with a group of friends, all staring at the same screen at least). But it’s equally possible to see app games (like video games overall, of course) as a way that we can and do connect to each other—my boys have shared every app gaming experience with each other, and as I mentioned also shared at least one extended one with me; and they similarly have connected to friends near and far in the same ways, both literally through online gaming and figuratively through discussing these shared worlds and experiences. The answer, of course, lies in a combination of these two poles, along with many other effects along the spectrum. But that doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t or won’t ultimately be possible to assess app games as creating more isolation or more community, and those are worthwhile and important questions to ask of this new gaming form, as well as of the technologies to which they connect.Crowd-sourced post this weekend,BenPS. So one more time: what do you think? Other video games you’d highlight and analyze?

October 25, 2018: Video Game Studying: Doom

[On October 21st, 1997, DMA Design and Tarantula Studios released Grand Theft Auto , the controversial first game in what would become one of the most popular (and even more controversial) video game series of all time. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy GTA and four other seminal video games. Share your thoughts on these and any and all other games for a crowd-sourced weekend post that requires no quarters or tokens to play!]On two strikingly communal and collaborative sides to the influential first-person shooter.I could write a post about id Software’s Doom (1993) very similar to yesterday’s on Pac-Man, as Doom was nearly as innovative and influential in its own era and genre as the little yellow dude was in his. (To cite one such aspect that I won’t be focusing on in this post: the game was originally distributed through shareware, making it a very direct predecessor to internet gaming.) Indeed, having spent more hours than I care to admit during my first year of college playing Doom with and against (on which more in a moment) other residents of my dorm, I would be even more equipped (armed, one might say) to write overall about the game’s staggering popularity and effects. But I wanted to take a slightly different approach for today’s post, and to focus in more closely on two distinct but interconnected aspects of Doom, both of which in their own ways reflect the game’s striking communal and collaborative elements—and both of which have been frustratingly linked to critiques of the game and its first-person shooter ilk for inspiring (whether implicitly or even explicitly) acts of violence in the real world.The first such communal aspect was a main reason why I spent so much time Doom-ing during my freshman year: the multiplayer mode known as “deathmatch.” The ostensible goal of Doomis to defeat level after level of swarming monsters using your array of weapons, and the game offered a “cooperative” (or “co-op”) multiplayer mode in which 2-4 players (linked through a shared network, such as, I dunno, in a college first-year dorm) could team up to fight those monsters as a unit. But that was only one of the game’s two multiplayer modes, and the other was the deathmatch, in which 2-4 players instead compete against one another, becoming their respective targets instead of the monsters. The deathmatch gameplay option became so popular that various corporations had to ban Doom entirely in order to keep their employees from devoting all their time to playing against each other. In my experience, Doomdeathmatches were a great way to connect with my fellow dormmates and become better friends with this important academic community; but for critics, the chance to kill fellow humans (rather than unrealistic monsters) brought video game violence home to the real world in dangerous ways—a perspective that was seemingly validated when the 1999 Columbine High School shooters were revealed to have been avid Doom players.That tenuous link between one of the first prominent school shootings and Doom was mythically amplified by a connection to the other communal and collaborative aspect of the game I want to highlight: the ability for players to create and play in their own custom levels, known as WAD files (“Where’s All the Data?”). The potential for such customization was a striking innovation, and became one of the most popular and shared aspects of the game for many players. But this aspect also became unhappily associated with Columbine, as one of the two shooters, Eric Harris, had apparently designed a number of WADs of his own (which came to be known as “Harris levels”). However, one of the key elements to how that fact was reported turned out to be entirely false: reports suggested that Harris had designed a level based on Columbine High and had used it to practice for the school shooting; but that was quite simply not the case. Here we can see quite specifically and frustratingly the way that violent video games in general, and this innovative collaborative side to Doom in particular, can be inaccurately turned into fodder for attacks on the games and their negative societal effects. Like any work of art, Doom can and should be analyzed and critiqued; but neither the WADs nor Doom overall are what gave us Columbine.Last game tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other video games you’d highlight and analyze?

October 24, 2018: Video Game Studying: Pac-Man

[On October 21st, 1997, DMA Design and Tarantula Studios released Grand Theft Auto , the controversial first game in what would become one of the most popular (and even more controversial) video game series of all time. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy GTA and four other seminal video games. Share your thoughts on these and any and all other games for a crowd-sourced weekend post that requires no quarters or tokens to play!]On three of the many ways Namco’s smash 1980 launch helped changed the game(s).1)      Character: Arcade and video games had certainly diversified in the decade or so since the release of yesterday’s subject Pong, with the biggest hits in the years before Pac Man arrived space shooters like Space Invaders and Asteroids . But one thing that no game had quite featured until the little yellow dude was a recognizable and marketable main character, one who could become the mascot and (literal) face of the game and franchise. That focus allowed the game to include another innovation: cutscenes in between levels, brief mini-movies featuring that main character in wacky adventures. It allowed for hugely successful sequels like 1981’s Ms. Pac-Man that would not have been possible without a distinct character at the heart of the franchise. And it paved the way for many of the most popular video games and franchises of all time: the Mario Brothers, Sonic the Hedgehog, Kirby, the Angry Birds, and more.2)      Artificial Intelligence: One of the game’s vital coding innovations was that the enemies—the four cute but deadly “ghosts” (Blinky, Inky, Pinky, and Clyde, natch) who pursue Pac-Man as he tries to eat all those delicious dots and fruits—were programmed with artificial intelligence and could respond to the player’s moves. I don’t imagine it was the most sophisticated such AI— Ex Machina this wasn’t, that is—but nonetheless, even the idea that every time you played Pac-Man, you could have an entirely different experience depending on your own choices and what effects they had on the ghosts’ behaviors was a profoundly new element to video gaming. I talked in Monday’s post about the flexible and interactive qualities to video games; of course that was somewhat true even with the Pong’s of the world, but adding artificial intelligence in this way (and at any level of complexity) really began to illustrate the possibilities for that kind of player-game interactivity.3)      Winnability: That artificial intelligence and its promises of constantly evolving gameplay certainly contribute to a sense of Pac-Man as a particularly replayable arcade and video game, one that grossed over $1 billion in quarters (!) in its first year of release. But another important element was Pac-Man’s seeming yet elusive sense of winnabililty; as Atari’s Chris Crawford put it in an 1982 interview with Byte magazine, “An important trait of any game is the illusion of winnability ... The most successful game in this respect is Pac-Man, which appears winnable to most players, yet is never quite winnable.” Indeed, Pac-Man was designed to have no final level, although apparently if a player beats 255 consecutive levels, a bizarrely split-screen and supposedly unbeatable 256thfinal level does appear. Even that strange, glitch-like detail, however, would only add to that sense of potential yet also ephemeral winnability, making playing Pac-Man again and again that much more appealing. Which, for nearly forty years now, is just what gamers have done.Next game tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other video games you’d highlight and analyze?

October 23, 2018: Video Game Studying: Pong

[On October 21st, 1997, DMA Design and Tarantula Studios released Grand Theft Auto , the controversial first game in what would become one of the most popular (and even more controversial) video game series of all time. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy GTA and four other seminal video games. Share your thoughts on these and any and all other games for a crowd-sourced weekend post that requires no quarters or tokens to play!]On two lesser-known and telling moments in the history of the first blockbuster arcade game.While I’m sure video game historians would point to many moments and games as possible origin points for the genre, some as that hyperlinked timeline indicates from as early as the 1940s, there’s no doubt that high on any such list would be Atari’s 1972 arcade release Pong. Debuting in late November 1972, Pong would quickly become a national and worldwide phenomenon, helping establish the viability of video game arcades in commercial spaces (and then eventually in spaces all their own), contributing (if in a complex way on which more in a moment) to the successful launch of the first home gaming system (the Magnavox Odyssey), spawning numerous sequels and copycat games, and generally changing the landscape of not only gaming and technology, but also entertainment, social spaces and interactions, and childhood. If that seems like an awful lot to attribute to one video game, well, that was the remarkable power of those two white paddles and that frustratingly bouncy little white ball. Indeed, I would say that only Star Wars measures up to Pong when it comes to 1970s popular culture landmarks that have influenced the next half-century of American and human life.That overall influence is pretty well-known, but in researching this post I learned about a couple of a lesser-known and equally telling moments in Pong’s early history. For one thing, the game was the subject of a 1974 lawsuit from Magnavox (and its parent company Sanders Associates). In May 1972 Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell had attended a Magnavox event and seen a demonstration of the company’s own table tennis game, and he himself later admitted that seeing the game prompted him to ask his own employee, engineer Allan Alcorn, to make a table tennis game for Atari; as Bushnell put it, “The fact is that I absolutely did see the Odyssey game and I didn't think it was very clever.” Despite protesting innocence from any patent infringement, Bushnell and Atari decided to settle out of court with Magnavox, with the case concluding in June 1976. I can’t really weigh in on the merits of the lawsuit; the two games do look pretty similar to me, but I suppose all table tennis games, especially in that very early era of game design, would likely seem similar. What I can say, however, is that the subsequent history of video games has been defined again and again by competing games and systems, a trend very much foreshadowed by Pong’s controversial relationship to Magnavox table tennis.The other telling moment is far less weighty than a lawsuit, but just as socially significant I’d say. In describing why and how Pong became such an arcade hit, Bushnell would later note, “It was very common to have a girl with a quarter in hand pull a guy off a bar stool and say, 'I'd like to play Pong and there's nobody to play.' It was a way you could play games, you were sitting shoulder to shoulder, you could talk, you could laugh, you could challenge each other ... As you became better friends, you could put down your beer and hug. You could put your arm around the person. You could play left-handed if you so desired. In fact, there are a lot of people who have come up to me over the years and said, 'I met my wife playing Pong,' and that's kind of a nice thing to have achieved.” This is of course another important side to the flexible and interactive qualities of video games that I highlighted in yesterday’s post—while of course many games can be played solo (not Pong, though, at least not in its first arcade iteration—it was two-player only), there is a fundamentally social element to gaming, and perhaps especially to arcade gaming. The art is often created, that is, through a communal experience, and one that, as Bushnell’s quote illustrates, links to other communal experiences like social interactions, friendship, and romantic relationships. All part of what Ponghelped initiate as well!Next game tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other video games you’d highlight and analyze?