Seeing video games as an academic field of study

I got up this morning with the crazy idea of recommending a website to you all. www.gamestudies.org will surely change your view upon the video game industry. This periodical academic journal has engaged in analyzing video games form all cultural points of view. Whether you want to find out how multiplayer shooters like Counter-Strike generate new language, compare The Sims to other popular titles (Grannies really ARE cooler than trolls, don’t you think?!) or just gain another point of view on one of the most famous games of the 21st century (World of Warcraft), you are surely bound to find out interesting things.

Video games have emerged as a cultural field of study for about nine years, with the launch of the first international scholarly conference on computer games, in Copenhagen in March 2001. The same academic year saw regular graduate programs in computer game studies being offered for the first time in universities. That is when scholars and academics first took computer games seriously, as a cultural field whose value is hard to overestimate.

As Espen Aarseth, in the editorial for the Game Studies journal admits:

We have a billion dollar industry with almost no basic research, we have the most fascinating cultural material to appear in a very long time, and we have the chance of uniting aesthetic, cultural and technical design aspects in a single discipline. This will not be a painless process, and many mistakes will be made along the way. But if we are successful, we can actually contribute both constructively and critically, and make a difference outside the academy. I am not too optimistic about influencing a multibillion industry. But in the long run, who knows?

And I really think games deserve a reality check, before they explode in an uncontrolled, poor quality pseudo-reality.

The Narrative Perspective in “Fannie and Annie” by D.H.Lawrence

This short story is part of D.H. Lawrence’s “England, my England” short story collection. Curious what I am talking about? Read it on Scribd.

D.H. Lawrence is the first writer in English with a truly international reputation to have come from the working class, and this is reflected in his work both in terms of subject matter and some of his attitudes. Many of his short stories, for instance, deal with elemental conflicts between men and women, but are set amongst ordinary working people. “Fanny and Annie” is no exception from the rule, as it presents the potential marriage between Fanny, a lady’s maid and Harry, a foundry worker, all taking place in a very realistic working class community.

As in most of his short-stories, in “Fanny and Annie” too, D.H. Lawrence  changes his manner of writing from one scene to the next, being sometimes plain and direct, sometimes lush and florid, while sometimes he intrudes in his narrative to deliver lectures in a style which is flagrantly rethorical and often incantatory. It is this aspect of Lawrence, the seer, the prophet that could most closely describe the type of narrator which he chooses for his writings. The narrative voice is omnipresent, closely focused on the main character, Fanny, as she progressively gets to the final decision of marrying Harry in spite of all the town gossip. In addition, the voice describes the woman’s thoughts and reveals portions of her past, as if all-knowing. It anticipates future scenes and even the reintegration of Fanny, a personality aspiring for the higher middle-class, into the working class society she once belonged to.

But the first purpose of this voice is to provide a realistic setting of the story. (more…)