Tag Archive for blogging

Remembering hearts

IMG_1352I have a whole whack of backlogged posts-to-write that I haven’t gotten around to: the end of spring semester (the end of my second year as a full-fledged assistant professor!) was full and busy. Two conferences, including a trip to Canada, thoughts on teaching an experimental-for-me course, other assorted bits of my life. Frankly, as summer slides by – as it’s wont to do when you’re an academic, I was at the dentist a few weeks ago & the hygienist said to me ‘It must be so nice to have the whole summer off!’, and I could only laugh, because it’s not quite that simple – every day means it’s less likely for me to go back and write those posts, or finish the half-written ones in my queue. I may sit on quiet, cool nights and tap through my phone, looking at photographs and little snippets of video that make me smile, but I don’t really want to write about them. But a past of mine that passed into history long ago: well, that’s a little easier to write about. A little more like writing proper history.

I don’t pay much attention to games writing these days, and honestly haven’t for a long time – certainly not for the past year or so, since there’s been so much hateful stuff directed at people I know and respect. It’s easier – as a person no longer connected to any of that, except in the most tenuous way – to get my news in snips here and there on Twitter, on Facebook. I don’t have to watch E3 because it’s my job, so I don’t. I don’t have to pay attention to GDC or the latest press releases, so I don’t – except when it’s already been filtered through people I know and trust, who have had to go through all that shit first. The first game-related thing I’ve felt strongly enough to post about in a while was Leigh Alexander’s wonderful essay on FFVII. It was beautiful. It was worth sharing.

This past E3, the long-begged for Final Fantasy VII remake was announced. FFX was my first ‘real’ FF (I have written about that), though I had played 7 & 8 & 9 prior to that. But I had a different relationship with those games than many people my age: though I played them close-to-or-shortly-after-their-release, it was still in a sort of second hand way, not in the excitement of playing the new thing that’s just come out. I was just starting to play videogames again – and really play them in more than a ‘7 year old with a GameBoy’ way – when these games were the latest thing; I didn’t even know what a JRPG was, never mind that I loved them. But I was close enough to 7 that I can understand why people have these bigger life memories bound up in it. It is of my generation, even if it wasn’t mine. I am currently replaying FFVIII (not one of my favorites in any case, but there’s a certain amount of comfort and nostalgia in its crazy junction system and story). I remember sitting on the floor of a friend’s cramped little room that I spent a lot of hours in as a high school student, watching him play the game. I remember how that room smelled and looked and felt.

Games always conjure up memories of where I was in life when I play them. That doesn’t mean I don’t have memories, important & emotional ones, attached to other kinds of media – music is particularly evocative, of course, and I can go through my library and give you a run down of where I was in life when I first read this book or that (even academic monographs). They have feelings attached to them. I hauled a bunch of books into my office today & going through them took forever, because I kept running down the hall to say to my friend ‘Look at this little memory or that! You should read this one … Oh, look at this random piece of academic dust that is living in the pages of this book I haven’t looked at in years …’, or I just sat on the floor of my little office and paged through them silently, remembering. But those memories are never as consistently complete as game memories are.

DSC00311.JPGThe game related to 7 that was mine was a PSP spinoff released in 2008, Crisis Core. It’s a beautiful little game in a lot of ways. I got it not because I was so attached to 7, but because I had played 7 & was curious about how Square was going to deal with a game where you knew the outcome before you started playing. I had also lived in Taiwan between 2006 & 2007, when FFVII prequel mania was at its height – my terrible little bathroom in my terrible (but wonderful) little rooftop one room studio with no kitchen had a FFVII prequel wall hanging in it (bathroom not shown here, but you get the idea). Crisis Core is a game where the main character is one that you know is dead in 7, the game that comes after. How does a writer deal with that? Can you write a satisfying story where everyone – well, everyone that had played the main game, which is the target audience here – playing it knows the character you’re playing is going to die? They did. I cried at the end – an end I knew I was coming. Maybe that’s why I liked it: it was like writing history with a sad end, where you know things are going to end badly.

861e3f3c6807f4d4762eff1ee6d054a6I played it on a PSP that I had bought myself on a whim the Christmas of ’07, at the end of my first quarter of grad school: I remember getting on the highway & driving down to the area with all the big box stores so I could go to GameStop. I came home with a trusty black PSP, which remained trusty and well-traveled until it was replaced with a Vita this year, long after it had become obsolete. It lives in my basement still, in its nice case, the kind that you could insert your own image into – which I carefully trimmed a photograph of the Meiji Temple in winter to fit, from my beautiful Christmas cards I used while I was in coursework. The interior simply said Peace. I still have a few in a desk drawer in my home office; I couldn’t bring myself to use all of them. I tried to find a case like that for my DS or Vita, because I just wanted to carry that beautiful image again, and I came up empty. That case (and PSP) went all over the US & to China (and various points in between), and now lives in my basement, mostly forgotten.

This past spring, I taught a seminar called “Games, Play & History,” which was basically a wonderful disaster. I had a lot of really wonderful students; we read some really wonderful stuff; I think I was trying to do something interesting. A lot of what I wanted to do didn’t happen, there were some unexpected bright spots that I was (delightedly) shocked by, and it was just a big learning experience in general. But while I was setting the course up in December and January, I was going through my archives and trying to find examples of good and interesting and different writing about games. An essay that kept nagging at me was one written by Leigh Alexander in 2008, about Crisis Core. I’ve read a lot (a lot) of Leigh’s writing, since my ‘career’ at Kotaku basically coincided with the early stages of her career, and while she’s written a lot of wonderful, smart stuff before and since – better stuff – this essay had stuck with me for a long time as a brilliant example of good writing on a contemporary game: striking a balance between nostalgic and insightful, personal and broad, a piece that talked about this cultural thing in her hands right now and how it connected to the past and spoke to it and was informed by it. It was, in short, a great piece of historical writing that wasn’t history. It’s what I try to do with my own academic work, I think: there is this thing I have right now in my hands that’s beautiful, and here’s why it matters beyond its immediate wonderful qualities.

CrisisCoreOSTI haven’t read it in years. But I remember saving a tab in my browser after it was published (where? I don’t even remember – maybe it was just on her Sexyvideogameland blog, the one that I linked to over and over when I wrote for Kotaku), and going back to look and look again, like I always do with good writing. In it, she talked about playing this game, this prequel to a game that had meant so much to her, and playing it while in the midsts of a relationship that was breaking down. And it wasn’t just that she was playing through this game where you know the main character is going to die, where the designers are deliberately making your heart stop with all these echoes of the game before, the game you are so attached to. But that original game formed the basis of that relationship that was breaking down. She wrote of this dying relationship, and silently passing the PSP between them, looking at this end-beginning – whatever one would term a prequel – that you know is going to end badly, at least for the current incarnation. And you have something here, in the right now, that is ending badly. But it’s a start, too: something new. It isn’t just the past replaying itself again and again.

It was beautiful. It was – it still is – one of the most beautiful pieces of writing on games I have ever read, partially because it was just so bloody personal and in a way that a lot of games writing, even relatively intimate stuff, just isn’t. I haven’t read it in at least six years, and I remember the way she described passing that PSP. Perhaps not in detail, but how it made her feel, because I felt it, too (and isn’t that what good writing is supposed to do?).

I don’t remember when she published the essay. Maybe it was April or May. Maybe it was June. I played through Crisis Core frantically when it first came out, in March. I galloped through it, I loved it, I finished it. I remember being glued to it, at least partially, when my boyfriend came to visit me (depressed, unhappy, freaked out, lonely me) in San Diego: it was, in many respects, easier to cling to the PSP than to him. I need to finish this. I reset it two months later, and frantically played through it again. Then took my time with the end, and maybe this is why I loved Leigh’s essay so much. I now had my own dying relationship on my hands: now I took my time in finishing it. The game, the essay, the relationship. I savored it, in a way, at the same time that it killed me to spend so much time on something where I already knew the ending. I sat in front of my shitty apartment in San Diego, on somewhat alarmingly rickety concrete steps, and smoked Camel Lights and drank Asahi, my PSP clutched in one hand. My dying relationship was different than hers, of course, but it was comforting to know that someone else had played through the same game I was now, feeling some of the same things I was feeling now.

When I pull out well loved monographs, or even novels, from my shelf, it’s hard to say that.

When I wanted to put the essay up on my course site this past January, I couldn’t find it. I wanted so badly to read it again, just for myself, even more than I wanted to be able to say to my students: This is what writing on a medium you don’t even think is very important can be. Maybe I just wanted to feel for a little bit what I had in April or May or June of 2008, when I was younger and a first year grad student and had a boyfriend I adored and still didn’t know how to handle distance. Maybe I just wanted to remember how those problems felt, the things I dealt with and survived, while I faced down new problems I don’t quite know how to manage, where I sit up late at night and whisper to myself that I don’t know if I can do this. Maybe I’m just hopeless. Maybe there is no good ending. I do know that I often find myself reading about games I loved a long, long time ago & thinking about a long, long time ago more generally (again, something that doesn’t usually happen when I read, say, book reviews of a well-loved monograph, even from years and years ago).

But it was nowhere to be found, Leigh’s essay. There is no JSTOR of old games writing.

I sheepishly sent an email to another ex-boyfriend and asked for suggestions, Where can I get this? It must exist somewhere. It has to. He gave me another email address, and said to just ask. So I did – shyly, shamefacedly. It was Leigh Alexander, after all – and who was I? Just another person cluttering up her inbox, asking for an old piece of writing she probably didn’t remember & she’d written better things since, besides. I knew that. I didn’t want her to think I thought she’d written nothing of value in the years since – not that she’d care about my opinion – it was just that this had really meant something to me.

The first time I met Leigh in person was at E3 in 2008, when we both worked for Kotaku, and as the two women on staff, had a hotel room to share. I had gotten there earlier than her, and was already set up at one of the desks when she breezed in. She was beautiful and cool and dressed so fashionably and so clearly comfortable with being Leigh Alexander. I was a shy, bumbling, nervous grad student, looking slightly ridiculous for being at a videogame event, not very comfortable with being Maggie Greene – my one photograph from that whole expedition is a selfie, showing off my E3 badge, ME with an E3 badge! How ridiculous! – and I was incredibly intimidated. We had a ‘Kotaku’ party at a bar one of the days, and I hid on the smoking porch, attached to another writer, afraid to talk to anyone. The people that did talk to me seemed shocked that I was a writer for Kotaku. I’m not sure what they were expecting, but it clearly wasn’t me. I remember towards the end of the night going up to get a drink at the bar, and seeing Leigh surrounded by people & being so comfortable. I marveled at her even as we walked back to the hotel barefooted, having taken off our pretty high heels because they were hurting our feet. I wondered if I could ever be that pretty and hip, or if I’d ever be so cool (I wasn’t, and am still not, any of those things).

I don’t think I told her then that she’d written something that I’d loved so much; in retrospect, I should have, because she probably would’ve liked to have heard that, much as I like to hear from people I know that they like my work. It means something different than random compliments, delightful as they are.

When she wrote back to me in January of this year and said that her Crisis Core essay was lost to the sands of time – worse than that, not able to be found on the internet! – it broke my heart a little bit. Oh, a piece of my past gone, I thought. And I felt bad for thinking it: she’s not writing for my pleasure. But the academic in me thought it was so sad, because – for better or for worse – all the stuff I’ve written as an academic is available, or at least findable. On the one hand, I’m glad she’s managed to make things go “poof”: it’s her writing, after all. But it’s sad to want something and be unable to find it. It’s not that we haven’t lost stuff previously. I was a Latin major in a former life, and one of my most beloved Latin teachers told us that in grad school, one of the favorite questions to sit around & discuss while tipsy was ‘If you could exchange one piece of extant writing for one piece that isn’t, what would those two be?’

My professor was talking about writers that had been lost – literally – to the sands of time, with some hope of an ancient, ragged manuscript dug up somewhere in an ancient Egyptian trash heap. I have no hope of that with a Crisis Core essay: it’s gone, just like those nights of sitting on rickety steps, chain smoking & drinking Japanese beer. Maybe that’s the wonderful and horrible thing about all these words on the internet. We talk about it as if it’s ‘simply’ disposable, but it’s ‘simply’ disposable – or becomes intangible – in the same way bits of our life do. It happened; it was; we remember; but we can’t touch it, can’t access it any more.

For now, for these little bits of digital flotsam, I just hit the ‘Paginated PDF’ button on my browser – as I did when I read Leigh’s most recent piece on FFVII – because wonderful writing might just disappear and not be hanging out in the Internet Archive for me to read, and there is no paper version. Even my own boring, run of the mill posts on Kotaku are gone, things I want now, brief records of what was important then. So I hit ‘Paginated PDF’: because you might find yourself years down the road longing to read just a certain essay, connected to nothing contemporary, since you want to remember what it felt to be like then. 

It’s yet another summer of learning how to say ‘goodbye,’ something I’m not very good at, but is a constant fact of life as an academic. And I know there are all sorts of things that are happening this summer that I’m silently telling myself to remember: remember how this feels, and that, and that. Because that’s all I’ll have soon. And I tell myself to remember those things, because invariably, something – like my class, or Leigh’s recent essay, or whatever – will crop up and remind me, whether I would like to remember or not. Pass this thing back and forth, remember together. It’s sad and beautiful. It means something. There should always be something more tangible than there was this thing that made me feel once, but often, there isn’t.

There’s a beautiful poem by Mary Ursula Bethell called “Response.” She writes of letters, and minor happinesses, and the now. Also the past. The last stanza is beautiful:

But oh, we have remembering hearts,
And we say ‘How green it was in such and such an April,’
And ‘Such and such an autumn was very golden,’
And ‘Everything is for a very short time.’

It reminds me of those fleeting moments: devouring Crisis Core on my lousy San Diego steps; walking back to a hotel near the convention center in LA, barefoot because my feet hurt; walking home with a person I adore so fiercely my heart could burst; laying on my couch, half-asleep, listening to a dog dreaming loudly; all those moments from Shanghai or grad school or or or ….. I think we get accustomed to the idea that our lives online stretch on and on, last forever (after all, isn’t that what all the news articles say?). They are for such a very long time -  but really, the bits that make it up can be (or are) such slippery things, and everything is for a very short time.

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“No, YOU’RE a bad Marxist” – On Debates & Things

Well, the semester is well & truly underway here. I’ve been having (anxiety-ridden) fun with my seminar – a topic I’ll come back to in a few weeks – and (completely anxiety ridden) not-so-fun with my manuscript, although I have been making forward progress. On the one hand, I’ve enjoyed getting back into my sources, trawling various databases, and the like; on the other, I keep bumping into walls that remind me I’m Not Very Good at some of this stuff. By which I mean: I have a lot of talents as a scholar (I think), but I also work on a kind of weird topic that’s at the intersection of several different disciplines and sub-disciplines, which often is going to make one feel like an idiot (“Why don’t I know everything about, well, everything“). There have been tears and angry tirades – and the grownup equivalent of temper tantrums directed at one’s self, which in my case usually means stalking off to soak in the bath for a good long while & having some comforting, juvenile dinner, like beer and croutons. But it hasn’t been unproductive, and once I yank myself out of a funk, I usually realize I am making progress!

The past few weeks, I’ve been revisiting/rewriting & doing some fresh work on one of my favorite little interludes from my research – a 1951 debate on drama adaptations of the famous Chinese story, “The Cowherd and the Weaving Maid” [niulang zhinü 牛郎织女]. The story is one of two celestial lovers, who wind up so engrossed in each other & having passionate, celestial sex that they (a) stop herding the celestial cows and (b) stop weaving celestial cloth. This makes other denizens of the celestial realm pretty angry, both because the cows are wandering everywhere and they have no new fabric for clothing. So – in the interests of the greater celestial good – the lovers are forcibly separated, only allowed to meet once a year. This is the basis for the Double Seven Festival – Qixi 七夕, or Tanabata in Japan: the stars Vega and Altair “meet” on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month (this does Screen Shot 2015-02-03 at 11.13.43 PMactually happen – another star serves as the “bridge”). This has, as far as I know, turned into some bizarre Valentine’s Day spin-off (at least partially), but originally, it was a celebration of women’s work (one of its alternate names is the Qiqiaojie 乞巧节, the ‘Begging for Skills Festival,’ referencing domestic skills & the practice of qiqiao 乞巧, making offerings to the Weaving Girl and holding competitions related to domestic tasks, like threading needles only by the light of the moon) & also one hoping for love or celebrating bonds. Or for missing lovers who were absent – not uncommon, at least among the poetry-writing literati, when husbands were not infrequently off on far-flung bureaucratic assignments and the like. In any case, it’s always struck me as a good deal mopier than Valentine’s Day, for the coupled and singled alike.

Regardless of its mopey (or not) character, it’s an important story & one that has been rather beloved on Chinese stages. Thus, the 1951 debate: to the consternation of many people, some particularly enthusiastic playwrights had been remaking the story to better speak to contemporary events. After all, art was supposed to be drawn from and speak to the people, and that included contemporary concerns, not abstract star lovers. In 1951, this largely meant the Korean War, so there were versions where Harry S. Truman (yes, Truman) was represented in the guise of the King of Demons, supporting characters become helpmates of feudal morality & the patriarchy, the Cowherd & the Weaving Maid actually didn’t mind being separated because it left more time for work (my title for this chapter is actually “The Weaving Maid as Labor Hero”), and the like. Some intellectuals liked this: it was taking art and really making it serve the present! But many intellectuals (the winning side of this debate, actually – both in the short term, and on the whole, at least until 1963/1965) emphatically did not like the idea of Harry Truman (or much of anything else) intruding on a classic, beloved Chinese story, and objected. Loudly. Very loudly. On the pages of People’s Daily, the CCP’s print mouthpiece.

It’s a very interesting debate, and pretty fun (I take particular glee in quoting some of the more snippy parts of it) – I discovered it more or less by happenstance, but it has a lot of things to say about drama reform in this early period, as well as theoretical issues. It’s largely been read solely as a theoretical debate (one on “formulism,” “subjectivism,” and “historical materialism” – the primary concerns here being approaches to historical material). I’m more interested in the actual subject matter of a few key essays, which are fundamentally, I think, addressing questions about how best to handle China’s “traditional” culture and explicating the relationship between art and socialism. There’s theory, to be sure, but we’ve generally looked past all the rest. It’s also simply pretty fun: a spicy, snarky argument between brilliant people – and there’s a certain casualness I don’t usually associate with my sources. It really does remind me of fans debating the particulars of a plot point – just really, really smart fans, deconstructing their perceived enemies in really smart ways. I described it recently on Twitter like this:

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I had a realization at some point while writing my dissertation, while tracing these kinds of debates between 1949 and 1963. For the most part – with very few exceptions – even these pretty violent debates (the subject of the Weaving Girl debate received a serious dressing down on the pages of People’s Daily – it can seem laughable in retrospect, especially some of the words hurled from this side to that, but there was someone who had to read this stuff written about them and their work in the CCP mouthpiece) look less like hardened ideological adversaries than people who are more or less on the same side, just have some quibbles with execution, interpretation, etc. (Kirk Denton points this out regarding Hu Feng & Mao, at least on some subjects, and certainly it’s been noted in a lot of more recent scholarship). From the distance of 70 years, minor stuff: and after all, most of them – with very few exceptions – wound up on the wrong side of the Party during the Cultural Revolution. In the end, time – and Mao – were the great equalizers.

frontWhen I started looking more seriously at older parts of the historiography, I realized the field had spent some time sorting many of these people into various categories. “Establishment” intellectuals, for instance, or “revolutionary” intellectuals. These divisions can be useful, to a point; but they can also obscure a larger point, which is there was frequently a lot more similarities between these people than sorting them into different “camps” would lead you to believe. I don’t mean to imply I think there weren’t differences, or that seemingly minor differences don’t have an impact. As the political trials and travails of the 1950s and early 1960s – never mind the Cultural Revolution – indicate, there were camps, and your opinion on certain matters could have deadly consequences. But at the same time, from a distance of 70 years, there are a lot more similarities than differences. All of the people in my 1951 debate, for instance, agreed that China’s traditional culture was important and should be preserved. They disagreed on what that preservation should look like (among other things). But they agreed on one of the most important things of all: that this was worth arguing about, fighting over.

Largely because I was bound up in trying to understand some of the more theoretical terms of this debate, I missed much of a more recent debate, on the subject of formalism and games. The fact that I was trying to figure out WTF subjectivism-formUlism (subjective-formulism? subjectivism & formulism?) encompassed – and fighting with autocorrect, which kept inserting “formalism” for “formulism” – while people on Twitter & in the blogosphere were viciously arguing about formAlism & games was a weird coincidence. Perhaps it was the spelling similarity in these -isms that made me ponder the similarity between the nature and shape of these debates.

I’m won’t rehash everything here – partially because I haven’t read everything (though I’ve looked at a lot), but partially because I’m less interested in the particulars than the shape of the debate – but I couldn’t help but read through everything and think that some historian, 70 years hence, would be sitting and reading the posts and laughing her head off, in much the same way that I laugh and laugh and laugh when reading my Weaving Girl debates. Not because the stakes were laughable, or the subject, or the writing, or anything else: but because that historian 70 years hence is going to know how things play out, and it’s entirely possible (likely, even) that the denouement will make what came before seem minor in comparison. But also that you’re witnessing – by virtue of being removed from it – people who more or less fall on the same side of an issue argue in a manner not entirely befitting their lack of an ideological gap. I don’t mean everyone falls on the same side of the “formalism” debate. What I mean is that everyone agrees games are important and worth talking about and studying. 

The most striking thing I read, while trying to catch up on some of this, was actually Ian’s comments on game studies as a discipline – found at the bottom of this post. Largely because it struck me as a pretty self-reflexive comment on a field that he has obviously had a large part in, and also has a lot of investment in. And it summed up why I found this all so achingly reminiscent of those “ancient” Weaving Girl debates: ultimately, if game studies is the academic joke Ian sketches it as, the people on both sides of this debate have a lot more in common with each other – at least where games are involved – than they do with the rest of the academy. This isn’t a “can’t we all get along” plea – Ian’s right, I think, in that debate is good in the long run (history hasn’t died as a discipline because we fight like cats and dogs over approach and theory, for instance. Plenty of people have serious disdain for the kind of history I do, and I have my own preferences when it comes to how to do history. That hasn’t stopped each of us from doing our thing – sometimes vicious repartee in major journals, monographs & edited volumes notwithstanding - and I daresay that kind of discussion and debate means the field’s a lot healthier than it would be if we all had the same approach to everything).

And, perhaps (well, almost certainly) ill advisedly, I’ll comment on what’s perplexed me most: the characterization of the “old guard” that says they’re involved in a “power grab” and/or some evil hegemonic power. Game studies has been, in my experience, the most open academic group I’ve been a part of. The idea that there’s essentially an evil cabal denigrating and trying to shut down points of view or research that don’t match their own really, really does not square with my own experience. Yes, I speak from a position of Privilege on multiple levels & that of course colors my perceptions. I “got into” game studies as a grad student because I wrote for Kotaku; I am now a tenure-track professor (of history). But I’m a serious outsider on a disciplinary level: my primary work is on the high socialist period of the PRC, for crying out loud. Even if I wanted to, I’m not equipped to do research on games in the way that much of the “old guard” is. And I don’t want to. And that’s been A-OK – I’ve never been cold shouldered, ignored, told to “kiss the ring” of important scholars, or belittled for being a cultural historian who doesn’t even do games as a primary subject of research. On the contrary, I’ve rubbed shoulders with a lot more luminaries – the “old guard,” I guess – at game studies conferences than I ever have in my home discipline. Doesn’t mean I always agree with them, or them with me, but it’s been a field made up of people (including the powerful and privileged) who have been really welcoming – I dare say encouraging – of different approaches. To be blunt, I’m a lot less freaked out about being a cultural historian when I go to a game studies conference than I am when interfacing with some members of my own field.

At FDG 2014, I was asked for the first time ever “What are you doing here?” (valid question, as it’s a conference where a Chinese historian is going to stick out more than at, say, DiGRA – which was the person’s point). But from that question, which I guess I could’ve taken as sign of latent hostility, flowed a really interesting, productive discussion, one that actually gave me an epiphany about my manuscript. Being in a relatively alien environment, with neither area studies nor history (nor games, for that matter) to fall back on as some kind of disciplinary common ground, I had to articulate my work in a way that made sense for someone whose academic context looks very, very different than mine. Experiences like that one are a reason I still make an effort, however small, to keep in the game studies milieu.

A few notes on obvious matters

Because isn't this what everyone aspires to?

Another day, another disgruntled post on how breaking into games journalism is hard (well, more a post about how breaking into games journalism is hard and I QUIT). I was struck yet again about how similar it all is to academia – so many people wanting so few positions, the same advice given to aspiring hopefuls (‘Don’t do it’), the complaints about that advice not being supportive enough, the accusation that it’s an exclusive and exclusionary club. Yet I think the author misses the mark here: it’s not necessarily an exclusionary club, and all the help in the world from people who have ‘made it’ won’t spell success for all the hopefuls. There are too many people who want jobs, or even just occasional nibbles on their freelance pitches, and not enough jobs; even when you remove all the people who don’t have the writing or intellectual chops, there are still too many people. Just like there are too many English PhDs and not enough jobs for English PhDs (insert department of choice here – it’s true for most of them, to some degree or another).

The ‘don’t do it’ advice is not so much exclusionary as it is cautionary. People say it knowing that the gung-ho person asking for advice is probably going to do whatever it is they’ve planned on, regardless. Sometimes it’s advice given from a position of knowing a lot about someone’s work. What we think about ourselves is often not what others see: it doesn’t matter how good a writer you think you are if you can’t convince others you’re brilliant. But regardless of raw talent or qualifications, the ‘don’t do it’ advice underscores a fundamental truth of breaking into games journalism (or academia): for most people, trying hard and being good isn’t enough. There is a high chance of failure, not because journalists are big mean exclusionary jerks, but because there aren’t enough jobs. Whether the author in question ‘worked hard enough,’ I don’t know – but even if he did, the chances of success are not stellar.

Of course, some people do make it, and a couple of people responded to the original posts with tales of success and the difficulty in finding that success. Scott Nichols gave us a nice article on the ‘club,’ and then another touching on some related issues. Brendan Keogh wrote a nice post about his success thus far. After some perfectly reasonable advice on how to break into games journalism, he has this to say:

At the end of the day, only one thing is true: to make it as a videogame journalist, you need to write a post about how to become a videogame journalist on your personal blog. So there you go. I made it. And you can too!

It occurred to me that – since he’s a smart & witty guy* who had just written in preceding paragraphs about “the ‘just keep writing until you make it! Don’t give up!’ crap pep talks” – this was perhaps a bit tongue in cheek, and what follows is certainly not an attack or criticism of his post, but I’m using it as a jumping off point. Because the ‘You can too!’ optimism is … not true. Rather, it isn’t going to be true for most people, and these kinds of statements are indicative of a problem that goes far beyond games journalism. It’s the insidious lie that if you just work hard enough and want it badly enough, you too can be a success!, something that has been drilled into – at least in the US – most people’s heads since childhood. It’s not true. It never has been true, and repeated statements to the effect that it IS true will not make it so. Sometimes, despite raw talent and ability, and despite doing everything ‘right,’ you will fail to attain your goals. In the case of academia or games journalism, both places where (for the most part) there are far, far more qualified applicants than there are available spots (freelance or salaried), chances of failure are quite high, no matter how talented you are or how well you sell yourself.

There is an element of luck to all of this. It’s something we don’t like to admit: a lot of success or failure has absolutely nothing to do with us and a lot to do with how things fall into place. I don’t mean to suggest that people who have ‘made it’ have done so without a lot of hand work, and have simply lucked into their positions. And while I don’t always like playing counterfactual history, it’s perhaps worth pondering if, say, Leigh Alexander would be where she is today if she had tried starting her career two years earlier, or two years later. Maybe she would be, or maybe not. I would offer that Leigh partially got her start on GameSetWatch, which no longer exists at all & hasn’t existed in that circa 2007 form for a pretty long time (closing off that particular avenue for aspiring Leighs-to-be): institutions (and the people involved in them) have a big impact on careers (a point I will return to shortly). On a personal level, would I have had the scrap of a “career” I did had that job opening been posted at another point in time? No. Would Kotaku of today hire me, or have need of putting up such a posting? No.

Or, another example, this one culled from the academic world. I spent my dissertation year in Shanghai supported by the prestigious Fulbright-Hays DDRA fellowship. In typical grant fashion, these things are decided on the basis of a ten page prospectus of your dissertation topic, a two page bibliography, and three letters of recommendation from professors. The LORs were out of my hands after I secured letter writers, but I spent a lot of time and effort putting together the best prospectus I could. I won one. But had I applied one year later, my letter writers would have been the same, my project would have been the same, and I would have left empty handed, as the competition was cancelled due to lack of funding. The year before I applied, two of my classmates both won the Hays – would I have been just as successful that year? Maybe, maybe not.

To say that some of my success was due to timing is simply to acknowledge that much of what happens in our careers has very little to do with us. It doesn’t mean that I think I was undeserving, or that my project isn’t good, or that I didn’t work hard. But I’ve found my graduate career a fine balancing act between self-criticism (‘I did XYZ very poorly and it needs work’) and admitting that sometimes, despite our best efforts and the quality of our offerings, the ‘stars weren’t aligned.’ Again, I don’t believe things are predetermined or that hard work has nothing to do with success – but I think we’d all be better off if we just admitted that yes, being in the right place at the right time, or knowing the right people, or any number of other things that have nothing to do with our talent or ability can impact our careers or lack thereof.

It doesn’t mean ‘don’t ever try,’ but it means ‘be prepared for failure.’ And preparing for failure is difficult and painful, especially when you are working your hardest and doing your best at the same time. I’ve given some really depressing advice to undergraduates thinking of grad school, and it’s not coming from a place of bitterness or failure – just one of being tired, and of being aware of how much the daily grind really takes out of you. I think the same can be said for the ‘don’t do it’ camp of battle-tested freelancers and writers. It’s hard. You’re probably not going to make it. And you need to go in understanding that the chances are you’re investing a lot of time, tears, and writing into an unsuccessful venture. Just as aspiring PhDs need to be comfortable with the idea of investing an unholy amount of time and effort and have absolutely nothing to show for it at the end in terms of long-term, gainful employment.

You'd be amazed at the faults that can be hidden with a little work

Which leads me to a seemingly unrelated issue. There is absolutely an element of gamesmanship or showmanship here (academia, games journalism, whatever) – knowing how to package yourself to hopefully get the best results – but it’s hard to know how to play the game if you’re ignoring the game. And, for the most part, people ignore the game of games journalism (there’s a touch of irony here … somewhere … maybe). It’s incredibly difficult to know how you fit into the bigger picture if you’re paying no attention to it, and the ‘But I love it so’ statements ignore the bigger picture. This is not entirely the fault of stars-in-their-eyes wannabe journalists: one of my greatest frustrations with the chatter of games journalism (or – more to the point – the critiques of games journalism) is that we spend astonishingly little time thinking about structures, about how all these different parts fit together. How does the aspiring writer fit into the system? How do the freelancers fit there? The stars? How do pressures from above impact the sorts of writing being produced – or who is being hired? Once we get past obvious hot button issues like ‘breasts = page views,’ there is precious little to be said about how all of this writing, all this knowledge is produced. You know, the producing that people want so badly to be doing.

We spend a lot of time lauding or tearing down individual writers and publications, and very, very little time thinking about how they fit together, or what they say about this culture of writing, reading, playing, consuming. It is mostly guaranteed that any time criticism or defense of a particular publication comes up, comments sections will be stuffed full of mind bogglingly ignorant commentary on how publications function, how it is that writers conduct their business. And really, it’s hard to blame such commentary on willfully ignorant participants – we never talk about structure(s), so why would anyone bring such things up? I would go back and cull a few examples from discussions that happened a few years ago, but it’s too depressing. Instead, I’ll just say that while academia is hardly a model to be emulated, a little more of the self-aware, self-critical examination of the ‘big picture’ (à la – dare I say it? – area studies) would be useful for all of us, past, present, and wannabe writers.

It won’t stop the frustration of people who feel they’re outside of the ‘club,’ and it certainly won’t stop the the fact that most people aren’t going to be successful, but it may take the edge off that ‘don’t do it’ advice. It may give us a little insight into how things function in this little journalistic subculture of ours, and really – won’t we (and our work) just be all the better for that?

*I had a crazy dream a few nights before I posted this that Brendan took serious offense to this & it led to a lot of people I’m very fond of on Twitter, like Kris Ligman, getting angry at me & saying particularly nasty things. It goes without saying that I hope that doesn’t actually happen, since none of this is coming from a place that’s critical of Brendan!

Iron girls

'We are proud of participating in the founding of our country's industrialization!' (1954; from chineseposters.net)

I’ve been trotting through the history of Chinese women in the 20th century in preparation for a course I’m teaching this coming winter. Unraveling these narratives that have been put in service to nation building has been both a trip down memory lane (recalling the early days of my fascination with Chinese history) and diving into new-to-me secondary sources that have popped up in the past couple of years, while my attention was turned elsewhere. It’s been dovetailing nicely with other talk of gender, one that played out (for me, an outside observer) on Twitter and on blogs – I’m referring to THAT panel (“The Words We Use”) at Freeplay 2011, a games event in Australia.

[Some relevant links: Brendan Keogh’s take, Ben Abraham over at Gamasutra, a post by Searing Scarlet, and lots of other links to be gleaned from those]

It’s been interesting, as a woman-journalist-that-once-was – I’m not sure I still count among the illustrious crew anymore, having mostly been resting on my laurels for the past few years, but I was once – interesting and sad and irritating and all sorts of things.

I was never made to be uncomfortable at Kotaku – part of that was my own design (and listening to Ian Bogost’s admonition not to read the comments! – which I pass along on Twitter to this day), part of it was the fact that I generally shied away from writing about gender and sex, part of it was the fact that most of the audience (if not always the most vociferous) weren’t into making irrelevant, sexist commentary. I did do at least one long form essay on the subject of sexuality and gender, and I’m sure the comments were a mix of thoughtful conversation, some ‘What? This again?’, and a smattering of ‘tl;dr’ or ‘Maggie is such a pedantic bitch’ (I wonder sometimes if the vitriol that was occasionally directed at me for looking down on my audience and thinking Kotaku readers were stupid and generally being a stuck up bitch would have been lobbed had I been male; I honestly don’t know). I think I wrote that under the ‘Everyone must produce feature articles’ phase of my employment, and I had been thinking about eroticism in Chinese movies (specifically, the subtle foot squeeze in Red Sorghum (红高粱 Hong gaoliang) and the wonderful tension present in the Maggie Cheung/Tony Leung pairing of In the Mood for Love (花樣年華 Huayang nianhua)).

However, that was not my first brush with issues of sex and gender and games. My first experience with writing ‘criticism’ was on the subject of sex and gender in games; it wasn’t terribly sophisticated, but I was about 22, so I try and cut myself a little slack. It appeared on Slashdot, and the comments literally made me cry. I remember being too horrified and hurt to even look away. It probably was a stupid essay, and perhaps was only parroting things that had been said before (and better), and almost certainly wasn’t a shining example of the genre. But I had never in all my life been subject to the kind of commentary thrown at me (and never since – whatever one wants to say about the Kotaku comments section, comments were moderated to a greater extent and people did get banned). ‘Clearly she just doesn’t get fucked enough,’ or ‘Must be a fat, bitter bitch – anyone have a picture?’ – and on and on and on. It was shocking and hurtful and offensive.

Here I will say that I have absolutely benefited from privilege-with-a-capital-P – maybe it shouldn’t have taken until I was 22 to realize that people who didn’t want to engage with me on an intellectual level would simply hurl insults based on my gender instead, but the only place this has ever happened to me personally is when writing about games. No academic paper reviewer, no matter how monstrous, would return an essay with the notation that ‘Clearly this author doesn’t get laid enough and probably does not fit into culturally accepted standards of beauty, which is obviously impacting her ability to engage with post-colonial interpretations of subjectivity.’ I realize some of this is just the vagaries of the internet, but honestly. I bristle at the implication that comes out sometimes, the one that says that we should just get used to it, and things will change … someday. In the meantime, toughen up, cupcake.

I hadn’t killed any kittens or mugged any grandmothers; I had simply been audacious enough to write an essay that was linked by Slashdot. An essay about what I as a woman who wrote about games would like to see in the games that I played. The nerve I had as a youngster.

Even Kotaku commenters weren't heartless enough to insult the world's cutest pit bull

In any case, that early experience had a rather large impact on how I conducted myself later. I generally think I flew pretty under the radar. At Kotaku’s E3 party in 2008, I hid outside on the smoking patio, sharing a couch with Mike Fahey and an assortment of people who passed by during the course of the evening. No one recognized me – a strange position to be in, since everyone else I worked with seemed so visible, but not an unexpected one. I avoided putting a face to my posts and making things ‘too’ personal, occasionally in stark contrast to my coworkers. The only photographic evidence readers got of me was my bookshelf (unimpeachably academic and wonderful!) and my dog (way too cute to insult).

I wonder if any of my male colleagues, the ones writing under their own names, ever felt nervous about putting a picture of themselves out there for public consumption. I did. I posted one picture of me as an adult on Kotaku, and that was with my goodbye letter – I was already halfway out the door, if someone wanted to call me a fat pig as a parting shot, more power to them (no one did). Even my user icon was a game character and not a photo. I liked sharing bits of my life with the audience, but I never wanted to be too out there – and by ‘too out there,’ I mean using a photograph of myself, not spilling out my deepest, innermost fears and dreams on there interwebs – lest it could be used against me.

Yes, that speaks deeply to my own personal insecurities, ones that are quite independent and alive separate from the sphere of games writing, but nevertheless: that run-in with utterly inappropriate, extremely hostile, very-much-tied-to-my-gender commentary did have a significant impact. I couldn’t – still can’t, actually – imagine anyone using my male colleagues’ bodies as criticism of their writing: ‘Brian Crecente’s opinions are stupid because he’s unattractive’; ‘Simon Carless must be fat and bitter, that’s why I don’t like his essay’; ‘I need to see a photograph of this Ben fellow before I determine my feelings about his writing.’ No, I don’t think everyone – or even a majority – of people in the industry, or people who follow blogs and critical discourse, would say (or even think!) such things. But it doesn’t take much of a minority, just a vocal one, to drown out all the other voices.

It saddens me that we’re still having the same conversations we had years ago, despite what seems to be an increase in visible female writers and critics.

But I agree with those that say people are ‘tired’ of the talk of sexism, it’s all been said before, and any current debate will simply rehash that. I am alarmed by the notion that “gender will stop being an issue when we stop acknowledging that there is a divide.” There is a divide. Refusing to acknowledge the divide just means … refusing to acknowledge it (the author more or less contradicts herself a few sentences later & appears to advocate for people speaking up, but this sort of idea – that talking about an issue is what propagates it – is definitely in play well beyond the game blogosphere. I think it’s a lie, a dangerous one at that, and we should stop throwing it out there. Not talking about an issue will never resolve it, just make it easier to ignore). But I do understand the dislike of talking about it, and the exhaustion with the subject. There is fatigue that sets in as we go round and round in circles and nothing ever really changes.

There’s a fine line here, at times a contradictory one, but I think it’s one that we collectively walk every day in different permutations. I am a woman. I don’t want people to flatten that out and not see my gender (because what usually happens when gender magically “disappears” is categories collapse into one appropriate one, the default being heterosexual male, with differing experiences ridiculed or ignored), but that’s not the only thing that defines me, or even the most important one. But it is part of me. I don’t often think of my gender in relation to my academic work, for example (primarily because I exist in a comfortable, supportive ecosystem in my program). But I am always aware that my experience has been shaped to larger and smaller degrees by being female. It’s not the most important characteristic I use to define myself by far, but it is more than just a box to check on standardized forms.

I’m currently reading a collection of essays published by acclaimed women writers who grew up under Mao – Wu Hui’s wonderful Once Iron Girls: Essays on Gender by Post-Mao Chinese Literary Women. The experiences and ruminations of these writers – most of whom were once told they were “iron girls,” that they held up half the sky, that they were equal (and indeed, did do everything that men did and then some; but ‘a new woman is just like a man’) – is packaged neatly and tightly. Some of the essays are absolutely brutal; most will at least give the reader pause. I’ve certainly been examining my own life in contrast. Here’s the introductory paragraph by an essay by Lu Xing’er called “Women and the Crisis”:

In recent years, I have been thinking about women’s issues and written about them in a fiction series. I plan to continue writing about these issues in the future. Indeed, since ancient times, woman has never failed to be a topic involving prolonged, heated discussions. I am sure that women will continue to be talked about, in depth and forever. However, women’s situation and future will see few fundamental changes, despite so much writing, thinking, and discussing.

I said “fundamental,” not superficial.

(Ouch)

I would like to think Lu is wrong. I’m hardly the poster child for optimism (if something can be worried about, I can worry about it like a true champion worrier/pessimist), but I would really, really like to think she’s wrong, both on a big scale and on a smaller scale like … the community that writes about videogames.

Here is a slightly more positive take on getting over the gender divide: “Androgyny” (which can also be rendered as “neutrality”) by Bi Shumin:

Androgyny is different from saying that women can do whatever men can do. This statement identifies women as a little boat managing to get close to the mens large ship. In contrast, androgyny is the lighthouse. Toward its welcoming lights both men and women move forward, helping and enabling one another, leaving no one behind.

I have been lucky in my academic career to not brush up against overt sexism from professors or classmates, as I mentioned above. Reading Katie Williams’ response to the Freeplay panel was painful – not because it reminded me of my own experience, but because it was so foreign, and no one ought to feel like that, nor should it be tolerated by those in a position of power. It underscores the futility of staying quiet. I wonder if we haven’t done ourselves a great disservice by distancing ourselves from the discussion, saying we’re not interested in those kinds of issues. I hasten to say that I would have no interest in focusing exclusively on gender issues, but sustained conversation could be a good thing – both in public and in more private (possibly ‘safer’) spaces. I’ve never had the opportunity to sit around with other female journalists and critics and talk about our experiences, and it’s something I would be interested in doing.

Obviously these issues go way, way beyond a conference in Australia and women who write about games. I hope one day, Lu Xing’er will be proved wrong. Until then, I’ll simply wish for thoughtful and sustained discussion on issues that impact all of us, female or not.

April showers bring May slugs & fierce debates

A more picturesque dream of sluggishness: Ingres, L'Odalisque à l'esclave (1839)

After a delightful two week trip to Beijing, I returned home to (quoting myself from elsewhere) “a horror scene of slug trails, dead and dying slugs all over the floor in my main room. Luckily I didn’t notice that one had been cruising around on my bed until the next morning.   I had noticed trails here and there on my carpet (but not thought ‘Oh, slug problem’) and caught a few parked on sponges in my kitchen a few months back, but thought it was an isolated issue. I thought wrong, clearly.”

It took several rounds of hysterical calls to my landlord and the dedicated efforts of his wonderful handyman to fix the issue (mostly).  And gross as it was, the Great Slug Infestation of 2011 (the first and, I sincerely hope, only time I will have to deal with such an issue) somehow spurred me out of my own, well, sluggish period.  The past 6 months haven’t been “as” productive as I would have hoped, but I’m back on track and not feeling as slow as the slugs that were having a field day in my kitchen.

Still, a couple of recent events reminded me that I’m pretty terrible at being immediately relevant.  I look in awe upon people who can magically whip up a response to writers and current events instantaneously – while I’m a pretty zippy writer, all told, it’s quite difficult for me to write unless a deadline is looming and/or a piece is writing itself.  I guess I’ve got a bit of slug in me, since in the past month I’ve had at least 3 hot button issues I’ve started to respond to & then simply abandoned.  OK, perhaps “abandoned” is too strong a word; I’ll get around to finishing them … someday … maybe.

The most recent was Daniel Cook’s “A Blunt Critique of Game Criticism” (its current form is an edited version of the one a lot of us first saw).  The original essay had me pretty frothy with rage for a few days, and while I sat down to write a response, only unpublishable snippets of text came out.  There were plenty of things I wanted to respond to with barely contained indignant fury – the slights against “game illiterates,” academics, all the other unworthies; the intimation that somehow, all those bits and pieces of writing that Cook disagreed with were crowding out stellar pieces of “worthy” game writing written by game literate people; the idea that fluffy humanities people were crowding out the “real” researchers (scientists); the arbitrary typology of writers that didn’t make much sense.  A lot of people jumped into the fray while I was sputtering up sentences here and there (Ben Abraham made a handy list), and said a lot of things as well or better than I could have (clearly).  But I typed away while cataloging archival finds, determined to finish an entry.

Then I thought … what’s the point?  Like a lot of these discussions, we’re chasing our own tail.  What Cook wants is more (better) writing for his particular niche interest (design and development); what I want is more (better) writing for my particular niche interest (not design and development); what we’re lacking overall is high quality, thoughtful writing that’s not geared toward niche interests.  Is there a lot of atrocious writing out there?  Yes.  Would I like to see a wider variety of quality writing, no matter what its thrust?  Yes.  Do I think poking sticks at those of us who aren’t designers or developers – nor, in some cases, particularly interested in writing about that side of the industry – is going to improve “game criticism”?  Absolutely not.  What Cook’s “call to arms” for people who “ought” to be writing “proper” game criticism is missing is a simple fact: a lot of people can’t write cogently, never mind thoughtfully and in a manner that holds the attention span of people who are interested in the subject.  While Cook points out that developing games doesn’t mean one can write about them, he pegs this as a problem of selecting one’s viewpoint.

… If only! There’s a lot of bad writing out there on all subjects.  Most pertinently for this discussion, there’s a lot of bad writing out there on games.  Period.  It’s not confined to academics coming from the humanities or eighteen year old fanboys.  I wonder how much time Cook has spent poking through the nooks and crannies of blogs on Gamasutra: there’s good writing, sure.  There’s also a lot of terrible writing on a wide range of subject matter.  Being “game literate” to Cook’s standards doesn’t mean being culturally literate and capable of writing to my standards.  It’s not that these things are mutually exclusive (obviously not, there are plenty of examples – including Cook! – to show that you can be quite technical and adept with language at the same time).  But as the blurb at Lost Garden says, “You’ve found a rare treasure trove of readable, thoughtful essays on game design theory, art and the business of design” (emphasis mine).

I also find the narrow view of what constitutes “game criticism” (and writing on games more broadly) troubling. Cook muses that “[in] all of this I sense an odd fear. What is so dangerous about being an engineer-geographer-historian-poet-lawyer? I only see benefits to the community as a whole. The only risk is that individuals comfortable in their current niche might need to change and grow.”  However, the assertion that there is one form of game criticism (discussion of game design from a design/ers perspective) that is more desirable, or intrinsically more valuable than other forms strikes me as the position that is cutting off possibilities that rise from the hyphenated “forms of being” Cook throws out.  I’m not running scared of developers or designers, and I’m happy to defend my position – I also think I have a record in the blogosphere that attests to the fact that I’ve been quite open to reading, writing about, and publicizing a really wide variety of writing from a number of angles.  I have certainly never advocated for a position that needlessly insults a number of talented individuals, regardless of whether I personally found their niches captivating.

I say that as someone who has been linked on Critical Distance (and used to write for Kotaku, “promoting” – or at least giving a bit of page space – to all sorts of writing that I liked very much, from Cook’s prototyping challenges to “I” pieces written by students and academics).  I don’t see myself fitting in particularly well to Cook’s typology of “game criticism”; I suppose the area that would come closest would be “Connecting games with the humanities: An academic exercise in which various aspects of games are described as being part of an ongoing structure of philosophy, movie criticism, literary criticism, art history, rhetoric, etc.”  Except that doesn’t fit at all.  On the most basic level (leaving aside Cook’s really narrow definition of what constitutes “the humanities,” at least based on that list), I’m generally less interested in writing about the experience of games than I am about the discourse surrounding games, just as I am generally less interested in the performative aspects of opera than I am about the discourse surrounding opera.  This is a position that opens me to criticism from a number of sides, which I’m OK with – at the foundation of research is doing things we enjoy and we find interesting.  I am not interested in picking apart design issues (nor am I qualified to beyond an experiential reaction).  Ergo, I generally don’t write about specific games in any of the ways that Cook lays out as types of “game criticism.”  A lot of people who Cook is, by default, taking aim at don’t – but that doesn’t mean that we don’t have something to contribute.

Simply put, we don’t have such an excess in terms of really, really good writing that there’s not enough room for everyone.  Really.  Cook may dream of better writing of the type that he wants to see, to the exclusion of what he takes as useless noise on the internet; I dream of better writing across the board, better research, better understanding on the whole.  We can all enjoy our own niches without resorting to belittling the positions of others. Michael Abbott of the Brainy Gamer said it much better than I can:

I accept Dan Cook’s encourgement to deepen my understanding of games from a designer’s perspective, and I’m persuaded that I can benefit from doing so. I hope he and others will accept the value of experiential, comparative, theoretical and other forms of criticism as no less vital to the evolution of video games as an art form worthy of careful consideration from many points of view. I can tell you from first-hand experience that territorialism and boundaries of expertise have played pernicious roles in academia. We mimic those behaviors at our own risk.

[Finally, on a bit of a personal note. The following characterization of historians is quite possibly one of the saddest views of history (and the historian’s craft) that I’ve ever read:

I understand that there are people who prefer to be historians and catalogers of culture.  There is still room for both catalogers and people who dream about the future.

Some historians – not all, but a great many – are dreamers, and dream not just of the past but of the future.  Much of written history reflects more on the author’s present than on the past, and often points to a “dreamed of” future – whether we agree with that projected future or not.  I’m certainly not spinning my wheels in archives so I can simply catalogue a phenomenon; my hope is to do work that will say something about where we are now, how we got there, and where we’ll be going. So too with my work that isn’t “properly” historical: how can you dream of a future without understanding where you’ve come from and where you are at present?  Cook and others may not be interested in the work that many of us do, but that doesn’t mean we’re not dreaming and it certainly doesn’t mean we aren’t thinking about the future.]

I was a blogger once, and young (II)

Part I: The bare bones of it (sort of)

It’s quite strange to be writing openly about all of this, but I guess aspects of it have come up quite a lot since I left (not necessarily related to me in particular, but life at a blog like Kotaku in general).  It’s a lot of navel-gazing and I feel a very silly and incredibly conceited in some respects, but in others it’s rather cathartic and useful to ruminate on that part of my life.  So, apologies for the self indulgence spreading over two posts. It also occurs to me that I probably make too much over “page views,” but it was how our “success” was measured, and the way I got used to thinking of myself & how I fit into the larger picture of Kotaku and the gaming blogosphere.

a. On intellectual background

My workspace in San Diego, in the midsts of final editing of my 2nd year research paper. Â Can't wait to see what Ben Abraham & ANT have to say about this!

I grew up with an incredibly intellectual mother (who, while not a member of the academy, is a historian) who instilled in me a deep and abiding love for the wonderful, invisible, essential thing of history, and also a love of cultural “stuff.”  This ranged from poetry to painting to music to architecture to furniture.  I joke that I was raised to be a cultural historian.  It’s not really a joke; it’s true.  I would’ve had to work very hard to outrun my upbringing, and indeed - I tried on other things over the years and none of them quite fit.  Certainly, the academic skill of approaching cultural production in a particular manner was honed in college, then further in grad school (and is an ongoing process), but the basics were there, I think, from a pretty young age.

My first independent intellectual passion was Latin.  I now teach students who sometimes struggle with how to take a 9th century poem about some guy’s cat and apply it to their lectures and textbooks (not, admittedly, always the easiest thing to do); the leap from “literature” to “history” is not always a smooth one (this goes for films and music – and games – as well).  My adventures in Roman literature taught me how to do that, or at least try.  I didn’t just love Catullus because he was funny and sad and wrote beautiful poetry; I also loved Catullus because I could read his poetry and it said something about a subject I wanted to know more about, but it was up to me to dig that out.  I started learning early on how to at least try and think critically about cultural production, and how it fit in with other topics.

It was my introduction to applying cultural production to historical studies.  It was also the only reason I didn’t flunk out of high school, because while I was barely scraping by in most every other class (due to boredom and lack of interest, particularly when it came to things like “doing homework”), I never had trouble getting good marks in Latin.  It even occurred to my mother, despairing over my future, that maybe since her offspring’s intellectual proclivities included translating authors who had been dead for 2,000 years and falling in love with Tolstoy, all was not yet lost.  Sure enough, things improved dramatically after I got out of high school and on to better things, like college seminars on “masculinity and power in the US” and “Roman historians: Caesar, Livy, Suetonius.”  So, gratias vobis ago, my wonderful Latin teachers, and my treasured old friends like Catullus and Horace and Vergil and Ovid – I wouldn’t be a Chinese historian if it weren’t for you.  I wouldn’t have found a weird little niche on Kotaku if it hadn’t been for you.

The more I read, watched, and studied, the more I had a hard time shutting off the academic side of my brain that was constantly humming away in the background, analyzing and making connections – even when watching “fluff.”  When I really started to play videogames, I approached them in much the same way I approached most every other piece of culture I consumed – and the intellectual side, likewise, didn’t really want to shut off.  It was pretty natural, then, that I gravitated towards work that approached games similarly (though much more sophisticatedly) to the way that I wanted to approach cultural objects of all stripes.

b. On becoming a niche writer

I suspect, if one were to go back through my earliest posts for Kotaku, you would find that they were trying to play more to the general readership (I haven’t done this, but I have a vague feeling that’s what I was doing).  Not because of any financial incentives, but I did want to make my boss and fellow writers happy and fit the mold, so to speak.  At some point pretty early on, I realized my page views were dismal (though steadily increasing – but they never got close to the views that other writers on the site got) and short of me totally setting aside my personal interests, I was never going to be widely read.  So I just started mining the blogs I liked, the things I read, the things that were interesting to me. And there was the practical matter I mentioned: other writers on the site weren’t posting from these sources, so there wasn’t the anxiety over ‘Oh no, they posted X, Y, and Z today that I was going to post.’

I did get lucky here: my boyfriend through most of my Kotaku tenure kept up on a lot of interesting things and introduced me to a number of blogs that would’ve taken me much longer to stumble upon on my own.  Leigh Alexander’s Sexy Videogameland, for example, was one of these (so while I get all the credit for helping to solidify Leigh’s early readership, at least insofar as Kotaku writers are concerned, my ex deserves the real lion’s share of that!  Thanks, Dave – I’m sure Leigh would thank you, too, if she could).  Between the two of us, I managed to build up a pretty respectable list of feeds I kept up on, and a lot of it was very different than the average post on Kotaku.  At some point it occurred to me in a more obvious manner that hey, I was posting stuff that wouldn’t be appearing on such a widely read site otherwise.

This is how I eventually wound up with a Mao Cow of my very own

That moment was probably when Ian Bogost IMed me to say “Thanks for posting my stuff.”  After I got over my fangirlish reaction of “OMGOMGOMG, Ian Bogost is talking to me!” and “Why is he thanking me?  He’s Ian freakin’ Bogost!  His body of work is amazing,” I responded with something insipid like “Well, I don’t always agree with everything you say, but I really like your work” (dur).

But it dawned on me that if someone like Ian Bogost gave me a polite nod to say thanks for flinging traffic his way (though Ian is a nice guy, so maybe he was just being polite), maybe all this stuff did need a lot more exposure on a place like Kotaku than I thought.  This is a double-edged sword, of course – I sometimes felt a little bad about throwing smaller blogs under the Kotaku bus.  I think the really sharp work itself forms an interesting ecosystem and it chugs along just fine without directing the people who read Kotaku to it.  Also, I knew people could be really nasty in comments and most of the writers weren’t asking me to link to their work – many of them were probably just as happy not to be involved with the wider blogosphere that Kotaku was part of.  Ethics of blogging?  In the end, I figured a lot of people who just wanted to say hateful things were frequently too lazy to actually go over to the other sites, and simply spewed their vitriol on Kotaku.  Unexpected traffic could be a problem, I’m sure, but I just hoped it all balanced out in the end (and I think it did).

c. On becoming a Chinese historian and a niche writer

One of Abraham’s questions was on how grad school impacted my approach to my work on Kotaku.  It did a couple of things, in retrospect – it put a new stress on a couple of issues that had been bubbling for me and introduced some new variables.

First, and probably most important, I told myself I would simply not post anything I would be embarrassed to have my academic reputation associated with.  It wasn’t that I thought posting about porn stars and sexy cosplay and lowbrow humor was beneath me, but I just couldn’t imagine someone from my academic universe googling my name and coming up with posts like that.  The fact I wrote about videogames was weird enough; writing about porn stars playing videogames would’ve been (would be) too much. While I posted plenty of things (including my own longform pieces) that weren’t up to quality standards set forth for our research projects, I’m not ashamed to have anyone I know in academia come across any of it. I once got (very kindly) nailed – before I got to grad school – for overestimating the anonymity and vastness of the internet (e.g., the ability to hide).  And that was before I wound up with my name attached, in a very public manner, to things I was writing – so losing any hope of anonymity at all.  It was an incredibly embarrassing flub, but a really valuable lesson to learn early on.  I never wanted to embarrass my advisors and other people important to me in academia.  It solidified my leanings towards esoterica.  Unfounded worries?  Perhaps; but it was something that certainly channeled my efforts away from certain directions.

Actually, let me clarify that: I would have posted about porn stars and sexy cosplay had it been framed in the right manner.  There are plenty of smart ruminations on gender, sex, and all sorts of potentially “lowbrow” (in other manifestations) topics in the blogosphere, and I did post a lot of that. What I did not post were articles about scantily clad women making sometimes questionably informed comments about AAA titles I didn’t play, with an attached photo gallery of them rubbing themselves on a 360 controller or PSP (among other things, it just seems this is one type of post that raises ire on a semi-frequent basis).  I don’t have a problem with that sort of stuff, I just wish people didn’t attempt to wrap it in the veneer of “But she’s a legitimate gamer, don’t you see!”  Don’t try and “justify” it at all; it is what it is, just like a lot of what I wrote was boring – if not to me personally, then to large chunks of the readership.  I didn’t try and make it something it wasn’t.  I posted calls for papers that 99% of the Kotaku readership couldn’t have cared less about, and other people posted lingerie-clad women that insulted some of the readership.  We did it because we could, we wanted to, we had the power to do such things, and we had posts to get out.  That’s OK.

Goatgate was hardly as charming as this little fellow (Zhao Mengfu, detail from "Sheep & Goat," Yuan dynasty)

But generally, the “gimme” headlines just weren’t the stuff I wanted to post and weren’t the kinds of things I wanted my name (one that is still very, very young in academic terms) pulling up as a top hit when people googled me – so there was little reason for me to compete with coworkers for those coveted, attention-grabbing posts.  Again, unfounded anxiety?  Maybe.  But I also have to say I found most of my “biggest” posts pretty unsatisfying – that is, the things that were way out of the zone of things I was interested in, but “someone” needed to post, and were attention grabbing enough to draw in more than my usual readers.  The example I remember most clearly was the God of War “Goatgate” “scandal” (I use that term loosely).  It got me a lot of page views that week, at least in terms of my usual – somewhere around 40,000 for that article alone.  My general reaction was “meh.” It was sensational and dull all at the same time, and I just didn’t care all that much.  Though I still cannot believe I used to have a job where I could post things with titles like “Sony Decapitates Goat, Raises Ire” and get paid for it.  In essence, I generally posted things I was interested in and that I wanted to read.  I don’t want to read about porn stars playing Madden.  Why would I want to post it?

Anyways, that segues into page views, which are an obsessive part of working for a blog.  On that particular aspect of writing, then, grad school did another thing for me.  A lot has been made of the bonus system at Kotaku, which I have tried to explain elsewhere.  When I first started writing there, I was paid a certain amount per post (which was predetermined – I did 12 posts a weekend, and that was that).  There were quarterly bonuses, but those were tied to overall site traffic – beyond that, there was some sort of calculation on how much a writer had contributed to that traffic, and that determined your bonus.  At some point (I don’t really remember when – a little less than a year into my tenure, maybe), there was a change in the bonus system – salaries were fixed, and then bonuses were paid to individuals based on their particular target number of page views.  I never got one of those checks, so I don’t really know how it worked.  I also want to underscore that my comments on this topic (both here and elsewhere) apply only to the time that I was working for Kotaku, between 2007 and 2008.  I have no idea what the system is now, and I don’t want people inferring from my comments something that may or may not be the case about the current setup.

Salary was not, as has been incorrectly reported in multiple places, fixed to page views.  I got the same amount of money every month, at least in base salary (and in practice, since I never had a lot of page views (thus no bonus), in total), regardless of whether I had 500,000 page views or 5.  It’s a testament to Brian Crecente that he kept me on as long as he did, since I’m pretty sure my “underperformance” was a fireable offense in the Gawkerverse.

OK, what in the hell does Gawker’s bonus structure have to do with grad school?  This is actually key to my blasé approach to page views (and why I wound up comfortably inhabiting a niche that was really unpopular compared to the bulk of the site).  Kotaku wasn’t my full time job.  I didn’t need it to make ends meet – I didn’t need it at all.  I had a salary – because I was a PhD student.  Yes, the money was absolutely very nice; I missed it when it went away – but I was never in danger of not being able to keep a roof over my head, or the dog in kibble, when it stopped.  In my particular life situation, the carrot of a bonus proved utterly ineffective – I didn’t need it, and the pursuit of it would’ve meant turning away from the things I was really starting to enjoy by that point.  I have always been mulish in my temperament, and the idea of a little bit of extra money (based on a system I never figured out in the first place) wasn’t worth abandoning what I was interested in.  I dug in my little heels and basically ignored the fact that bonuses existed.  If Brian had said, “Maggie, you’re really underperforming and this is a problem,” I would’ve had to reevaluate my stance.  As it was, he never did, and I always had the impression that everyone thought my penchant for posting “weird” stuff that no one else did was, if not valuable, at least contributing something.

Would I have wound up writing on the 1904 "serious game" edition of mahjong without Kotaku? Probably not.

On a more personal level, actually starting my formal graduate studies combined with the crash course I did in game studies (when I started posting about it on Kotaku) and made me say “Hm, maybe this is something I ought to pursue.”  Which of course led to me reading more, and thinking more, then reading more, then posting more, then reading more ….  A self-perpetuating cycle.  There are very few historians and very few China studies people in the field (and definitely very, very few Chinese historians), and the more I read from academics I respect – and other writers just doing smart stuff with games – the more I wanted to be part of it, too.  There was a hole to fill, a China-shaped one, and I could be someone to help fill it.  The more brilliant critical writing on games I saw, written by all sorts of people in the scattered little sphere that made up my sources, the more I wanted to be able to contribute to it, too.  It’s one reason I’ve come back to writing, over two years after I stopped.  It’s one reason I’ve been slowly picking up blogs I put down in December of 2008.  I really liked being part of that ecosystem, I liked a lot of the people I “met,” and I really liked engaging with smart people with interesting ideas.  I still do (so I’m back).

I certainly made great connections at UCSD thanks to Kotaku – e.g., I met my friend Stephen when, during the break for the first session of a seminar I was enrolled in and he was thinking of taking, I staggered outside to catch a breather.  As the elevator doors were closing far too slowly for my liking, he came running down the hall, saying “Hey, hey!  Are you Maggie Greene that writes for Kotaku?”  I said that I was (now trying to keep the elevator doors open, to no avail), and he just said, “Keep up the good work!”  I managed to squeak out a thanks as the elevator doors shuddered shut.  Kotaku helped me meet a lot of interesting people on campus, which was and is great fun and good for me, intellectually and personally.  It also really expanded the network of academics I knew beyond the bounds of UCSD, and at least writing for Kotaku gave me a little foot in the door.  It had later (positive) ripple effects on my fledgling academic career as a “proper” Chinese historian.  I think the sheer strangeness of that line on my otherwise standard history PhD student CV helped when it came to things like applying for dissertation fellowships – particularly when combined with proper “academic” work in the field of game studies, incredibly limited though mine is at this point.

I think it’s a little unfortunate I left Kotaku when I did; I’m in a much better position now to write about games than I was two or three years ago, when I was writing about games.  But, part of the reason I am in a better position is because I did write for Kotaku – it was an essential part of developing that side of my academic and intellectual interests.

d. On a “legacy” (?): We are thinking

I stopped writing for Kotaku when I was 25.  I’m 28 now.  I find the mere idea of me having a legacy at this point pretty hilarious, but my name does still come up from time to time in conversations here or there, so I guess that means I did leave one.  I certainly wasn’t thinking of leaving one, nor really sitting down and pondering my role in the vast universe of the blogosphere – well, not frequently and not terribly cogently, at least.

I didn’t start off wanting to be a game journalist.  I still don’t want to be a game journalist.  I wasn’t fulfilling any particular dream of mine to be a writer or anything else.  People used to send emails and IMs saying “How can I break into writing about games?”  I would think to myself, “Submit a writing sample based on Lu Xun and Chinese dresses to a young blog and see where it takes you?  How should I know?”  I just wanted to grow up to be a Chinese historian (and I still do – just one that happens to research games).

At the heart of my job, I was an aggregator. I didn’t write all the interesting things I posted about, I just had to find them, pull out a few quotes, write a few vaguely coherent sentences to bookend it (sometimes, not even that), and add a link.  It was production, but of a particular kind.  I knew that I wasn’t as smart, at least when it came to writing about games, as all the people I was linking to – I wasn’t producing the stuff, after all, just offering occasionally pithy commentary and sometimes clever titles.  Furthermore, I was just one more writer, out of a long list of writers, that had passed through Kotaku (I mean, check the Wikipedia page if you doubt me here).  I fell into the job by dumb luck, and I wasn’t any different than a lot of other people (except, perhaps, in having dismally low page views).  It’s not like I built up a readership by the sweat of my own brow and laboriously worked to “CHANGE THINGS!”.  I didn’t.  I was just a writer on a Gawker Media blog, another cog in that big wheel.

But I did wind up doing something – I got a lot of things out to a much wider audience than they otherwise would’ve gotten.  I tried to make sure that those wickedly smart writers with blogs that had awesome titles got out on a place like Kotaku, and those readers who maybe wouldn’t have found them – but were looking for that kind of thing – got a little nudge in the right direction.  You know, just as I would’ve liked someone to do for me, if I’d been writing smart things about videogames, and like I wanted the big blogs to do for me before I discovered the intellectual underbelly of the blogosphere.  Much as I’m writing this now (partially) to help someone else’s dissertation (well, that’s the intent, anyway), just as I wish Meng Chao could write for me. I’ve gotten a lot of help over the years, and I like to repay those favors when and if I can.

I guess one of my favorite examples of “what I was trying to do at Kotaku” was also one of my last.  In late October or early November 2008, I got a really nice email from Daniel Martins Novais.  Now, this was nothing out of the ordinary – the Kotaku inbox I had was a thing of terror, filled with press releases, tips on news items, and lots of people pitching their blogging or game to us.  It was, in short, a giant headache with a few gems surrounded by a lot of dreck that was practically impossible to keep up with.

But Daniel approached this initial contact quite differently than most people (and quite wisely, though I don’t know if it was a calculated strategy on his part).  Instead of saying ‘Here’s a game I made and would you please post it?’, he first wrote an email to me (just to me – not to the general ‘tips line’ that went to everyone, or to a bunch of us all CC’d together), explaining that he had really been influenced by Jason Rohrer’s work (which I had posted all of, up to that point), really wanted to do the game design thing full time, and would I mind just taking a look at the game he made, just to give feedback, because he really respected my opinion?  No grubbing for a link or anything (of course, this made me more inclined to actually link to him if I liked the game).

Screen from Estamos Pensando

I played the game, called Estamos Pensando (‘We are thinking,’ unfortunately no longer available).  I saw the Rohrer connection.  It was polished, sad, and sweet.  I really liked it.  So I posted it.  It was one of the few times I remember posting something and watching it spread pretty quickly, since people actually gave my post credit.  A slight diversion here, one that probably belongs in the section above. The issue of “attribution” in the blogosphere is a fascinating one (it occurs to me that it would probably make a great study from several angles – has someone already done one?), and one reason I really remember Estamos Pensando is because (thanks to “via” links) I could actually see where my work was going.  With few exceptions, my impression of my work and its reach while I was doing it was confined to what I garnered from our stats page (listing page views, with me at the bottom of active writers – as always) and the occasional mention here or there.

I originally had one of my very favorite stories of making the acquaintance of someone in the game journalism world here, but in interests of not hurting said person’s feelings by appearing as though I’m poking unnecessary sticks at someone I’m really very fond of, I’ll just sum up the point: I took proper attribution really seriously and proper links, including the “via” part where warranted, were a matter of academic honor to me. I realize that probably sounds outrageously overblown (“It’s just a link,” right?), but bear with me. I once got “reminded” to give credit where credit was not due (on the assumption that it was due, an honest mistake), and it really, really offended me.  It generally bothered me greatly to see how things wound their way around without leaving a trail that led back to the people who had discovered whatever article, and I was incensed that someone would try and say I was doing the thing that I so disliked.  Lack of that little “via” seemed, somehow, pretty dishonest in a lot of cases. I tried really hard to make sure that I maintained my academic sensibilities where attribution was concerned.

Footnotes: I love them. LONG ones, too.

This was because, for me, a “via” link was the equivalent of a footnote, which of course I would not forget in a paper, since that would be plagiarism (and a fearsome, fearsome charge to have leveled at you).  I’m not saying that not linking is the equivalent of plagiarism (though sometimes, it can skate damn close to the line – I ran into this with the “Atlanta Examiner,” whose writer seemed to do little more than repost everything I posted in a weekend without credit to me); but for me, it felt like it.  I tried to treat fellow writers the same way I treated fellow historians, even if sometimes we were just aggregating and pointing back to the same original.  It was also just a matter of habit from writing a lot of papers – I love doing footnotes (one of the great soothing joys for me when I write papers) so filling in my little “via” link in a proscribed format was something of the same ritual.

A great many sites never seemed to feel the need to give me credit, even when I damn well knew there was a 99.9% likelihood they had gotten the article from something I posted.  I never sent emails or IMs saying, “Where’s my credit?”  I wrote for Kotaku, a giant juggernaut of a site – why did I need credit? (at least, that’s what I assume people who didn’t give my work the courtesy of a blogger’s footnote were thinking). I wanted credit because I wasn’t a faceless automaton; I wanted to see where things I found wound up, too.  I didn’t want other writers to feel the same way I sometimes did, so I was always careful to note where, if anywhere, I had procured a link from.  I’m sure things slipped through the cracks on occasion, but I wanted that to be as rare as possible.

In any case, Estamos Pensando was one of the few times that I distinctly remember other blogs actually showing a clear trail to me, and it was delightful to see it spread – more so because Daniel was genuinely thrilled with the fact that I had posted the game at all, and the fact it was getting nice attention from multiple spots thanks to that first post I made was icing on the cake.  It was just a post on a blog, but it made a difference – a good one – to someone. I felt really good about that. I still feel good about that.  That sounds appallingly sappy – and I really don’t care.

That was a late, particularly obvious case, but one that I would like to think sums up what I was doing – consciously and not – at Kotaku.  Giving a little more page space to a lot more things that shouldn’t have needed me, of all people, to be pushing them – but I somehow wound up with the platform and ability to do so.  I suppose there were a lot of examples like that, but I guess because Estamos Pensando was the last big one, it’s one I most remember.

I hit my stride at some point and was comfortable with the fact that I would never be “popular”; there were people out there who liked what I posted, and got something out of it – something they wouldn’t necessarily have found on Kotaku otherwise.  Sure, plenty of the audience thought I was a dull, pedantic, elitist snot (or me and my subject matter were just plain boring, or not why they came to Kotaku) – but I wasn’t writing for them.  I was writing for me, and people like me.  I wrote about the kinds of things I wanted to see on blogs like Kotaku, and apparently, other people did, too.

I did get to introduce people to neat sites and incredibly smart people and wonderful critical thinking on games.  I hope I did facilitate in building networks between readers and writers and other readers and other writers (and I think I did, in some cases – maybe not all, but some).  I at least wanted to show that there was a really interesting world of blogs that existed pretty apart from the “big guys,” and they were worth reading, too.  Sure, there were other sites doing this, and probably doing it a lot better – reasonably widely read ones – but they didn’t have Kotaku’s readership.

I hardly had a captive audience, but I had a lot more potential readers to hook than most people.  There were places to read about and talk about games in a really smart, intellectually engaged manner, if that’s what you wanted, and I wanted to point that out on the platform I had available to me.  I wanted to post about things that I thought were important and didn’t get enough press in general.  China, of course, would be the prime example – yes, I poked a lot of fun at silly press releases, but I also posted about “real” issues, and about a lot more than just laughing at crazy Chinese knockoffs.  In retrospect, this was an incredibly smart thing for me to do for my own benefit, because I now have a whole body of work to look back on as I write papers years later.  But from a less self-serving perspective, I did want to underline that there was more to gaming outside of the West & Japan than people dying after gaming binges and piracy.  I think I wrote a longform essay on the very subject of getting outside mainstream news and thinking about games as a truly global product – precisely because I found the blinkered regional perspective terribly frustrating, as both a writer and consumer of gaming news and writing.

I was the least read writer on Kotaku, but it was a bigger audience than a lot of us will ever have.  I had a funny conversation with one of my professors once, roughly the following:

“How many regular readers do you have, do you think?”

“Oh, I don’t know, not a lot – maybe 4,000 who regularly click on my stuff.”

“You realize that 4,000 would count as a book that sold well in our fields?  And you have that every weekend, without thinking about it.”

I think about that sometimes, particularly when I’m up late at night and struggling with Historical Stuff that is frustrating me.  I did have that.  No, it’s not a monograph or a list of publications in prestigious journals, but it is something, regardless of whether many of my colleagues would think it important or not.  I did make a difference, however little it may have been in the grand scheme of a blog like Kotaku (or the game blogosphere as a whole, or for game studies in the enthusiast press, or whatever). I managed to have a pretty impressive reach – not for a real, widely read blogger, but for an otherwise totally unimportant 20-something Chinese history grad student, even if it was something that was so far out of the purview of what “should” matter for my career that many people I respect highly never even gave it a thought.  For most people in my “real life,” it was an odd curiosity and little more (“Maggie writes for a blog, huh.  They pay people for that?”), but I had more of an audience at 24 and 25 than I will likely ever have again (and many academics never have), even for work that I try so hard at and put so much thought – and blood and tears and sweat – into.  How to explain that?  Sure, it was utterly pathetic compared to the reach my fellow writers had and have; but I think for many of us – a couple of hundred thousand page views a month is still quite the potential platform!

So I do try and remember that I did something once for a while that I was pretty good at (at least after a fashion; maybe not in the way I was “supposed” to be as a writer for Kotaku), and I did make some difference (I think), and people do still remember – even as I slog along at the moment, back to being a mostly anonymous, insignificant fish in the brilliant glittering sea of grad school and academia and my “real life.”  It wasn’t always so, I remind myself, at least not in some areas of my life.  And I’ll get there again someday, I hope, just in a different sort of way.  I remind myself of all the wonderful things and people that flowed from that lucky, dumb chance I had – one that I’m very grateful for – and all those connections that are humming along as we speak.

I was a Kotaku writer once, and young ….

A screen from Rohrer's Passage, which got almost as many page views for me as "Goatgate" - not quite, but almost

Postscript: This was surprisingly hard to write.  I meant to be a smart blogger and spread things out – and, since the person whose research made me sit down and write it in the first place is at GDC this week & I would assume has neither the time nor inclination to read this at the moment when there are so many more interesting and fun things going on than me pondering away incoherently, wait until GDC madness had subsided to publish it.  I have the patience of a gnat and want feedback immediately (which is unrealistic at the best of times, more so when it’s GDC week & 70% of people I know on the internet are there and very busy!): Well, was it useful?  What did you think?  Did that change anything about the ways you’re thinking about my career?  What else do you want to know? By the way, I think you’re missing X Y Z article of importance, and that one that you said was just a short blurb was actually …. However, it’s been sitting in my queue and I’ve been fretting over it, deleting this and adding that and fixing that grammatical flub or choice of words – and getting more and more upset, probably because it was cathartic to write, being the first (and last) time I’ve ever really written about that very important chunk of my life in any manner, and emotions are still bubbling up.  So, in the interests of not having it lurking, begging me to fuss with it more, I’ve just gotten it up & not on the schedule I’d intended, so I can get back to other important things.

It all sounds so conceited, especially the last bit, I think (is it possible to ponder one’s “legacy” without sounding a little full of yourself?  We’re supposed to leave that for other people to do, aren’t we?).  But then, I’m more given to being hard on myself for everything I haven’t done, rather than being pleased with what I have done.  Finding out that someone thought that my work was special enough to bother researching and writing about was a bit odd, then.  I research and write about things myself; I don’t think any of us select topics that we find irrelevant or inconsequential, since that would just be pouring salt into the open wound that is writing a dissertation.  So maybe it’s OK to be a little proud of what I did, whatever the sum of that is.  I’m looking forward to reading an outside perspective on that part in my life, and how it fits in with bigger issues.

It feels good to have written it, and just as good that I won’t have to do it again.  Unless, of course, Mr. Abraham has more specific questions he would appreciate my ruminations on – in which case, I will be happy to ruminate on specificities at a later date.  I suspect having to dig around to remember the specifics would be more like research, and less like navel-gazing whining, and would probably not leave me with such a mournful feeling.  Wang Xizhi, like so many of the old dead guys, spoke the truth – though the heart does give rise to longing, everything must come to an end.

I was a blogger once, and young (I)

Meditations on how I wound up doing things like cross stitching Final Fantasy logos & writing a how to on it for Kotaku

I got a gigantic shock this weekend while idly googling myself (one never knows what’s going to turn up – a habit I got into while I was writing for a blog, it was always interesting to see what people had to say about the things I was posting): I discovered that I’m part of someone’s dissertation.  More precisely, I guess, my work at Kotaku & me as Kotaku writer are part of someone’s dissertation, but even so.  I had a good laugh that it has to do with Bruno Latour & actor-network theory (ANT), and promptly sent it off to the professor who introduced me to Latour & ANT.  Probably more importantly, he was the one professor who seemed really interested in my work at Kotaku (I used to stop by his office and he’d always start with ‘So, how many page views for the month?’), and is the prof I go to when I want to ruminate on my game/new media/digital media stuff.  So I thought he’d get a kick out of the fact that I’m a chapter in someone’s dissertation (well, I gather at the moment I’m just on the outline & a few paragraphs – but I will be a chapter someday).

In any case, it’s weird reading about yourself in third person, in someone’s research blog, like:

I also tried to write down some ideas about the things that were making Maggie Greene do things, and so far I’ve come up with this list of black boxes ….

It’s really a fascinating turn of the tables – the historian goes from studying objects to being the object of study.  And it’s a little strange to see someone working through, in a general way, some of the same issues I work through with my subjects – but about me (lucky for him, I am still alive and well and open for questions!).  But I thought some of Ben Abraham’s “list of black boxes” for the hypothetical me that he’s trying to query in part through the digital traces I left behind was actually a pretty interesting list of questions for the me that’s sitting here typing this at 6:30 PM in Shanghai, eating the good kind of instant ramen (from Korea – it has bits of kimchi in it!).  So I’m going to try and “answer” some of them by doing what I do best – rambling (what I really mean is it just inspired me to think a little more about the job & what it meant/means to me, and I thought it a subject worthy of writing out, at least on my own little corner of the internet).

I hope Mr. Abraham realizes how lucky he is that he’s studying objects that can write sources on demand!  I’m downright jealous.  This, then, is both a self-indulgent gift to myself and a gift from one PhD candidate to another: my wish that, were most of my subjects still alive, they’d be nice enough to help a dissertator out (and I may have prayed a little to the God of Archives: “Please make my sources multiply and be bountiful; I’ll be a good object of study, I promise“).  We’re fallible, of course, extremely so, and this is colored by the rosy tint of time & all the other stuff that’s filled my brain up in intervening years. I’m also not too sure that my half-ripe ruminations two years after the fact are going to be particularly helpful for someone thinking about things that transpired while I was at Kotaku in a theoretically sophisticated framework, in a way that my brain just doesn’t work.  However, I hope it will prove of some use in combination with his own thoughts and research on the subject.  More sources are never a bad thing, right?  At the very least, it ought to fill in a few gaps and provide a little food for thought.

So here’s my yammering on how I wound up writing for a giant, widely read blog (and subsequently wound up a case study in a dissertation!) when I never, ever said to anyone “I really wish I could write about videogames for a living!” and it never, ever occurred to me that I’d ever have anything to do with videogames on an academic/professional level.  Since I am mostly incapable of keeping things short (and I think this is actually the first time I’ve ever sat down and written anything about this), I’m breaking this into two parts: the bare outlines of my blogging “career,” and how I came to wind up in a comfortable niche & what I was trying to do with it (I think).  That, at least, is the goal: I am very good at talking everywhere and nowhere at once, so my apologies if this isn’t entirely cogent.

A Portrait of the Blogger as a Young Girl: The Bare Bones (sort of)

My first run in with videogames? (Korea, with Miss Lee, 1983)

Unlike a lot of people whose work on games I read, I didn’t have any special attachment to them growing up.  I had a Gameboy when I was in elementary school, and then mostly put games aside until I was 16 (when I got my first console, a PlayStation).  Sure, I bumped up against them at friends’ houses and the like, but there was no ongoing fascination, no real formative moments that were defined by my attachment to this game or that game.  I didn’t play a lot of the ‘classic’ games (like Final Fantasy VII) until years later.  For my 19th birthday, I bought – mostly on a whim – a PS2, and mostly because I wanted to play Final Fantasy X.  I was taking what would wind up being a year long break from my college studies & actually had some disposable income, since I was working. I’d played good chunks of the eighth and ninth iterations, but nothing really hooked me.  But the tenth installment did, for whatever reason.

I remember a few things about that birthday: (1) my mum was out of town & a blizzard was rolling in, so I just had a nice dinner at my (formerly) favorite Korean restaurant with my aunt and uncle, and some friends braved the roads to come and hang out and (2) after everyone had departed the next day, I sat and had my first monster gaming marathon ever, fueled by one of those giant cookie cakes that my best friend had gotten me for my birthday.  It was a good cookie, in a hyperprocessed sort of way.  The game was better.

I also remember, while clocking through the game, that my mother fretted some – “Wouldn’t you like to, I don’t know, read a book or something?”  My mother is not the most technologically savvy of people, so I tried – with sweeping broad strokes of cultural essentialization – to explain it to her.  “You know how Kurosawa was good at those big, epic tales, like Seven Samurai?”  She nodded.  “Right, it’s kind of like that, but you’re involved in the action.”  This seemed to make some sense to her, and with apologies to Kurosawa for comparing his work to, well, a videogame of all things, I went on my merry way (I cried at the end of FFX & it’s the game that cemented my great affection for JRPGs, still my preferred genre).

I continued gaming, got more into it I guess, spent a few long sessions discussing and debating with friends who also gamed.  In 2005, my boyfriend at the time sent me a link to an article on the relatively new blog Kotaku about a new site called “The Game Chair.”  Its unique spot was interesting take on reviews – “progressive reviews,” where reviews would be written over the course of the game – and they were looking for writers.  I thought the idea sounded neat, so sent an inquiry – after some light chatter, the guy behind the idea wanted to see some of my writing.  Well, I didn’t have any bloggish stuff, so I sent along a recently completed paper entitled “‘So Many Parts’: Revolution and the Question of ‘Woman'” that I’d written for my very first seminar in Chinese history (incidentally, I would later use that same paper as part of grad school applications).  It talked about Lu Xun, 1930s Chinese films and fiction, and Antonia Finnane’s work on the development of the qipao in Republican China. This is probably a telling detail for the path my later career took.

So I started writing reviews for the site.  It was actually a fun intellectual exercise, and I’ve always liked to write – and write and write – not being given to brevity in any situation, except the ones where I need to be lengthy and expound on things in a cogent manner.  We also decided to write non-review “thought pieces.”  My first one was on girls and gaming – I found that there weren’t many women writing, thus people tend to say things like “Why don’t you write a piece on being a girl gamer?”.  At the time, I was sure I was going to wind up focusing on gender in China, so had some academic interest in it, too (I still do, though it’s not my primary focus) – but somehow it falls on us female writers in the gaming sphere to write about gender, games, and sex, frequently at the behest of others.  That post was linked on Slashdot.  This moment was enshrined in my memory as “That horrible time I got Slashdotted.”

The Slashdot experience introduced me to the god awful world that comments sections on the internet can be.  I was horrified to read the comments, which not only ripped my work to shreds, but also flung commentary at me like “Well, this must be because she’s fat and ugly and bitter and needs to get laid.  We need to see a picture to confirm!”  The best thing that could be said about that long, long page of comments is that the person who accused me of misusing the word “nauseous” at least backed down after I cited from the Oxford English Dictionary.  As I would later realize, the fact that this person backed down when confronted with evidence of his mistake, courtesy of something with the majestic authority of the OED, was by no means a common thing on the magical interweb tubes.  So props to that person for recognizing – and admitting – that maybe he didn’t know more than the ultimate dictionary on the English language.  The result of all this was that I was so upset I was in tears, even though my boyfriend said, “Honey, just don’t look.  It’s Slashdot, that’s what they do.” (Ian Bogost would later give me a similar admonition – several times – about reading the comments on Kotaku, but it can be so hard to tear yourself away, even when it’s making you frothy with rage)

Still, I wrote a couple of longer essays and some reviews, and really enjoyed it.  I also started poking around for other interesting sites related to games.  I’d been writing for The Game Chair for nine months or so when I packed up and headed to Taiwan; though I packed my PS2 and my DS, I didn’t really game much – so my writing petered off.

In the spring of 2007, Brian Crecente posted a call for female journalists on Kotaku (or something – I don’t really remember; I don’t know that I ever actually looked at the post).  My boyfriend (the same one who had seen TGC) sent my details along to Brian, who got in touch with me.  This time, I did have some game writing to pass along – my essays and reviews at TGC.  Brian took a look, must have liked what he saw, and asked me to keep a blog for a week so he could see how I handled news.  I’m pretty sure I panicked and covered a lot of obscure Taiwanese and China-related news (another potentially telling detail).  It was dull and boring, I’m sure, but while Brian thought I wouldn’t be a good fit for the full time weekly gig, he did ask me if I’d like to do some part time work on the weekends.  I, of course, accepted.  My first post was on women and gaming, because Brian said “Here, why don’t you write up something on this.”  Not unlike that first thought piece I did for TGC, and other essays I would later write.

As it turned out, I outlasted the person who got hired to do the weekday stuff by quite a while, and it also turned out to be a very good thing that I wound up on the weekend staff – when grad school started up, there was no way I would’ve been able to keep up with the work required of weekday editors.  It was also the weekend – slower in general, so real “NEWS” was a little harder to come by, and my posts weren’t immediately buried under a lot of other writing.  The schedule on a lot of big blogs can be absolutely punishing, and it is at Kotaku – a lot of readers comment on the fact that it’s just “too much” to keep up with.

So I wrote for Kotaku from late April or early May of 2007 until December of 2008.  It about killed me once I started school, since I never really had weekends off – some part of my leaning towards esoteric things was simply a matter of practicality.  No one else was posting from the same blogs I was (for the most part), so I didn’t have to worry that I was going to double post an article that someone had already gotten up on Wednesday.  It made prepping for the weekends a lot easier, since I tended to just gather things throughout the week so I could write them up in an organized manner and be done with Kotaku (and get back to my other job of being a grad student).

When Flynn DeMarco left, I was offered the chance to step up to the lead position on weekends, which I regretfully declined – I was with it enough to realize my workload as a PhD student was only going to get worse, and I was already stretching myself pretty thin with my meagre 12 posts a weekend.  Owen Good was hired to take over the lead spot, and it was nice having someone to commune with about work on weekends again.

I was told I would no longer have a position in late November 2008.  It came at a particularly bad time – I was having a spectacular, quarter-long internal breakdown over my doctoral studies and my first (and to date, only) “real” existential crisis on my choice of career paths.  Somewhat softening the blow was the assurance that it had nothing to do with my quality of work or my value to the site.  In hindsight, it was actually a good thing – the next quarter (which started about 2 weeks after my last day of work), I flung myself into researching Meng Chao and Li Huiniang with absolute abandon and started loading up my schedule with extra courses.  I probably could have continued the gig indefinitely, but Fate made sure I didn’t have to continue stretching myself that thin – at least, not because I was writing on the weekend.

Still, I was very upset.  I generally liked working for Kotaku and liked many aspects of my job.  I really liked making all sorts of cool connections with people like Ian Bogost and Leigh Alexander and Simon Carless and innumerable commenters and other bloggers – people who had nothing at all to do with what school I went to and who my advisors were.  Certainly there were things I didn’t like and that grated on me, but on the whole, it was a positive (if tiring at times) experience.  It was wonderful to get to be “Maggie, Kotaku writer,” not “Maggie, occasionally competent PhD student,” if only for a few hours a week.  It was the one place where – in the midsts of impostor syndrome and unhappiness over the fact that I felt downright awful at my new job of PhD student and was constantly being confronted with (what felt like to me at the time) my stupidity and incompetence – I liked what I did, and thought I got to do something quite interesting.  And useful, and purposeful, and different.  And it was something that I was at least good at, depending on how you approached my posts.

Screen from 'The Majesty of Colours'

I posted one of my favorite little games (at least, that I’d posted in my category of “Weird Artistic Timewaster”) on my last day of work; it was so wonderfully appropriate for how I was feeling.  Called “The Majesty of Colours,” Gregory Weir (the designer) calls it a “tale of love and loss.”  Sort of appropriate for a day when I was reflecting on my own (blogging) love and loss.

And then I had to post my farewell letter, which I fretted (and cried) over for several days, deleting and rewriting and editing, all while getting progressively more depressed about it all.  I hate saying goodbye, and it was very hard to say goodbye to Kotaku and everything that it meant to me, everything the wider community of people meant to me.  I didn’t have to say goodbye to everyone of course, much to my great relief, but it was shutting the door on one important part of my life – and that’s never easy.  While my Kotaku gig has continued to follow me through the past couple of years (sometimes in very interesting ways), that day I stopped being “Maggie, Kotaku writer” and put on another hat, “Maggie, that girl who used to write for Kotaku.”

I closed the note, which was mostly a link dump with my favorite, most relied upon sites (in the hopes that people who did like my writing would continue following up with the actual authors and their sites), with a few lines from the Lantingji xu 兰亭集序, Wang Xizhi’s “Preface to the Poems Composed at the Orchid Pavilion.”  It was probably the first and only time something dating from the 4th century (Chinese, no less) has appeared on Kotaku & probably will always remain so.  That, too, is probably a telling detail about my blogging career.

向之所欣,俛仰之間,已為陳迹,猶不能不以之興懷;况修短隨化,終期于盡。

What they had taken pleasure in has now passed away in an instant, so how could their hearts not give rise to longing? … A long or short life depends on the transformation of all things: everything must come to an end. (trans. Richard Strassberg)

The Lantingji xu

As a bit of a postscript (though really, how does one follow up on Wang Xizhi?  Not very well, is the answer), Simon Carless invited me to write for GameSetWatch after I left Kotaku.  I realized, after the initial shock of having my weekends mostly to myself wore off, that I was incredibly burned out from the grad school-writing juggling act.  We bandied about the idea, but I shied away from being locked into writing for other people, and within the set bounds of a formal column.  As this blog (young as it is) probably indicates, I’m not very good at “thinking in straight lines.”  It took me a long time to even want to write again (something other than academic papers, that is), and longer to actually start doing it.  And even then, I just wanted it to be on my own terms.

Part II: More indulgent reflection on how I wound up with the niche that I did