Tag Archive for games

Recent research and … Star Wars (of course)

Since moving to Montana, I’ve come to the general conclusion that academics are like wolverines (well, at least academics in my fields): we like our space. We really, really like our space. One might say we’re ridiculously, fiercely protective of that & may in fact get pretty damn grumpy when we don’t get it. I’m currently knee-deep in a week that is making me want to crawl under a blanket and not come out – in the midst of a month that’s doing the same – mostly because my calendar app looks like someone else’s calendar got imported on top of mine. It’s forcing me to be really productive, which I appreciate (I’ve gotten TONS done in the past couple of days!), but I’m also realizing how loosey-goosey my week must look to a person on the usual 9-5.

In any case, amidst generalized work insanity & some personal nonsense, some recent stuff of import:

Jeff Wasserstrom (UC Irvine) was kind enough to think of me (well, more accurately, the Star Wars lianhuanhua) when the world was abuzz with speculation on the latest Star Wars premiere in China. While it’s a little weird to have a random purchase be my calling card since 2014, I’ve just gone with it – Jeff interviewed me for the Los Angeles Review of Books China blog, in the hilariously titled “Darth Vader and the Triceratops,” which came out a few days before my birthday (nice little birthday present, a new line on the ‘Press Appearance’ section of the CV. Thanks, Jeff!). There was also an amazing article in the Japan Times that a fellow UCSD Modern Chinese history-er pointed me towards, on the artist behind the lianhuanhua! Entitled “Red ‘Star Wars’: How China used pirate comic to promote science in 1980s,” I was a little sad to see no mention of a little post that went viral, but still – cool to discover more history about this thing that I will apparently be dealing with forever.

Shortly after that came out, my first academic article in eons came out – relating to stuff I’ve already yammered about a lot here in a much more casual format. “The Game People Played: Mahjong in Modern Chinese Society and Culture” is available at Cross-Currents (open access!). A quick plug: the Cross-Currents editorial staff were models of efficiency & great to work with, and the whole process was really pleasant. It’s not necessarily the article I dreamed of publishing, but for something that was mostly a hacked back version of a 3rd year grad school research project, I did OK. Thanks to Amanda Shuman, Chris Bateman, and Reed Knappe for a lot of good feedback while I was getting it ready for publication. And of course, that seminar from oh-so-many-years-ago – it makes me a little misty eyed remembering it!

I did want to include a couple of images I couldn’t in the article – paired below with the relevant portions of the article.

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The association between mahjong and baser social elements was not confined to Chinese observers alone. In 1925, the Japanese professor Aoki Masaru commissioned a series of paintings—later published as Pekin fuzoku zufu [Illustrations of Beijing customs]—depicting many aspects of life in Beijing. One series of three images illustrates some pleasurable (and morally suspect) pastimes: sandwiched between two well-dressed gentlemen inspecting beauties spilling out from behind a curtain in a “tea house” and opium smokers lounging while puffing on their pipes is a lively game of mahjong (Aoki 1964, unnumbered plate). It doesn’t seem accidental that mahjong is slotted alongside a teahouse of ill repute and opium. And yet, by the twentieth century, mahjong not only was attracting players from the upper echelons of Chinese society, but had fans in Japan and the West, as well. Despite being a trifling matter, mahjong was a concern for reformers because it cut across class, gender, and geographical boundaries.

And on one of my favorite cartoons:

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At the same time, some writers recognized that mahjong was merely a symptom, not the cause, of problems faced by urban residents, particularly women. In a compelling Women’s Voice article from 1947, the reader is drawn to a cartoon labeled “Still Comrades” (“Naiyi” 1947, 18). Four women hunker down over a mahjong game, complaining about their husbands. “My husband’s a refrigerator,” one says. “My husband is as cold as the snow of the Himalayas,” grouses another, while the next states that her husband is like a block of marble. “My husband is hot as a volcano,” declares the last, “but he only uses his heat on the body of his secretary.” Mahjong is simply a facilitator for the conversation happening at the table, and it is this social quality that the article takes up in discussing mahjong clubs.

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.

Learning on a limb

Crow On Willow Woodblock printAs I’ve noted before, academia can be full of pretty strange transitions – the leap from grad student to professor is an enormous one. A year and a half in, and I can say with some confidence I’m getting settled, but of course – this is not an overnight process. I’m lucky to be at a university where I have a lot of latitude with my teaching, so in addition to drilling down on my core classes (like the general modern East Asian history survey course, which I teach once a year), I’ve been experimenting with classes I may or may not ever teach again. But just because I don’t get a perfectly working syllabus out of a course doesn’t mean it’s a waste of a prep. I taught a slightly harebrained course on memory & culture in 20th century East Asia this past fall, and while I don’t think I’d ever try and do that again (at least, not as I had it set up!), I did get some fantastic feedback from my students regarding readings and films, general structure and themes, etc. that I will be incorporating into future courses. I try hard to be upfront with my students that a lot of things (like their professor) are works in progress & like soliciting feedback on what they liked (or didn’t), and I’ve generally been rewarded with really helpful commentary. So at least at the end of a semester, I can usually say I went out on a limb, it didn’t entirely work, but hey: I learned a lot & next time will be better.

For the semester starting in a few days, I’ll be out on a limb again – one that I’m pretty excited to be on. I’ll be teaching a seminar on games and play, from weiqi to videogames & many points in between. I’ve been pretty amped about the course & in unusual fashion, actually had my syllabus more or less worked out by the beginning of November – two months early! This is really pretty out there for me – although I’ve cruised around the edges of game studies since I started grad school, it’s not an area where I’ve had any sustained, formal training. I’ve picked things up as I’ve gone along; I’m lucky enough to have a plethora of brilliant people in my life who have a lot more experience than me, and are generous with sharing experiences and strategies. When it comes down to it, I’m a Chinese historian who happens to have some background (however limited) in skirting the edges of the academic community & the industry. I am interested in games and play across time and space, which is one reason I wanted to teach this class: a chance for me to push myself a bit, and get outside my sinologist box (although our reading list does tilt towards East Asia, it’s by no means an Asian history class).

I did teach a senior capstone last spring (which in my corner of the department, is sort of a hybrid of sit-around-and-talk-about-monographs seminar & research seminar) on “games and play,” which taught me a lot about the perils of basing a history course around the subject. Armed with memories of that experience, I decided I was going to try something radically different (for me). I figured out my general goals for the course – a biggie was getting everyone writing better and more about these products that don’t get a lot of treatment in most history classes – and also pondered some of the pitfalls from last spring, as well as my other classes. I’m still getting my legs as far as running a seminar goes (facilitating discussion for a 3 hour block each week is a very different beast than a lecture course, even one that includes a lot of discussion), so I wanted to channel as much of the “extraneous” conversation in as productive a manner as possible.

One of the challenges of the last seminar was integrating people who had a lot of experience with games or sports, and people who didn’t. We spent a lot of time meandering off subject & while I hate to put an end to interesting conversation, I frequently found myself going ‘OK, back to the book!’. This is something I don’t really have to deal with in “my” classes – although teaching gender in Asia does give rise to more of the “Well, in my experience …” conversations – and I’m still learning how to guide and refocus conversation. But it is a seminar on games and play, and I want everyone to be able to engage with the material in ways that make sense to them & also allow them to explore their own interests within the broader framework. So why not build all that into the course? Maybe having a sanctioned – graded – outlet would help us manage seminar time more productively.

As a result, I’ve laid out a course that’s definitely not radical by any stretch of the imagination, but is a big experiment for me personally. I’ve moved us off the university course management software & back to my comfortable home base of a WordPress backend - that’s a story for another day in and of itself – and in lieu of the usual types of writing assignments I give, have provided a “choose your own grading adventure” menu of options, ranging from book reviews to long form essays to Let’s Plays. There’s no final paper, just a final long-form essay à la many of my posts in this blog: while I don’t think I’ll ever move entirely away from the formal “academic” undergrad final paper, I don’t think there’s any reason thoughtful, well-written, properly cited, interesting writing can’t happen in a more relaxed format. I’d rather read high-quality, perhaps slightly more casual writing (of course, the ideal – in some respects – is both, but I learned a lot about writing on cultural objects by writing more informally, and that has carried over to my formal writing). And I want students to be able to deploy the digital tools and resources at their disposal if they so choose: somewhat more difficult to do in a PDF or Word doc!

It’s going to be more work for my students (and me), but I hope it will prove satisfying. It could turn out to be an utter disaster, but it will be a learning experience either way, and I am confident that I’ve got a pretty interesting, diverse crop of readings that I’m very excited about. I’m hoping to blog a bit about the experience, to ponder what works and what doesn’t, though since I’m in the thick of revising my dissertation, other writing needs to take a backseat (somewhat to my chagrin). Regardless of the ultimate success or not, it’s going to be a fun adventure – one I’m really looking forward to, and one that reminds me how much I enjoy teaching. There are many pleasures of solitary research work, to be sure – but having a space for collaborative experimentation is its own particular joy.

Pigs

Top image, Ohara Koson, “Crow Perched on a Tree Branch” from the Freer & Sackler

Coming ’round full circle

I took the first week and a half of winter break to go on one of my every-nine-months-or-so gaming binges – doing the media consumption equivalent of gorging one’s self during the holidays on delicious treats with little thought to anything or anyone else (or your waistline). I played through Tales of Xillia, having played about 3/4s over spring break last year, and its sequel, Tales of Xillia 2. I do love a good JRPG – it’s one of the few genres I’ve been playing consistently – and consistently seek out – since I started “really” playing games in the late ’90s – and it occurred to me that I’ve actually played a lot of the Tales of series. They feature a pretty frenetic battle style that isn’t actually my preferred way of play (boring, old school turn based battle is my favorite!), but there’s a pleasant rhythm and often plenty of game-sanctioned grinding via side quests. I’m one of those people that loves to grind, although not if I feel like I have to do it to progress in the game; but generally, I play games to put myself into a happy space, and low-stress, repetitive-task activities (cross stitch! Organizing things! Fixing footnotes! Grinding in an RPG!) do that for me.

image-newsIn any case, I liked both the Xillia entries. I was a little suspicious of the second installment when I first started, since I don’t particularly like a silent protagonist, which Xillia 2 mostly has. My concern was perhaps heightened by the fact that I find random grunts, sighs, and other vocalizations – in absence of any other sort of voice acting – a bit irksome; at least in Persona, say, or Suikoden, the silent protagonist is, well, silent. After playing a game, I usually go poke around review sites, discussion boards, etc., just to see what conversation surrounding the game is like (I don’t tend to be playing the latest & greatest – or even popular – so thoughtful, focused criticism can be hard to find). I did so with the Xillia games, and was most interested in chatter surrounding the plot/ends of Xillia 2. There are three endings, which I guess are never officially named as “true,” “good,” and “bad,” but do seem to have some ranking, based on the kind of end credits given to each – well, the “bad” ending is rather clearly not the intended ending, since you never get to the end, and the battle to get to that ending is monstrously hard – far more difficult than the “final boss” in either of the other endings.

JRPGs often get castigated for being totally predictable, and it’s generally true (although I don’t know that most other genres aren’t equally as predictable) – you know you’re probably going to be facing down some big evil with a motley collection of people, there’s going to be criticism of organized religion and/or environmental destruction and/or technology, there’s probably going to be some kind of betrayal along the way, one of the good guys will turn out to be bad or vice versa, things are probably going to resolve well for our band of heroes, and so on. I actually don’t mind the repetitive nature, but this may be somewhat linked to what I study. Drama in China was recycled from generation to generation; the same source material provided inspiration for centuries worth of cultural production. Consider the proliferation of Romance of the Three Kingdoms-themed games in East Asia: the medium may be new, but the popularity is not. There are patterns of narrative that can be comfortably inhabited; they don’t tend to be “shocking” or introduce anything new, but if the writing is good & characterizations are on point, well – a solid story is a solid story, even if it is rehashing ground we’ve been over before. I’m also willing to suspend my disbelief at everything if I like the gameplay and other elements (there are limits though: once, after Final Fantasy XIII was released, I was talking to a friend about the skill leveling system, which seemed a little ridiculous and over the top to me, and finally said “Are we just getting too old and jaded for this stuff?” “Yes,” he responded, not missing a beat, “Yes, we are.” But had I liked everything else about the game, I probably could’ve – would’ve – forgiven the “Crystarium”).

Li Huiniang (not a datuanyuan!), from Judith Zeitlin's The Phantom Heroine (158)

Li Huiniang (not a gentle maiden!), from Judith Zeitlin’s The Phantom Heroine (158)

Xillia 2 wasn’t surprising exactly, but it was quite a bit darker than I was perhaps expecting. I was intrigued that none of the endings were really “fan service” endings – meaning happy in the sense of everything being resolved perfectly and easily. Many people liked this (it seems more mature, more realistic), many other people seemed to find it unsatisfying (where’s my happy ending, dammit!). In Chinese literature, there is a plot structure called datuanyuan 大团圆 (the “grand denouement,”  “big and happy reunion,” a version of “… and they all lived happily ever after.”): the perfect, full-circle ending where the boy gets the girl, and the job, and everything else. No loose ends anywhere, and we all walk away with the warm fuzzies. I’ve been pondering the appeal of traditional literature – rife with datuanyuan, among other things – in high socialist China, and something about these Xillia 2 endings (somewhat happy, in some cases, or moving, perhaps, but not perfect in the sense that some fans long for: any option means cutting off some possibility, some person) spoke to my intellectual side a bit. Funnily enough, the “good” (but not “true”) ending in Xillia 2 is “round” in many respects, largely because of the game’s plot point about “alternate dimensions”: there is a certain amount of “things coming full circle” due to the alternate timelines and overlapping histories. But it’s not “round” in the sense of a datuanyuan - things don’t entirely work out as they “should” for a clear cut, unimpeachably happy ending.

The datuanyuan  is not some minor point for children’s fairytales (something I think we tend to associate the “and then they lived happily ever after” endings with – “grownup” media should be grittier, or more complex, and not so happy against all odds); it’s actually quite an important thing in Chinese literature, including some of the greatest things ever written in any language.  The English translation doesn’t convey the cultural significance of roundness (as Zhang Zhen notes in An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema, 1896-1937, the significance of datuanyuan goes way beyond a cliché, and points to a kind of cultural conditioning – she mentions, for instance, the importance of visual cues like the typical round table used for family meals, as well as cosmological symbols like the full moon, in early Chinese cinema that had a tendency to rely on the “big reunion” as a plot structure). Cultural resonance or not, forcing a datuanyuan sometimes leads to bizarre results, like in the 1926 film A String of Pearls (Yi chuan zhenzhu 一串珍珠), based loosely (and I do mean “loosely”) on the famous Guy de Maupassant short story “La parure” (The necklace), where the emotional punch of the story is more or less removed by an effort to ensure the happy ending. I suppose this is one complaint with happy endings in games; they can seem contrived or leave massive plot holes.

There are also old examples of “fanfic,” intended to write the wrongs of an original narrative, or flesh things out (often appending a datuanyuan) – the ones I think of are related to Dream of the Red Chamber [Honglou meng 红楼梦], the 18th century novel by Cao Xueqin 曹雪芹. The first printed version (in 1791) included 40 extra chapters that don’t exist in earlier  manuscripts, and there’s been a great amount of debate about what the ending should have looked like, who wrote the extra 40 chapters, the role of the editors of the printed version, etc (indeed, there is an entirely discipline dedicated to study of this novel – called Hongxue 红学 in Chinese, “Redology” – a tidbit that I still delight in passing on to students). The 19th century saw all sorts of new endings put forth, though as Jin Feng points out in Romancing the Internet: Producing and Consuming Chinese Web Romance, these have not generally been looked at from the angle of fan activity, but simply as part of pre-20th century literary production.

But of course, it’s not just fans who write happy, perfect endings. One argument about the datuanyuan – and it is a pretty constant feature of a lot of Chinese fiction over the centuries – is that Chinese fiction was initially “meant to entertain the writer himself more than his readers” (Gu Mingdong, Chinese Theories of Fiction: A Non-Western Narrative System). On this, brilliant intellectuals pointed out in the 1950s and 1960s that even the heyday of Ming chuanqi produced works that were generally self-indulgent on the part of the author (the translator Yang Xianyi commented in the early ’60s that “feudal period literati” paid little attention to coherence or overall structure, instead weaving together a bunch of disparate plots into one sprawling mass of a story: in essence, writing what they wanted to write, regardless of the effect it gave their audience). Owing to the unlikely chances of truly succeeding in the civil service system, literati – the producers and consumers of fiction – used these cultural products to daydream; they daydreamed not of “realistic” endings, but of spectacularly perfect ones. In some respects, it’s a more ancient and literary version of fan fiction, though in this case, the source material is generally historical in nature.

In truth, I like most datuanyuan-type endings, at least in games. I don’t seek them out – and often, designers are more than happy to give us one, so it’s interesting when one doesn’t appear – but there’s something pleasing about them, even if they’re ridiculous. I loved Final Fantasy X – which did not have a datuanyuan denouement (I cried! I snuffled lightly at all three endings of Xillia 2, but I actually cried at the end of FFX), and it’s possible I loved it because it didn’t have a perfect ending – but at the same time, I loved Final Fantasy X-2 because it tacked a company-sanctioned happy ending on to everything. I got my bittersweet ending and everything being tied up in a neat, if not entirely logical, package at the end. This is one reason for multiple endings, I suppose (that and the illusion of choice) – give the people what they want, make everyone happy! Bittersweet, sad, happy? We’ve got you covered.

kunqunr03_03_clip_image001_0001This is much harder to do in literature, for obvious reasons, although a single work can encompass all those moments. In drama, this is helped by the fact that the sprawling Ming tales were not performed in their entirety, and were instead seen in excerpts. Some of the most enduring parts of Tang Xianzu’s 汤显祖 masterwork The Peony Pavilion (Mudan ting 牡丹亭), or at least the ones that get trotted out the most, are not, in fact, the end, where everything works out – they are the beautiful and rather tragic (or at least bittersweet) early scenes. Considering the fears of moralists that chuanqi like Peony would drive women to madness, suicide, or worse, it seems that even having a happy ending was no guarantee your audience would gravitate towards that! Instead, portions of the reading audience seemed to fixate on the somewhat depressing (perhaps more realistic?) chapters – an acknowledgement that the datuanyuan was simply a fantasy, impossible in real life? The famous “Walking through the garden, waking from the dream” [Youyuan jingmeng 游园惊梦] section is rather wondrous – and it does feature quite the fantastic dream! – yet it’s simply that: a dream. And yet the (male) authors seemed to love writing the fantastical ending, no matter how improbable, even if those weren’t the parts segments of their audience gravitated towards. Perhaps this is partially a difference in producing and consuming; I wonder if fan-produced writing and art geared towards alternative paths or endings, fleshing out what happened after, writing a “perfect” scenario, whatever that might mean for an individual, often focuses more on the perhaps improbable yet perfect because it’s created largely to entertain one’s self and not really for an audience (publishing on fandom specific sites and the like notwithstanding) – not unlike some of the great fiction and drama in China.

LHN2I’m interested in literary production as self-entertainment. While I don’t think my Marxist intellectuals were generally writing to entertain themselves (though I do think sinking one’s self into the full capabilities of classical Chinese – worlds away from rote Marxist language, more “understandable” vernacular – must have been a pleasure), I do think they were writing to entertain each other, at least in some cases – something that gets lost when we focus on ideological squabbles and high politics to the total exclusion of thinking about writing and consuming literature. I’m also interested in the fantasy of it, at least as applied to the historical dramas c. 1960 I write about. We focus so much on their political meaning – the coded, yet sharp, rebukes of a system that wasn’t working for vast amounts of the Chinese population – but what about their function as escapes? As daydreams? To be sure, “righteous phantasm raining down hellfire on cruel and unjust prime minister” (as in this image from Li Huiniang) is lacking a bit of the romance of “dead maiden revived for love of talented scholar, and everything works out in the end.” But on the other hand, it’s a fantasy of a very particular kind, well-suited for a specific moment. The act of creating or consuming such a fantasy in that moment could be quite powerful, I think. Consuming the fantastical can be powerful at any moment.

We sometimes act like a story with a “fairytale” ending is necessarily simplistic, juvenile, or unsophisticated; the history of the datuanyuan in China illustrates that such things can be quite sophisticated in terms of aesthetics and artistic value. I suppose I don’t place a huge amount of value on a “round” ending in the sense of datuanyuan (though the fangirl inside me does like them in games where I’m attached to the main characters), but I do place value on an ending feeling “round,” fleshed out, and coming to a conclusion in a graceful, logical way. Games are a bit of a fantastical daydream for me, or that’s how I use them – I suspend disbelief for so many other things, a happy “round” ending is just one more thing. Not so unlike my playwrights, I suspect – they were willing to suspend disbelief for that chance of escape and daydreaming, if only for the duration of a performance. Those few hours of being thrilled at the turn of events, of imagining some other path were worth any logical gymnastics they subjected themselves to.

Those happy golden years (?)

10653510_10100150925336471_1539700535619140759_nThe semester is back in full swing here in Montana, and I’ve been feeling like I’m drowning on multiple levels (though I have had the time for some nice hikes the past two weekends, which has made me and the dog super happy!), but still trying hard to keep my head above water. It’s good for reminding myself that I can cope with stressful situations with (relative) aplomb, but has made those precious hours at home where I can just veg out, embroider, or watch mindless TV all the more magical. I preordered the latest Theatrhythm months ago & had completely forgotten about it, so when it showed up late last week, I was totally delighted (more low-stress, repetitive task activities to distract myself with!) – despite being completely & utterly disgusted with the whole cultural edifice of “videogames.”

The past two months (give or take a week or two) have been utterly insane on the internet, at least in the world of videogames. I was going to describe it as a ‘kerfluffle,’ but the campaign of harassment and vitriol has been totally appalling (this is too light a descriptor) to watch from a distance. Although I don’t write about games much anymore – and even then, write only here, sporadically – I still have a number of friends and acquaintances who are involved in the “games criticism/journalism” community in some capacity or another, and I spent several years pretty close to it on account of my then-significant other. The past few months have been pretty bad, with a lot of talented writers (particularly women) exiting the space for a number of reasons, anger from freelancers over their working conditions (similar in many respects to the adjunct crisis), many things just seeming pretty untenable as writers scramble for limited Patreon dollars to try and support themselves, etc etc. A lot of these issues aren’t new, but they have reached a boiling point. The past couple of weeks have just added to that, and it’s hurt to watch people I care about be targeted, one after another (and just when it seems to be dying down, it comes back with a vengeance …).

At some point, while watching crazier and crazier things be retweeted (my only contribution was replying to people I know: “These people can’t be serious. They CAN’T.” If it were satire, it would be brilliant and cutting – but sadly, I think it was (is) all being spoken or typed with the utmost seriousness), I had this weird thought: My “career” happened during a golden age. I’m teaching a course on “memory & culture,” and talked early in the course about the development of Chinese historiography; we pondered the mythical “golden ages” discussed by ancient historians in various places. Of course, it’s not only an ancient impulse (the “Back in my day” or “Kids these days” – or, more elegantly phrased by Cicero, O tempora o mores – point of view is something every generation needs to come up with). Part of the strange thing about the way people (namely, those who seem to think that the current state of games journalism is Really Awful and Something Needs to Be Done) are talking about games journalism now – or criticism, or blogging, or the Twitterverse, or whatever – is that they seem to believe there’s some amazing mythical past where everything was fine and to their liking. I’m not sure when they’re talking about – four years ago? Seven (when I was writing)? Ten? Twenty? Never? I tend to slot this mythical age of Perfect Games Journalism in the same category as the Yellow Emperor.

It’s made me sad to watch: all of this, but particularly this latest outburst. Things didn’t used to be like this. I don’t think the period I was writing was really a golden age – there is so much smart writing on games now, and much easier ways to connect with people who are interested in the same sorts of things you are! – but on the other hand …. I got the job at Kotaku after Brian Crecente made a post specifically looking for women writers. I don’t remember any hue and cry over this, and Kotaku did in fact hire not one, but two women (I was deemed – justifiably – a bit too dull for weekday rotation, but was offered a weekend spot). I wonder what would happen now? Would a major site put out such a call (based on the recent hires, I’m going to go with ‘no’)? Would there be rants, raves, and death threats over a perceived “social justice warrior” agenda? Probably, is the sad answer. The toxicity that makes it so that I don’t even want to look at games-related tweets on my Twitter feed, for example, just wasn’t such an issue. Oh, sure, there were grumpy, sexist, asshole comments even then (Ian Bogost’s constant wise counsel was ‘Don’t read the comments!’) – but a coordinated harassment campaign? No. I don’t mean to imply that my experience was the norm; but considering the targets of these recent campaigns, I have a hard time imagining I would’ve escaped unscathed were I still writing – and it quite simply never occurred to me that someone would be threatening my life & make me move out of my house due to what I was publicizing in whatever way. And I was pretty paranoid about putting myself out there on the internet!

Theatrhythm LogoCompared to the average history professor, I suppose I’m something of an “insider” as far as games go, but I recognize that for game studies – never mind the enthusiast group – I’m on the fringes, at best. Even when I was writing about games, I didn’t play everything; these days, with time at a premium, I’m far less likely to do so. JRPGs are my poison of choice, and I plink away at a couple of games of a far more casual variety on my iPad when I just need to be distracted. Chances are, if I’m going to invest significant time into a game, it’s going to be something already known and loved (i.e., old). In a word, I’m boring, behind the times, and not a particularly good example of a person who plays a lot of AAA games (or indie games. Or, really, ANY kind of games). I’m never going to be a “games writer” ever again; on the other hand, I do love videogames (some of them, at least).

I don’t love them because of the shit that’s happened the past 2 months. I don’t want to teach with them because of the incredibly toxic community that’s grown up around them – truly, far and away more toxic than I remember anything being 7 years ago. I’ve been playing the latest Theatrhythm release for 3DS (I do haul that around with me everywhere, even though Bozeman is a terrible place for streetpassing!) & reliving “Great moments in gaming past.” Just hearing the music from well-loved titles from many years ago has sent me on a nostalgic bent – it’s not something exclusive to games (I certainly get the same feelings with the right kind of literature or non-game-related music, for instance), but it is a bit funny how bound up certain game memories are with bigger life memories. That’s why I will always play games in some capacity or another.

I remember watching the end of Crisis Core (which I sorely wish would be re-released!) at some point during my first year of grad school, on a PSP I’d bought myself as a Christmas present on a total whim. I loved it. I loved the gameplay, and the story, and the music. I really loved the music (despite not being much for dramatic guitar riffs – but damn, is that a good theme). As I often do, a few months later, I once again clocked through the game after that first frantic playthrough. It was good (more than good). It came at a difficult point in my personal life, and I remember sitting out on the concrete steps of my crappy apartment in a so-so San Diego neighborhood, with my big wonderful black dog keeping watch from inside the steel security grate, while I was drinking canned Kirin Ichiban and smoking cigarettes, playing through the ending (again!), and thinking how sad it all was.

I had weird intimations of that moment this week, as I motored through Theatrhythm & was delighted to discover songs from Crisis Core were included (along with a lot of other things). I love that feeling. It’s why I still bother to buy games (chasing that particular high of wanting to play more more more!), add to my console collection, still have game music in my collection, still have old consoles and handhelds hanging around. I remember how this made me feel, or that, or that. Those feelings often come burbling up at incredibly appropriate times.

Mambo GirlMy office tea mug is known as Mambo Girl (曼波女郎), after the film that graces it. It’s a “homemade” mug – the kind that screws apart so you can put whatever you’d like inside as the decoration – the image trimmed from a DVD cover. I have had it since 2006, and it’s older than that – my friend carried it for some length of time in Taiwan. The night she, her partner, and their Shiba Inu left Taiwan, we were frantically stuffing things into suitcases and bags in that last panicked sweep of their apartment. I caught sight of Mambo Girl – “Cindy! It’s Mambo Girl, you can’t leave her here!” – but there was no room to bring her back to the US, so I took her & have carried her ever since. The lid has chew marks from that Shiba in his younger days (he is much older now – he even has arthritis!), and I’m sure most people would look askance at using a mug that’s pretty ancient, as far as these things go, and has been chewed on by a dog. But I get a kick out of those youthful chew marks, and remember watching the actual Mambo Girl film in Berkeley on my first trip out there, and every time I pour some tea into her (uh, it), I feel warm and fuzzy with the weight of happy memories. Not unlike when I return to well-loved game worlds.

Things like the past few months make me glad I’m happier returning to the past than excitedly looking towards the future, at least insofar as games are concerned; unlike many people I know, I can ignore this stuff these days. I’ve gone through periods wishing I were more involved in the writing community, but having watched what my friends and other people I think highly of have gone through, I’m happy I haven’t. That’s a sad, sad statement of affairs.

Placeholder & recent writing

From Benjamin Breen's interpretation of a 1981 photo of Hu Zhifeng as Li Huiniang

From Benjamin Breen’s interpretation of a 1981 photo of Hu Zhifeng as Li Huiniang

As I’m currently in the frantic final stages of writing my dissertation (for a 26 July defense – grad school is almost over! I still can’t quite wrap my head around it) as well as trying to get my life in order for a big move to beautiful Bozeman, Montana to take up an assistant professorship at Montana State University (I really can’t quite wrap my head around that – even though I’ve known since December, it’s still baffling and quite wondrous, and I’m thrilled with how things panned out this year), I’ve had less time to write than I’d otherwise like. But I have cranked out two pieces I was rather pleased with & they have both appeared in the past month:

The first was a reworked excerpt on a Chinese proposal, c. 1904, to “reform” the game of mahjong. The piece was pulled from my third year research paper (on mahjong & its social/cultural standing from the late Qing through the Republican period), which I have written about a few times here already. I was delighted to be included in Zoya Street‘s new effort, Memory Insufficient, an e-zine that hopes to encourage high-quality historical writing on games. With Zoya at the helm, we can look forward to a lot of good material & I hope the effort really takes off (it’s off to a splendid start, so I can’t wait to see how it develops). In any case, my piece “Mahjong as edutainment” can be found in the second issue, which is on Asian histories in games.

The second is a piece I’m particularly pleased with, on an important subject of my dissertation: the literary figure of Li Huiniang. I hardly ever say I’m happy with a piece of my own writing, but I’m really tickled with how well my recounting of the tale of Li Huiniang – moving from 1981 all the way back to 1381 – came out in “The Woman in Green: A Chinese Ghost Tale from Mao to Ming, 1981-1381.” Ages ago, Maura Cunningham put me in touch with Christopher Heaney, one of the founders & editors of a new journal of experimental and narrative history out of UT Austin (The Appendix). Chris was fantastic to work with, especially considering I was in a particularly flakey period, and the whole staff is putting out such a fantastically creative publication (I absolutely adore Benjamin Breen‘s take on one of my favorite photographs of Hu Zhifeng as Li Huiniang – a bit of his version is seen above, the original is below). I hope the piece was worth it in the end, and just like Memory Insufficient, I am really looking forward to seeing how The Appendix develops – they have already gathered some really impressive, very creative pieces in their first two issues. I hope I’ll have more fun things to contribute in the future. Getting out of the formal “academicese” box is so very valuable for us (and a blessed break from the dissertation for me).

And with that, it’s back to the grindstone. Where has the time gone?

Hu Zhifeng胡芝風 as Li Huiniang

Hu Zhifeng胡芝風 as Li Huiniang

Dreaming of the far horizon

Fair warning: this is rough and addled; I’m in a particularly manic phase of writing/research of my dissertation, which has spilled over into all sorts of areas of my life. But it usually manifests in the desire to write something – anything – other than my dissertation, and read something – anything – other than my sources, leading to half-baked and somewhat frantic bits and pieces of writing spilling out at inopportune moments. This was originally supposed to be more on the concept of ‘female role models,’ but it wound up being more a meditation on what we find worthy of attention and valorization when it comes to female characters or historical personages.

ffxsunset For my nineteenth birthday, I bought myself a PlayStation 2 and a copy of Final Fantasy X. It was something of an impulse purchase, but I passed a nice week afterwards holed up on my first real gaming binge. While I’d played through the Final Fantasy offerings for PS1, FFX was the first of the series to really catch me, and it’s part of the reason I’m generally playing some JRPG or another, or nothing at all.

Ten years after the fact, I still have a great affection for the world and characters of FFX (if not always the voice acting); I’ve even gotten over my embarrassment at admitting that (a) I really do love FFX when talking to more old-school FF fans and (b) I cried at the end, and was delighted to have what amounted to an official fanfiction-esque sequel. It’s a game space I feel very comfortable in – appropriate, I think, for a game that marked the real start of my adult interest in games.

It may seem to be a bit of an odd game to select when talking about ‘female role models.’ There’s no one who comes out swinging a sword bigger than she is, or really turns expected JRPG roles on their head. Yuna is delicate and feminine (and a white mage, natch), Lulu is one sharp gasp away from heaving right out of her corset, and Rikku is young, lithe, and perky. I liked Lulu right off the bat, her snark and cynicism appealing to my own snarky, cynical self. But in the years since my first play through, I’ve come to appreciate Yuna more and more. I don’t know that I would describe her as a ‘role model’ precisely, but I like her. While she’s generally a pretty well-liked character, I used to be baffled by the occasional criticism I came across: ‘She’s naïve! She’s weak! She’s wishy-washy! She needs a man to give her life direction! She’s so damn nice! Her voice acting sucks! I hate female characters like that!’ Even if you don’t hate characters like her, she’s not exactly the first example trotted out when talking about ‘female characters we need more of in games.’ And yet …

… and yet. There’s a quiet moral strength about her, steel wrapped in a pretty obi. It’s a strength that’s compelling to me, and has only become more so in the years since I first played the game. In my head, the ‘Yuna’ archetype runs together with a type of virtuous woman often celebrated in imperial China. I find many of them quite inspiring – for their talent, for their bravery, for their ability to get things done in adverse circumstances. They aren’t swashbuckling heroines, but there is something about them. In the same way, I find there’s something about Yuna – her sense of purpose (no man necessary), her bravery (she is not a damsel in distress), her quiet, constant belief in herself and what she’s doing. Perhaps it’s that there sometimes seems to be a small gap between a somewhat mild temperament and less bombastic forms of heroism, and women as ineffective sweetness and light – there’s something a little uncomfortable about championing this particular form of heroism. Does it hew too closely to a narrative of what women are simply expected to be? Does it simply not push the envelope enough?

(More Ancient) Iron Girls

One of the great challenges of teaching women’s history in China is walking a fine line between valorizing the agency women had/made for themselves and being realistic about social, cultural, and political oppression. I have shelves full of books that swing from one extreme to the other – there’s the 1970s feminist scholarship that decried the fate of generations of Chinese women who were utterly oppressed by the patriarchy and Confucian order. In reaction to that, we have more contemporary works that highlight the experiences of small numbers of women to show that women weren’t simply locked in the inner quarters, bound footed and pregnant. The former is hideously negative, flattening the lived experiences of women and their own voices, the latter a bit too rosy at times. When I pull out the writings of women in my own teaching, I usually tell my students that while we can’t and shouldn’t ignore the very real negatives that women had to contend with, I want to at least give them a glimpse of the inner lives of some of these otherwise faceless women. Many of them weren’t simply vessels to carry on the family line; they did have rich intellectual and interior lives, interests, friends; they were loved. They made spaces for themselves, and they were not simply blank witnesses.

One of the most treasured, battered volumes in my entire library is Women Writers of Traditional China (it’s such a favorite, I’ve made a habit of gifting it to people for whom it seems even vaguely appropriate), a spectacular anthology that pulled together some of the very best translators to cover two thousand years of women’s writings, primarily poetry. I like introducing people to these amazing women, who run the gamut from pampered daughters of elite literati families to courtesans, but the things that make them such exemplars can be somewhat unsatisfying for modern sensibilities, I think. These are generally not Mulans come to life: they aren’t marching off to war, they’re not fooling the patriarchy by passing as men, they don’t attain glory in particularly manly ways (at least, not to Western eyes: however, there is something to be said for the fame many reached in manly intellectual pursuits). It can be difficult to make these stories sing for students – they often see these women as victims at worst, at best rather dull examples of ‘good women.’ Certainly they don’t seem to be heroes.

I think the discomfort stems in part from the fact that these women have little agency in the ways that we would like. To be sure, there were plenty of constraints in the often repressive Confucian moral code. It should also be noted that their biographies hew closely to the classic tales of virtuous and moral women, which have their own patterns and expected outcomes. And certainly, there is often a lament in the biographies – sometimes quite explicitly – that ‘if only she had been a man!’ There are tales of badly arranged marriages and horrible stepmothers; a not insignificant number of the great poets were themselves courtesans.

Qiu Jin, dressed in a Japanese style & as a man

Qiu Jin, dressed in a Japanese style & as a man

There are Mulan-ish characters, and these women often grab our attention right away. The famous revolutionary Qiu Jin 秋瑾, who was beheaded in the waning years of the Qing dynasty for her anti-dynastic, anti-Manchu activities, is one example. A figure worthy of the ‘heroine’ title (indeed, Qiu Jin wrote in one poem, ‘Don’t tell me that women are not heroes, I rode the East Sea’s winds – alone – for ten thousand miles’), I suppose, and yet I find her friend Xu Zihua 徐自華 more interesting in many ways. Qiu Jin charges headlong into the unknown – there is a streak of naïveté in her actions, it’s not just confined to the sheltered, quiet good girls. But it is someone else who is left to clean up the mess, and also see the project through. After Qiu was executed, it was Xu who set off to retrieve the body of her good friend and bury her:

Red clouds closing in on all sides as evening sorrow rises;
A lonely boat in a river full of wind and snow.
How I can I bear to walk the road to Shanyin today
Where no one but me comes to bury Autumn?1

I would be curled into a shell-shocked ball, and don’t think I would deal nearly so well with making burial arrangements for a well-loved person who was now in two pieces instead of one. Especially when such action would encourage more attention from the authorities who had just arrested and beheaded said friend.

I don’t mean to imply that it’s only these types of ‘quiet’ strength that are worthy of attention, just that perhaps we don’t give it as much attention as it deserves. It’s something that is harder to valorize than the more obviously ‘heroic’ qualities. Qiu Jin is a clear hero, and she hits some of those points we like: she shunned the expected female roles of her time (leaving her husband and children to head to Japan), she embraced the idea of revolutionary violence, she was photographed with weaponry. Delicate Chinese flower she was not, despite having bound feet. But there is heroism in Xu Zihua’s story: it is not bombastic, and it doesn’t involve assassination plots, but it speaks to a person who willingly bore a tremendous responsibility in a volatile time.

Of course, there’s a problem when it comes to talking about videogame characters and their sense of self – unlike the historical women, who were writing their own version of their life (real or imagined), Yuna is scripted, largely (entirely?) by men, and while she’s a hugely important character in the game, she’s not the main character. She is not writing her story. But she’s not simply a cookie cutter female-in-a-game, though, just as these women poets I so adore are not simply cookie cutter images of what people imagine ‘a traditional Chinese woman’ to be.

Are they women to be emulated? Are they role models? There are few characters or actual people I’d point to and say ‘We should all desire to be like that!’ Virtues of Ming-Qing China (to say nothing of fictional worlds) are not always virtues in modern society, and some of them can seem downright horrifying. The faithful maiden cult, a complement to the cult of the chaste widow (i.e., women who did not remarry after the death of a husband), is one of those – who in their right mind would point to young women committing suicide after the death of a fiancé as a model to emulate? On the other hand, there is the shape of many of these stories and biographies. Would that I could write like many of those poets, or have such an intellectual command of a vast literature and history. Would that I were able to stick closely to my own sense of purpose, and see things through to completion with a clear mind. Would that I could take the vicissitudes of life in stride without balancing on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Would that I were such a loyal friend.

The Far Horizon Road

I love the candy-colored world of Spira; grey faux-medieval cities rarely do much for me (I love wandering them in real life, not so much in a game). My ideal landscape can be summed up by another Chinese poet, Zhang Yaotiao 张窈窕: 万里秋光碧, ‘boundless emerald-hued autumn light,’ or more poetically, ‘miles and/miles of autumn/light – sapphire/turquoise,/jade.’2 I like the relatively cheerful attitude of many of the characters – perhaps the brooding lead, à la Cloud or Squall, reminds me a bit too much of myself, and it’s not as comfortable an experience to slip into. But I also like the fact there’s a bit of melancholy that pervades much of the game. It reminds me of my favorite Chinese poems: beautiful, lush language that is by turns happy and sad. It’s wonderfully bittersweet in a way. I have the same feeling traipsing through the world of FFX: I know how things are going to end, I know that it’s going to make me sad, and even so, there’s something wonderful about everything leading up to that.

Niether Yuna, nor all my beloved poets of centuries past, are particularly likely candidates for role modelhood. They’re not particularly badass women, at least in the ways that we usually talk about it, c. 2013. They often conform a little too closely to the roles we collectively expect women to fall into (and that we fight against): quiet, cheerful, willing to subsume personal happiness for the good of the whole, naïve. But I wonder sometimes if it’s not like focusing on the bound foot to the exclusion of the entire woman. Just as the act of binding their feet did not cripple their minds, surely having what some might define as classically ‘feminine’ traits does not mean they’re simply yet another version of the virtuous, silent, ineffective, inactive woman? Fictional characters can be rather difficult – most of us know we need to take historical people on their own terms. Paraphrasing from an excellent scholar, getting on a moral high horse about foot binding, for instance, does precious little for us; trying to understand it in context, getting past that first ‘Ohmygod, how disgusting/barbaric/appalling’ reaction, is much more valuable. But what to do with fictional women? Whose terms should we take them on? Are we reinforcing the more overtly negative portrayals of women if we embrace less overtly heroic portrayals?

There’s a lot of longing for a someday that seems forever out of reach in both classical Chinese poetry and videogame criticism. Perhaps that’s just a human impulse when presented with realities that are not currently to our liking.

By the azure edge of the evening clouds – do you know where it is?
Beyond the four mountains – perhaps you dwell in the mountains there.
One sheet of crimson clouds comes, cutting across the bamboo,
Two lines of white birds go, parting the smoke.
I stretch my eyes: my heart is tangled in ten thousand threads.
Leaning against the wall, I softly chant “Jian jia.”
My longing makes me dream of the far horizon,
Though I still don’t know the way on the far horizon road.3

ffx sending

Show 3 footnotes

  1. From “On the 26th of November, I Crossed the Yangzi During a Snow Storm to Take Care of Xuanqing’s Burial; I Was Moved to Write,” trans. Grace S. Fong, Women Writers in Traditional China 664-665
  2. Trans. Jeanne Larsen, Women Writers of Traditional China, 81-82
  3. Wu Shan 吳山, “Yulou chun: Gazing into the Distance at Evening and Remembering the Talented Woman Wang Chenrou,” trans. Ruth Rogaski, in Women Writers of Traditional China, 384

I see your Weber and raise you some Confucius

I’ve been lucky during grad school to be ensconced in a place where East Asia matters a great deal and I have to spend very little time explaining why people ought to care about my area of study. In a rare reversal, we are sometimes accused of suffering from the ‘Middle Kingdom mentality’ – wearing blinders to other areas (it’s something I try very hard to avoid, but at the same time – I’m thankful to have the experience of being in such an Asianist-friendly cocoon!). The same cannot be said about the gaming world, where a constant frustration is the lack of attention paid to non-Western areas (with the obvious exception of Japan). When I was actively writing, it wasn’t quite the obvious blind spot it is today (Nexon’s success flew, more or less, under the radar, and the explosion of free to play hadn’t yet happened) – but with the increasingly important role non-Western or non-Japanese companies are playing in the global milieu, the blinkered outlook is seriously problematic.

Several weeks back, an article appeared on Kill Screen that made me a bit frothy – entitled “Will Work for Fun,” it was a critique of the f2p model with a healthy dose of Weber. The hysterical criticism of f2p games is old hat at this point, but several points here rubbed me the wrong way (it rubbed Jesper Juul the wrong way, too , but for different reasons). It was a nice example of the excessively Western-centric point of view that needs reevaluation. The piece started from an unstable premise and that didn’t help matters:

In its purest form, play is a creative act negotiated between two people without intermediary. I am not playing when I’m interacting with a videogame, I’m accepting someone else’s rules and experimenting with them, allowing the designer to delimit my instincts for behavior. Doing this with another person feels like a waste of time, an inherent loss of the generative possibilities of play without intermediary limits. Videogames are the experience of being ruled. In contrast, play is the experience of generating new rules in collaboration with someone else. The idea that “play” is free is redundant. It is only ever free. As soon as money is involved it no longer simply “play” but a perverse form of labor, proving one’s worth as a participant in, and exponent of, the zeitgeist.

My first question was ‘Who came up with this definition of play?’ – it’s not one I agree with (play is ‘the experience of generating new rules’? So anything that’s not generating new rules is not play? That’s an awful lot of playful activities – even ignoring videogames – excluded). While I’m hardly the arbiter of all things play related, I have spent enough time researching games and playful things to know that there’s a wide, wide world of what constitutes play, and saying that as soon as money is involved it becomes ‘labor’ is overstating the case just a smidge.

The ‘Protestant work ethic’ is brought into things and further muddies the waters:

With the emergence of professional pastimes in the 20th century, the Protestant work ethic becomes a philosophy of play as well as vocation. Michael Jordan is not a world-class basketball player because of his innate skill, but as a reflection of 15 years of labor spent improving his efficiency relative to the particular rules of basketball.

This is not an exclusively 20th century phenomenon, nor is it an exclusively Protestant one. I’ve already written about the Confucian fantasy of meritocracy and its relation to weiqi. To sum up, the ‘traditional’ Confucian ideal was that one cultivated skill at weiqi – it was not dependent on innate skill (indeed, innate skill was not something to be prized), but careful years of self-cultivation. I suppose one could argue that this is simply another form of labor-as-play, but the capitalist narrative sort of falls apart if we’re discussing Song dynasty China, no? Surely there’s something else going on here. Now, lest anyone think I’m simply nitpicking, return to the beginning of the article, which specifically picks out East Asian gamers in an East Asian context – and East Asian companies. Is the affection for games that are ‘evidence’ of the “Protestant work ethic” illustrative of that, or some latent Confucianesque approach to play and development of self?

Woman playing weiqi (c. 722) – Painting on silk, Astana graves, Xinjiang

Well, quite possibly it’s neither, or a little of both. I’m not arguing for an essentialist reading, some Protestant vs. Confucian face off (that’s silly), or saying that the labor-as-play model doesn’t work in a number of contexts (it does) – because really, the territory has yet to be adequately mapped. There has been precious little study of games in pre-20th century East Asia, slightly more regarding digital games in East Asia, and the Western press/blogging community takes a sneering and insulting attitude towards the Asian market (with the necessary exception of Japan, of course). It has always really rubbed me the wrong way – just because you might have no interest in playing XYZ game doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable to discuss it. Turning up our collective noses at Korean or Chinese games (for a quick example) because they’re long, slogging grinds is short sighted at best. I don’t play most of the titles that people are playing, but I try and maintain at least cursory impression of what’s going on. I certainly don’t claim to have a firm grasp on the intricacies of the Asian market(s), but I certainly acknowledge the need to acquire a better understanding of the processes at work. It’s on my to-do list, and I hope it’s on the to-do list of many others.

The critique in many ways seems to be an outgrowth of the disdain with which f2p MMORPGs were treated four or five years ago – but the territory has just shifted, and now we can’t simply turn our noses up at them. When people make statements like f2p was “a unique idea that made sense in China and Korea, where loot-hoarding games like Ragnarok Online, The Legend of Mir, and World of Warcraft found a perfect match with internet bar culture,” do they stop and think why that is? Are we going to argue that somehow, South Korean and Chinese players are more ready to soak up whatever capitalism is selling – insidious somethings that have made their way West?

How can anyone have fun by obediently following the rules someone else has set out for them?

I was a bit speechless by this point, for the mere reason that “following the rules someone else has set out for them” describes a number things (pre-capitalist things, even) undertaken by humans for the purposes of “entertainment” and “fun” and “play”. Let’s not get so wrapped up in spouting largely justifiable critiques of capitalism that we start making very little sense.

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!