on this date in history...

i had had a pretty good weekend...

Game

**what follows is an extensive definition of the word game, written by me for my 'Theories of Media' class (taught by Professor Tom Mitchell & Professor Mark Hansen), which was not accepted into their elite definition collection (we should come up for a name for that), but was, i think, worth looking at...

“. . . Games are popular art, collective, social reactions to the main drive or action of any culture. Games, like institutions, are extensions of social man and of the body politic, as technologies are extensions of the animal organism. Both games and technologies are counter-irritants or ways of adjusting to the stress of the specialized actions that occur in any social group. As extensions of the popular response to the workaday stress, games become faithful models of a culture. They incorporate both the action and the reaction of whole populations in a single dynamic image.”(McLuhan, 235)

The modern English word ‘game’ comes from the Old English (and Middle High German) word gamen meaning ‘joy, glee’ and from the Old Norse word gaman which means ‘game, sport, merriment.’ The word may also derive from the Gothic term gaman which means ‘participation, communion.’ The common prefix for all these sources is ga- which means ‘together.’

The Oxford English Dictionary has as its definition of the word game, “1.Amusement, delight, fun, mirth, sport” and “3.a.an Amusement, diversion, pastime” (OED). While these definitions account for the enjoyment and pleasure generally associated with games, it fails to recognize the fundamental connection that games have with rules. Marshall McLuhan says games are “contrived and controlled situations, extensions of group awareness that permit a respite from customary patters” (McLuhan, 243). This definition encompasses both the diverting nature of games and the imposition of the structure of rules on the players. McLuhan also calls games ‘contrived,’ emphasizing the artificiality of the structure of rules. When the OED does address the subject of rules in the fourth definition it describes a game as “4. a. A diversion of the nature of a contest, played according to rules, and displaying in the result the superiority either in skill, strength, or good fortune of the winner or winners” (OED), connecting the rules of the game with competition. Of course, competition is as much a part of games as their diverting, amusing nature, though non-competitive games (cooperative or solitary games, for instance) exist just as surely as games that aren’t enjoyable do. What is essential to a game is an agreement by the players to abide by the artificially imposed rules and structure of the game, to play by the rules.

The verb ‘to play’ is fundamentally entwined with games. This connection serves both to keep the game in the realm of the amusement and to associate the playing of games with the act of a child’s play. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Sigmund Freud describes a very young child’s invention of a game. The child would throw his toys out of sight and say ‘gone’ which Freud “eventually realized…was a game and that the only use he made of any of his toys was to play ‘gone’ with them” (Freud, 599). The difference between the child simply engaged in the act of playing with his toys and playing a game with them is the imposition of a set of rules for playing. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s ‘language-games’ provide another useful example of a non-traditional way to think about what a game is. Wittgenstein imagines the naming of objects, without providing a context for the use of that object (for example, telling a non-chess player that the king is called ‘king,’ but not what that piece does on the board) as a kind of language game. He then extends the idea of this primitive language as a game to “also call the whole, consisting of language and the actions into which it is woven, a ‘language-game’” (Wittgenstein, 4). Language itself is a collection of arbitrary rules, a code, that speakers of common languages must agree to abide by for communication to be possible.

A player must follow all of the rules of that particular instance of the game (‘house rules’ may apply, but these, too, must be determined before the game) or they are not, strictly speaking, playing that game. “There is, then, a sort of passion that binds the players to the rule that ties them together—without which the game would not be possible” (Baudrillard, 131). Baudrillard argues that it is a passion for the rules themselves that draw people to play games. He goes on to draw a distinction between the rules of the game and the law of the land. While laws are based on a supposed moral consensus, rules are arbitrary and have no meaning outside the confines of the game. “Because the Law establishes a line, it can and must be transgressed. By contrast, it makes no sense to “transgress” a game’s rules; within a cycle’s recurrence, there is no line one can jump (instead, one simply leaves the game)” (Baudrillard, 131-2). Laws can be broken or bent and they change through the course of history. While the rules of games may evolve over time, they do not change for the players during any one occurrence of a game.

In pointing out that in transgressing the rules a player ‘simply leaves the game,’ Baudrillard also reveals another limitation of games. “All board-games are limited as to time and space” (Murray, 5). In fact all games are temporally and spatially limited. Another fundamental feature of games is an object or goal at the end of them. A game ends upon completion (or failure to complete) the pre-determined goal. A game also takes place within a certain area, on a board or field or within certain boundaries. A single game cannot take place everywhere at once, but must be confined. In discussing why war is not a game, even though it shares many of the features of games, Marshall McLuhan says that “what disqualifies war from being a true game is probably what also disqualifies the stock market and business—the rules are not fully known or accepted by all the players. Furthermore, the audience is too fully [a] participant” (McLuhan, 240). The audience is in danger of becoming part of war, because unlike a game, it has no respect for its boundaries. Gilles Deleuze calls chess a “game of state…each [piece] is like a subject…of enunciation, that is, the chess player or the game’s form of interiority” (Deleuze, 352). Chess is a game-form of war, though Deleuze argues that the game Go may be a better game of war, because the board (just as the field of battle) grows as the game goes along.

There are virtually endless varieties of games, including: board games, card games, sports, video games, role-playing games, word games (puzzles), online games and gambling. Each of these groups also has its own sub-sets and variations. Archeologists have discovered Sumerian board games dating back to as early as 2600 B.C. and images of ancient Greeks and Egyptians playing earlier versions of games still played today (Avedon, 21). Marshall McLuhan, in his chapter on games in Understanding Media, discusses the differences in the perception of gambling in tribal and individualist cultures. What is deemed a vice by many Western cultures is seen as “mocking the individualist social structure” (McLuhan, 234) because the competition is brought to the extreme. “This further motive is the desire of the anticipated winner, or the partisan of the anticipated winning side, to heighten his side’s ascendancy at the cost of the loser” (Veblen, 277). Whether money is at stake or not, competitiveness is often at the center of games.

McLuhan claims that games are extensions of social man and as such, the competitive nature in games is a logical extension of individualist social structures. But there are also cooperative games, such as role-playing games and their digital offspring multi-player worlds online. Role-playing games are essentially storytelling games, where one player creates a world for the other players to explore, narrating as the game progresses. Multi-player online worlds are similar, where each player plays the part of some character in a larger narrative, but the world is made up entirely of computer code. While there is some competing and fighting within these games, because players can simply narrate their actions and do what they want, the games are generally structured in such a way as to make it necessary to form a group of players to complete the assigned tasks.

One way that games have extended beyond their basic existence is in the creation of game theory. Perhaps most famously exemplified by the Prisoner’s Dilemma, “game theory is concerned with the actions of decision makers who are conscious that their actions affect each other” (Rasmusen, 9). Game theory is a branch of economics that studies the affects that competitors who are aware of each other have on each other. Game theory takes as its ‘rules,’ players, actions, payoffs and information. These four elements go in to determining possible outcomes for real-world economic situations.

Works Cited

Avendon, Elliot M & Brian Sutton-Smith. The Study of Games. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1971.

Baudrillard, Jean. Seduction. Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1990.

Deleuze, Gilles. A Thousand Plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Freud, Sigmund. The Freud Reader. Ed. Peter Gay. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1989.

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1964.

Murray, H.J.R. A History of Board Games Other Than Chess. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951.

The Oxford English Dictionary. (http://www.oed.com/)

Rasmusen, Eric. Games and Information: An Introduction To Game Theory. Blackwell, 2001.

Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class: an economic study of institutions. New York: Macmillan, 1899.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations: The German Text, with a revised English translation. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. Malden: Blackwell, 2001.

'der Blick' in Fassbinder's Angst essen Seele auf

though there may be those who disagree with me...

Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Angst essen Seele auf (Ali: Fear Eats the Soul) is first and foremost about 'the gaze' (this isn't a perfect translation of der Blick, which might be thought of as something like 'the glance', but 'gaze' is familiar to us. 'Blick' also means something like view or way of seeing, but all this and more {vista?} fits into the term, but let's just agree to refer to it as 'der Blick'. While we're on the idea of vocabulary, we might, instead, use the German term Anschau, which, again, is something like Blick, something like gaze, but also related to point of view...).

*   *   *

[October 2017]
I haven't any clue what this post was going to be about.  Given the level of parenthetical in just the preamble, i think its scope must have been large.

I post it as found, because i think the Germanic translation nuance may be useful someday to someone.

Enjoy!

The Milwaukee Admirals

or, the least indie indie site in the room.

Last Saturday (October 25) i attended a Milwaukee Admirals hockey game in response to an assignment for my Indie Culture Seminar which asked me to write about a ‘site of indie culture’. I selected an Admiral’s game primarily because it was the least ‘indie’ indie site I could come up with. That is, the Admirals (and independent sports teams or leagues in general) perform many of the same tasks & fulfill the same roles as we might assign to indie culture: resisting (or at least defining itself against) 'mainstream' culture, providing a more 'authentic' experience than the overly commercialized mainstream product, and locating itself (often geographically or spatially, but not always) somewhere outside the 'mainstream'. I want, in some sense, to frustrate this working definition of indie culture by looking at an area of culture that we likely can mostly agree is decidedly not ‘indie’. I see independent sports leagues in as in some way defining themselves against the mainstream (major league sports) by paying players substantially lower salaries and often arguing (at least implicitly) for a more ‘authentic’ competition because of the lower, more equitable payrolls. The Admirals also operate with little to no media coverage (they get minimal coverage on local sports talk radio and newspaper coverage, but nationally get absolutely no attention). On the other hand, hockey games (and sports events in general) seem to be exactly contrary to what we might define as ‘indie’ in that the way they are marketed (corporate sponsorships abound both on the website and at the game), the commodification of all aspects of the game (souvenir shops at the Bradley Center are almost entirely filled with Admirals goods), and even the sport itself (which we might call a ‘mainstream’ sport as opposed to more ‘indie’ sports like Roller Derby or Frisbee golf).

* * *

Walking toward the ticket booth of the Bradley Center it becomes fairly obvious fairly quickly that this ‘site’ and the people walking into the site are anything but ‘indie’. Groups of 30-40something adults and families seem most prevalent. At the ticket booth, 20 minutes before game time the best cheapest tickets available were 3 rows off the ice. Walking around the stadium on our way to our section, a group of high school kids played “Brown Eyed Girl” on a stage set up on the lower level. We bought a couple beers (Pilsner Urquells, a beer of ‘distinction’), some popcorn, and found are seats as the zambonis were finishing up their circuits. (At Admirals games you can, evidently, buy a ride on the zamboni before the game and between periods. On one zamboni a young boy of maybe 7 or 8 was having the time of his life, while on the other one, a middle-aged man in a Packers sweatshirt waved awkwardly and I wondered who he was and why he might have decided to ride the zamboni, which seemed like such a kid-centered novelty).

The game got under way and I was immediately struck by the way fans seemed to be watching the game. Not being an expert on hockey (or really even much of a hockey fan) I can’t say for sure, but compared to the way I’ve seen professional sports fans watch games in the past, these fans seemed to attend to the game much more constantly than I had expected. I’ve been to one NHL game and a UND hockey game before, but both times my seats were much farther away from the ice, so the attention being paid to the game might have had something to do with the proximity (and given the low attendance and closed off upper deck everyone was close to the ice, relatively speaking). The crowd was generally quiet and when they yelled anything, it was generally specific instructions or critiques (“put a body on them!” “Play it in”) rather than the more general yells I am accustomed to (“C’mon!”s or “Boo”s). While on the subject of specific quotes, I noted that throughout the game, whenever a player would come out of the penalty box the announcer would say “And the teams are at equal strength” to which the crowd would reply “That’s Debatable!” This surprised me the first time it happened, but was a comforting ritual that instantly made you feel like a part of the crowd. The game itself was fairly exciting, a number of lead changes and ultimately the Admirals lost. A full account can be found on the Admiral’s website if you’re interested.

The Admirals play in the AHL (American Hockey League), which currently serves as a feeder system for NHL teams, with teams generally having exclusive or joint contracts with NHL teams, but operating as an independent league. I was surprised by the number of people wearing Admirals gear as well as how many people had come up from Chicago and were wearing Chicago Wolves jerseys (particularly because Chicago has the NHL Blackhawks in their home market). In fact this segment of the crowd might be the most useful when talking about indie vs. mainstream sports. Why, when AHL hockey is an inferior sport at least from the perspective of the individual athlete’s ability, would someone choose to be a Wolves fan? Is there some extra cultural capital from enjoying this ‘more authentic’ experience, a less commercialized, less ‘sell out’ game? Or, perhaps they see their viewership ironically, some sort of ‘lo-fi’ hockey. Or, it might just be that there seems to be a lot more fighting and checking into the wall at this level. My clearest memory from the game is of the aftermath of an Admirals forward getting smashed into the glass just in front of us. The crowd around me was laughing and cheering and saying things like “Dude, did you see his face just before his face hit.”

Then & Now, Voyager

So, i've now watched what might have been my first 'woman's film', or at least the first one i tried to 'take seriously'. Last fall when David Halperin came to talk about melodrama i was skeptical, at best. "Really" i thought, "melodrama is something we're considering now", but now that i've seen one (Now, Voyager), i'm totally an expert.

We might, in some sense, think of melodrama as a sort of an über-Genre for Hollywood (this is a stolen idea, though i'm not entirely sure from whom). Everything that Hollywood makes aspires to melodrama in some sense... I'm starting to become truly convinced by Patrice Petro's (via Linda Williams {or vice versa}) idea of 'Body Genres', which are films that hit us viscerally, that force us to react bodily.

So, Tuesday we watched Now, Voyager in class and i was surprised not only by how much i enjoyed it, but by how much it paralleled the very real horrors of the American family i got to dig into in September*. Charlotte (Bette Davis) begins the film as a repressed daughter, an unwanted late child whose charge is to take care of her widowed, really quite scary, mother (mostly because she clearly won't ever find a man for herself, so she may as well be useful to someone). At one point Mother even points to this idea, finding comfort in a 'late child' by knowing that that child will care for you in your later years (the 'pre-late years', that is). This system only works, of course, if said child doesn't go off on their own path, make their own life (which in the world of melodrama {but perhaps more generally in contemporary American culture, too} means pairing off and starting a family of your own). So Mother stalls the child's development employing guilt, classist proclamations of 'proper' behavior, and constant reminders of the child's weaknesses (& sickliness) in order to assure her remaining at home.

What interests me in particular, is not necessarily the plot of Now, Voyager, or family melodramas like it. Rather, i find the underlying notion of the family structure itself an interesting (and often frightening) object of inquiry. My brother Tim has reflected on how 'the Family' operates for him, and i don't mean to present some personal sob story about my own family (i'm hugely fortunate in this regard), but i'm interested in the institution (notice the word, an odd word) of the family structure itself...

There's a model of the family (originally presented by Antonio Gramsci, i think), which operates as a sort of Social Taylorism, in which the worker's life is organized and managed to such an extent that not only is their work-day set up in assembly-line fashion, but through familial obligations and constructed consumerist needs, the worker's life outside of work (their leisure in other words) is similarly orchestrated (even to the extent of their 'entertainments' are constructed both through television & bar life {maybe even bowling}. Though bars and pubs might formerly have been been a place for radical organization {three cheers for the real Sam Adams}, but now they operate as places to lose yourself, to obliterate yourself. The music, the setup, and the way we no longer speak to strangers discourage any kind of organization in the modern bar).

Ok, this is just a start to this thinking, but it's where i'm going...



*This September a local matriarch passed away and it fell to brooke's family to do much of the sifting through the house. Along with a life-time's worth of stuff, we uncovered box-fulls of old letters, photos, and journals that painted a less-than-idyllic picture of this upstanding family.

the Global Village

I remember when i was younger, i drove, with my brother & dad (can't remember if andy was there or not), to the middle of illinois, grabbded hands with piles of strangers...

I have no recollection what this blog post initially may have been intended for, but man... Hands Across America... what an idea. Line up hundreds of thousands of people... then hold hands with them. and eventually make a big line of people. for Africa?



Now, i'm all for Africa. But lining up piles of white people does not seem a solution for anyone... How did this thing make money? Was it a sort of pledging thing? ("betcha can't get 1,000, i'll give you 10 dollars...")...

Anyway, it must have been quite a success...

on this date in history

joel was finding himself...