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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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B
Hi everyone and welcome back to New Books and Game Studies, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. On this channel we explore new scholarship that helps us understand what games are, how they work, and why they matter culturally, politically and historically. I'm your host, Rudolf Inders, professor for Game Studies at the University of Applied Sciences, Neuhulm in Germany. Before we get started, if you enjoy the show, please consider leaving us a five star review on Apple Podcasts or the platform of your very choice. It really helps others discover the podcast and of course feel free to share this episode with colleagues, students or anyone interested in games and culture Today. I'm very happy to welcome Rob, who joins us to talk about his new book, Art After Gamergate, published by Palgraf. Rob, welcome to the show.
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A
Thanks Riolf. Great to be on the podcast.
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B
To begin, could you briefly introduce yourself and your background and tell us how this project came together? What drew you to studying art games, specifically in the context of Gamergate and its aftermath?
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A
Sure. So I currently work at King's College London. I'm a lecturer in the Culture, Media and Creative Industries department. Going far enough back, my background's in literary studies, but I've been writing about games for quite a while now, and I think in many ways this book is a reflection of my trajectory since my last book, Video Games, Identity and Digital Subjectivity, came out in 2017. So at that time I was a postdoctoral researcher on a project about digital identity, how we understand and express our identities in the age of the Internet. In the years following that, I also worked on another project at the University of East Anglia that was thinking through the alt right as a case study in how far right politics is exploiting digital media. And across that time I was maintaining an interest in games as kind of expressive and creative texts, and particularly autobiographical games, artistic games. So this book is really kind of at the center of that Venn diagram. It's looking at Gamergate as moment that was quite important as a catalyst for this broader rightward turn in digital culture. It's thinking about games as vehicles for thinking about identity, in particular what it means to be a gamer, what that identity is or means. And it's also obviously looking at these games that are very much expressive, artistic works, trying to do interesting things with the medium and its affordances.
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B
Now, your book opens from attention that many of us in game studies know very well. Video games are constantly fresh, framed as a medium in development, yet they remain culturally associated with wasted time. Especially, I gotta say, in Germany, that Is immaturity and reactionary attitudes. Now the question, when will games grow up? Seems to haunt the medium. How did Gamergate intensify this discourse? And why was it such a decisive moment for the kinds of games you examine?
- [03:25]
A
Yeah, I think this question of when will games grow up? And, and what would it mean for games to grow up has been posed in different ways over the course of gaming's history. And I think for a long time the assumption was that as computers become more powerful, games will become more expansive and expressive and mature as a medium. But I think by the mid 2000s and into the 2010s, we were beginning to see other kinds of answer to this question gaining currency. So in that era, you have the enormous popularity of systems like the Nintendo Wii, you have the rise in browser games and smartphone games, where you no longer need specialist hardware to engage with games. And those kind of change gaming's demography. There are suddenly different kinds of people playing games or coming back to games, having felt alienated from that culture. And we also see partly as a consequence of these new ways of distributing and monetizing games, smaller, more personal, more experiment games circulating and gaining traction. And at this point, we can maybe say that maybe gaming growing up would be a matter of games mattering to more different kinds of people, or maybe games becoming a vehicle for personal storytelling or artistic expression. And I think Gamergate in many ways is a kind of backlash against those attempts to rethink who games could be for, who they could be made by, what they could be about. There's obviously a long kind of history of toxicity and misogyny in gaming culture. But one of the big wobbles on the seismograph, I think, comes about a year before Gamergate, where some sectors of the gaming press are very enthused about Gone Home as this kind of slice of life game, A kind of coming of age story centering on a queer young woman. A first person game that's not a first person shooter with no combat or puzzles. And sections of the gaming public are very worried by that. And so Gamergate is an attempt to kind of retrench and say, no, no, we want the violent, misogynistic, apolitical games, please. And in the wake of that, I think this optimism about the idea games might be maturing becomes harder to maintain. So as a kind of progressive game designer or as an artistic game designer, you're faced with this question of what do I do now? How do I reckon with the fact that there is still this very kind of retrograde backward looking strain in gaming culture right now.
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B
One of the book's central arguments is that independent and experimental game makers responded to Gamergate not simply by rejecting gaming's past, but by actively engaging with it, often by scavenging assets, characters and mechanics from iconic franchises like Zelda Street Fighter or Sonic. What is at stake in this act of reuse? And why look backward at precisely or why look backward at precisely the moment when gaming culture seemed so politically fractured?
- [06:39]
A
Yeah, I mean, I think there is a section of the kind of art game creating cohort for whom Gamergate is even more of an impetus to move forward, to cut ties with the past, to try and do new things. But the games I'm interested in, as you say, they have this more complicated relationship with gaming's past. And in many cases they're directly taking assets or mechanics or characters from classic games. I think part of that is saying that these are our games too, this is our history. People who may not fit your model of the gamer archetype have long played and enjoyed these games. So when an artist like Cassie McQuaiter is looking back to playing Super Nintendo games with her grandmother, that's part of what she's doing. I also think part of what she's doing in the game Blackroom, which is one of my case studies, is foregrounding just how juvenile and how retrograde these supposedly classic games can be. So in her case, she foregrounds these very sexist character designs that are all over 1990s fighting games and beat em ups. And I think these two impulses, number one, to sort of affirm your affection and nostalgia for older games, and number two, to foreground all of the stuff that's kind of distasteful or questionable about older games. They're not necessarily mutually exclusive. The games I'm interested in are quite ambivalent about gaming. They're kind of affectionate, but there's also a degree of sort of sadness or anger in how they're looking back and what they're drawing from gaming's past. And I also think there's obviously a long artistic tradition of appropriation, sampling, bricolage. And in many cases these games can be seen as part of that. Certainly David Kanaga's Oiko spiel, where he's taking these copyrighted Nintendo characters and he's putting them in this game. That is a kind of critique of corporate capitalism and of the ecological impacts of digital media. It's sort of using bits of the mainstream culture to speak back to it and articulate a critique of It. And games really do lend themselves to that because obviously on some level it's a digital database. There are these sound files and character models and all of these other bits and pieces that are sitting there in the file waiting to be plucked out and recontextualized right now.
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If you haven't been living under a stone, dear listeners, you will notice why when I reread my questions for our conversation, or my conversation with Rob today, the next question almost sounded surreal to me because if you take a look at the, at the times, it's really all right. You will, you will notice. So, because I was wondering, you focus on titles released between roughly 2015 and 2018, and then I wrote a period marked by political disorientation, well beyond games, particularly in the United States. So. And this sounds so awfully surreal now because we live in this time again. So. But nevertheless, I gotta ask, how do these art games connect the growing pains of video game culture to broader experiences of decline, disillusionment, or a crisis in American cultural life?
- [10:07]
A
Yeah, maybe that period now looks comparatively sunny and stable compared to what we're seeing. And it was strange to talk about this post Gamergate pre Covid period as a, as a kind of historical epoch. But yeah, when we talk about the elements that these games are drawing from older series, they're often looking back to the 1990s. So for Kanega, it's games like Ocarina of Time. The arcane kids are harking back to games like Sonic Adventure on the Dreamcast. Other case studies I look at are thinking about Quake 3 or looking further back, Street Fighter 2. So it's the 1990s. Often this period that in gaming terms is often seen as a period of kind of dynamism and possibility. You have the coming of the CD ROM, you have the move to 3D graphics, you have the beginnings of online gaming and that idea that, oh, technological progress is going to turn games into these wonderful things that we can barely imagine. There seems to be a lot of proof for that way of seeing things. There's a lot of optimism about gaming's future and more broadly, at least for more privileged Americans. And the book mostly thinks about the American context. It's a time of kind of confidence and comfort, I suppose. The battle of ideology seems to have been won. There's this kind of school of ascendant third way liberalism that just thinks you have to keep interest rates to 2% and redistribute a bit of the wealth that's coming in via the financial sector, extend Cheap credit to people. And there we are. It's the end of history. It's utopia year. And obviously that way of thinking hit a wall, certainly with the 2007, 2008 subprime mortgage crisis and global financial crisis. And that's a moment a lot of the games I look at are harking back to Tabitha Nicolai. Her games are full of these deserted suburban houses and also these empty shopping malls. So these spaces that kind of speak to that period of sudden wave of bankruptcies and foreclosures that for millennials, speaking as a millennial. And all of the designers whose games I'm writing about here are also in that generational cohort. Suddenly you're looking at downward mobility for the first time Since World War II in the overdeveloped nations. You're thinking about, am I going to get on the housing ladder? Do I have a career path? Are my prospects worse than those of my parents? And obviously the far right has been quite deft in capitalizing on those circumstances, on kind of demonizing feminists and social justice warriors, as they called them during Gamergate migrants, trans people. So yeah, I think these games, they're kind of interrogating the appeal of the 1990s, and also using the fact that gaming culture arguably seems to be a bit stuck in that period still, when a lot of these franchises were first hitting their strokes. Tried to think about this sense that maybe we're losing faith in the future. We're losing faith in the idea that things could ever get better. So they're talking about gaming culture and the nostalgic bent there, but they're also linking that to this tendency to glorify the past that you see in MAGA or these other ascendant right wing movements.
- [13:31]
B
Now, a brief note for our listeners. New Books and Gamestars reaches an international audience of scholars, educator, students, and professional professionals working across game studies and game design or game development. If you're involved in running an academic program or publishing research in this area, this podcast is a great place to connect with a thoughtful and engaged community. Now back to the show. Returning to the book, I was struck by how strongly biography figures into your analysis. You show how designers use familiar games assets not only to critique gaming culture, but also but also to reframe their own life histories as players, creators and cultural subjects. How important is this autobiographical dimension to understanding post Gamergate art games?
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A
Yeah, I was really glad you shone a light on this strand of the book, and it is, as I said, in some ways a product of my time at the center for Life Writing Research at King's College London, which is a place that specializes in life writing theory, in theories of biography and autobiography, which was not a literature I knew much about before I took up that post, but I think it offers us a few ways into thinking about gaming and its cultural status. So there's this idea that the life writing scholar Anna Poletti has that the injunction to get a life is a way of kind of passing judgment on what counts as really living. And obviously, as you were saying, I think gaming is still widely seen, not by everyone, not everywhere, but as a kind of waste of time, as not really living, or at least not the sort of living that's going to make it into your memoirs. And I think maybe there's a grain of truth to that, insofar as part of the reason gaming does figure in people's lives is because it can be a way of losing yourself or forgetting yourself or trying on other identities. So I think there's an interesting friction between biography and autobiography as these attempts to make sense of your life and your agency out there in the world. And gaming is this hobby that is often about sort of retreating from that. I also think, as I say, part of what these games are doing is they're testifying to the kinds of people who were playing games and the kinds of contexts in which they were playing games, and showing how once we do that, this archetype of the gamer as a kind of young white cishet male loses a lot of its credibility. It starts to seem quite limited. So Tabitha Nikolai is playing Beat Em Ups and online shooters, but as a trans woman, she's seeing things in these games and their aesthetics and the connections they're allowing her to form that are quite different to what we might imagine from the kind of macho gamer culture. Angela Washko, a feminist artist, is playing RPGs and thinking about how some of these mechanics, some of these forms of storytelling could be used for progressive ends. And finally, I think I'm interested too in that, in what an autobiographical game could do with the things that games allow us to do. How you could be using not just text or audio or visuals, but codes, these nonlinear structures, random number generators, what it means to try and encapsulate someone's personality as a set of statistics or probabilities, how you kind of tell a life story through an interactive medium. So, yeah, I think there were lots of ways that game studies could learn from life writing studies.
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B
Now, the next question is particularly interesting to me since I teach a course called Game research methods. So it's a very dear topic close to my heart, so to speak. And from a game research perspective, your book also raises questions regarding different kinds of researching methods. You combine close playing or close readings of games with cultural history, political context, media theory. So what do you think art games after Gamergate teach us about how we should study games, especially when games are responding so directly to moments of cultural conflict.
- [17:51]
A
Yeah, great, great question. I think I mentioned that my background is in literary studies, and I think that's sort of reflected still in my approach that I'm interested in very close analysis of particular case studies and the kinds of expressive techniques they use. At the same time, I'm not a formalist. I'm not interested in kind of drawing up taxonomies or trying to think about what every possible game that is or could be could do expressively. Instead, I'm trying to think about the bespoke responses that particular creators in particular moments come up with in their context. And the games that I'm writing about here, they definitely elicit that kind of engagement. They're quite referential. They are full of references to gaming's history, but also to culture more broadly. They're also quite abstract in Sarah Stang's terms. I guess they're more about inviting us to exercise our interpretive agency than they are about sort of complex simulations or systems. They're often more about moving through spaces and trying to make sense of what we see. So I feel like that method fits at the same time, I mean, game studies is a broad church. A lot of scholarship is obviously more interested in players and what they do with games and coming more from a kind of social science or a cultural studies perspective. And I think that that's really valuable and important too. I've drawn in the book also on a lot of brilliant research that's been going on recently into game production studies, kind of labor of game making. And this book is also partly about that historical period where a certain set of tools and distribution vectors are available to independent creators. So I definitely wouldn't want to claim that my methodology is the only valid one, but this is the sort of work I was trained to do. And I think games are, or certain kinds of games are often quite fruitful objects to apply these methods to.
- [19:53]
B
Yeah, so we have arrived at the last question, actually, but I was wondering if I thought about it or gave it a second thought, maybe this also would have been a question for the very beginning of our conversation. But now it's too late for that. But now let's see, for our listeners who may not be deeply familiar with art games. So what we say is to broader significance of this body of work. Do these games offer a way forward for video game culture after Gamergate, or do they merely function more as a critical diagnostics of a medium and a culture in crisis?
- [20:31]
A
Yeah, great question. I think part of what the book is proposing is that maybe we don't need to think about games in terms of moving forwards. And in fact, all of my case studies, I would argue that they kind of involve us in this thought experiment where they say, what if we were to accept that games have already failed to grow up, that they're not going to mature into something richer and deeper and better? That might be a very disappointing thing to us, but the designer Stephen Gill Murphy has talked about this. At the point where you maybe accept games are a dead medium, you then ask, what can we do with this medium? And I think one of the things you can do with this medium that is still dogged by this question of whether it will ever grow up and what that would mean is to speak to this moment in culture where we're also asking, what does it mean to grow up? Old models of the life cycle, old ambitions we might have had for ourselves and our lives don't seem to fit anymore in the historical period we find ourselves in. So I don't want to dismiss the degree to which these games are fun as well. These are often free because they're art games. They're often saying clever, outrageous, funny things about gaming's history and culture. But I do think they're using the fact that games have this kind of delicate cultural status where they've never quite been taken seriously, to try and think through some of these questions of why we seem so attached to certain models of what the future could look like, and how we maybe reconcile ourselves to the idea that the future we were promised isn't going to arrive. I don't know if that feels like an adequate answer to your question.
- [22:18]
B
No, it's just. Yeah, definitely. Most definitely. Because I was just thinking about whether this could be also said about the field of game studies itself. And it's because we often think about it of has it become a discipline? Is it more of a research field? Do we want to evolve it into something that it never meant? Maybe this won't even work out. We don't know yet. So these questions, or the last answer you were just given, maybe a good starting point to also reflect upon the future of game studies as a research field. Itself well, becoming profound now deeply philosophical. Rob, thank you so much for joining me today. All in all, in my opinion, After Gamergate offers a compelling account of how games can reflect on their own history while grappling with the political and cultural tensions of their moment. Dear listeners, and you should get and read this very book.
- [23:25]
A
That's very kind. Thanks for being such an attentive reader at the Bit of Rudolph. And thanks for your brilliant questions.
- [23:30]
B
And to our listeners, I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you're an author or editor working in game studies or game design research and would like to discuss your work on this very podcast, please feel free to reach out to me@rudolf.inderstooglemail.com you can also find me on LinkedIn and Bluesky under aamestudies. And please, for God's sake, leave X. And finally, if you'd like to support the show, you can check out our Game studies merchandise@gamestudiesmerch.de until next time and always keep it playful. Good night and bye bye.
- [24:18]
C
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