Gaming and Academia

A few years ago, I pursued the (at the time insane) idea of writing a doctoral dissertation on RPGs. This was before the MMORPG boom, and my focus was going to be on the evolution of console based japanese RPGs, while keeping an eye out for things foreshadowed by my early experiences in Phantasy Star Online. I wanted to study this genre from a typically postmodern anthro standpoint, with a little socio-cultural, and post-structural reading analysis thrown in. I say typical because, from my viewpoint, this is the style of academic pursuit that now seems to be the goal of almost any contemporary graduate student who'se been raised on a healthy dose of the pomo canon: Derrida, Foucault, Butler, Silverman, Lacan, Barthes, yadda yadda... Only, at the time, it felt groundbreaking and exciting.

I'm still dissappointed that the History of Consciousness program at UCSC never really picked up on my idea, not just from my own selfish viewpoint but also because it could have used a bit of a booster shot to keep it out of its slow decline into esoteric irrelevance. I mean have we heard anything out of De Lauretis since the mid-90's? There's the occasional contribution from Victor Burgin on photography, but overall... the program seems to be practically dormant. My weird little niche might have stirred things up a bit, with just enough secular appeal to keep it interesting outside of HisCon acolytes.

But in another sense, in retrospect, I'm glad I didn't get a chance to digest RPGs as more pomo-fodder. I've grown wary of the seemingly innate tendency of postmodern/poststructural theory to 'consume' the subject of its analysis and regurgitate it as a mere instantiation of its own lexicon & jargon. And this is very apparent in the recent essays I've been reading in the latest issue of Reconstruction.

Academia is indeed catching onto RPGs, and going a bit beyond the bumbling or cursory sociological studies that usually inaugurate any academic attention to a new subject (case in point: Anime). But it's still in the throes of jargonizing its subject matter, leading to mouthfuls such as this:

This multiform (player, character, avatar) “variable body” questions the “fact” of biological deterministic narratives.
[...]
The fact that players are invited to select a body (rather than being assigned one based on their RL sex) re-envisions “sex” as a possible “choice” rather than a biological fact. Likewise, the necessity for a verbal construction of gender (regardless of the avatar’s gender) further undermines the notion of the physical body as the origin of gender: a female player can play a male character without any attempt to conceal her real world gender and thus be treated as a female regardless of the physical evidence supplied by the avatar. These cross-gendered performances highlight the performative nature of the sex-gender system, ultimately opening it to critique with a wider audience than hitherto could have been possible. This potential for “casual cross-dressing”—or even interacting with the casual cross dressers—of a segment of our community clearly has the potential as a site for the interrogation of gender issues. After all, in the end, we are the roles we play.

This is the meat of one of the essays, which spends paragraph upon paragraph simply describing the act of creating and using a MMORPG character with (gasp!) and alternate gender. This is akin to describing, in excrutiatingly minute detail, how you got up and went to work this morning, with particular attention to the different tie you decided to wear that day. To anyone with any remote familiarity with games, this 'let me put this in laymens terms for ya' mode instantly triggers 'scanning' for the real content. And for extra-generational readers, it probably just leads to a lot of scowling, head-scratching, and dozing, although the author seems to think it will illuminate them somehow, if only by sheer detail and exoticness.

Here's the kicker. The quote above, while interesting, still amounts to a big "See? Judith Butler told ya so!" which I could have gleaned from the title: "Body Matters in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games" (a lame knockoff of Judith Butler's Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex). Never mind the fact that nowhere, in the entire essay, including the footnotes, are there any overt references to Judith Butler's works. This amounts to making the entire premise of the article a big pun or inside joke, and a rather uninteresting one, in the guise of detailed analysis.

Now give me back my 30 minutes...

It's this sort of approach that makes me crave more centralized and critically responsible academic programs in relation to virtual/synthetic worlds, or even offline RPGs. Something more than the individual ramblings of graduate students. But I'm ambivalent here as well, since it could just as well lead to more systematic, centralized, pomo-puking.

I guess time will tell. But for now, I'm really not impressed. Gaming + Academia = Zzzzzzzz.