Sometimes, irony is no fun

So I’m preparing a presentation for next week’s CCCC about the experience of writing a digital dissertation, and I just found out that the only AV equipment I’ll have is an overhead projector. Looking for solace in the friendly screens of Kairos, I ran across this:

Ways that WoW frames individual identity

When people ask me what my dissertation is about, and their interest level warrants a more detailed answer than “World of Warcraft,” I’ll usually say, “the ways WoW frames individual identity.” As in, the ways the total sum of the game’s gameplay modes (all of the challenges it presents and the actions it allows) plus its user interface (the medium through which the game represents its gameplay, as well as its aesthetic elements) communicates to the player with regard to that player’s identity as an avatar in the game world. Man, that was hard to condense into a single sentence, even an unwieldy one. I’ll have to work on that.

Anyway, I sat down this morning to try to list off all of these ways. Not really to say anything about them (yet), but to make sure I named ‘em all. And thus to consider whether I’m trying to bite off more than I can chew here. For lack of time to do a fancy Photoshop illustration, I’ve put them in a table. But don’t be fooled by the neat, rigid columns: this is really a continuum.

Let me know if I’ve missed anything. I’ll begin fleshing these out in later posts.

A fantasy in theory

As many of you know, I’m writing this dissertation thing. For this project, I am tasked with not only coming up with some interesting/new/significant analysis of a videogame, but also with an interesting/new/significant way of analyzing videogames. A new theoretical approach. A toolkit, if you will, which others can use after I present it.

In academia, theoretical toolkits are usually packaged in big long chunks of text – books and, for the smaller ones, articles. We’re trained to produce work like this, and it has lots of great features: depth, sustained thought, nuanced argument, careful attribution, etc. However, academic writing (not to mention print in general) has a few of shortcomings that make academics’ theoretical toolkits kind of unwieldy for future users. One is that it doesn’t do nonlinearity well.  Since text is a linear medium, written arguments have a hard time describing nonlinear things, like networks. Plus, historically and culturally tied as it is to print, academic work usually isn’t very good at portraying things visually, or, more accurately, multimodally – using words and visuals.

Broadly speaking, I want my theoretical toolkit to let me map networks: networks of ideological, rhetorical, technological, economic influence that run amongst and between videogames and players. Something that can address a game as text and a social space; that can describe players’ relationships with the game and each other; that can get to larger forces that help explain why players find those affinities with the game and each other. I envision it as a 3D web, like those ones you see of the whole Internet. Each node in the web would be an “agent” of influence: a player or a group of players; a game’s rules, characters, or narratives; the game’s developers; an ideology; a cultural myth; a dialectical struggle. At the heart of the web would be a story – a specific time and place where cultural meaning was made or maintained, minds were transformed or significantly untransformed.

This has me fantasizing about programs. Wouldn’t it be cool if I could make a software program that would let me (and future scholars) create such a map? Like any scholarly theory, the program would contain a description of why it works the way it does, i.e., my basis for my theory. But it would also be functional. Thus, the web it makes would serve as a central illustration of my argument, but it would also function as the work’s main mode of organization: readers would click on nodes in the web and read about the agents in detail. And so the program would let me preserve the best features of academic writing while adding some of the best features of electronic communication.

Could such a program exist? Does one already exist? How hard would it be to make one?