The Meaning of Video Games: Gaming and Textual Strategies

209 Pages·2013·6.94 MB·English

The Meaning of Video Games
The Meaning of Video Games takes a textual studies approach to an increasingly
important form of expression in today’s culture. It begins by assuming that
video games are meaningful—not just as sociological or economic or cultural
evidence, but in their own right, as cultural expressions worthy of scholarly
attention. In this way, this book makes a contribution to the study of video
games, but it also aims to enrich textual studies.
Early video game studies scholars were quick to point out that a game should
never be reduced to merely its “story” or narrative content and they rightly
insist on the importance of studying games as games. But here Steven E. Jones
demonstrates that textual studies—which grows historically out of ancient
questions of textual recension, multiple versions, production, reproduction,
and reception—can fruitfully be applied to the study of video games. Citing
specific examples such as Myst and Lost, Katamari Damacy, Halo Façade,
Nintendo’s Wii, and Will Wright’s Spore, the book explores the ways in which
textual studies concepts—authorial intention, textual variability and perform-
ance, the paratext, publishing history, and the social text—can shed light on
video games as more than formal systems. It treats video games as cultural
forms of expression that are received as they are played, out in the world,
where their meanings get made.
Steven E. Jones is Professor of English at Loyola University Chicago. He is
co-editor of the Romantic Circles website and author of Satire and Romanticism,
The Satiric Eye, and Against Technology: From the Luddites to Neo-Luddism, also
published by Routledge.

The Meaning of Video Games
Gaming and textual strategies
Steven E. Jones
First published 2008
by Routledge
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Simultaneously published in the UK
by Routledge
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This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008.
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book
ISBN 0-203-92992-6 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN10: 0–415–96055–X (hbk)
ISBN10: 0–415–96056–8 (pbk)
ISBN10: 0–203–92992–6 (ebk)
ISBN13: 978–0-415–96055–7 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978–0-415–96056–4 (pbk)
ISBN13: 978–0–203–92992–6 (ebk)
To Emilia and Henry, Research Assistants
My, Earth Really is Full of Things

Contents
List of illustrations viii
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction 1
1 The game of Lost 19
2 Collecting Katamari Damacy 47
3 The Halo universe 69
4 The game behind Façade 97
5 The Wii platform 127
6 Anticipating Spore 150
Notes 175
Selected bibliography 187
Glossary 194
Index 195
Illustrations
2.1 Katamari Damacy cosplay during Bay to Breakers race, 2006.
Photograph by Kathryn Hill, used by permission of Kathryn Hill 68
3.1 Halo: Combat Evolved screenshot: the AI Cortana, cybernetic
supersoldier Master Chief, and human Captain Keyes on the
bridge of the Pillar of Autumn 72
3.2 Halo: Combat Evolved screenshot: Cortana 73
3.3 I Love Bees Web page (www.ilovebees.com) 78
3.4 Halo: Combat Evolved screenshot: first-person gun 84
3.5 Space Invaders screenshot (online emulator) 85
3.6 The Ivanhoe Game (www.patacriticism.org/ivanhoe/) 95
4.1 Screenshot from Façade: Welcome 98
4.2 Screenshot from Façade: Grace and Trip 104
5.1 Actors playing at playing the Wii in a London cinema. Used
by permission of CommentUK 148
6.1 Arecibo image 163
6.2 Screenshot from Space level of Spore 165
Acknowledgements
Every book is a collaborative, social product, and that’s especially true in this
case. I want to thank, first, my students at Loyola University Chicago, particu-
larly the members of an advanced undergraduate seminar on Video Games and
Textual Studies in spring 2007, who read some of the following chapters in
draft and whose discussions and group projects taught me much as I formulated
the rest of the book. They are: Jeff Behrends, John Blyschak, Kevin Cioffi, Andy
Dost, Betty Foley, Kristina Giovanni, Kristin Hertko, Tiana Jansen, Joe LeBlanc,
Dan Lenzini, Peter Leonteos, Bryan McCutcheon, Dan Melnick, Punit Patel,
Ryan Ptomey, and Elise Rombach. I also want to thank Doug Guerra, an
exceptional graduate student with an interest in games and a history in Chicago
theater. He loaned me PS2 games when I needed them, discussed them theor-
etically, and put me in touch with a colleague of his, Chloe Johnston, who
played the voice of Grace in Façade (my thanks to her in turn, for answering my
questions in email). Talmadge Wright, of the Department of Sociology at
Loyola University Chicago, visited my class and was always happy to talk video
games in the hallway between our two classrooms: what I liked to call material
interdisciplinarity. Thanks to Halo players who shared their experiences with
me for chapter 3, including two anonymous friends of the formidable Megan
Milliken and two anonymous Loyola University students (“John” and “Dave”).
In the game studies community, I’m grateful to Espen Aarseth, for a brief
but simulating lunchtime conversation at an Association for Computers in the
Humanities conference in Sweden; to Nick Montfort, for joining a panel I
organized for the MLA and for his own pioneering interdisciplinary work. For
helpful responses to my questions on Façade, my thanks to Andrew Stern.
Among textual-studies colleagues, I’m indebted especially to G. Thomas
Tanselle, David C. Greetham, Karl Kroeber, Suzanne Gossett, Neil Fraistat,
Matthew Kirschenbaum, and, in particular, Jerome McGann, whose theoretical
work on textuality helped to inspire my approach to this subject. Reports
from anonymous readers at Routledge were very useful as I completed the