The Medium of the Video Game

Rating:
Summary: ... upclose and thorough view of personal cyberspace
Review: Mark Wolf presents a ground breaking and thorough examination of the video game as artistic medium, cultural phenomena, and a meaningful portal for understanding the context of what has become our new digital lifestyle.

A "Popular Electronics" January 1975 cover picture of the Altair computer kit prompted the founding of the Homebrew Computer Club, another milestone in history as we know it, which preceded the surge of features and utilities that characterized personal computers with recordable cassette tape drives in the late '70s and early '80s such as Atari, Apple and Commodore. Thus making it relatively easier for individuals to expand creative boundaries, soon to be seen as an inescapable irony allowing some early dark shadows such as "Custer's Revenge" and "FireBug", beginning a long list of collateral, ghastly underworld currents there are now. While we can trust our emerging philosophical inquiries will, in good conscience, examine the pressure to balance those freedoms with responsibility, our generation may so far have not completely charted moral consequences for a healthy society. Obviously video games are not just a fantasy theater, as some might fear, for the furious expression of male adolescent rage fueling new ideologies of terror, misogyny and brutalization throughout the modern world. "First person shooters" can visually and mentally exercise ethnic biases and assorted prejudices that assault human sensibilities and continually challenge the boundaries of those creative freedoms. And we cannot ignore some underground travesties that mimic other "unthinkables" like Columbine, Oklahoma City and Ground Zero.

Now, some groundbreaking museum venues are beginning to provide a quiet, safe harbor for contemplating and celebrating the best of this new American media, even while acknowledging the fears emanating from among its dark shadows that can be millions of times more [exponentially] powerful than the limitations we've known of the Gutenberg effect. For example, the chapter "Hot Circuits: A Video Arcade" by Rochelle Slovin, longtime creative spirit and Director of the American Museum of the Moving Image, presents insightful path markers while continuing in celebrating the best in American media history. AMMI's brilliant series begins with "Hot Circuits: A Video Arcade" 1989, distinguished by its marvelous gallery (and online, ammi.org) presentations continuing through "Expanded Entertainment" 1996, "Computer Space" 1998, and " Digital Media" 2002, marking a significant place on an historic trail of kinetic luminism preceded by other remarkable mile markers such as Wilfred's "Lumia Suite" at MOMA in the '60s, and Nam June Paik's debut at NYC's New School in the early '60s (foretelling his magnificent AMMI installation today). The history of man's cultural kinetic lightworks and precursors harkens back even to the to the magic lantern Phantasmagoria of the Renaissance and the Shadow Puppetry Theatre in Bali 1000 years earlier. As signaled in the AMMI companion essay here by poet and critic Charles Bernstein "video games are the purest manifestation of our computer consciousness", and with their engagingly playful and peculiar allure, "We've started using them as culture" observes Ms. Slovin.

The reader may find additional perspectives by looking at "Video Games: A popular Culture Phenomenon" by Berger, 2002 for a social context of sexuality, and at the "Ultimate History of Video Games" by Kent, 2001 for putting David Grossman's fiery challenge to video game violence (Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill) into an expanded context.

So, "what-if" my new digital appliance today is one thousand times more powerful, at the same price, than my PC ten years ago -- and then my next digital tool ten years from now is again one thousand times more powerful than today, at the same price ...will that million times more powerful tool routinely do things not previously thought of? What-if kids were to spend more time on their computers than watching TV? What-if "...the first primitive versions of the next PC interface have already been delivered ...and they're called video games." What-if we "put more computing power in a video game at the finger tips of a 9-year-old kid than NASA used to put a man on the moon"? What-if that 9-year-old kid in 20 years, comfortably uses a personal digital tool that is yet again a million times more...? Our new digital lifestyle is no more unnatural or less humanistic than book reading of the "Gutenberg Effect" has been. As presented here in "The Medium of the Video Game", AMMI's "Hot Circuits" and sequels elegantly mark a new path for those of us whose lifetime understanding of present reality would have more nearly fitted a society of thirty, forty or fifty years ago. Our historic environmedia landscape and our culture have shifted beneath our feet.

Rating:
Summary: a problematic book worth browsing through
Review: The Medium of the Video Game is an anthology edited by Mark J. P. Wolf. However, to say that Wolf is only the editor is really an understatement, Medium of the Video Game is really his baby. Of the nine essays in this book, five of them are his.

Wolf is coming from a film theory perspective. Hence he is emphasizing the video part of the term videogame (a notion I disagree with. I feel the fact that they are games is more important than the fact that they are video).
More than this, however, Wolf is concerned with categorization. He lists eleven different types of spacial structures and forty-two different videogame genres. One of the problems with this is that some of his categories are questionable. Amongst his genres he lists diagnostics, demos and utilities. While it may be argued that demos are a distinct genre as they are trying to make you buy the full game (an argument I do not buy), I fail to see how diagnostics or utilities can be classified as genres of games of any sort. His rational seems to be that they come in cartridges or CD-ROM's like games and some game collectors collect them too, so they are the same as games. If you do a web search for his name and the book title you will find this chapter online, so you can make up your own mind about this issue.

There is one section that I do think deserves praise, the appendix. In the appendix, Wolf has has collected a fairly large listing of resources for video game research. He lists websites, books, and periodical articles as well as emulators. It is a valuable resource. However, I did not find the rest of the book as usefull and cannot really recommend buying it.