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half of the early command
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Delivering his keynote paper to the International Game Cultures Conference, Espen Aarseth identified 2001 as the first year of video game studies. His statement was confirmed in many ways by the grandiose scale of the event, bringing together an international community of video gamers and academics to discuss this new and exciting discipline. For Jesper Juul, Aki Jarvinen and Espen Aarseth the terminology of video game theory had to be drawn from the language of ‘play’. However, the concept of theory being intertwined with play/pleasure appeared unexpectedly problematic for some academics. Even the field of ludology in which Juul and Jarvinen situated themselves was new and unfamiliar to many at the conference. Although not entirely incompatible, the narratological perspective adopted by Henry Jenkins and Greg Smith did not sit well with ludology. Similar tensions arose where methodology was called into question. Ethnographic studies presented by T.L. Taylor, Kirsty Horrell, David Buckingham and Julian Sefton-Green emphasied the benefits and the limitations of conducting empirical research into video games. Henry Jenkins’s opening keynote address was a productive enterprise in applying film-theory to video games. Using the phrase, ‘an art of narrative architecture’, he described the relationship between games and cinema as a two-way process where both media share aesthetic devices along with a similar cultural status. As vessels of a so-called ‘popular aesthetic’, cinema and video games exist somewhere in between a continuum of pure convention and pure invention. Jenkins argued that they are both in a constant process of movement between the conventional and experimental, and between urban and technological worlds. As objects of comparison, Jenkins selected two texts of ‘pure invention’, namely Sergei Eisenstein’s cinematic masterpiece Battleship Potemkin (1925) and the critically acclaimed computer game The Sims (2001). Both texts were united by the presence of what Jenkins termed ‘micro narratives’. A still from the famous Odessa Steps sequence of Battleship Potemkin is composed of a number of micro-narratives.
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