A Discipline is Always Born Twice1: Is there Room for Interdisciplinary Humanities Methods in Game Studies Scholarship Today? Caroline Bem Université Saint-Paul University, Ottawa Faculty of Human Sciences/Faculté des Sciences Humaines School of Social Communication/École de Communication Sociale 613-236-1393, ext. : 2494 [email protected]

Abstract

This short “extended abstract” paper is intended as a provocation (some might say a polemic) whose goal it is to spark a greater discussion, within the field of game studies at large, about 1) possible reasons for and answers to a growing lack of interest in interdisciplinarity within the field and 2) how, or even whether at all, to achieve an increased openness to interdisciplinary methods originating, specifically, within the humanities. The remainder of the abstract then puts forward an analytic stance which I term “humanistic sensibility.”

Keywords interdisciplinarity in game studies; humanities methods for game studies; history of academic fields and disciplines; “humanistic sensibility”

INTRODUCTION

Over the last decade or so, the field of game studies has noticeably distanced itself from both literature and film studies, two disciplines whose influence weighed heavily on the field’s early days (Aarseth 1997, King et al. 2005, Perron 2002, 2007). Indeed, little current games scholarship draws overtly on contributions from humanities disciplines, even though humanistic methods of inquiry and analysis, such as close reading in particular, have recently regained attention from other disciplines, such as law or history, where they are viewed as valuable interdisciplinary tools of analysis (Levine 2015, Nussbaum 1992, Van Rahden 2019).2 Written intentionally as a provocation of sorts, it is my hope that this short paper might spark a greater discussion, within the field of game studies at large, about 1) possible reasons for and answers to this lack of interest in interdisciplinarity and 2) how, or even whether at all, to achieve an increased openness toward interdisciplinary methods originating, specifically, within the humanities. Finally, I use the remainder of this paper to lay out a very rough version of an analytic stance which I term “humanistic sensibility.”

THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

Mirroring conditions in the games industry, where structural sexism and racism are especially deeply entrenched, women, women-identified, and LBTQ+ scholars, as well as POC scholars, were relatively late to gain access to the field of game studies; in their subsequent re-evaluation of the first wave of games scholarship, the field’s

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foundational struggle (the narratology vs. ludology debate) came to be viewed as both the site and the expression of a racially and sexually privileged, dominant viewpoint. In her recent book, Aubrey Anable neatly summarizes this critique as follows: “This binary in game studies also privileges certain types of games and certain types of questions about games over others, reinforcing gendered hierarchies in gaming culture around issues such as what constitutes a video game and who its proper subjects are” (2018, 52). As the important reevaluation of the field’s theoretical foundations continues, however, I want to suggest that the time has also come to ask what the field has to gain from external contributions stemming both from different disciplines and from a broader, international range of perspectives. Going further still: is game studies finally solid enough to tolerate, and productively acknowledge, input from other fields and, in particular, humanities disciplines?

The barriers between the arts and most humanities disciplines have long been porous: thus, building on a long and ongoing tradition of humanistic interdisciplinarity, from literary writers discussing art (Proust 1997, Genet 2007, Hustvedt 2007) to films routinely serving as the basis for philosophical discussions (Badiou 2013, Brinkema 2014, Deleuze 1986 and 1989, Žižek 1988), interdisciplinarity continues to spark collaborations as diverse and daring as art historians making contributions to the field of medicine (Goodden 2002) or scholars discussing architecture in relation to visual art and film (Bruno 2007). Thus far, however, game studies has remained conspicuously cautious of participating in such processes of disciplinary crosspolination when those offering their takes on video games are not, primarily, video game scholars. Here, Aubrey Anable (2018), a self-avowed late-comer and dilettante, is something of an exception. Indeed, notwithstanding the shift brought about by feminist, LGBTQ+ and decolonial scholarship (most of these writers still identify as gamers and, often, as game designers as well), it is my contention that over-investment in “straight” values, such as “skill acquisition” and “geekiness,” as well as rigorous typologies, and the consolidation of a “canon” of both games scholarship and gamic objects, endure to render the field inimical for thinkers who hail from other primary backgrounds. Even amongst LGBTQ+ scholars, who frequently put forward dilettantism, counter play, or “crip gaming” (Ruberg 2019, Ruberg et al. 2017) as the counter-values of queer game scholarship, a rather limited corpus of indie games and critical texts rooted in game studies seems to dominate discussions. What is needed, then, to fill this interdisciplinary void, is a philosophical- conceptual approach that allows for the field to revisit its relation to methodology (currently overly skewed towards empirical methods), historicization, and canonicity itself. I name this approach a “humanistic sensibility.”

WHAT IS A “HUMANISTIC SENSIBILITY” AND HOW CAN IT APPLY TO GAMES SCHOLARSHIP?

By the phrase “humanistic sensibility” I mean essentially three things: first, the phrase designates a philosophical attitude whose primary marker is a consistent and conscious endeavor to contextualize individual objects within an intricate lineage and long history of artistic, cultural, and theoretical writings that cross disciplinary, epochal, and medial divides. Secondly, I also equate the phrase with an analytic stance steeped in the recognition that aesthetics and forms are the primary outlets that an object has at its disposal to communicate both its philosophical and affective positions.3 Finally, analyses that rely at least in part on a scholar’s conscious use of their humanistic sensibility imply that a certain je ne sais quoi, or “supplement” in Derridean terminology, is at work within the moment of interpretation; an interpretative spark that cannot be quantified, and that typically has little room to blossom within analyses that are hypothesis-driven and generally empirical. At its

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most basic, then, “humanistic sensibility” could be taken to designate the ways in which the totality of a game’s representational contents, game mechanics, and material form (both hardware and software) resonates sensorially with the player. However, here I am mostly interested in the concept’s potential to get at, not simply the affects a game might generate in the player, but at game objects’ own, formalist- affective relations (Brinkema 2014) with what intermedial scholar Eric Méchoulan has called the greater milieu of media objects (the intertextual and intermedial web an object stands in relation to, Méchoulan 2003).

CONCLUSION

To conclude, then, “humanistic sensibility” is an analytic method that is both deeply interdisciplinary and intermedial, and that draws on a longstanding, non-Anglo- American-centric tradition of humanities concepts and methods of inquiry, such as close reading. As such, it is a method that is deeply aware of itself as a method; its efficacy, in other words, derives both from the analytic work it does on and through its object of inquiry and from its theorization of the philosophical and methodological lineage from whence it originates. Elsewhere, I plan to use analytical case studies of game objects to demonstrate what close readings grounded in a long humanities tradition might be able to do for the interpretation of contemporary games; presently, however, my interest is in sparking a conversation about the theoretical underpinnings of what I have sought to diagnose, and then propose, within this short paper.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aarseth, E. J. 1997. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Anable, A. 2018. Playing with Feelings. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Badiou, A. 2013. Cinema. Cambridge and Oxford: Polity.

Bogost, I. 2006. Unit Operations. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Bolter, J.D. “Foreword.” In Avant-Garde Videogames – Playing with Technoculture by D. Schrank, vii-x. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Brinkema, E. 2014. The Forms of the Affects. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press.

Bruno, G. 2007. Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Deleuze, G. 1986. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. London: The Athlone Press.

---. 1989. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. London: The Athlone Press.

Frampton, Daniel. 2006. Filmosophy: A Manifesto for a Radically New Way of Understanding Cinema. London: Wallflower Press.

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Gaudreault, A. and Marion, P. 2005. “A medium is always born twice …” Early Popular Visual Culture. 3 (1). 3-15.

Genet, J. 2007. L’Atelier d’Alberto Giacometti. Paris: Gallimard.

Gooden, A. 2002. The Eighteenth-Century Body: Art, History, Literature, Medicine. New York, NY: Peter Lang.

Hustvedt, S. 2007. Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press.

King, G. and Krzywinska, T. (eds.). 2005. Tomb Raiders and Space Invaders: Video Games in the 21st Century. London: I.B. Tauris.

Levine, C. 2015. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Méchoulan, E. 2003. “Intermédialités: le temps des illusions perdues.” Intermédialités “Naître” 1. 9-27.

Mitchell, W.J.T. 2005. What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Nussbaum, M. 1992. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Perron, B. 2007. “Anaconda, a Snakes and Ladders Game. Horror Film and the Notions of Stereotype, Fun and Play.” Journal of Moving Image Studies 5 (1). 20- 30.

---. 2002. “L’Approche Ludique Du Cinéma De Fiction: Un Jeu à Motif Mixte.” COMPAR(A)ISON 2. 69-88.

Proust, M. 1997. Proust on Art and Literature. New York: Carroll and Graf.

Ruberg, B. and Shaw, A., ed. 2017. Queer Game Studies. Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press.

Ruberg, B. 2019. Video Games Have Always Been Queer. New York, NY: NYU Press.

Van Rahden, T. Demokratie: Eine gefährdete Lebensform. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2019.

Žižek, S. 1988. Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan... But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock. London: Verso Books.

ENDNOTES

1 If, in the words of André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion, “a medium is always born twice,” then I want to suggest that the same is likely true of academic disciplines that take media as their objects of study. In the case of game studies, however, the process has happened twice over. Gaudreault and Marion theorize that a medium’s

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emergent phase (when it still seeks to define itself) is followed by a second birth, which appears only “when its quest for identity and autonomy coincides with institutional recognition and a decisive improvement in the economic resources devoted to its production” (2006, 13). In the case of game studies, the emergence of ludology first underscored the field’s need to break free from the conventions of pre- existing narrative media and their attendant modes of critical analysis in order to allow game studies to develop its own, constitutive identity. Next, however, and giving rise to a sort of second “first birth” of the field, feminist, queer, and decolonial reevaluations of the “grand narratives” of game studies have been proving essential in pointing the way to freeing the field from modes of oppression that are systemically inscribed, not only within an industry and its objects, but within scholars’ critical engagement with these objects.

2 This is especially visible in the case of older humanities disciplines, such as art history. See for instance Jay David Bolter’s foreword to his former PhD student Brian Schrank’s Avant-Garde Videogames (2014), which both dramatically emphasizes the uniqueness of Schrank’s project – “the only only one that engages the history of twentieth-century art in a serious way” (Bolter 2014, p.vii) – and preemptively deplores that “I imagine that few students of traditional art and art history will pick up Avant-garde Videogames” (ibid.). Here, lack of interest and communication is attributed to both sides—game studies and art history—but while multiple artists and visual arts scholars have in fact shown interest in video games (e.g. Lev Manovich, Peter Weibel, Jeffrey Shaw) it appears that the exploration of interconnections between games and other visual arts media has become the exclusive province of game scholars working on avant-garde art games from within the philosophical perspective of aesthetics.

3 The idea that media texts might “think themselves” through the aesthetic forms they adopt has been put forward, with some theoretical variation, in three notable models rooted, respectively, in film studies and art history (Brinkema 2014, Frampton 2006, and Mitchell 2005).

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