Tag Archive for games

Iron girls

'We are proud of participating in the founding of our country's industrialization!' (1954; from chineseposters.net)

I’ve been trotting through the history of Chinese women in the 20th century in preparation for a course I’m teaching this coming winter. Unraveling these narratives that have been put in service to nation building has been both a trip down memory lane (recalling the early days of my fascination with Chinese history) and diving into new-to-me secondary sources that have popped up in the past couple of years, while my attention was turned elsewhere. It’s been dovetailing nicely with other talk of gender, one that played out (for me, an outside observer) on Twitter and on blogs – I’m referring to THAT panel (“The Words We Use”) at Freeplay 2011, a games event in Australia.

[Some relevant links: Brendan Keogh’s take, Ben Abraham over at Gamasutra, a post by Searing Scarlet, and lots of other links to be gleaned from those]

It’s been interesting, as a woman-journalist-that-once-was – I’m not sure I still count among the illustrious crew anymore, having mostly been resting on my laurels for the past few years, but I was once – interesting and sad and irritating and all sorts of things.

I was never made to be uncomfortable at Kotaku – part of that was my own design (and listening to Ian Bogost’s admonition not to read the comments! – which I pass along on Twitter to this day), part of it was the fact that I generally shied away from writing about gender and sex, part of it was the fact that most of the audience (if not always the most vociferous) weren’t into making irrelevant, sexist commentary. I did do at least one long form essay on the subject of sexuality and gender, and I’m sure the comments were a mix of thoughtful conversation, some ‘What? This again?’, and a smattering of ‘tl;dr’ or ‘Maggie is such a pedantic bitch’ (I wonder sometimes if the vitriol that was occasionally directed at me for looking down on my audience and thinking Kotaku readers were stupid and generally being a stuck up bitch would have been lobbed had I been male; I honestly don’t know). I think I wrote that under the ‘Everyone must produce feature articles’ phase of my employment, and I had been thinking about eroticism in Chinese movies (specifically, the subtle foot squeeze in Red Sorghum (红高粱 Hong gaoliang) and the wonderful tension present in the Maggie Cheung/Tony Leung pairing of In the Mood for Love (花樣年華 Huayang nianhua)).

However, that was not my first brush with issues of sex and gender and games. My first experience with writing ‘criticism’ was on the subject of sex and gender in games; it wasn’t terribly sophisticated, but I was about 22, so I try and cut myself a little slack. It appeared on Slashdot, and the comments literally made me cry. I remember being too horrified and hurt to even look away. It probably was a stupid essay, and perhaps was only parroting things that had been said before (and better), and almost certainly wasn’t a shining example of the genre. But I had never in all my life been subject to the kind of commentary thrown at me (and never since – whatever one wants to say about the Kotaku comments section, comments were moderated to a greater extent and people did get banned). ‘Clearly she just doesn’t get fucked enough,’ or ‘Must be a fat, bitter bitch – anyone have a picture?’ – and on and on and on. It was shocking and hurtful and offensive.

Here I will say that I have absolutely benefited from privilege-with-a-capital-P – maybe it shouldn’t have taken until I was 22 to realize that people who didn’t want to engage with me on an intellectual level would simply hurl insults based on my gender instead, but the only place this has ever happened to me personally is when writing about games. No academic paper reviewer, no matter how monstrous, would return an essay with the notation that ‘Clearly this author doesn’t get laid enough and probably does not fit into culturally accepted standards of beauty, which is obviously impacting her ability to engage with post-colonial interpretations of subjectivity.’ I realize some of this is just the vagaries of the internet, but honestly. I bristle at the implication that comes out sometimes, the one that says that we should just get used to it, and things will change … someday. In the meantime, toughen up, cupcake.

I hadn’t killed any kittens or mugged any grandmothers; I had simply been audacious enough to write an essay that was linked by Slashdot. An essay about what I as a woman who wrote about games would like to see in the games that I played. The nerve I had as a youngster.

Even Kotaku commenters weren't heartless enough to insult the world's cutest pit bull

In any case, that early experience had a rather large impact on how I conducted myself later. I generally think I flew pretty under the radar. At Kotaku’s E3 party in 2008, I hid outside on the smoking patio, sharing a couch with Mike Fahey and an assortment of people who passed by during the course of the evening. No one recognized me – a strange position to be in, since everyone else I worked with seemed so visible, but not an unexpected one. I avoided putting a face to my posts and making things ‘too’ personal, occasionally in stark contrast to my coworkers. The only photographic evidence readers got of me was my bookshelf (unimpeachably academic and wonderful!) and my dog (way too cute to insult).

I wonder if any of my male colleagues, the ones writing under their own names, ever felt nervous about putting a picture of themselves out there for public consumption. I did. I posted one picture of me as an adult on Kotaku, and that was with my goodbye letter – I was already halfway out the door, if someone wanted to call me a fat pig as a parting shot, more power to them (no one did). Even my user icon was a game character and not a photo. I liked sharing bits of my life with the audience, but I never wanted to be too out there – and by ‘too out there,’ I mean using a photograph of myself, not spilling out my deepest, innermost fears and dreams on there interwebs – lest it could be used against me.

Yes, that speaks deeply to my own personal insecurities, ones that are quite independent and alive separate from the sphere of games writing, but nevertheless: that run-in with utterly inappropriate, extremely hostile, very-much-tied-to-my-gender commentary did have a significant impact. I couldn’t – still can’t, actually – imagine anyone using my male colleagues’ bodies as criticism of their writing: ‘Brian Crecente’s opinions are stupid because he’s unattractive’; ‘Simon Carless must be fat and bitter, that’s why I don’t like his essay’; ‘I need to see a photograph of this Ben fellow before I determine my feelings about his writing.’ No, I don’t think everyone – or even a majority – of people in the industry, or people who follow blogs and critical discourse, would say (or even think!) such things. But it doesn’t take much of a minority, just a vocal one, to drown out all the other voices.

It saddens me that we’re still having the same conversations we had years ago, despite what seems to be an increase in visible female writers and critics.

But I agree with those that say people are ‘tired’ of the talk of sexism, it’s all been said before, and any current debate will simply rehash that. I am alarmed by the notion that “gender will stop being an issue when we stop acknowledging that there is a divide.” There is a divide. Refusing to acknowledge the divide just means … refusing to acknowledge it (the author more or less contradicts herself a few sentences later & appears to advocate for people speaking up, but this sort of idea – that talking about an issue is what propagates it – is definitely in play well beyond the game blogosphere. I think it’s a lie, a dangerous one at that, and we should stop throwing it out there. Not talking about an issue will never resolve it, just make it easier to ignore). But I do understand the dislike of talking about it, and the exhaustion with the subject. There is fatigue that sets in as we go round and round in circles and nothing ever really changes.

There’s a fine line here, at times a contradictory one, but I think it’s one that we collectively walk every day in different permutations. I am a woman. I don’t want people to flatten that out and not see my gender (because what usually happens when gender magically “disappears” is categories collapse into one appropriate one, the default being heterosexual male, with differing experiences ridiculed or ignored), but that’s not the only thing that defines me, or even the most important one. But it is part of me. I don’t often think of my gender in relation to my academic work, for example (primarily because I exist in a comfortable, supportive ecosystem in my program). But I am always aware that my experience has been shaped to larger and smaller degrees by being female. It’s not the most important characteristic I use to define myself by far, but it is more than just a box to check on standardized forms.

I’m currently reading a collection of essays published by acclaimed women writers who grew up under Mao – Wu Hui’s wonderful Once Iron Girls: Essays on Gender by Post-Mao Chinese Literary Women. The experiences and ruminations of these writers – most of whom were once told they were “iron girls,” that they held up half the sky, that they were equal (and indeed, did do everything that men did and then some; but ‘a new woman is just like a man’) – is packaged neatly and tightly. Some of the essays are absolutely brutal; most will at least give the reader pause. I’ve certainly been examining my own life in contrast. Here’s the introductory paragraph by an essay by Lu Xing’er called “Women and the Crisis”:

In recent years, I have been thinking about women’s issues and written about them in a fiction series. I plan to continue writing about these issues in the future. Indeed, since ancient times, woman has never failed to be a topic involving prolonged, heated discussions. I am sure that women will continue to be talked about, in depth and forever. However, women’s situation and future will see few fundamental changes, despite so much writing, thinking, and discussing.

I said “fundamental,” not superficial.

(Ouch)

I would like to think Lu is wrong. I’m hardly the poster child for optimism (if something can be worried about, I can worry about it like a true champion worrier/pessimist), but I would really, really like to think she’s wrong, both on a big scale and on a smaller scale like … the community that writes about videogames.

Here is a slightly more positive take on getting over the gender divide: “Androgyny” (which can also be rendered as “neutrality”) by Bi Shumin:

Androgyny is different from saying that women can do whatever men can do. This statement identifies women as a little boat managing to get close to the mens large ship. In contrast, androgyny is the lighthouse. Toward its welcoming lights both men and women move forward, helping and enabling one another, leaving no one behind.

I have been lucky in my academic career to not brush up against overt sexism from professors or classmates, as I mentioned above. Reading Katie Williams’ response to the Freeplay panel was painful – not because it reminded me of my own experience, but because it was so foreign, and no one ought to feel like that, nor should it be tolerated by those in a position of power. It underscores the futility of staying quiet. I wonder if we haven’t done ourselves a great disservice by distancing ourselves from the discussion, saying we’re not interested in those kinds of issues. I hasten to say that I would have no interest in focusing exclusively on gender issues, but sustained conversation could be a good thing – both in public and in more private (possibly ‘safer’) spaces. I’ve never had the opportunity to sit around with other female journalists and critics and talk about our experiences, and it’s something I would be interested in doing.

Obviously these issues go way, way beyond a conference in Australia and women who write about games. I hope one day, Lu Xing’er will be proved wrong. Until then, I’ll simply wish for thoughtful and sustained discussion on issues that impact all of us, female or not.

In summer, it is the nights that are most beautiful

Sei Shōnagon, Edo period print

In summer the nights [are most beautiful]. Not only when the moon shines, but on dark nights too, as the fireflies flit to and fro, and even when it rains, how beautiful it is! (Sei Shōnagon, The Pillow Book, trans. Ivan Morris)

Summer in Shanghai is draining – it’s hot and very humid, and it hasn’t been raining as much as one would expect in the summers (or at least, as much as I was expecting). Nights are not particularly beautiful either, and there are no flitting fireflies, just mosquitos – though evenings are at least a respite from the sun. I’ve survived heat and humidity before; Virginia is no cool paradise come August, and Taipei is on par (at a minimum) with Shanghai temperature and humidity-wise – but it seems particularly unrelenting here. Rain storms were a near-daily occurrence in Taipei, which makes summer more bearable, and Virginia at its worst was the equivalent of a normal day in Shanghai. Which is to say, I’ve felt like doing precious little other than hibernating in air conditioning. I think the weather has contributed to my terrible case of incompletitis – the inability to finish anything. Oh, I’ve met immovable deadlines when I’ve come up against them, but it’s all that more flexible stuff: for instance, I have no fewer than five unfinished blog entries languishing in my queue. I’ll get around to finishing them … maybe.

In any case, it’s the home stretch here (I booked my tickets to fly back to the US in October – and I’m thrilled to bits at the prospect of being back in California in a smidge over two months!), and I’ve been good and working a lot. I was lucky enough to host a good friend who came down to use the wonderful Shanghai municipal archives (上海市档案馆) and soak up some of the French Concession atmosphere. It was a delight to have someone else to go archiving (after we had our morning coffee & breakfast, of course) and try new restaurants with, squeal over sources to, and gossip. I’m not used to having roommates, having had my last one at the age of 20 or so, but it’s a nice change for a few weeks – mostly because I am not used to being alone for extended periods, and in truth, it’s been one of the most difficult things about this year abroad.

But, having caught a summer cold and piled loads more activity than I’m used to on top of it, I’ve taken a few days off to lounge around the apartment, recover, contemplate cleaning (and do a bit of actual tidying), and play some videogames. I’ve been flip flopping between a few things, but currently I’m playing through ÅŒkamiden, the recent ‘sequel’ to ÅŒkami. It’s cute, though the graphics can get a bit choppy at times – but I do think the drawing mechanic is quite suited to the DS. It works better (for the most part) than it did on the PS2 or Wii, even. Still, mostly I’ve been playing through and wishing I could pick up the original again.

ÅŒkami is – and will probably always be – the only game I played (not once, but twice) because I found the aesthetic experience so damn pleasurable. It was the look that got me interested in the first place, and it was the environment that kept me playing a game that wasn’t always very good. But I was so impressed with the visuals and the idea of the gameplay linked to the tactile pleasure of writing. I loved the way the ink (‘smoke’) pooled at the tip of the brush, and the way mountains were simple outlines on the sky.

There was a certain joy of movement in the Wii version. I generally dislike the ‘Wii waggle,’ and find it excruciating when it pops up where it just doesn’t fit (particularly awful execution of Wiimote action in one game I played caused me to put the game aside totally rather than face 30+ hours of waggling my way through a JRPG). I flicked my wrist in the middle of an ÅŒkami battle, and the wolf dodged smoothly. It was elegant – more importantly, there was a connection between that little flick of the wrist and the movement on screen. It was the first time I had played anything on the Wii and gone ‘Oh, well. That was nicer than I would’ve gotten out of my standard controller.’ This is a bit funny, of course, because a lot of people criticized the lousy control scheme. I found that the learning curve was sharper, but once I got the hang of it, it worked brilliantly for me.

I liked touring the countryside; it was a pleasure to go galavanting about scenery that struck a balance between drab realism and candy-coated fantasy. There was a solidness to Amaterasu’s movements, but it never turned stiff and clumsy. Animals so frequently come off poorly in games – most representations of equids leave me aghast at the fact that anyone could think any horse-like creature could ever look like that – it was nice to see one that verged on believable. Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that the believable wolf was set in an unbelievable setting? The world of ÅŒkami is not ‘realistic,’ but maybe that’s why Amaterasu’s mannerisms and movements were often so real (and delightful): she was totally unburdened by the need to be ‘realistic,’ as were the things that surrounded her.

Leigh Alexander wrote a nice piece for Kotaku a few months back entitled “Why Don’t I Lose Myself in Games Anymore?“:

When games were more abstract-simple designs and massive worlds with yawning gaps in between each fragile plot point-they engaged us more, because they became worlds we could own. When all of the work of creation is done for us, when every element of lore is written in, when every object in the game world is explicable and available for interaction, there’s nothing for our hearts and minds to do except ride along. And that’s beautiful and well, but it’s just not very engaging.

Now, Leigh is speaking to the structure and plot and characterization, but some of the underlying issues here are the same, I think. It’s the gaps that capture our attention (how many people have hated big screen versions of favorite books, where someone else’s vision is played out – partially or wholly at odds with the world and characters you’d built in your head?) and allow us to fill in the blanks. The fact that ÅŒkami‘s art style was somewhat literally fuzzy around the edges is what let her become ‘real’ (at least in my eyes). Those yawns, side flops, ear scratches, tail wags, and countless other minute movements could have become bogged down in details in a game striving for realism.

All of this got me thinking about a conference presentation I saw over a year ago, at a conference I also presented at. The presentation was on early 1960s “ink painting animation” (shuimo donghua 水墨动画), in particular two films from the noted animator Te Wei 特伟. We watched clips from the 1960 release Tadpoles looking for Mama (Xiao kedou zhao mama 小蝌蚪找媽媽) and 1963’s The Cowherd’s Flute (Mu di 牧笛 – the Youtube title below is wrong regarding the date). I won’t bore with details of the political maneuvering that make these two films resonate with my research on early ’60s drama, but beyond their historical significance, I found them absolutely enthralling. I’d never seen anything like it.

Except in ÅŒkami.

Of course, if all animation in China looked like this, or all games went for the fluid, the minimalist, the purposefully unrealistic, it wouldn’t be special. On the other hand, it’s less about the stylistic particulars and more about the idea of staunching the flow of this wanting-so-badly-to-be-real-that-it-hurts, which is in a lot of cases simply taking away space for imagination. It can become dull, stiff, and boring. There is something to the openness, the literal blank spaces – more room to maneuver. My favorite example of this is around the 2:00 mark below, where ‘water’ is not much more than totally blank space.

(Part two can be found here) I watch a lot of contemporary Chinese cartoons, and I doubt many of them will stand the test of 50 years like The Cowherd’s Flute (that’s for the commercial stuff, of course – there is a whole slew of independent animation, but I don’t think many people are watching, sadly). I wonder how many of the types of works that entirely spell out a world for you will be able to? There is a lot of flexibility in gaps, a lot of room for people to fill in their own present.

I opened with Sei Shōnagon – her Pillow Book (finished sometime in the very early 11th century) is rightfully famous and I have loved it for over half my life. It’s absolutely contrived in some respects (parts of it were revealed at court, and there was editing, rewriting, and shuffling going on), but it’s such a great hodgepodge of stuff. She was witty, catty, and immensely talented – which is what makes her work such a fascinating historical record. But the thing I like most are her lists. Sometimes she expounds rather lengthily (here, part of a list on Hateful Things):

A lover who is leaving at dawn announces that he has to find his fan and his paper. “I know I put them somewhere last night,” he says. Since it is pitch-dark, he gropes about the room, bumping into the furniture and muttering, “Strange! Where can they be?” Finally he discovers the objects. He thrusts the paper into the breast of his robe with a great rustling sound; then he snaps open his fan and busily fans away with it. Only now is he ready to take his leave. What charmless behavior! “Hateful” is an understatement.

Equally disagreeable is the man who, when leaving in the middle of the night, takes care to fasten the cord of his headdress. This is quite unnecessary; he could perfectly well put it gently on his head without tying the cord. And why must he spend time adjusting his cloak or hunting costume? Does he really think that someone may see him at this time of night and criticize him for not being impeccably dressed?

And sometimes she just offers her opinion without commentary:

Elegant Things

A white coat worn over a violet waistcoat. Duck eggs. Shaved ice mixed with liana syrup and put in a new silver bowl. A rosary of rock crystal. Wistaria blossoms. Plum blossoms covered with snow. A pretty child eating strawberries.

Who among them was a robe rustler? (From the NY Public Library site; the Kokushi daijiten)

Lists, observations, opinions, records of a life. An eleventh century LiveJournal, if you will.

One reason Sei Shōnagon has stood the test of time so well is because her writing is ‘fuzzy around the edges.’ It isn’t that there aren’t tons of particulars that alert you to the fact that we are in the past (where, to quote L.P. Hartley, ‘they do things differently’). That’s one key to its enduring popularity: the time capsule effect. But somehow, the Japanese noblewoman who lived over a thousand years ago wrote passages that seem as though they could have been pulled from today. It’s the fuzzy bits that can’t be tied to specific periods, the parts that make you want to ask questions (what was so elegant about duck eggs? has been one of my perennial, flippant favorites) and make you think. That’s the other key, and probably the more important one, at least in terms of keeping translations of her work on shelves across the world. She resonates with today (whenever that today may be).

Even if she did leave one important thing off her list of why in summer, nights are the most beautiful: cicadas and roosters shut up for a few hours!

April showers bring May slugs & fierce debates

A more picturesque dream of sluggishness: Ingres, L'Odalisque à l'esclave (1839)

After a delightful two week trip to Beijing, I returned home to (quoting myself from elsewhere) “a horror scene of slug trails, dead and dying slugs all over the floor in my main room. Luckily I didn’t notice that one had been cruising around on my bed until the next morning.   I had noticed trails here and there on my carpet (but not thought ‘Oh, slug problem’) and caught a few parked on sponges in my kitchen a few months back, but thought it was an isolated issue. I thought wrong, clearly.”

It took several rounds of hysterical calls to my landlord and the dedicated efforts of his wonderful handyman to fix the issue (mostly).  And gross as it was, the Great Slug Infestation of 2011 (the first and, I sincerely hope, only time I will have to deal with such an issue) somehow spurred me out of my own, well, sluggish period.  The past 6 months haven’t been “as” productive as I would have hoped, but I’m back on track and not feeling as slow as the slugs that were having a field day in my kitchen.

Still, a couple of recent events reminded me that I’m pretty terrible at being immediately relevant.  I look in awe upon people who can magically whip up a response to writers and current events instantaneously – while I’m a pretty zippy writer, all told, it’s quite difficult for me to write unless a deadline is looming and/or a piece is writing itself.  I guess I’ve got a bit of slug in me, since in the past month I’ve had at least 3 hot button issues I’ve started to respond to & then simply abandoned.  OK, perhaps “abandoned” is too strong a word; I’ll get around to finishing them … someday … maybe.

The most recent was Daniel Cook’s “A Blunt Critique of Game Criticism” (its current form is an edited version of the one a lot of us first saw).  The original essay had me pretty frothy with rage for a few days, and while I sat down to write a response, only unpublishable snippets of text came out.  There were plenty of things I wanted to respond to with barely contained indignant fury – the slights against “game illiterates,” academics, all the other unworthies; the intimation that somehow, all those bits and pieces of writing that Cook disagreed with were crowding out stellar pieces of “worthy” game writing written by game literate people; the idea that fluffy humanities people were crowding out the “real” researchers (scientists); the arbitrary typology of writers that didn’t make much sense.  A lot of people jumped into the fray while I was sputtering up sentences here and there (Ben Abraham made a handy list), and said a lot of things as well or better than I could have (clearly).  But I typed away while cataloging archival finds, determined to finish an entry.

Then I thought … what’s the point?  Like a lot of these discussions, we’re chasing our own tail.  What Cook wants is more (better) writing for his particular niche interest (design and development); what I want is more (better) writing for my particular niche interest (not design and development); what we’re lacking overall is high quality, thoughtful writing that’s not geared toward niche interests.  Is there a lot of atrocious writing out there?  Yes.  Would I like to see a wider variety of quality writing, no matter what its thrust?  Yes.  Do I think poking sticks at those of us who aren’t designers or developers – nor, in some cases, particularly interested in writing about that side of the industry – is going to improve “game criticism”?  Absolutely not.  What Cook’s “call to arms” for people who “ought” to be writing “proper” game criticism is missing is a simple fact: a lot of people can’t write cogently, never mind thoughtfully and in a manner that holds the attention span of people who are interested in the subject.  While Cook points out that developing games doesn’t mean one can write about them, he pegs this as a problem of selecting one’s viewpoint.

… If only! There’s a lot of bad writing out there on all subjects.  Most pertinently for this discussion, there’s a lot of bad writing out there on games.  Period.  It’s not confined to academics coming from the humanities or eighteen year old fanboys.  I wonder how much time Cook has spent poking through the nooks and crannies of blogs on Gamasutra: there’s good writing, sure.  There’s also a lot of terrible writing on a wide range of subject matter.  Being “game literate” to Cook’s standards doesn’t mean being culturally literate and capable of writing to my standards.  It’s not that these things are mutually exclusive (obviously not, there are plenty of examples – including Cook! – to show that you can be quite technical and adept with language at the same time).  But as the blurb at Lost Garden says, “You’ve found a rare treasure trove of readable, thoughtful essays on game design theory, art and the business of design” (emphasis mine).

I also find the narrow view of what constitutes “game criticism” (and writing on games more broadly) troubling. Cook muses that “[in] all of this I sense an odd fear. What is so dangerous about being an engineer-geographer-historian-poet-lawyer? I only see benefits to the community as a whole. The only risk is that individuals comfortable in their current niche might need to change and grow.”  However, the assertion that there is one form of game criticism (discussion of game design from a design/ers perspective) that is more desirable, or intrinsically more valuable than other forms strikes me as the position that is cutting off possibilities that rise from the hyphenated “forms of being” Cook throws out.  I’m not running scared of developers or designers, and I’m happy to defend my position – I also think I have a record in the blogosphere that attests to the fact that I’ve been quite open to reading, writing about, and publicizing a really wide variety of writing from a number of angles.  I have certainly never advocated for a position that needlessly insults a number of talented individuals, regardless of whether I personally found their niches captivating.

I say that as someone who has been linked on Critical Distance (and used to write for Kotaku, “promoting” – or at least giving a bit of page space – to all sorts of writing that I liked very much, from Cook’s prototyping challenges to “I” pieces written by students and academics).  I don’t see myself fitting in particularly well to Cook’s typology of “game criticism”; I suppose the area that would come closest would be “Connecting games with the humanities: An academic exercise in which various aspects of games are described as being part of an ongoing structure of philosophy, movie criticism, literary criticism, art history, rhetoric, etc.”  Except that doesn’t fit at all.  On the most basic level (leaving aside Cook’s really narrow definition of what constitutes “the humanities,” at least based on that list), I’m generally less interested in writing about the experience of games than I am about the discourse surrounding games, just as I am generally less interested in the performative aspects of opera than I am about the discourse surrounding opera.  This is a position that opens me to criticism from a number of sides, which I’m OK with – at the foundation of research is doing things we enjoy and we find interesting.  I am not interested in picking apart design issues (nor am I qualified to beyond an experiential reaction).  Ergo, I generally don’t write about specific games in any of the ways that Cook lays out as types of “game criticism.”  A lot of people who Cook is, by default, taking aim at don’t – but that doesn’t mean that we don’t have something to contribute.

Simply put, we don’t have such an excess in terms of really, really good writing that there’s not enough room for everyone.  Really.  Cook may dream of better writing of the type that he wants to see, to the exclusion of what he takes as useless noise on the internet; I dream of better writing across the board, better research, better understanding on the whole.  We can all enjoy our own niches without resorting to belittling the positions of others. Michael Abbott of the Brainy Gamer said it much better than I can:

I accept Dan Cook’s encourgement to deepen my understanding of games from a designer’s perspective, and I’m persuaded that I can benefit from doing so. I hope he and others will accept the value of experiential, comparative, theoretical and other forms of criticism as no less vital to the evolution of video games as an art form worthy of careful consideration from many points of view. I can tell you from first-hand experience that territorialism and boundaries of expertise have played pernicious roles in academia. We mimic those behaviors at our own risk.

[Finally, on a bit of a personal note. The following characterization of historians is quite possibly one of the saddest views of history (and the historian’s craft) that I’ve ever read:

I understand that there are people who prefer to be historians and catalogers of culture.  There is still room for both catalogers and people who dream about the future.

Some historians – not all, but a great many – are dreamers, and dream not just of the past but of the future.  Much of written history reflects more on the author’s present than on the past, and often points to a “dreamed of” future – whether we agree with that projected future or not.  I’m certainly not spinning my wheels in archives so I can simply catalogue a phenomenon; my hope is to do work that will say something about where we are now, how we got there, and where we’ll be going. So too with my work that isn’t “properly” historical: how can you dream of a future without understanding where you’ve come from and where you are at present?  Cook and others may not be interested in the work that many of us do, but that doesn’t mean we’re not dreaming and it certainly doesn’t mean we aren’t thinking about the future.]

The Fearless Muse

Some assorted musings that are far from complete, probably painting plenty of things with too broad a brush, and a bit kneejerk in reaction.  Well, these things happen – it’s a start, and I’ll sort some of this out later.

What shade of blue is the sky?

A Killscreen piece has been making the rounds of late (“‘Game designers want to be artists without knowing what that means’“).  I confess it rubbed me the wrong way for a lot of reasons, some that I haven’t quite put my finger on.  It’s just … well.  A little too simplistic, even for a simplistic laundry list of questions, I think.

Why do you think game designers are so misinformed [about what art is]?

I’m generalizing, but game developers are coming out of computer science or a different side of universities, if they’ve studied art at all. At most, they’ve had one or two art history classes and most of those are boring. People haven’t taken time to understand what it means to be an artist.

Let me say at the outset: I think it would be great if more people had more courses in things like art history, or history, or art, or literature, or foreign languages (multiples).  I am a huge believer in the benefits of the ideal model of the liberal arts education (whether or not it’s attainable, feasible, or has existed for a long time is a debate for another day).  But this isn’t about courses.  What this is really about is being a culturally well-rounded person: crash courses and college courses can help, but they certainly don’t make up for simply living your life in such a way that you’re steeped in a variety of cultural things that you’re constantly thinking about.  What department you’re in doesn’t have much to do with it.  Plenty of people in the humanities are not exactly paragons of cultural beings.  I am certain there are art historians who have no idea of “what it means to be an artist.”

Mei Lanfang 梅兰芳

It’s not simply about “taking the time” to think about something; it requires energetic, sustained engagement.  When I think of my development as a historian, it’s something that’s happened over a very long period of time, and much of it has simply happened in the course of living my life the way it wound up (Sharp points to this in a later comment – the process is ongoing).  There was – is – no way to force it.  The disciplinary example is a red herring.  This isn’t about disciplines – the art historians who haven’t thought very much about “what it means to be an artist” probably haven’t done so because that’s not what it means to be an art historian in their corner of the Ivory Tower.  It’s also like asking what shade of blue is the sky: there is no right answer.  It’s such a broad question as to be meaningless.  What kind of artist are we talking about?  A dancer, a musician, a writer, a painter?  Are we talking about a choreographer, a prima ballerina, or a member of the corps de ballet?  A composer, a conductor, a pianist, a first chair flute, a second row trumpet?  They’re all artists, after all – but it all means something very different.  Besides, many art historians aren’t going to have any better idea how to approach many kinds of artists than I: it’s not an all-encompassing field, after all.  Does Sharp have any idea “what it means” to be a Chinese opera star?  They are artists, after all.  Then again, does it really matter if he does – or doesn’t?

But I don’t want to poke petty little holes in an argument that I don’t particularly disagree with; I just think it’s framed in the wrong way.  This isn’t about what computer science majors are or are not doing – it’s about what’s prized out there on the open market in a lot of ways.

Here’s what I’d like to consider: what kind of person is the industry selecting for?  Are they selecting for people who are likely – regardless of background – to be culturally well-rounded, with plenty of examples and a broad worldview to draw on?  The ones who have “thought about what it means to be an artist,” or any number of other things?  What kinds of backgrounds are important?

Well, now that you mention it …

The “developers wanna be artists but have no clue what that means” article was sent my way by a friend who actually wanted to bring up a (related) issue – one that’s bound up with the background/breadth question.  I will preface this with: I am not, nor have I ever been, a student of game design, an aspiring designer, an actual designer, or a computer science major.  I’ve never taken a CS class and I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be any good at it (luckily, I’ve never had to try!).  I can’t code, couldn’t design a game for you if you held a gun to my head, and so on. Brenda Brathwaite gave a talk at GDC ’11 on how game design students need to have a coding background. Not just background, actually, their degrees should involve the “same level of coding as a comp science degree” (this statement is what my friend took umbrage with).  “This sort of ignores all the other things that go into making a good game designer, no?” is a dumbed down version of my friend’s argument against such thinking – requiring comp sci levels of ability cuts out the people who can master the basics and acquire a good understanding, but aren’t ever going to be proficient in the way that a comp sci specialist will be.  Which isn’t to say some people aren’t going to have that level of mastery, just that maybe it shouldn’t be an expectation?

I get the need for strong basics.  Here’s an example from my own field: one of the tools of our trade, one of the most basic building blocks of our work, is language ability.  It is critical to what we do: we must have a certain grasp on modern and classical Chinese, regardless of our eventual research subject, and we must pass tests demonstrating the standard of proficiency our advisors deem sufficient.  However – and this is a big however – we are not expected to have the “same level of Chinese mastery as a Chinese literature major.”  Some people assuredly do, many of us do not, and it funnels our research accordingly.  I was told by a professor that they approached their dissertation topic from angle B because their linguistic abilities were insufficient for angle A.  Said professor still turned out brilliant work – and it’s a story that’s not uncommon.  You can be proficient without being a specialist.

What caught my eye was the statement that by not expecting students to attain computer science standards of specialization in coding, programs are sending out ill-prepared students and the lack of education “has to stop. We owe the students more.”  Ok, maybe so; but here’s the more important part, I think – one that has precious little to do with code if you sort through it:

Unfortunately, many programs – if not the great majority of game design programs – mislead their students into believing they will get game design jobs when they graduate, and that is simply not true.

Yes, programs do owe their students more, and it includes things like being frank, upfront, and honest when it comes to things like “potential for gainful employment.”  This is a huge problem in graduate school, where there are far more hopeful PhDs than will ever be jobs.  There are a lot of people who aren’t particularly upfront or honest with potential or current students (I felt very lucky to have a wonderfully supportive, yet really honest, undergraduate mentor who had a number of frank discussions with me on the state of the Ivory Tower and what I was getting myself into).  How about not letting in loads more students than the job market can realistically support?  Let’s be honest – even if every single program out there required every single hopeful student to attain “computer science” levels of coding ability, there still wouldn’t be enough jobs for everyone coming out of such programs (and it’s likely that a lot of talented people would fall by the wayside thanks to the addition of a certain level of specialization that’s going to be unrealistic for otherwise really talented and useful people).

Flock of Geese (Egyptian, c. 1350 BC, housed in the British Museum)

But of course, being a business these days, that would be bad for the program bottom line – and we couldn’t have that, could we?  It’s a shameful problem that exists in many corners of the education sector (and makes me just as angry, if not more so, elsewhere and closer to home) and yes, we do owe the students more, including not leading them on years long wild goose chases for jobs that don’t and won’t exist, regardless of how well they do or don’t code.  Maybe that ought to be a rant at GDC next year.

Back to my own corner of the Ivory Tower, there are several programs that have pretty impressive records of success (even with the lousy academic job market).  I think one thing worth noting is that often, professors wind up “taking a chance” on students who may not have a “classical” background that clearly led to a given field or speciality.  The equivalent, if you will, of taking a chance on the student who may not come in with computer science levels of coding but brings a lot of other things to the table – sometimes nebulous, undefinable qualities.  Except these days, it seems more likely to fall in your favor than not – specialization is still expected, yes, but future employers increasingly want to know what other skills a fledgling academic is going to bring to the table.  What sets you apart from all the other specialists who have the same general specialty as you.  Negotiating the line between the demand to specialize and the demand to be broad and wide-ranging is one of the orders of the day.

In a glutted job market, there’s something to be said for taking a chance, both before, during, and after the education process.

The Fearless Muse

Balanchine & (a young) Farrell

While pondering these issues, I find myself thinking about George Balanchine’s last great muse, Suzanne Farrell.  She’s an interesting character – one of those dancers with that nebulous je ne sais quoi (the dramatic story of her rise-fall-rise and the prominent position she occupies in the history of modern ballet doesn’t hurt).  Most people agree that she wasn’t a particular star technically (e.g., she wasn’t “known” for, say, her jumps), but as the choreographer Maurice Béjart (who took her & her husband in after they were forced to leave the New York City Ballet) said about her musicality – it was as if the music came through her.  That is, part of her “something” was one of the hardest things to train people at – she was just naturally gifted, and it remained one of her greatest strengths as a dancer, technique absolutely aside.  Incidentally, it was also something Balanchine noticed during her audition for the School of American Ballet – and undoubtedly one reason he took a chance on the girl from Cincinnati despite her wonky left foot with a fallen arch.  His gamble paid off in spades.

Anyways, Balanchine loved her for many reasons, but there are a few that get mentioned with some frequency: first, she was fearless.  Unlike many ballerinas, Farrell wasn’t afraid of being off balance or falling off pointe.  She wasn’t afraid of making mistakes – mistakes that sometimes led to revelations.  Second (and likely connected to the first), she was willing to experiment, to try, no matter how crazy an idea may have sounded.

This was important.  Because, you see, George Balanchine had never been en pointe.  According to Ferrell, when they were working – creating – in the studio, Balanchine would remind her of this fact.  And while working, he would ask her about things that they had never attempted before: “Is this possible?  Is that possible?”  (Think on that: another definition of what it means to be an “artist,” no?  And a little revelatory that one of the greatest – if not the greatest – choreographers of the twentieth century had never actually practiced one half of his “instrument” at all.  He didn’t always know what it was even capable of!)

“I don’t know,” she would respond, “but we can try.”

Arthur Mitchell, Balanchine & Farrell rehearsing Slaughter on Tenth Avenue

I was a blogger once, and young (II)

Part I: The bare bones of it (sort of)

It’s quite strange to be writing openly about all of this, but I guess aspects of it have come up quite a lot since I left (not necessarily related to me in particular, but life at a blog like Kotaku in general).  It’s a lot of navel-gazing and I feel a very silly and incredibly conceited in some respects, but in others it’s rather cathartic and useful to ruminate on that part of my life.  So, apologies for the self indulgence spreading over two posts. It also occurs to me that I probably make too much over “page views,” but it was how our “success” was measured, and the way I got used to thinking of myself & how I fit into the larger picture of Kotaku and the gaming blogosphere.

a. On intellectual background

My workspace in San Diego, in the midsts of final editing of my 2nd year research paper. Â Can't wait to see what Ben Abraham & ANT have to say about this!

I grew up with an incredibly intellectual mother (who, while not a member of the academy, is a historian) who instilled in me a deep and abiding love for the wonderful, invisible, essential thing of history, and also a love of cultural “stuff.”  This ranged from poetry to painting to music to architecture to furniture.  I joke that I was raised to be a cultural historian.  It’s not really a joke; it’s true.  I would’ve had to work very hard to outrun my upbringing, and indeed - I tried on other things over the years and none of them quite fit.  Certainly, the academic skill of approaching cultural production in a particular manner was honed in college, then further in grad school (and is an ongoing process), but the basics were there, I think, from a pretty young age.

My first independent intellectual passion was Latin.  I now teach students who sometimes struggle with how to take a 9th century poem about some guy’s cat and apply it to their lectures and textbooks (not, admittedly, always the easiest thing to do); the leap from “literature” to “history” is not always a smooth one (this goes for films and music – and games – as well).  My adventures in Roman literature taught me how to do that, or at least try.  I didn’t just love Catullus because he was funny and sad and wrote beautiful poetry; I also loved Catullus because I could read his poetry and it said something about a subject I wanted to know more about, but it was up to me to dig that out.  I started learning early on how to at least try and think critically about cultural production, and how it fit in with other topics.

It was my introduction to applying cultural production to historical studies.  It was also the only reason I didn’t flunk out of high school, because while I was barely scraping by in most every other class (due to boredom and lack of interest, particularly when it came to things like “doing homework”), I never had trouble getting good marks in Latin.  It even occurred to my mother, despairing over my future, that maybe since her offspring’s intellectual proclivities included translating authors who had been dead for 2,000 years and falling in love with Tolstoy, all was not yet lost.  Sure enough, things improved dramatically after I got out of high school and on to better things, like college seminars on “masculinity and power in the US” and “Roman historians: Caesar, Livy, Suetonius.”  So, gratias vobis ago, my wonderful Latin teachers, and my treasured old friends like Catullus and Horace and Vergil and Ovid – I wouldn’t be a Chinese historian if it weren’t for you.  I wouldn’t have found a weird little niche on Kotaku if it hadn’t been for you.

The more I read, watched, and studied, the more I had a hard time shutting off the academic side of my brain that was constantly humming away in the background, analyzing and making connections – even when watching “fluff.”  When I really started to play videogames, I approached them in much the same way I approached most every other piece of culture I consumed – and the intellectual side, likewise, didn’t really want to shut off.  It was pretty natural, then, that I gravitated towards work that approached games similarly (though much more sophisticatedly) to the way that I wanted to approach cultural objects of all stripes.

b. On becoming a niche writer

I suspect, if one were to go back through my earliest posts for Kotaku, you would find that they were trying to play more to the general readership (I haven’t done this, but I have a vague feeling that’s what I was doing).  Not because of any financial incentives, but I did want to make my boss and fellow writers happy and fit the mold, so to speak.  At some point pretty early on, I realized my page views were dismal (though steadily increasing – but they never got close to the views that other writers on the site got) and short of me totally setting aside my personal interests, I was never going to be widely read.  So I just started mining the blogs I liked, the things I read, the things that were interesting to me. And there was the practical matter I mentioned: other writers on the site weren’t posting from these sources, so there wasn’t the anxiety over ‘Oh no, they posted X, Y, and Z today that I was going to post.’

I did get lucky here: my boyfriend through most of my Kotaku tenure kept up on a lot of interesting things and introduced me to a number of blogs that would’ve taken me much longer to stumble upon on my own.  Leigh Alexander’s Sexy Videogameland, for example, was one of these (so while I get all the credit for helping to solidify Leigh’s early readership, at least insofar as Kotaku writers are concerned, my ex deserves the real lion’s share of that!  Thanks, Dave – I’m sure Leigh would thank you, too, if she could).  Between the two of us, I managed to build up a pretty respectable list of feeds I kept up on, and a lot of it was very different than the average post on Kotaku.  At some point it occurred to me in a more obvious manner that hey, I was posting stuff that wouldn’t be appearing on such a widely read site otherwise.

This is how I eventually wound up with a Mao Cow of my very own

That moment was probably when Ian Bogost IMed me to say “Thanks for posting my stuff.”  After I got over my fangirlish reaction of “OMGOMGOMG, Ian Bogost is talking to me!” and “Why is he thanking me?  He’s Ian freakin’ Bogost!  His body of work is amazing,” I responded with something insipid like “Well, I don’t always agree with everything you say, but I really like your work” (dur).

But it dawned on me that if someone like Ian Bogost gave me a polite nod to say thanks for flinging traffic his way (though Ian is a nice guy, so maybe he was just being polite), maybe all this stuff did need a lot more exposure on a place like Kotaku than I thought.  This is a double-edged sword, of course – I sometimes felt a little bad about throwing smaller blogs under the Kotaku bus.  I think the really sharp work itself forms an interesting ecosystem and it chugs along just fine without directing the people who read Kotaku to it.  Also, I knew people could be really nasty in comments and most of the writers weren’t asking me to link to their work – many of them were probably just as happy not to be involved with the wider blogosphere that Kotaku was part of.  Ethics of blogging?  In the end, I figured a lot of people who just wanted to say hateful things were frequently too lazy to actually go over to the other sites, and simply spewed their vitriol on Kotaku.  Unexpected traffic could be a problem, I’m sure, but I just hoped it all balanced out in the end (and I think it did).

c. On becoming a Chinese historian and a niche writer

One of Abraham’s questions was on how grad school impacted my approach to my work on Kotaku.  It did a couple of things, in retrospect – it put a new stress on a couple of issues that had been bubbling for me and introduced some new variables.

First, and probably most important, I told myself I would simply not post anything I would be embarrassed to have my academic reputation associated with.  It wasn’t that I thought posting about porn stars and sexy cosplay and lowbrow humor was beneath me, but I just couldn’t imagine someone from my academic universe googling my name and coming up with posts like that.  The fact I wrote about videogames was weird enough; writing about porn stars playing videogames would’ve been (would be) too much. While I posted plenty of things (including my own longform pieces) that weren’t up to quality standards set forth for our research projects, I’m not ashamed to have anyone I know in academia come across any of it. I once got (very kindly) nailed – before I got to grad school – for overestimating the anonymity and vastness of the internet (e.g., the ability to hide).  And that was before I wound up with my name attached, in a very public manner, to things I was writing – so losing any hope of anonymity at all.  It was an incredibly embarrassing flub, but a really valuable lesson to learn early on.  I never wanted to embarrass my advisors and other people important to me in academia.  It solidified my leanings towards esoterica.  Unfounded worries?  Perhaps; but it was something that certainly channeled my efforts away from certain directions.

Actually, let me clarify that: I would have posted about porn stars and sexy cosplay had it been framed in the right manner.  There are plenty of smart ruminations on gender, sex, and all sorts of potentially “lowbrow” (in other manifestations) topics in the blogosphere, and I did post a lot of that. What I did not post were articles about scantily clad women making sometimes questionably informed comments about AAA titles I didn’t play, with an attached photo gallery of them rubbing themselves on a 360 controller or PSP (among other things, it just seems this is one type of post that raises ire on a semi-frequent basis).  I don’t have a problem with that sort of stuff, I just wish people didn’t attempt to wrap it in the veneer of “But she’s a legitimate gamer, don’t you see!”  Don’t try and “justify” it at all; it is what it is, just like a lot of what I wrote was boring – if not to me personally, then to large chunks of the readership.  I didn’t try and make it something it wasn’t.  I posted calls for papers that 99% of the Kotaku readership couldn’t have cared less about, and other people posted lingerie-clad women that insulted some of the readership.  We did it because we could, we wanted to, we had the power to do such things, and we had posts to get out.  That’s OK.

Goatgate was hardly as charming as this little fellow (Zhao Mengfu, detail from "Sheep & Goat," Yuan dynasty)

But generally, the “gimme” headlines just weren’t the stuff I wanted to post and weren’t the kinds of things I wanted my name (one that is still very, very young in academic terms) pulling up as a top hit when people googled me – so there was little reason for me to compete with coworkers for those coveted, attention-grabbing posts.  Again, unfounded anxiety?  Maybe.  But I also have to say I found most of my “biggest” posts pretty unsatisfying – that is, the things that were way out of the zone of things I was interested in, but “someone” needed to post, and were attention grabbing enough to draw in more than my usual readers.  The example I remember most clearly was the God of War “Goatgate” “scandal” (I use that term loosely).  It got me a lot of page views that week, at least in terms of my usual – somewhere around 40,000 for that article alone.  My general reaction was “meh.” It was sensational and dull all at the same time, and I just didn’t care all that much.  Though I still cannot believe I used to have a job where I could post things with titles like “Sony Decapitates Goat, Raises Ire” and get paid for it.  In essence, I generally posted things I was interested in and that I wanted to read.  I don’t want to read about porn stars playing Madden.  Why would I want to post it?

Anyways, that segues into page views, which are an obsessive part of working for a blog.  On that particular aspect of writing, then, grad school did another thing for me.  A lot has been made of the bonus system at Kotaku, which I have tried to explain elsewhere.  When I first started writing there, I was paid a certain amount per post (which was predetermined – I did 12 posts a weekend, and that was that).  There were quarterly bonuses, but those were tied to overall site traffic – beyond that, there was some sort of calculation on how much a writer had contributed to that traffic, and that determined your bonus.  At some point (I don’t really remember when – a little less than a year into my tenure, maybe), there was a change in the bonus system – salaries were fixed, and then bonuses were paid to individuals based on their particular target number of page views.  I never got one of those checks, so I don’t really know how it worked.  I also want to underscore that my comments on this topic (both here and elsewhere) apply only to the time that I was working for Kotaku, between 2007 and 2008.  I have no idea what the system is now, and I don’t want people inferring from my comments something that may or may not be the case about the current setup.

Salary was not, as has been incorrectly reported in multiple places, fixed to page views.  I got the same amount of money every month, at least in base salary (and in practice, since I never had a lot of page views (thus no bonus), in total), regardless of whether I had 500,000 page views or 5.  It’s a testament to Brian Crecente that he kept me on as long as he did, since I’m pretty sure my “underperformance” was a fireable offense in the Gawkerverse.

OK, what in the hell does Gawker’s bonus structure have to do with grad school?  This is actually key to my blasé approach to page views (and why I wound up comfortably inhabiting a niche that was really unpopular compared to the bulk of the site).  Kotaku wasn’t my full time job.  I didn’t need it to make ends meet – I didn’t need it at all.  I had a salary – because I was a PhD student.  Yes, the money was absolutely very nice; I missed it when it went away – but I was never in danger of not being able to keep a roof over my head, or the dog in kibble, when it stopped.  In my particular life situation, the carrot of a bonus proved utterly ineffective – I didn’t need it, and the pursuit of it would’ve meant turning away from the things I was really starting to enjoy by that point.  I have always been mulish in my temperament, and the idea of a little bit of extra money (based on a system I never figured out in the first place) wasn’t worth abandoning what I was interested in.  I dug in my little heels and basically ignored the fact that bonuses existed.  If Brian had said, “Maggie, you’re really underperforming and this is a problem,” I would’ve had to reevaluate my stance.  As it was, he never did, and I always had the impression that everyone thought my penchant for posting “weird” stuff that no one else did was, if not valuable, at least contributing something.

Would I have wound up writing on the 1904 "serious game" edition of mahjong without Kotaku? Probably not.

On a more personal level, actually starting my formal graduate studies combined with the crash course I did in game studies (when I started posting about it on Kotaku) and made me say “Hm, maybe this is something I ought to pursue.”  Which of course led to me reading more, and thinking more, then reading more, then posting more, then reading more ….  A self-perpetuating cycle.  There are very few historians and very few China studies people in the field (and definitely very, very few Chinese historians), and the more I read from academics I respect – and other writers just doing smart stuff with games – the more I wanted to be part of it, too.  There was a hole to fill, a China-shaped one, and I could be someone to help fill it.  The more brilliant critical writing on games I saw, written by all sorts of people in the scattered little sphere that made up my sources, the more I wanted to be able to contribute to it, too.  It’s one reason I’ve come back to writing, over two years after I stopped.  It’s one reason I’ve been slowly picking up blogs I put down in December of 2008.  I really liked being part of that ecosystem, I liked a lot of the people I “met,” and I really liked engaging with smart people with interesting ideas.  I still do (so I’m back).

I certainly made great connections at UCSD thanks to Kotaku – e.g., I met my friend Stephen when, during the break for the first session of a seminar I was enrolled in and he was thinking of taking, I staggered outside to catch a breather.  As the elevator doors were closing far too slowly for my liking, he came running down the hall, saying “Hey, hey!  Are you Maggie Greene that writes for Kotaku?”  I said that I was (now trying to keep the elevator doors open, to no avail), and he just said, “Keep up the good work!”  I managed to squeak out a thanks as the elevator doors shuddered shut.  Kotaku helped me meet a lot of interesting people on campus, which was and is great fun and good for me, intellectually and personally.  It also really expanded the network of academics I knew beyond the bounds of UCSD, and at least writing for Kotaku gave me a little foot in the door.  It had later (positive) ripple effects on my fledgling academic career as a “proper” Chinese historian.  I think the sheer strangeness of that line on my otherwise standard history PhD student CV helped when it came to things like applying for dissertation fellowships – particularly when combined with proper “academic” work in the field of game studies, incredibly limited though mine is at this point.

I think it’s a little unfortunate I left Kotaku when I did; I’m in a much better position now to write about games than I was two or three years ago, when I was writing about games.  But, part of the reason I am in a better position is because I did write for Kotaku – it was an essential part of developing that side of my academic and intellectual interests.

d. On a “legacy” (?): We are thinking

I stopped writing for Kotaku when I was 25.  I’m 28 now.  I find the mere idea of me having a legacy at this point pretty hilarious, but my name does still come up from time to time in conversations here or there, so I guess that means I did leave one.  I certainly wasn’t thinking of leaving one, nor really sitting down and pondering my role in the vast universe of the blogosphere – well, not frequently and not terribly cogently, at least.

I didn’t start off wanting to be a game journalist.  I still don’t want to be a game journalist.  I wasn’t fulfilling any particular dream of mine to be a writer or anything else.  People used to send emails and IMs saying “How can I break into writing about games?”  I would think to myself, “Submit a writing sample based on Lu Xun and Chinese dresses to a young blog and see where it takes you?  How should I know?”  I just wanted to grow up to be a Chinese historian (and I still do – just one that happens to research games).

At the heart of my job, I was an aggregator. I didn’t write all the interesting things I posted about, I just had to find them, pull out a few quotes, write a few vaguely coherent sentences to bookend it (sometimes, not even that), and add a link.  It was production, but of a particular kind.  I knew that I wasn’t as smart, at least when it came to writing about games, as all the people I was linking to – I wasn’t producing the stuff, after all, just offering occasionally pithy commentary and sometimes clever titles.  Furthermore, I was just one more writer, out of a long list of writers, that had passed through Kotaku (I mean, check the Wikipedia page if you doubt me here).  I fell into the job by dumb luck, and I wasn’t any different than a lot of other people (except, perhaps, in having dismally low page views).  It’s not like I built up a readership by the sweat of my own brow and laboriously worked to “CHANGE THINGS!”.  I didn’t.  I was just a writer on a Gawker Media blog, another cog in that big wheel.

But I did wind up doing something – I got a lot of things out to a much wider audience than they otherwise would’ve gotten.  I tried to make sure that those wickedly smart writers with blogs that had awesome titles got out on a place like Kotaku, and those readers who maybe wouldn’t have found them – but were looking for that kind of thing – got a little nudge in the right direction.  You know, just as I would’ve liked someone to do for me, if I’d been writing smart things about videogames, and like I wanted the big blogs to do for me before I discovered the intellectual underbelly of the blogosphere.  Much as I’m writing this now (partially) to help someone else’s dissertation (well, that’s the intent, anyway), just as I wish Meng Chao could write for me. I’ve gotten a lot of help over the years, and I like to repay those favors when and if I can.

I guess one of my favorite examples of “what I was trying to do at Kotaku” was also one of my last.  In late October or early November 2008, I got a really nice email from Daniel Martins Novais.  Now, this was nothing out of the ordinary – the Kotaku inbox I had was a thing of terror, filled with press releases, tips on news items, and lots of people pitching their blogging or game to us.  It was, in short, a giant headache with a few gems surrounded by a lot of dreck that was practically impossible to keep up with.

But Daniel approached this initial contact quite differently than most people (and quite wisely, though I don’t know if it was a calculated strategy on his part).  Instead of saying ‘Here’s a game I made and would you please post it?’, he first wrote an email to me (just to me – not to the general ‘tips line’ that went to everyone, or to a bunch of us all CC’d together), explaining that he had really been influenced by Jason Rohrer’s work (which I had posted all of, up to that point), really wanted to do the game design thing full time, and would I mind just taking a look at the game he made, just to give feedback, because he really respected my opinion?  No grubbing for a link or anything (of course, this made me more inclined to actually link to him if I liked the game).

Screen from Estamos Pensando

I played the game, called Estamos Pensando (‘We are thinking,’ unfortunately no longer available).  I saw the Rohrer connection.  It was polished, sad, and sweet.  I really liked it.  So I posted it.  It was one of the few times I remember posting something and watching it spread pretty quickly, since people actually gave my post credit.  A slight diversion here, one that probably belongs in the section above. The issue of “attribution” in the blogosphere is a fascinating one (it occurs to me that it would probably make a great study from several angles – has someone already done one?), and one reason I really remember Estamos Pensando is because (thanks to “via” links) I could actually see where my work was going.  With few exceptions, my impression of my work and its reach while I was doing it was confined to what I garnered from our stats page (listing page views, with me at the bottom of active writers – as always) and the occasional mention here or there.

I originally had one of my very favorite stories of making the acquaintance of someone in the game journalism world here, but in interests of not hurting said person’s feelings by appearing as though I’m poking unnecessary sticks at someone I’m really very fond of, I’ll just sum up the point: I took proper attribution really seriously and proper links, including the “via” part where warranted, were a matter of academic honor to me. I realize that probably sounds outrageously overblown (“It’s just a link,” right?), but bear with me. I once got “reminded” to give credit where credit was not due (on the assumption that it was due, an honest mistake), and it really, really offended me.  It generally bothered me greatly to see how things wound their way around without leaving a trail that led back to the people who had discovered whatever article, and I was incensed that someone would try and say I was doing the thing that I so disliked.  Lack of that little “via” seemed, somehow, pretty dishonest in a lot of cases. I tried really hard to make sure that I maintained my academic sensibilities where attribution was concerned.

Footnotes: I love them. LONG ones, too.

This was because, for me, a “via” link was the equivalent of a footnote, which of course I would not forget in a paper, since that would be plagiarism (and a fearsome, fearsome charge to have leveled at you).  I’m not saying that not linking is the equivalent of plagiarism (though sometimes, it can skate damn close to the line – I ran into this with the “Atlanta Examiner,” whose writer seemed to do little more than repost everything I posted in a weekend without credit to me); but for me, it felt like it.  I tried to treat fellow writers the same way I treated fellow historians, even if sometimes we were just aggregating and pointing back to the same original.  It was also just a matter of habit from writing a lot of papers – I love doing footnotes (one of the great soothing joys for me when I write papers) so filling in my little “via” link in a proscribed format was something of the same ritual.

A great many sites never seemed to feel the need to give me credit, even when I damn well knew there was a 99.9% likelihood they had gotten the article from something I posted.  I never sent emails or IMs saying, “Where’s my credit?”  I wrote for Kotaku, a giant juggernaut of a site – why did I need credit? (at least, that’s what I assume people who didn’t give my work the courtesy of a blogger’s footnote were thinking). I wanted credit because I wasn’t a faceless automaton; I wanted to see where things I found wound up, too.  I didn’t want other writers to feel the same way I sometimes did, so I was always careful to note where, if anywhere, I had procured a link from.  I’m sure things slipped through the cracks on occasion, but I wanted that to be as rare as possible.

In any case, Estamos Pensando was one of the few times that I distinctly remember other blogs actually showing a clear trail to me, and it was delightful to see it spread – more so because Daniel was genuinely thrilled with the fact that I had posted the game at all, and the fact it was getting nice attention from multiple spots thanks to that first post I made was icing on the cake.  It was just a post on a blog, but it made a difference – a good one – to someone. I felt really good about that. I still feel good about that.  That sounds appallingly sappy – and I really don’t care.

That was a late, particularly obvious case, but one that I would like to think sums up what I was doing – consciously and not – at Kotaku.  Giving a little more page space to a lot more things that shouldn’t have needed me, of all people, to be pushing them – but I somehow wound up with the platform and ability to do so.  I suppose there were a lot of examples like that, but I guess because Estamos Pensando was the last big one, it’s one I most remember.

I hit my stride at some point and was comfortable with the fact that I would never be “popular”; there were people out there who liked what I posted, and got something out of it – something they wouldn’t necessarily have found on Kotaku otherwise.  Sure, plenty of the audience thought I was a dull, pedantic, elitist snot (or me and my subject matter were just plain boring, or not why they came to Kotaku) – but I wasn’t writing for them.  I was writing for me, and people like me.  I wrote about the kinds of things I wanted to see on blogs like Kotaku, and apparently, other people did, too.

I did get to introduce people to neat sites and incredibly smart people and wonderful critical thinking on games.  I hope I did facilitate in building networks between readers and writers and other readers and other writers (and I think I did, in some cases – maybe not all, but some).  I at least wanted to show that there was a really interesting world of blogs that existed pretty apart from the “big guys,” and they were worth reading, too.  Sure, there were other sites doing this, and probably doing it a lot better – reasonably widely read ones – but they didn’t have Kotaku’s readership.

I hardly had a captive audience, but I had a lot more potential readers to hook than most people.  There were places to read about and talk about games in a really smart, intellectually engaged manner, if that’s what you wanted, and I wanted to point that out on the platform I had available to me.  I wanted to post about things that I thought were important and didn’t get enough press in general.  China, of course, would be the prime example – yes, I poked a lot of fun at silly press releases, but I also posted about “real” issues, and about a lot more than just laughing at crazy Chinese knockoffs.  In retrospect, this was an incredibly smart thing for me to do for my own benefit, because I now have a whole body of work to look back on as I write papers years later.  But from a less self-serving perspective, I did want to underline that there was more to gaming outside of the West & Japan than people dying after gaming binges and piracy.  I think I wrote a longform essay on the very subject of getting outside mainstream news and thinking about games as a truly global product – precisely because I found the blinkered regional perspective terribly frustrating, as both a writer and consumer of gaming news and writing.

I was the least read writer on Kotaku, but it was a bigger audience than a lot of us will ever have.  I had a funny conversation with one of my professors once, roughly the following:

“How many regular readers do you have, do you think?”

“Oh, I don’t know, not a lot – maybe 4,000 who regularly click on my stuff.”

“You realize that 4,000 would count as a book that sold well in our fields?  And you have that every weekend, without thinking about it.”

I think about that sometimes, particularly when I’m up late at night and struggling with Historical Stuff that is frustrating me.  I did have that.  No, it’s not a monograph or a list of publications in prestigious journals, but it is something, regardless of whether many of my colleagues would think it important or not.  I did make a difference, however little it may have been in the grand scheme of a blog like Kotaku (or the game blogosphere as a whole, or for game studies in the enthusiast press, or whatever). I managed to have a pretty impressive reach – not for a real, widely read blogger, but for an otherwise totally unimportant 20-something Chinese history grad student, even if it was something that was so far out of the purview of what “should” matter for my career that many people I respect highly never even gave it a thought.  For most people in my “real life,” it was an odd curiosity and little more (“Maggie writes for a blog, huh.  They pay people for that?”), but I had more of an audience at 24 and 25 than I will likely ever have again (and many academics never have), even for work that I try so hard at and put so much thought – and blood and tears and sweat – into.  How to explain that?  Sure, it was utterly pathetic compared to the reach my fellow writers had and have; but I think for many of us – a couple of hundred thousand page views a month is still quite the potential platform!

So I do try and remember that I did something once for a while that I was pretty good at (at least after a fashion; maybe not in the way I was “supposed” to be as a writer for Kotaku), and I did make some difference (I think), and people do still remember – even as I slog along at the moment, back to being a mostly anonymous, insignificant fish in the brilliant glittering sea of grad school and academia and my “real life.”  It wasn’t always so, I remind myself, at least not in some areas of my life.  And I’ll get there again someday, I hope, just in a different sort of way.  I remind myself of all the wonderful things and people that flowed from that lucky, dumb chance I had – one that I’m very grateful for – and all those connections that are humming along as we speak.

I was a Kotaku writer once, and young ….

A screen from Rohrer's Passage, which got almost as many page views for me as "Goatgate" - not quite, but almost

Postscript: This was surprisingly hard to write.  I meant to be a smart blogger and spread things out – and, since the person whose research made me sit down and write it in the first place is at GDC this week & I would assume has neither the time nor inclination to read this at the moment when there are so many more interesting and fun things going on than me pondering away incoherently, wait until GDC madness had subsided to publish it.  I have the patience of a gnat and want feedback immediately (which is unrealistic at the best of times, more so when it’s GDC week & 70% of people I know on the internet are there and very busy!): Well, was it useful?  What did you think?  Did that change anything about the ways you’re thinking about my career?  What else do you want to know? By the way, I think you’re missing X Y Z article of importance, and that one that you said was just a short blurb was actually …. However, it’s been sitting in my queue and I’ve been fretting over it, deleting this and adding that and fixing that grammatical flub or choice of words – and getting more and more upset, probably because it was cathartic to write, being the first (and last) time I’ve ever really written about that very important chunk of my life in any manner, and emotions are still bubbling up.  So, in the interests of not having it lurking, begging me to fuss with it more, I’ve just gotten it up & not on the schedule I’d intended, so I can get back to other important things.

It all sounds so conceited, especially the last bit, I think (is it possible to ponder one’s “legacy” without sounding a little full of yourself?  We’re supposed to leave that for other people to do, aren’t we?).  But then, I’m more given to being hard on myself for everything I haven’t done, rather than being pleased with what I have done.  Finding out that someone thought that my work was special enough to bother researching and writing about was a bit odd, then.  I research and write about things myself; I don’t think any of us select topics that we find irrelevant or inconsequential, since that would just be pouring salt into the open wound that is writing a dissertation.  So maybe it’s OK to be a little proud of what I did, whatever the sum of that is.  I’m looking forward to reading an outside perspective on that part in my life, and how it fits in with bigger issues.

It feels good to have written it, and just as good that I won’t have to do it again.  Unless, of course, Mr. Abraham has more specific questions he would appreciate my ruminations on – in which case, I will be happy to ruminate on specificities at a later date.  I suspect having to dig around to remember the specifics would be more like research, and less like navel-gazing whining, and would probably not leave me with such a mournful feeling.  Wang Xizhi, like so many of the old dead guys, spoke the truth – though the heart does give rise to longing, everything must come to an end.

I was a blogger once, and young (I)

Meditations on how I wound up doing things like cross stitching Final Fantasy logos & writing a how to on it for Kotaku

I got a gigantic shock this weekend while idly googling myself (one never knows what’s going to turn up – a habit I got into while I was writing for a blog, it was always interesting to see what people had to say about the things I was posting): I discovered that I’m part of someone’s dissertation.  More precisely, I guess, my work at Kotaku & me as Kotaku writer are part of someone’s dissertation, but even so.  I had a good laugh that it has to do with Bruno Latour & actor-network theory (ANT), and promptly sent it off to the professor who introduced me to Latour & ANT.  Probably more importantly, he was the one professor who seemed really interested in my work at Kotaku (I used to stop by his office and he’d always start with ‘So, how many page views for the month?’), and is the prof I go to when I want to ruminate on my game/new media/digital media stuff.  So I thought he’d get a kick out of the fact that I’m a chapter in someone’s dissertation (well, I gather at the moment I’m just on the outline & a few paragraphs – but I will be a chapter someday).

In any case, it’s weird reading about yourself in third person, in someone’s research blog, like:

I also tried to write down some ideas about the things that were making Maggie Greene do things, and so far I’ve come up with this list of black boxes ….

It’s really a fascinating turn of the tables – the historian goes from studying objects to being the object of study.  And it’s a little strange to see someone working through, in a general way, some of the same issues I work through with my subjects – but about me (lucky for him, I am still alive and well and open for questions!).  But I thought some of Ben Abraham’s “list of black boxes” for the hypothetical me that he’s trying to query in part through the digital traces I left behind was actually a pretty interesting list of questions for the me that’s sitting here typing this at 6:30 PM in Shanghai, eating the good kind of instant ramen (from Korea – it has bits of kimchi in it!).  So I’m going to try and “answer” some of them by doing what I do best – rambling (what I really mean is it just inspired me to think a little more about the job & what it meant/means to me, and I thought it a subject worthy of writing out, at least on my own little corner of the internet).

I hope Mr. Abraham realizes how lucky he is that he’s studying objects that can write sources on demand!  I’m downright jealous.  This, then, is both a self-indulgent gift to myself and a gift from one PhD candidate to another: my wish that, were most of my subjects still alive, they’d be nice enough to help a dissertator out (and I may have prayed a little to the God of Archives: “Please make my sources multiply and be bountiful; I’ll be a good object of study, I promise“).  We’re fallible, of course, extremely so, and this is colored by the rosy tint of time & all the other stuff that’s filled my brain up in intervening years. I’m also not too sure that my half-ripe ruminations two years after the fact are going to be particularly helpful for someone thinking about things that transpired while I was at Kotaku in a theoretically sophisticated framework, in a way that my brain just doesn’t work.  However, I hope it will prove of some use in combination with his own thoughts and research on the subject.  More sources are never a bad thing, right?  At the very least, it ought to fill in a few gaps and provide a little food for thought.

So here’s my yammering on how I wound up writing for a giant, widely read blog (and subsequently wound up a case study in a dissertation!) when I never, ever said to anyone “I really wish I could write about videogames for a living!” and it never, ever occurred to me that I’d ever have anything to do with videogames on an academic/professional level.  Since I am mostly incapable of keeping things short (and I think this is actually the first time I’ve ever sat down and written anything about this), I’m breaking this into two parts: the bare outlines of my blogging “career,” and how I came to wind up in a comfortable niche & what I was trying to do with it (I think).  That, at least, is the goal: I am very good at talking everywhere and nowhere at once, so my apologies if this isn’t entirely cogent.

A Portrait of the Blogger as a Young Girl: The Bare Bones (sort of)

My first run in with videogames? (Korea, with Miss Lee, 1983)

Unlike a lot of people whose work on games I read, I didn’t have any special attachment to them growing up.  I had a Gameboy when I was in elementary school, and then mostly put games aside until I was 16 (when I got my first console, a PlayStation).  Sure, I bumped up against them at friends’ houses and the like, but there was no ongoing fascination, no real formative moments that were defined by my attachment to this game or that game.  I didn’t play a lot of the ‘classic’ games (like Final Fantasy VII) until years later.  For my 19th birthday, I bought – mostly on a whim – a PS2, and mostly because I wanted to play Final Fantasy X.  I was taking what would wind up being a year long break from my college studies & actually had some disposable income, since I was working. I’d played good chunks of the eighth and ninth iterations, but nothing really hooked me.  But the tenth installment did, for whatever reason.

I remember a few things about that birthday: (1) my mum was out of town & a blizzard was rolling in, so I just had a nice dinner at my (formerly) favorite Korean restaurant with my aunt and uncle, and some friends braved the roads to come and hang out and (2) after everyone had departed the next day, I sat and had my first monster gaming marathon ever, fueled by one of those giant cookie cakes that my best friend had gotten me for my birthday.  It was a good cookie, in a hyperprocessed sort of way.  The game was better.

I also remember, while clocking through the game, that my mother fretted some – “Wouldn’t you like to, I don’t know, read a book or something?”  My mother is not the most technologically savvy of people, so I tried – with sweeping broad strokes of cultural essentialization – to explain it to her.  “You know how Kurosawa was good at those big, epic tales, like Seven Samurai?”  She nodded.  “Right, it’s kind of like that, but you’re involved in the action.”  This seemed to make some sense to her, and with apologies to Kurosawa for comparing his work to, well, a videogame of all things, I went on my merry way (I cried at the end of FFX & it’s the game that cemented my great affection for JRPGs, still my preferred genre).

I continued gaming, got more into it I guess, spent a few long sessions discussing and debating with friends who also gamed.  In 2005, my boyfriend at the time sent me a link to an article on the relatively new blog Kotaku about a new site called “The Game Chair.”  Its unique spot was interesting take on reviews – “progressive reviews,” where reviews would be written over the course of the game – and they were looking for writers.  I thought the idea sounded neat, so sent an inquiry – after some light chatter, the guy behind the idea wanted to see some of my writing.  Well, I didn’t have any bloggish stuff, so I sent along a recently completed paper entitled “‘So Many Parts’: Revolution and the Question of ‘Woman'” that I’d written for my very first seminar in Chinese history (incidentally, I would later use that same paper as part of grad school applications).  It talked about Lu Xun, 1930s Chinese films and fiction, and Antonia Finnane’s work on the development of the qipao in Republican China. This is probably a telling detail for the path my later career took.

So I started writing reviews for the site.  It was actually a fun intellectual exercise, and I’ve always liked to write – and write and write – not being given to brevity in any situation, except the ones where I need to be lengthy and expound on things in a cogent manner.  We also decided to write non-review “thought pieces.”  My first one was on girls and gaming – I found that there weren’t many women writing, thus people tend to say things like “Why don’t you write a piece on being a girl gamer?”.  At the time, I was sure I was going to wind up focusing on gender in China, so had some academic interest in it, too (I still do, though it’s not my primary focus) – but somehow it falls on us female writers in the gaming sphere to write about gender, games, and sex, frequently at the behest of others.  That post was linked on Slashdot.  This moment was enshrined in my memory as “That horrible time I got Slashdotted.”

The Slashdot experience introduced me to the god awful world that comments sections on the internet can be.  I was horrified to read the comments, which not only ripped my work to shreds, but also flung commentary at me like “Well, this must be because she’s fat and ugly and bitter and needs to get laid.  We need to see a picture to confirm!”  The best thing that could be said about that long, long page of comments is that the person who accused me of misusing the word “nauseous” at least backed down after I cited from the Oxford English Dictionary.  As I would later realize, the fact that this person backed down when confronted with evidence of his mistake, courtesy of something with the majestic authority of the OED, was by no means a common thing on the magical interweb tubes.  So props to that person for recognizing – and admitting – that maybe he didn’t know more than the ultimate dictionary on the English language.  The result of all this was that I was so upset I was in tears, even though my boyfriend said, “Honey, just don’t look.  It’s Slashdot, that’s what they do.” (Ian Bogost would later give me a similar admonition – several times – about reading the comments on Kotaku, but it can be so hard to tear yourself away, even when it’s making you frothy with rage)

Still, I wrote a couple of longer essays and some reviews, and really enjoyed it.  I also started poking around for other interesting sites related to games.  I’d been writing for The Game Chair for nine months or so when I packed up and headed to Taiwan; though I packed my PS2 and my DS, I didn’t really game much – so my writing petered off.

In the spring of 2007, Brian Crecente posted a call for female journalists on Kotaku (or something – I don’t really remember; I don’t know that I ever actually looked at the post).  My boyfriend (the same one who had seen TGC) sent my details along to Brian, who got in touch with me.  This time, I did have some game writing to pass along – my essays and reviews at TGC.  Brian took a look, must have liked what he saw, and asked me to keep a blog for a week so he could see how I handled news.  I’m pretty sure I panicked and covered a lot of obscure Taiwanese and China-related news (another potentially telling detail).  It was dull and boring, I’m sure, but while Brian thought I wouldn’t be a good fit for the full time weekly gig, he did ask me if I’d like to do some part time work on the weekends.  I, of course, accepted.  My first post was on women and gaming, because Brian said “Here, why don’t you write up something on this.”  Not unlike that first thought piece I did for TGC, and other essays I would later write.

As it turned out, I outlasted the person who got hired to do the weekday stuff by quite a while, and it also turned out to be a very good thing that I wound up on the weekend staff – when grad school started up, there was no way I would’ve been able to keep up with the work required of weekday editors.  It was also the weekend – slower in general, so real “NEWS” was a little harder to come by, and my posts weren’t immediately buried under a lot of other writing.  The schedule on a lot of big blogs can be absolutely punishing, and it is at Kotaku – a lot of readers comment on the fact that it’s just “too much” to keep up with.

So I wrote for Kotaku from late April or early May of 2007 until December of 2008.  It about killed me once I started school, since I never really had weekends off – some part of my leaning towards esoteric things was simply a matter of practicality.  No one else was posting from the same blogs I was (for the most part), so I didn’t have to worry that I was going to double post an article that someone had already gotten up on Wednesday.  It made prepping for the weekends a lot easier, since I tended to just gather things throughout the week so I could write them up in an organized manner and be done with Kotaku (and get back to my other job of being a grad student).

When Flynn DeMarco left, I was offered the chance to step up to the lead position on weekends, which I regretfully declined – I was with it enough to realize my workload as a PhD student was only going to get worse, and I was already stretching myself pretty thin with my meagre 12 posts a weekend.  Owen Good was hired to take over the lead spot, and it was nice having someone to commune with about work on weekends again.

I was told I would no longer have a position in late November 2008.  It came at a particularly bad time – I was having a spectacular, quarter-long internal breakdown over my doctoral studies and my first (and to date, only) “real” existential crisis on my choice of career paths.  Somewhat softening the blow was the assurance that it had nothing to do with my quality of work or my value to the site.  In hindsight, it was actually a good thing – the next quarter (which started about 2 weeks after my last day of work), I flung myself into researching Meng Chao and Li Huiniang with absolute abandon and started loading up my schedule with extra courses.  I probably could have continued the gig indefinitely, but Fate made sure I didn’t have to continue stretching myself that thin – at least, not because I was writing on the weekend.

Still, I was very upset.  I generally liked working for Kotaku and liked many aspects of my job.  I really liked making all sorts of cool connections with people like Ian Bogost and Leigh Alexander and Simon Carless and innumerable commenters and other bloggers – people who had nothing at all to do with what school I went to and who my advisors were.  Certainly there were things I didn’t like and that grated on me, but on the whole, it was a positive (if tiring at times) experience.  It was wonderful to get to be “Maggie, Kotaku writer,” not “Maggie, occasionally competent PhD student,” if only for a few hours a week.  It was the one place where – in the midsts of impostor syndrome and unhappiness over the fact that I felt downright awful at my new job of PhD student and was constantly being confronted with (what felt like to me at the time) my stupidity and incompetence – I liked what I did, and thought I got to do something quite interesting.  And useful, and purposeful, and different.  And it was something that I was at least good at, depending on how you approached my posts.

Screen from 'The Majesty of Colours'

I posted one of my favorite little games (at least, that I’d posted in my category of “Weird Artistic Timewaster”) on my last day of work; it was so wonderfully appropriate for how I was feeling.  Called “The Majesty of Colours,” Gregory Weir (the designer) calls it a “tale of love and loss.”  Sort of appropriate for a day when I was reflecting on my own (blogging) love and loss.

And then I had to post my farewell letter, which I fretted (and cried) over for several days, deleting and rewriting and editing, all while getting progressively more depressed about it all.  I hate saying goodbye, and it was very hard to say goodbye to Kotaku and everything that it meant to me, everything the wider community of people meant to me.  I didn’t have to say goodbye to everyone of course, much to my great relief, but it was shutting the door on one important part of my life – and that’s never easy.  While my Kotaku gig has continued to follow me through the past couple of years (sometimes in very interesting ways), that day I stopped being “Maggie, Kotaku writer” and put on another hat, “Maggie, that girl who used to write for Kotaku.”

I closed the note, which was mostly a link dump with my favorite, most relied upon sites (in the hopes that people who did like my writing would continue following up with the actual authors and their sites), with a few lines from the Lantingji xu 兰亭集序, Wang Xizhi’s “Preface to the Poems Composed at the Orchid Pavilion.”  It was probably the first and only time something dating from the 4th century (Chinese, no less) has appeared on Kotaku & probably will always remain so.  That, too, is probably a telling detail about my blogging career.

向之所欣，俛仰之間，已為陳迹，猶不能不以之興懷；况修短隨化，終期于盡。

What they had taken pleasure in has now passed away in an instant, so how could their hearts not give rise to longing? … A long or short life depends on the transformation of all things: everything must come to an end. (trans. Richard Strassberg)

The Lantingji xu

As a bit of a postscript (though really, how does one follow up on Wang Xizhi?  Not very well, is the answer), Simon Carless invited me to write for GameSetWatch after I left Kotaku.  I realized, after the initial shock of having my weekends mostly to myself wore off, that I was incredibly burned out from the grad school-writing juggling act.  We bandied about the idea, but I shied away from being locked into writing for other people, and within the set bounds of a formal column.  As this blog (young as it is) probably indicates, I’m not very good at “thinking in straight lines.”  It took me a long time to even want to write again (something other than academic papers, that is), and longer to actually start doing it.  And even then, I just wanted it to be on my own terms.

Part II: More indulgent reflection on how I wound up with the niche that I did

Sailing the high seas (II)

A Ming ship from the voyages of Zheng He 郑和, utterly dwarfing the European galleon by comparison (insert game piracy analogy here)

Part 2 of 2: On shanzhai products as an object of study

Like Part I, a lot of this is simply my preliminary ramblings on the subject – I still have a lot more research to do (don’t we always), but this is a starting point for me, conceptually and otherwise.  I’ve been getting increasingly excited about the market for foreign games in China (both legal and not), and what follows is my first attempt at putting down my early thoughts in a somewhat coherent manner.  I’m probably using the term shanzhai too broadly, but I will wait for another day to try and tease the complexities out more clearly.

a. On piracy in China

Piracy of all kinds is rampant in China, as noted in the last post (and as anyone who keeps up with the news, or has set foot in the country, undoubtedly knows).  However, simply stating that doesn’t really get us anywhere.

Last week, Gamasutra published a small piece on a report released by the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), which noted that over half of all pirated games come from five watch list countries: Italy, China, Spain, Brazil and France.  OK, no huge surprises there, though there’s some quibbling on how the figures were arrived at.  I looked at the comments on the article and was curious to see some of the takes on why this might be so.  I was aghast when this little gem leapt out at me:

China is not a commerce based country like the U.S. so it won’t adopt our policies.

(I might have choked on my morning tea when I read this for the first time.) Not commerce based?  What does that even mean?  If one thinks China isn’t commerce based, how in the world does one come to grips with the incredible explosion of development (and all the business deals!) over the past decade – and longer?  And that’s ignoring commerce of a less global type, like the little old ladies at the vegetable market wanting to getting the best price on their mountain yams, and passionate bargaining that sounds like it’s about to come to blows at any minute.

People not conducting commerce in 12th century China. Detail from the Qingming shanghe tu 清明上河图 (Song dynasty), Zhang Zeduan å¼ æ‹©ç«¯

Obviously, I don’t think the issue is commercial failings on the part of Chinese society. An actual “problem” (if we want to call it that), and one that was recently in the news, is the “price is the bottom line” culture that pervades shopping here.  Best Buy, the large US retailer, recently shuttered all of its China stores (and by recently, I mean this past Tuesday – after the company denied rumors of closures on Monday).  Adam Minter has been discussing the closure over at Shanghai Scrap, and points out that part of the retail giant’s problem was being unable to adjust to the demands of the Chinese electronics market.  A market that is “already crowded, highly-competitive and extremely price sensitive ….”  Further,

Best Buy didn’t enter China intending to hire talent that knew how to be successful in China. Rather, it entered China intending to create talent that knew how to be successful in North America. That might work very well in Canada, where the retail culture is decidedly service-oriented, but it was going to be a hard, hard road in China where – even Best Buy’s internal studies showed – price was still king for most consumers.

It’s one reason shanzhai products are all over the place, I think.  Does it really matter if you have an authentic Nintendo charger, or an “authentic” Nintudo charger?  How much is it worth to you?  For a lot of customers, spending time haggling with retailers and walking out with a charger that runs a quarter or less of list price in the US is worth that misspelled name on the product (as long as it works – and a lot of it works just fine).  Same thing with shanzhai cartridges, DVDs, CDs – well, do they work, or not?  And how much would you have paid for the gratification of knowing you had an “authentic” product?** I have a hard time envisioning anyone buying a game at a Chinese brick and mortar store or on Taobao saying the following: “Good heavens!  This game I paid a ridiculously low price for is FAKE!  I’m marching right back and returning this” (I can imagine consumers raising a big fuss if it didn’t work or wasn’t the game advertised, which are different matters altogether).  Many Western gamers, on the other hand, seemed surprised and even affronted if the game they purchased for a ridiculously low price on eBay, for example, is a shanzhai copy – even if it is the game advertised, and it works.

Obviously the problem of piracy and shanzhai products impacts a whole lot more people than the Chinese consumer looking for a good deal at Metro City.  It’s big business, both for people pirating and people trying to prevent pirating.  The blog PlayNoEvil is dedicated to security issues, piracy, real-money transactions (RMT – the foundation for “gold farming”), and digital rights management (DRM) – a great read if you’re interested in those kinds of issues.  As an aside, DRM frequently winds up crippling end users who have legitimately purchased a game, and barely puts a dent in efforts to pirate the games (in fact, pirated versions can work better in many cases, since they’re not hampered with crippling DRM!). Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s John Walker recently posted a great essay on some (very serious) Ubisoft DRM issues, and closed with this:

I have to finish by observing what we all already know, and yet that which the publishers refuse to acknowledge: When your game comes with crippling DRM that prevents someone from legitimately playing it, but a pirated version has all this patched out such that it works as you would wish a product would work, piracy is offering vastly better customer service than you. And therefore your customers, literally unable to use the product you’re selling, will turn to the better offer. At the moment you are charging £35/$60 for a product that is much, much worse than one that can be obtained for free. Please, can you present this information to your shareholders?

b. On piracy and translation

[I will apologize here for my ham-fisted approach to the really complex issues surrounding translation/localization.  It’s something that I’ve just recently come to ruminating on, so these are just preliminary thoughts without much background research to back them up.   My friend Stephen Mandiberg has been working on translation and localization for quite some time, and he has much clearer, more erudite thinking on the matter(s) than I probably ever will have.  You can read his writing and work over at his site, Trans(ference/lation/ition): the movement of cultural texts.]

Piracy is one of the most pressing concerns for companies thinking about making an entrance into China – and one reason given for the astonishing lack of Chinese localizations of games.  A few notes on game hardware (PlayStation, Xbox, Wii, PSP, etc.) in China.  They’re technically illegal and have been since 2000 (Nintendo does market here under the iQue brand, but only the DS is here on the up-and-up – any Wiis for sale have been traveling through the grey market).  That doesn’t mean you have to meet people in dark alleys to get your console fix; to the contrary, they’re out and being sold in public quite openly.  It does mean that the popular foreign systems aren’t supposed to be here anyways, for the most part, and legitimate games can cost an arm and a leg (or at least as much as you’d pay in the US) – one reason is that they’re being imported through grey market channels.

The current situation is not nearly so harmonious as in the halcyon days of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere

Back to piracy and (lack of) localization, and lack of legal availability.  Here we have a chicken-or-egg problem.  What came first?  I have no idea, but it’s an issue.  I’ve heard apocryphal tales that long ago, Nintendo decided “to hell with the Chinese-language market!” when they discovered the Taiwanese government owned a sizable stake in a company dedicated to pirating Nintendo cartridges.  Whether or not the story is true is somewhat irrelevant; it neatly encapsulates part of this vicious cycle.  Foreign companies don’t want to invest money into product launches, localization, and marketing when the stuff is going to wind up being pirated and sold on Taobao for 6 yuan (and with tacit – or explicit – government approval to boot).  And who can blame them?  It’s a losing proposition financially.

Which leads me to another part of the produce-pirate-produce cycle.  I’ve been on the hunt for (legitimate, non-shanzhai) Chinese language localizations of role playing games (RPGs) for my (legitimate,  non-“cracked” – which means they’re not ready to get around any DRM issues) handhelds. I’ve discovered that by and large, they don’t exist.  Japanese companies frequently do an “Asian edition” – just another one of the multiple editions that will be part of a global release.  Except … not quite.  They’re generally the Japanese version of the game – voices, text, menu screens, everything.  The only difference is the inclusion of a sheet of instructions in Chinese (and English).  For many types of games, this may not be an issue (and for many types of gamers, depending on why they’re playing).  But for gamers who don’t read or speak Japanese fluently, partially, or at all, they’re left with a pretty pricey game that they may not be able to fully appreciate (particularly an issue, I think, with games dependent on story – if that’s part of what a gamer is after).

So while there’s the issue of price (pirated stuff is just cheaper – significantly so, especially if it’s free!), there’s also the issue of “You want me to pay how much for a game that’s in another language?”.  There is significant time invested by people into making “Chinese editions” (zhongwen ban 中文版) of games that were never intended to be in Chinese; these are widely available, both as free downloads and for sale very cheaply in stores or on Taobao. I’m not suggesting that piracy would magically go away if every game company suddenly decided to release a Chinese localization of their products – it absolutely wouldn’t.  But it is another part of puzzle.  Gamers aren’t just snagging pirated copies of English or Japanese releases (though they’re certainly doing lots of that).  They’re also acquiring pirated copies that have been translated into Chinese.  They’re getting versions of games that literally cannot be purchased legally – they don’t exist.

c. On pirated products as objects of study

The first problem with taking up the topic of pirated products in China is the wide variety of meanings we can attach to “pirated products.”  While sorting objects into categories and attaching labels is, of course, problematic – most fledgling China scholars have been hit with the question “Well, what China are you talking about?” at some point or another – it is necessary to lay out exactly what we’re talking about (or try to, at least).  I have a couple of categories I’ve been bouncing around; they ignore a lot, but it’s a starting point for me:

A screen from the (unauthorized) Chinese translation of Crisis Core (Square Enix, 2007) for the PSP

  • Pirated products in their most basic forms – the DVDs, the copies of Windows operating systems, the games that are simply copies of existing products, the knockoffs of designer brands.  In terms of games, I’m particularly interested in what gamers are getting out of the games that have not been translated.  In the case of games like massive JRPGs, are they turning to other sources to follow the story along (as many Western gamers who buy Japanese releases wind up doing)?  Or is it irrelevant in the face of more important priorities?  What are the priorities (beyond ‘Hey, it’s cheap and/or free!’)?
  • Pirated products that have been unofficially translated (localized?) – the unauthorized translations of releases that otherwise would only be available in Japanese or English, done by Chinese groups or companies.  I’m currently most taken with these “fanlations” – who’s behind them, how they translate them, how the games do on the market in comparison to the same games in languages other than Chinese, how the translators decide on which games to translate, and so on.
  • Products infringing on IP, but that aren’t actually copies of anything.  The Titanic game I referenced in part 1 of this post would be the best example – it’s definitely based on the movie, but doesn’t fit into the two categories above.  I’ve been referring to these types of products as “murkymarket” games in conversations with friends.  These are going to be the hardest to track down – the demand is most likely much, much lower than for AAA, foreign-produced titles made for much more current hardware.  I think the Final Fantasy VII “demake” (porting a game made for the PlayStation to the NES) would probably fit here as well, though there are aspects that fit into the second category.  It’s a “copy” of an existing game, it translates that game into Chinese, but it’s neither a wholesale copy of FFVII for the PS1 or PC, nor is it “only” layering a Chinese translation onto the game as it was published.
  • Products that don’t infringe on IP (the fact that one of the most popular subjects for games in Asia – the classic Chinese novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms – is in the public domain probably helps in this case), aren’t actual copies of anything, but somehow aren’t doing anything other than being a poor imitation of World of Warcraft (this is the usual charge leveled at Chinese MMORPGs).  This is tricky – it doesn’t really fit with the three categories above (there’s not actual IP infringement), but does fit into shanzhai more broadly, at least if we’re considering these games as “imitations” (with some cosmetic changes) of brand name, foreign products.  It’s also a lot more open to interpretation than the obvious examples of piracy.  A friend once described the Chinese MMORPG Wanmei shijie 完美世界 (Perfect world, now localized for the English speaking audience) as “WoW with an Asian facelift.”  Then again, if we’re going to nail Chinese companies for imitation WoW MMOs of variable quality, we should probably take a hard look at all the Japanese and Western companies that make lousy imitations of big titles in whatever game category.  Creators of wannabe Final Fantasy RPGs, I’m looking at you.

Obviously, none of these are exclusive to China – fansubbing/”fanlation” (unauthorized translation), for instance, has a reasonably long history in the US (and elsewhere).  However, I’m a China person at heart (back to that whole idea of selfish obsessions!), and furthermore, the issue of the game market in China is a more pressing concern for a lot more people than amateur “fanlations” of niche manga and anime in the US or elsewhere (though it’s no more “legal” than the Chinese translations).  It also costs more companies more money.

Ethical problem, or thorough research?

If one is equipped with Chinese language, handling the second, third, and fourth types of pirated/shanzhai products isn’t going to be a huge issue to deal with, at least linguistically (I confess to struggling a bit with the acquisition of a new vocabulary relating to pirated games, but it’s just a new area I need to familiarize myself with – just like every other research project in Chinese history I’ve ever taken on!).  There’s an ethical question that bothers me a bit more, at least in reference to the second type of game (and, depending on how one approaches the subject, the first).  The only way to actually get your hands on this stuff is to join the ranks of people acquiring it illegally – either by downloading it off frequently dodgy Chinese websites/torrents, or purchasing cheap copies on websites like Taobao (or heading to your local electronics market).  More concerning is the fact that – for the games designed for the PSP and consoles, at least – you’re looking at having to either modify your current system (an easy enough proposition in China) or purchase one that’s already cracked/modded (pojie 破解).

We’re not talking about doing experiments on humans or animals here, but it does rub me the wrong way that I’ve been cruising Taobao for illegally modified PSPs (so I don’t have to run the risk of potentially fouling up my current, “legal” one) and illegal copies of games in the name of research.  Depending on one’s approach, you could bypass this completely – but I’m interested in playing the games (which I have already purchased and played in their English language releases) myself and seeing how the translation has actually been done.  Oh, the issues we just don’t have to confront when dealing with archival materials from the ’50s!

As for the question of what to do with shanzhai, pirated goods – well, there’s a million angles one could approach these from.  At the moment, I’m personally interested in collecting the “fanlated” games and following discussions along on Chinese forums and sites.  But there’s the myriad problems of regulation, government intervention (or lack thereof), the connection to foreign companies, and if one has Japanese language skills – probably a whole wide world of interesting connections to be made and research to be done (both comparative, and in terms of how Japanese companies are approaching the “China problem” – beyond the soundbites we get in English media).

Still, there’s a lot of work I have to do before I’m really ready to start producing actual RESEARCH! on pirated games in China.  Up first is fleshing out a taxonomy of shanzhai games – and constantly keeping Andrew Jones’ statement in the back of my head**: we need to keep thinking about how all parties involved “have been and continue to be inextricably bound up in a larger and infinitely more complex process.”  It’s not just about Chinese knockoffs and illegal fanlations; it’s about the global circulation of media.  I sometimes like to retreat to the safe place of “China-centered,” and forget that one can keep one foot firmly in the Middle Kingdom while speaking to the much, much bigger picture.

* It is probably worth dwelling on notions of ‘authenticity,’ and deeper – and older – perceptions on what that means.  I’ve been thinking about this in regards to painting in particular, but it seems that it might provide one way of considering more contemporary issues and concerns from a longer term, more historicized perspective. (back)

**A Chinese friend recently described Yellow Music as a 神奇书 (shenqi shu) – a magical or miraculous book. It’s been one of my favorite and most relied upon tomes, and I think 神奇 is a wonderful description for it.  It is a rare work that can be applied so usefully to so many subjects.

Sailing the high seas (I)

From the Chinese model opera, Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy (智取威虎山 Zhiqu weihu shan)

What the anti-piracy task forces are in need of is a modern-day Yang Zirong 杨子荣

Part 1 of 2: Notes on the conceptual background

I get my best thinking done in transit.  In Shanghai, this means while riding the subway and/or walking; back in the US, commuting by car frequently proved productive.  My research paper on Meng Chao & Li Huiniang was largely “written” on my daily commute to & from school; I had more than one epiphany (however small) while traversing the 52 between 805 and the 5, headed to Gilman Drive.

On one such occasion in the fall of 2009, I was pondering a paper for my historiography class on 20th century cultural history in China.  I mostly focused on the problem of dichotomies and turned to a perennial favorite of mine – the introduction to Andrew Jones’ Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age (Duke, 2001).  In the intro, which is (in my mind) the most sophisticated, readable, understandable, and flat-out useful explication on “colonial modernity” out there, he points out a couple of things that I’ve continued to trot out over the years.  Most importantly, in describing jazz culture in Republican China (this can be extended much more broadly), Jones points out that we can’t simply see cultural production in terms of either/or – he notes the “folly” in understanding Chinese jazz as merely “an example of Western influence on Chinese musical forms,” or “Chinese” being “merely adjectival” (7).  Instead, we “need to look at the ways in which both (and indeed all) parties have been and continue to be inextricably bound up in a larger and infinitely more complex process” (10).

From Jones’ Republican jazz, I hopped to my own area of research – post-1949 cultural production.  Chen Xiaomei’s Acting the Right Part: Political Theater and Popular Drama in Contemporary China (Hawai’i, 2002) is a work I have serious reservations about, but she does at least underscore one point that any student of cultural issues in the PRC bumps up against: the idea that the socialist period “produced no works of ‘literary excellence’” is a “dismissal generally accepted by students of modern Chinese literature and culture” (20).  Part of the idea that no cultural achievements were reached is that everything in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s was politicized, and politicization is somehow antithetical to art.  I ran up against this while taking a course on “modern Chinese literary thought.”  We read from Liang Qichao & other late Qing intellectuals up to 1949 … then picked back up in the 1980s.  “Everything is political after ’49,” was one explanation on why we just chopped thirty years out of our study on the topic – as if politics magically disappeared after 1976 or 1979 or 1989 (they didn’t, obviously – nor were they introduced in ’49, hence the strangeness of using “politics” as an excuse.  I would’ve been more comfortable if we’d just said, “It’s hyperpoliticized and kind of boring.  Onwards to post-modernism!”  Which can also be very dull, just in a different sort of way).

游园抗父权制: Walking through the garden, resisting patriarchy

In any case, the idea that the first few decades of the PRC were a cultural deadspace is one that still persists, though plenty of talented scholars have tackled this with aplomb.  Certainly, politics are unavoidable – one of my favorite examples is a 1959 edition of The Peony Pavilion, where the beautifully written introduction spent eleven pages (nearly 1/3 of its page space) detailing the modern political merits, particularly the staunch anti-patriarchal and anti-Confucian character, of a play written in 1598.  But at a conference last year, a more senior scholar kindly told a few of us fledgling PRC historians not to let anyone tell us that our sources are “just” propaganda – as if Qing and Republican archives aren’t stuffed full of it.  He had a very worthwhile and valid point.  I’m actually quite fascinated by the political hoops (like justifying study of one of the glittering achievements of Chinese drama on the basis of being anti-Confucian, anti-patriarchy, and anti-a-lot-of-other-bad-things)  intellectuals and artists had to jump through in the socialist period, but we’ll return to that another day.

Back to driving.  As I was turning over this problem of cultural deadspace in my mind, my thinking came around to the sort of problems future China scholars who study games and digital media were likely to face.  And it came to me rather suddenly that this problem – the problem of large swaths of culture in Mainland China being dismissed out of hand – is actually going to get worse, not better.  And it’s not because I think scholars are going to be dismissing post-1976 cultural developments as having no artistic value due to hyperpoliticization.  Not quite.  No, one of the problems I’m thinking of is respect for intellectual property rights, or lack thereof.  One of the problems is shanzhai.

Backing up a bit: when I wrote for Kotaku, I spent most of my time posting things that usually didn’t appear on the site, particularly on East Asia outside of Japan (I had a semi-regular post category dedicated to hilariously bad press releases from Chinese game companies, for example).  I read a lot of comments on a lot of articles and one of the most pervasive attitudes was “Oh, all that stuff is just a crappy Chinese or Korean knockoff of World of Warcraft anyways.”  Now, the attitude that Chinese games suck is not confined to Western gamers and pundits; one of my Chinese friends is baffled that I have an interest in Chinese games.  “But Chinese games aren’t any fun to play!” he points out when the subject comes up.  I usually respond that a lot of stuff isn’t any fun to read or watch, but that doesn’t stop us from studying it!

I’m not trying to suggest that China studies is – or is going to be – full of people with the exact same kind of dismissive attitudes towards Chinese products.  But it is a fact that there’s a pervasive attitude about China (one that is, in some ways, deserved – which I’ll touch on in a bit) that shows up a lot in the press and does shape many people’s attitudes towards many aspects of culture in the PRC in the present.  I really have very little doubt that we’re going to run into something of the same issues that Chen Xiaomei refers to – the out of hand dismissal of cultural production.  Perhaps a viewpoint like: “China is good for knockoffs (some good, some bad), flagrant violations of intellectual property rights, and being home to an astonishing number of people engaging in piracy of all kinds.  And who would want to bother studying products of that?”  will be the 21st century equivalent of:  “All Chinese ‘art’ between 1949 and 1976 is just propaganda, written by spin masters for the great masses of people clutching their Little Red Book and singing along to one of the eight model operas.  And who would want to bother studying products of that?” (Both of these statements are, of course, wild imaginings on my part, but sometimes they don’t seem that far off the mark)

Obviously, pirated products are serious business on a number of levels (look no further than the melamine-laced milk scandal of 2008, which eventually resulted in a couple of death sentences being handed out).  It can be really hard to wind up with legitimate products – shanzhai 山寨 (in current parlance, imitations or pirated things – its original usage meant “mountain strongholds,” places far outside of official control, where bandits and warlords reigned supreme) are all over the place.  I once headed down to one of the big electronics markets in Shanghai to buy a replacement charger for my Nintendo DSi – one shop tried to sell us a “Nintondo” brand charger with a straight face.  Is the one I eventually wound up with (labeled Nintendo) real?  Probably not – but who knows?  It’s a common occurrence.  There has been much sport had in the foreign press with Chinese knockoffs – everything from the “Vii” console to the Disney knockoff Beijing Shijingshan Amusement Park 北京石景山游乐园 (it’s owned & run, incidentally, by the Shijingshan District government).

Why yes, that IS a submarine inside the Titanic

On the other hand, there is stuff that is both a knockoff and quite interesting.  One of my favorite examples is the horrible-sounding shanzhai NES cartridge, Titanic 1912 (Taitannike hao 泰坦尼克号) – an RPG based on Titanic, the movie with Kate Winslett and Leonardo DiCaprio.  The post describing it over at Cinnamon Pirate remains, to this day, one of my favorite pieces of game journalism ever.  I laughed until I cried the first time I read it (I originally posted it on Kotaku in 2008), and have done so a couple of times since.  Obviously, neither Paramount nor 20th Century Fox signed off on this puppy – it’s copyright violation of a pretty clear stripe.  On the other hand, it’s not just a copy of an existing game.  It may be a bad game, but so are a lot of AAA titles.  The question for me here is: what do we do with stuff like this?

Or, another example from Cinnamon Pirate: the NES port of Final Fantasy VII (originally released in 1997 for the PlayStation). This one is a little less interesting than Titanic 1912, but I’m still not comfortable putting this type of production in the same category as the Black Swan DVD I got on Wulumuqi lu last month.  Copyright violation?  Absolutely.  But it’s not just a flat out copy.  Again: what do we do with it?  Dismiss it as evidence of a lack of Chinese creativity and a desire to make a buck off of someone else’s hard work?

Returning to Andrew Jones, this isn’t simply a matter of lousy Chinese imitations – there’s more going on here, both with the acts of making, selling, purchasing, and playing these things (both the “actual” knockoffs, as well as the “imitation” games that structure themselves after foreign creations), and the reason it’s happening in the first place.  There is a need to resist the urge to merely leave the “Chinese” as adjectival.  We need to consider how all parties “have been and continue to be inextricably bound up in a larger and infinitely more complex process.”

Part 2: On approaching piracy & imitation in China as an object of study