The Medium of The VideoGame

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Ethnologies
Review
Ian Brodie
Musées
Volume 24, Number 2, 2002
URI: https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/006656ar
DOI : https://doi.org/10.7202/006656ar
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Association Canadienne d’Ethnologie et de Folklore
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1481-5974 (print)
1708-0401 (digital)
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Brodie, I. (2002). Review. Ethnologies, 24, (2), 264–267. https://doi.org/10.7202/006656ar
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264 COMPTES RENDUS / REVIEWS
and poetry, as well as the general slant of the questions in the Instructors’
Companion, would also make it useful in an English literature course
which included some folklore. The book could conceivably also be
used as a text for advanced folklore students, if the instructor
supplemented it with more in-depth readings on folklore theory and
critical analysis.
Anne Lafferty
Memorial University
The Medium of the Video Game. By Mark J. P. Wolf, ed. Foreword by Ralph H.
Baer. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001. xx + 203 p., ISBN 0-292-79150-X)
This book will, in some respects, be looked back on as a pivotal

moment in the history of video game studies. Mark J. P. Wolf has
presented an argument that not only understands the video game as a
separate medium but looks at the medium itself, on its own terms and
not as an economic or sociological phenomenon. That said, this book
suffers from some serious flaws, most of which seem to be attributable
to Wolf in his additional role as editor.
Of the eleven articles in the book (nine chapters, an Introduction,
and a Foreword) six are by Wolf. Of the remaining, the Foreword by
Ralph Baer, inventor of the Odyssey, the first home video gaming
console, nicely contextualises the book by establishing that the video
game phenomenon, in potency if not in form or act, stretches back to
the early sixties when the first game, Spacewar!, was created at MIT in
1962 by (who else?) bored graduate students with access to a computer.
Video games coincide with the coupling of a computer to a video display,
a seemingly self-evident observation which is nevertheless critical to a
discussion of medium.
Chapter Two, “Super Mario Nation” is a reprint of an article from
American Heritage by Steven L. Kent on the history of the video game
which, although informative, is five years out of date. It does not account
for the most recent generation of home gaming consoles B PlayStation
2, X-Box, GameCube B or advances in home computing. Considering
that one of Kent’s main arguments is the speed at which video games
evolve, the inclusion of his article here is ironic.
COMPTES RENDUS / REVIEWS 265
Chapter Seven, Rochelle Slovin’s “Hot Circuits,” looks at the 1989

Video Game Exhibition of the same name at the American Museum of
the Moving Image, of which Slovin is founding director, with the
hindsight of a further decade of advancement in video games as a
cultural phenomenon. There may be much here for the museologist:
the original exhibition was comprised of a “canon” of console units,
with the units arranged like an arcade, albeit with greater spacing, and
tokens given at the entrance so they could be played. However, when
the exhibit traveled and was brought into smaller rooms, the units,
now crammed together more tightly, were treated less as objects in a
museum and more as games in an arcade: decals were peeled away,
chewing gum was left on them, and so forth. For the exhibition, the
museum commissioned an essay from the poet and critic Charles
Bernstein, “Play it Again, Pac-Man,” which as Chapter Eight is now in
print for the fourth time. It is truly dreadful, and an example of the
worst form of criticism since it offers nothing constructive. It is apparent
that Bernstein’s observations of video game playing and arcade life are
all drawn from perceptions left untested, and his essay reads like a
Newsweek article filtered through an introductory liberal Arts course
on Marx, Freud, and MacLuhan.
For the folklorist, it is Rebecca Tews’ “Archetypes on Acid” which
may be the most useful as an entry into the video game world. Tews, a
psychology doctoral candidate from Marquette — which makes her
almost by default a Jungian — approaches the question of the popularity
of video games by addressing their use of Jungian archetypes. If we
transliterate, or transpose, this conclusion by instead noting the recurrent
use of motifs in video games, we have the genesis of the genus “folklore
and/in” applied to this medium. (For an excellent refutation of the
reluctance to go beyond “folklore in” in the “folklore and” approach,
see Kuly 2000: 85-96). Furthermore, Tews is actually interested in the
people who play the games, and not simply the games as text. Hers is
the only article supported by fieldwork as she is the only contributor
who bothered to observe someone at play.
It seems the essays not written by Wolf were added at the request of
the publisher to beef up the book to a more publishable two hundred
pages. The weight of the book, and its real value, is Wolf’s own work,
wherein he provides arguments for granting medium status on the video
game, and then separately approaches time, space, and narrative in the
video game, ending with the genesis of genre. Video game producers
266 COMPTES RENDUS / REVIEWS
have often borrowed conventions and ideas from other media, but the
cause and effect relation between the player’s actions and the actions of
the “player-surrogate” in the diegetic world of the video game and the
attendant notion of developing gaming skill, and the navigation through
this diegetic world’s time, space and narrative independent from the
programmers” specific intent (albeit dependent on a general intent:
Mario cannot stay at home doing laundry), necessitate a hermeneutic
different from that of other media.
Even here, however, Wolf falls into a trap that may be endemic to
“higher criticism”: the examples he cites to ground his conclusions are
not necessarily games that are widely played. The context of games
played by players is shelved in favour of a game as text approach. To
illustrate, Wolf provides E.T. The Extraterrestrial as an example for an
early use of opening sequences, for the use of both side and top views
within the same game, for the graphical representation of clothing for
character detail, and for the direct transference of characters and plot
from another medium. What impact this may or may not have had on
the development of the medium or on the game playing community is
questionable, however, since, as Kent has already told us, “The game
was dull and hard to play. In the end Atari created a landfill in a New
Mexico desert, dumped in millions of E.T., Pac-Man, and other
cartridges, crushed them with a steamroller, and buried the fragments
under cement” (45). Hardly an argument for canonicity.
Another concern comes with Wolf’s attempt to narrow down what
precisely the video game is. Wolf tends to use the broadest possible
definition: a “game” — something with conflict, rules, player ability,
and measured outcome — on a “video” — raster or vector graphics or
text; cathode ray or LCD display. Although this catholicity is not only
suited for his textual purposes but preferable to establishing a hierarchy
of display formats, there does seem to be a significant contextual
difference between formats. Play on the arcade console unit is different
from play on the home console unit, which is different from play on the
home computer, which is different from play on the networked home
computer, which is different from play on a handheld module. An arcade
game, which is designed to make money through quick turnover, is by
its very nature brief, and the player is always on the verge of “Game
over”. The arcade is also public space, where the players find themselves
a spectacle, even if the spectator is the next person in line. Contrast
this with playing the same uninterrupted game for hours on end at a
COMPTES RENDUS / REVIEWS 267
home computer in the stereotypical basement and we may begin to see

how the differences of game display introduce notions of differing genres
extrinsic from the genres based on interactivity (the generic basis for
Wolf’s Chapter Six, “Genre and the Video Game”). There are hints
throughout that Wolf takes these differences seriously, but ultimately
the point is left unresolved.
As a resource, readers would be well advised to double-check some
of Wolf’s facts: the date of Sid Meier’s Civilization, for example, is given
as both 1993 (58) and 1991 (68 and 88), while it is sometimes difficult
to decipher from context whether Wolf is referring to the arcade version
of Night Driver (1976) or the version for the Atari 2600, the dates for
which are either 1980 (63) or 1988 (104). The index seems cobbled
together, with, for example, separate entries for “Sony PlayStation” and
“Sony Playstation,” although the former is used exclusively throughout
the text. These are minor points, but show a lack of attention to detail
which betrays the rush-to-print feel of the book: a final edit or proofread
would have been appreciated. An appendix by Wolf on “Resources for
Video Game Research” is a bit lacklustre, but useful for the initiate.
Ultimately, this is a fine book. What limitations it has, comes from
it being the first of its kind: subsequent work will have the advantage of
both building on and challenging Wolf. As an opening salvo in what
should turn into an interesting field of cultural study it does the service
of addressing the issue squarely and with the aim of comprehensiveness.
Reference
Kuly, Marc. 2000. “Ideology, History, and the Discipline of Folklore:
Reading Media Sense Fifteen Years Later”. In Culture & Tradition 22:
85-96
Ian Brodie
Memorial University of Newfoundland

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Document generated on 04/30/2019 11:01 a.m.

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Explore this journal

Cite this article

This article is disseminated and preserved by Érudit.

This book will, in some respects, be looked back on as a pivotal

Chapter Seven, Rochelle Slovin’s “Hot Circuits,” looks at the 1989

home computer in the stereotypical basement and we may begin to see

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