Skip to main content

Bibliography: "Privileging Form Over Content: Analyzing Historical Videogames" (2012) by Adam Chapman


Chapman, Adam. "Privileging Form Over Content: Analyzing Historical Videogames." Journal of Digital Humanities1, no. 2 (June 2012): 42-46.

In this article, Chapman argues that it is important to adopt an approach that privileges understanding the video game form (and the varying structures this entails) and its integral role in the production and reception of historical meaning, rather than solely, or even primarily, on the content of specific products as historical narratives. He argues against the usage of historical accuracy as the sole approach to comprehending and analyzing historical video games because it does not further the discourse, and proposes to consider the form instead. Firstly, there is the question of whose truth is portrayed in the video game narrative, which already proposes a lens through which the audience must see, placing a limitation on the veracity of the narrative. Secondly, unlike the majority of historical forms (such as film), video games have an additional layer of meaning negotiation because they are actively configured by their audiences, in the sense that during gameplay, there is the act of “reading” (i.e. interpreting and negotiating historical signifiers and narrative), while also “doing” (i.e. playing, engaging). This, he points out, as the aesthetics of historical description functions at a ludic level, thus producing a form of “procedural rhetoric” through which the game’s design and structure can influence virtually all of the other signifiers through which the game produces meaning.

It should be noted as well that the meaning-making power of the historical video game is not limited only within the game itself, for in the process of recognition of the aesthetics of historical description, there is movement of knowledge between game and other forms, thus situating video games within the transmedia meta-discourse in creating collaborative opportunities for establishing historical understanding.

There are two main reason for including this in my research. Firstly, Adam Chapman is a recognizable and influential scholar of historical game studies, which allows me to have good grasp of the recent discourses. And secondly, as Chapman notes, this study provides transferrable knowledge that can be used to analyze other games that operate similarly with an understanding of what opportunities for historical meaning-making they are likely to offer.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Bibliography: " Game Design as Narrative Architecture" (2004) by Henry Jenkins

Jenkins, Henry. 2004. “Game Design as Narrative Architecture.” In First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game , edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan, 118–30. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. In this article, Jenkins examines games less as stories than as spaces ripe with narrative possibility. He list downs the characteristics of games as defined by current Ludology versus Narratology debates such as: (1) not all games tell stories but they do have narrative aspirations, follows genre entertainment and previous narrative experiences; (2) narrative analysis need not be prescriptive; (3) games should not be reduced to the experience of a story; and (4) if games tell stories, they are unlikely to tell them in the same ways that other media tell stories for games as a medium, specifically, is what distinguishes them from other narrative traditions. He also lists down the problems and limitations within the current game study discourses, often pointing out how ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Precis + Critical Response Paper: " The Imaginary" (2006) Chapter 1 part 1 by Claudia Strauss

Reevaluating Scholarships (October 17, 2019) In Claudia Strauss’s article “The Imaginary” (2006), she gives a detailed discussion and analysis of the major scholarships in cultural studies regarding the matter of the Imaginaries, such as the works of Castoriadis, Lacan, Anderson, and Taylor, in order to map out the essential arguments that are more popularly being used/cited in cultural studies research, before she examines how Ivy uses these concepts with regard to the national-imaginaries with the Japanese socio-cultural sphere. In summary, Strauss explains that Castoriadis was concerned with "concepts of cultural abstraction, reification and homogenization, while Lacan used the concept of the imaginary to explain fantasies, and Anderson and Taylor used the concept for explaining cultural models as potentially valuable when used with person-centered ethnographic methods to study real rather than abstract cultural subjects” (323). Despite the summation of the the...
Post a Comment
Read more

Precis: "The Invention of the Martial Arts: Kano Jigoro and Kodokan Judo" (1998) by Inoue Shun

In Inoue Shun’s “The Invention of the Martial Arts: Kano Jigoro and Kodokan Judo” (1998), Inoue explores the modern invention, and subsequent reinvention, of the Japanese martial arts by an examination of Kodokan judo (163). This is done through a detailed discussion of Kano’s decision and active participation of creating the new martial arts such as: conception, process of modernization through scientification of the martial arts, promotions and competitions, institutionalizations and adoptions into various agencies (government institutions, universities, etc.), establishment of the Kodokan Cultural Association (promotion of the basic principles of Kodokan judo as well as serving as a legitimate infrastructure and governing body that actively promotes the new martial arts ideology), its inevitable re-invention post-Kano years by the Dai Nihon Butokukai (leading to an ultranationalistic role), and finally, a return to the sportification of budo post-WW2 in order to escape censorship wh...
Post a Comment
Read more