#games studies

All this started with my looking for the old devlog of Storyteller. I know at some point it was linked from the blogroll on the Braid devlog. Then I tried to look at on old devlog of another game that is still available. The domain for Storyteller is still active. The devblog is gone.

I tried an old bookmark from an old PC (5 PCs ago, I think). It was a web site linked to pixel art and programming tutorials. Instead of linking to the pages directly, some links link led to a twitter threads by authors that collected their work posted on different sites. Some twitter threads are gone because the users were were suspended, or had deleted their accounts voluntarily. Others had deleted old tweets. There was no archive. I have often seen links accompanied by "Here's a thread where $AUTHOR lists all his writing on $TOPIC". I wonder if the sites are still there, and only the tweets are gone.

A lot of "games studies" around 2010 happened on blogs, not in journals. Games studies was online-first, HTML-first, with trackbacks, tags, RSS and comment sections. The work that was published in PDF form in journals and conference proceedings is still there. The blogs are gone. The comment sections are gone. Kill screen daily is gone.

I followed a link from critical-distance.com to a blog post. That blog is gone. The domain is for sale. In the Wayback Machine, I found the link. It pointed to the comment section of another blog. The other blog has removed its comment sections and excluded itself from the Wayback Machine.

I wonder if games stuff is uniquely lost. Many links to game reviews at big sites lead to "page not found", but when I search the game's name, I can find the review from back in 2004. The content is still there, the content management systems have been changed multiple times.

At least my favourite tumblr about game design has been saved in the Wayback Machine: Game Design Tips.

To make my point I could list more sites, more links, 404 but archived, or completely lost, but when I look at small sites, personal sites, blogs, or even forums, I wonder if this is just confirmation bias. There must be all this other content, all these other blogs and personal sites. I don't know about tutorials for knitting, travel blogs, stamp collecting, or recipe blogs. I usually save a print version of recipes to my Download folder.

Another big community is fan fiction. They are like modding, but for books, I think. I don't know if a lot of fan fiction is lost to bit rot and link rot either. What is on AO3 will probably endure, but a lot might have gone missing when communities fandom moved from livejournal to tumblr to twitter, or when blogs moved from Wordpress to Medium to Substack.

I have identified some risk factors:

Personal home pages made from static HTML can stay up for while if the owner meticulously catalogues and links to all their writing on other sites, and if the site covers a variety of interests and topics.

Personal blogs or content management systems are likely to lose content in a software upgrade or migration to a different host.

Writing is more likely to me lost when it's for-pay writing for a smaller for-profit outlet.

A cause for sudden "mass extinction" of content is the move between social networks, or the death of a whole platform. Links to MySpace, Google+, Diaspora, and LiveJournal give me mostly or entirely 404 pages.

In the gaming space, career changes or business closures often mean old content gets deleted. If an indie game is wildly successful, the intellectual property might ge acquired. If it flops, the domain will lapse. When development is finished, maybe the devlog is deleted. When somebody reviews games at first on Steam, then on a blog, and then for a big gaming mag, the Steam reviews might stay up, but the personal site is much more likely to get cleaned up. The same goes for blogging in general, and academia. The most stable kind of content is after hours hobbyist writing by somebody who has a stable and high-paying job outside of media, academia, or journalism.

The biggest risk factor for targeted deletion is controversy. Controversial, highly-discussed and disseminated posts are more likely to be deleted than purely informative ones, and their deletion is more likely to be noticed. If somebody starts a discussion, and then later there are hundreds of links all pointing back to the start, the deletion will hurt more and be more noticeable. The most at-risk posts are those that are supposed to be controversial within a small group, but go viral outside it, or the posts that are controversial within a small group, but then the author says something about politics that draws the attention of the Internet at large to their other writings.

The second biggest risk factor for deletion is probably usefulness combined with hosting costs. This could also be the streetlight effect at work, like in the paragraph above, but the more traffic something gets, the higher the hosting costs. Certain types of content are either hard to monetise, and cost a lot of money, or they can be monetised, so the free version is deliberately deleted.

The more tech-savvy users are, the more likely they are to link between different sites, abandon a blogging platform or social network for the next thing, try to consolidate their writings by deleting their old stuff and setting up their own site, only to let the domain lapse. The more tech-savvy users are, the more likely they are to mess with the HTML of their templates or try out different blogging software.

If content is spread between multiple sites, or if links link to social network posts that link to blog post with a comment that links to a reddit comment that links to a geocities page, any link could break. If content is consolidated in a forum, maybe Archive team could save all of it with some advance notice.

All this could mean that indie games/game design theory/pixel art resources are uniquely lost, and games studies/theory of games criticism/literary criticism applied to games are especially affected by link rot. The semi-professional, semi-hobbyist indie dev, the writer straddling the line between academic and reviewer, they seem the most affected. Artists who start out just doodling and posting their work, who then get hired to work on a game, their posts are deleted. GameFAQs stay online, Steam reviews stay online, but dev logs, forums and blog comment sections are lost.

Or maybe it's only confirmation bias. If I was into restoring old cars, or knitting, or collecting stamps, or any other thing I'd think that particular community is uniquely affected by link rot, and I'd have the bookmarks to prove it.

We have gone from mutated, spear-wielding cannibals on a dinosaur-ridden island to named NPCs with iwi affiliations and backstories. The change in Polynesian representation within the Tomb Raider series is encouraging, but also highlights the central narrative basis of the Tomb Raider games.

*This is a section from an ongoing work that I had to edit out for the sake of word count. I still often think about it though, and perhaps I will flesh it out into its own work soon*

-with the help of gender and game theory-

Y’all asked for it so here we go

Some things before we start: -If you were watching the episode looking for gay/trans shit, and got disappointed, I’m sorry but I can’t help you because that’s just not what the episode was about and that is ok. It explored some aspects of queer experience, and the limbo between queer and cis-straight experience, that isn’t usually addressed in such an honest and indepth way, which I think is just as important as trans or gay rep.  -I will focus my analysis on the core theme of what certain academics writing about androgyny call the “moment of transgression” so in this case the question of ‘what is Karl/Roxette’s deal & what does that mean for Danny/Lance’s feelings toward and interactions with them?’. -CW: transphobia, homophobia, toxic masculinity, (rpg) uncanny valley stuff, you get it, you know what subjects we’ll be talking about here. 

Now!

Well, it wasn't that. What I found is a research history essay on a formative debate in games studies that shouldn't have held the influence it did and still does. Summarizing the first half of Emma Vossen's piece, one and a half decades before Gamergate, academia had a very similar event happen where one side—the ludologists—claimed the field for themselves in opposition to arguments and methods they deemed unfit or invalid and thereout constructed an enemy that never was, resulting in an environment that was implicitly hostile towards an outgroup that was ascribed that position without ever acknowledging that these consequences were happening. Games studies as defined by them needed to differentiate itself from established disciplines as a principal step: first and foremost, it is not literary-, film- or cultural studies. There never was a unified narratology side that claimed to have a better understanding of games or more relevant research questions, but there were scholars that wanted to expand what could be explored within the field that were discouraged by a research community that wasn't interested in their work.

I'm not about to dive further into the topic because it's not where my interest lies, so take this with more than a grain of salt. If I wanted to seriously write about this and take a stance, I'd have to dive into the primary texts myself, and even then, I'd be an amateur. Still, there is value in recognizing the fact that if I were to read more games studies papers, this is a debate that most likely will have influenced the author one way or another.

After nine volumes, 31 issues and just under 10 years of publications, The Computer Games Journal has ceased operations as a standalone academic journal.

After nine volumes, 31 issues and just under 10 years of publications, The Computer Games Journal has ceased operations as a standalone academic journal. The journal – which was published by Springer, a household name in scientific research – is being substituted for a new ‘Digital Games’ section in the long-running Multimedia Tools and Applications journal. In an email sent to editorial board…

PlayAway: William Kavanagh - Why do some games lose popularity, while others pull in new players even years after they were released? We speak to Games researcher William Kavanagh about quantifying fun.

Why is it that some multiplayer games see an explosion of popularity at launch only to fizzle out six months later, while a select few seem to stick around indefinitely? How is that games made decades ago are still some of the most popular games today and, in many cases, far outperform their technologically superior successors?   “I’m thinking now of games like Age of Empires II, which they…

Ye Old Link Roundup!

I updated my professional website with online article and interviews for the first time in four years. So, yeah, I guess you could say I’m not doing great.Special issue of Loading on Animal Crossing: New Horizons.Second Languages and Jesuit Core Education.Still stripping the walls of copper wire on his way out the door: Trump sought to tap Sidney Powell as special counsel for election fraud.…

In their article Digital Games for Education: When Meanings Play Jennifer Jenson and Suzanne de Castell explore the meaning of “content” as it relates to educational games, and the resulting challenges of developing games that effectively facilitate learning. As they define it, content is “educationally valuable knowledge,” i.e. what the game developers set out to teach their players by creating a particular product. The way content is frequently approached in the development of educational games is by treating it as separate from the game itself and its underlying mechanics. For example, in a fantasy math learning game you might still have the exact same arithmetic problems you would find in school as your content, but now you need to solve them because it’s a magic spell needed to defeat the dragon, as part of a game.

As Jenson and de Castell argue, often this approach is undertaken because the developers of educational games need to approach learning in a quantifiable way – the developer has to be able to list with conviction all the things the player learned throughout their gaming session. Such an approach frequently results in games that don’t fulfill their educational function: they might end up so unengaging that players stop playing them, or the educational content is lost entirely to the gamic parts, or a myriad other ways the game is unsuccessful.

Take, for example, All Aboard: Trackin’ through Canada, from the Games section of the CBC Kids’ website. With its visuals focusing a beautiful locomotive in a picturesque landscape and the little advertising blurb inviting you to “Create train routes to make your way across Canada,” it at first glance gives no indication that in reality it’s simply a train-themed re-skin of the 1989 classic Pipe Mania. It’s a simple, if engaging, time-based puzzle that asks you to connect two points using randomly-generated tracks before the train runs and inevitably crashes at an ill-advisedly built intersection.

Did I spend 20 minutes trying to earn 3 stars on the tricky New Foundland map? Yes, I did. Did I learn anything at all about the (engaging and deeply problematic) Canadian railway history or the (fraught with controversies) state of the Canadian passenger railroads today? Definitely not, and it’s really a shame.

There isn’t really anything about this game that wouldn’t allow the developers to make it both fun and educational. For example, even with the same track-laying mechanic, some of the added challenges could be the fact that the majority of Canadian tracks nowadays are privately-owned by companies that profit from freight. Or, alternatively, the game could invite players to ponder the role of the government in massive seizures of indigenous lands to build “the railroads of tomorrow”.