In the first installment of my interview with Brenda Romero, we chat about her early days at Sir-Tech and programming the C-64. We also talk about her favorite arcade game, Tron, and how she ended up running the Wizardry hotline.
Download the mp4 here.
I guess you guys have probably noticed I’ve been playing around with the Matt Chat format. Mostly this is just to avoid stagnation; I feel like I should always be trying to find ways to improve the show or just change it up enough to keep it fresh. I also have to admit it’s been fun playing around with Blender and some of Vegas’s more advanced features.
However, some folks have objected strongly to the changes in the latest video. It seems that I may have went overboard, rendering a moving 3D background of a circuit-textured tunnel throughout the video. Even I thought it might be a bit distracting and tried to slow it down, but apparently not enough. Only now do I realize that I didn’t need any such thing–I’m already providing two points of interest for viewers: the talking head and the gameplay footage. If you get bored with one, you switch to the other. Adding a third thing just makes it look too busy.
Okay, I’m deliberately raking the coals with this title. What does it mean to say that “all games are political” or “unethical?” Obviously, some games are concerned with politics (such as Democracy), and some that are clearly unethical (Ethnic Cleansing–no way I’m going to link that). But what about games like Halo 4, Gears of War, or Skyrim? Clearly, there’s nothing “political” or “unethical” about them, right? They’re just “games,” you say, with no connection whatsoever to reality. But, hold on a minute–what if we’re wrong about that? What if all games, no matter what their content, are expressing a political and ethical perspective that we–as gamers, unconsciously embrace (or consciously reject) when we play them?
Are CRPGs good for nothing but reinforcing capitalist values? Is there nothing else for us but looting, slaying anything that isn’t “one of us,” and romanticizing that bloody climb up the social and corporate ladder?
I know I’m probably driving some of you guys and gals batty with all of this academic stuff, but the truth is, I’ve so immersed in it these days (I am a prof, after all) that it’s about all I have time to think about. Fortunately, most of the theoretical stuff I teach (or, at least, attempt to teach) to students is nicely applicable to videogames.
There’s a special feeling you get when you first see and hold a book you wrote for the first time. Usually, it’s bittersweet–you always feel that there was more work to do, and plenty of parts you aren’t happy with. You brace yourself for the inevitable scathing reviews, and just hope that those are balanced out by people who appreciate what you tried so hard to accomplish. Above it all, though, is the simple fact that you’re now holding something in your hand that was all just thoughts in your head and bits floating around in cyberspace just a few days before.
Hi, all. I’m interviewing two awesome people tomorrow: Brenda Romero and Richard Garriott. Brenda (formerly Brenda Brathwaite) is probably best known for her work on the Wizardry series, though she’s also done some work on sex in games (yeah, thought that might get your attention). She’s also the wife of the most popular Matt Chat guest of all time, Mr. John Romero.
I interviewed Richard (aka Lord British) for Matt Chat already, but now I’m chatting with him for an upcoming issue of Retro magazine. I don’t want to rehash the same old stories, so let me know what thoughts you have for questions.
I just read a great article called Fantasy and Rhetorical Vision: The Rhetorical Criticism of Social Reality by Ernest G. Bormann. Bormann is well known for his Symbolic Convergence Theory. It’s not as technical as it sounds. Basically, he’s interested in seeing how the stories we listen to and tell each other “create a sense of us and them” (Sellnow 97). His research comes out of analyses of small group discussions, where people tell stories to relieve tension. These stories could be quite simple–you just need some characters (real or imaginary) “playing out a dramatic situation in a setting removed in time and space from the here-and-now transactions of the group” (397). The story in question could simply be about what happened at the office last week, or it could be about what happened on a recent episode of Dexter. The key part for Bormann is that the other folks there have to help “chain out” the story, legitimizing it by adding something or making an appropriate response, such as laughing at a joke. If you mention something that happened on Dexter and everyone just scratches their heads because they haven’t ever heard of the show, they don’t share that part of your symbolic reality.
Dani Bunten Berry, the famous designer of M.U.L.E. and The 7 Cities of Gold, is often quoted as saying, “No one ever said on their deathbed, ‘Gee, I wish I had spent more time alone with my computer.'” I see this as an early example of what we’ve come to call “gamer regret,” that is, the kick-to-the-belly feeling you get when you realize that you’ve spent 562 hours playing Civilization V. When you figure out all the math, you realize that you may have spent months of your life engrossed in a videogame. “Oh, man,” you say, “I feel so awful to have wasted all that time doing something so stupid! I could have spent that time with my family, or learning a foreign language, exercising…” You get the point. These feelings are reinforced by our “helpful” loved ones, who may be fond of saying things like, “If you spent as much time doing X as you did playing that stupid game, you’d be rich/successful/famous/holy now.” It all boils down to not doing whatever it is you (or other people) think you ought to be doing with your free time.
I’ve been having a lot of fun playing all manner of Roguelikes as I gather footage for my interview with Glenn Wichman. I knew there were lots of them, but I’m frankly stunned at the productivity of the roguelike community. Most of us have probably heard of the major roguelikes–ADOM, Angbad, Crawl, ToME, Larn, and, of course, NetHack, but that’s just scratching the surface. Roguebasin lists over 800 in 25 subcategories!
I’ve been teaching a rhetoric of pop culture class this semester. Instead of focusing on videogames, I’ve been focusing on another of my favorite pop culture phenomena–the zombie. One of our textbooks is by Kyle Bishop, whose book American Zombie Gothic earned him a PhD. One of the most fascinating aspects of his argument is that horror films are a “barometer” of our cultural anxieties and a panacea; a sort of displacement therapy. It’s been awhile since I read Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, but apparently dreams work something like this: (a) You get stressed out over something that you’re just not ready to cope with, such as a good friend trying to sleep with your wife. The thought horrifies you, so you try to repress it. (b) At some point that day, you see a shark documentary. (c) That night, you dream that you’re out swimming with some dolphins, and suddenly one of them turns into a shark and starts pursuing you. Thus, your subconscious mind has put together an allegory for you–the dolphin turned shark is your friend who is trying to “kill you” by possibly destroying your family. Take this concept, apply it to a cultural rather than individual level, and you can see how we might find it easier to deal with zombies on the screen than dwell on the real possibilities of pandemic, economic collapse, or our prisons “overrunning” with deadly pot smokers.