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Document Type

Introduction

Abstract

[First paragraph]

This edition is as much about Game Studies as it is about the games being studied. At its heart there are really two impulses behind the collection of critical thought we have been fortunate enough to gather for this issue of Reconstruction. First, there is the sense that games can’t do anything. Second, there is the sense that games don’t do anything. Their origin (and the underlying biases) makes these sentiments particularly intriguing. In the simplest terms, these premises delineate competing camps, as well. Roger Ebert notoriously asserts that video games will never be art (Ebert). Similarly, and yet quite differently, Espen Aarseth proclaims that a game has no intertext (cf. 48). Frankly, locating a project within these dismally disparate parameters is kind of like hitting water after falling out of a boat in the Pacific Ocean. It is, for all intents and purposes, irrelevant. Nevertheless, the question of games and cultural resistance is something of a loaded one given the prevailing popular and professorial positions on the subject. For his part, Gonzalo Frasca wonders if (video) games will ever have the purchase to qualify as progressive political texts (cf. 86). Moreover, neither of the current editors began approaching games, gamers and gaming with either or even an inkling for these positions. Quite simply, we recognize that gaming is a (kind of) social act. It doesn’t take a rhetorician—though one of us is—to notice that any assertion implies its negation, nor does it take someone versed in cultural theory—though that would be the other of us—to find that any discourse defines itself by implicitly disqualifying and that this signals a clear relationship of power.[1] For us this means that when taken together games clearly have the power to move men’s hearts in the classical sense. Said another way, the sign itself is ambivalent, even polyvalent. The question remains as to who is using it, how it is deployed and to what effects. It helps that we teach classes on the progressive rhetoric in game design and on counter cultures, respectively, and that we find that play is much more than a means of occupying and socializing children or mindlessly distracting oneself. Play is serious enough business for IBM to make super computers to challenge Jeopardy champions and chess wizards. It also lies at the heart of the generally agreed upon and much celebrated toolkit of any form of cultural critique and/or resistance: appropriation, détournement, pastiche, bricolage, parody, satire, and the rest. Indeed, it seems that scholars circling the magic edgeless square have forgotten the connection between the play theories of the 1950s and the counter culture and lettrist movements that came shortly after them. Luckily, neither we nor our contributors have done so, as we hope readers will find.

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