The Asiascape hosted Beyond Utopia is a Leiden University project funded by NWO (Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research) concerned with identifying the potentials of artistic media such as manga, anime, and video games for expression, criticism, and intervention in political thinking.
On August 27 Martin Roth, one of the project's three PhD candidates, was the first to get the degree for his research on the political potential of video games. An historic PhD degree it seems; it is Leiden's Faculty of Humanities first one ever in this field.
Below a translation of an article by Bart Braun in Leiden University newspaper Mare about Martin and his PhD thesis. The original article in Dutch is available on Mare Online.
(translation by Asiascape.org)
The academic interest for games has finally
reached Leiden: last month the Faculty of Humanities bestowed its first PhD degree in this field.
‘Games encourage us to explore alternatives’.
In the 1950’s the University of Manchester assisted
in the development of the worlds first commercially available computer: the
Ferranti Mark 1. It consisted of a huge box containing over four thousand
vacuum tubes, built under the supervision of the legendary computer scientist
Alan Turing.
This computer outperformed the mechanical
calculators of the time and you could also use it to play chess. When you
entered your move with a punch card, the computer presented a countermove after
20 minutes. The human opponent then had to put this move on a wooden
chessboard; the Mark 1 was not equipped with a monitor to display the course of
the game. If you were smart enough to understand the punch card hassle, you
were likely to beat it at chess because the machine could not think more than
two moves ahead. But still, depending on the definition, this was the first
computer game of all time.
The computer game has come a long way
since. Monitors came and more and more beautiful things could be seen on it.
Apart from programmers, composers, authors, actors and artists all participate
in the creation of a game and the computer games business forms the largest
branch of the entertainment industry. Destiny,
the console game that was released this week, cost 500 million dollars to make,
almost twice as much as the most expensive movie ever.
Games have gained enormously in popularity
and sales, yet they command little respect. Music and film can be considered art;
the written word literature and interactive artworks in museums receive praise.
But the real culture vultures turn
their noses up at a mix of all these elements.
The academic interest in games is lagging
behind that of other art forms too. If scientists have been doing research into
games, it is to examine whether they make you smarter, faster, addicted or more
violent.
This is slowly beginning to change, also in
Leiden. Games did come into play, but only now they are made explicit. Recently
Leiden started to offer a minor in Game Studies, in which games will be
approached in a art historical and philosophical way rather than a neurological
one. The introductory course has already begun and all 35 spots for the minor
are taken. Professor Comparative Philosophy and Political Thought Chris
Goto-Jones [Asiascape : the original Dutch text wrongly states that Goto-Jones
is professor of Eastern Philosophy], has won a NWO scholarship to research the
‘intersections of visual culture and political philosophy in Japan’. Last month
Martin Roth was the first of the PhD students on this project who had to
publicly defend his thesis.
‘I believe that gaming culture and the game
industry can profit greatly from more academic research into games’, Roth says.
‘Theory-based critique and methodical inquiry offer new perspectives on the
medium. I also believe in the innovative force of a research-based scholarly
critique, which is not only interested in judging how „good“ or “harmful” a
game was but also looks at its content critically and against the background of
our lives, our history and ideologies. With my thesis -and with the book I plan
to publish sometime soon- I hope to stimulate a dialogue between the humanities
and gamers.’
Art, and especially
literature and film, enable us to get closer to the other. A man who grew up in the nineties can better
imagine what it must have been like to be a Jewish girl in World War II thanks
to the diary of Anne Frank. In a similar fashion, art and games should be able
to let us imagine something really
different. Roth: ‘The world won’t change when you enact a soldier even if you
haven’t been one yourself. The “Otherness” I’m interested in is the kind that hasn’t
existed before but seems plausible to imagine. Science Fiction authors have
tried to create Otherness in their works, with more or lesser success, and my
question is if games might have the potential to do something similar.
The search for new possibilities
of “Otherness” is central to my work, because these days we seem to live under
the impression that the status quo is the only possibility. It scares me that I
am not able to come up with an alternative to the current socioeconomic system.
Perhaps videogames are capable of stimulating our thinking of radical
alternatives because they put us in situations that don’t fit with our common
views, opinions and experiences. In other words, when we are disrupted. Games
manage not only let’s us experience new roles and situations remote from our
sofas and daily lives, but are also capable of profound disruption on very
basic levels of our experience and thought.’
If you mainly play Angry Birds or Candy Crush and don’t recognize these kind of gaming experiences:
don’t worry. For his thesis, Roth used a selection of Japanese games that
haven’t all gained much popularity in the Netherlands. ‘Japan has a long and
rich gaming culture, which has influenced gaming globally worldwide. There is
an enormous amount of Super Mario
games but there are also many notable exceptions. Plus, Japanese games are less
violence-focused. My personal favorite is the Metal Gear Solid series precisely
because it plays with violence in a very ambiguous way. The games in this
series feature instances in which violence is directly criticized or in which
the tragedies of war are displayed in a critical way. In some cases the
characters in the game even directly address the player and confront him/her
with the violent actions committed throughout the game, and the fact these were
done solely for entertainment’s sake.’
Another example: ‘The
time travel game Shadow of Memories
confronts the player with a world in which our concept of time does not make
sense anymore. This game invites us to question our own understanding of time
and its linearity. What does it mean to measure our entire lives in the same
time - I worked 8 hours, you worked 10. We spend time although we never seem to really
have it, in the sense that it is ours
to distribute freely. What kind of world would it be if we did have time? Would it work?
‘This is a rough
sketch of my though process while playing the game and reading Paul Virilio’s
political philosophy on time and the speed of our society. Games can speak to
this, express it in a palpable way. Some games, at least, and and maybe only if
you want to be disrupted.
Martin Roth, Disruptive Conflicts in Computopic Space – Japanese SF Videogames as
sources of Otherness and Radical Political Imagination.
Date PhD
defence: 27 August
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