Graeme Kirkpatrick

Online ‘chat’ facilities as pedagogic tools A case study

This article assesses the pedagogic value of the ‘chat’ facility in the Blackboard integrated learning platform. It draws on a case study carried out by the author in the 2001-2 academic session. A level three class in research methods involved students in group working away from class and student feedback indicated that more support was needed to coordinate this independent work, without compromising its independent character. The ‘chat’ facility seemed to hold out the possibility of enhancing conventional, class-based techniques for generating informal discussion between students and, more particularly, for the coordination of their activities between classes. The lecturer perceived the integration of the facility into delivery of the unit as highly problematic, however. The reasons for this are discussed and a number of explanations are considered. Possible solutions are put forward.

Controller, Hand, Screen: Aesthetic Form in the Computer Game

This paper tries to clarify the place of the handheld controller in computer game aesthetics. It starts from the premise that aesthetic form, perhaps the central category of modernist critical theory, is present in our play with computer games. The central argument is that controllers and our use of them are repressed in gameplay and that this repression facilitates a diversion of the players energy that helps explain the compulsive nature of good games. Our sense of participation in events in game fiction is bought at the price of a loss of interest in our hands. The smooth integration of players into the rough, faltering world of gameplay is made possible by an excess of energy that passes from the unacknowledged tension in the hand into the imaginary relation we have with on-screen action.

Between Art and Gameness: Critical Theory and Computer Game Aesthetics

This article argues that the computer game can be a locus of aesthetic form in contemporary culture. The context for understanding this claim is the decline of the artwork as bearer of form in the late 20th century, as this was understood by Adorno. Form is the enigmatic other of instrumental reason that emerges spontaneously in creative works and, in the modern era, is defined as that which makes them captivating and enigmatic yet resistant to analytic understanding. Clarification of the ways in which form is at work in game play is sought from aesthetic theory (Kant), ludology (or theory of games), and the idea of a neo-baroque entertainment culture (Ndalianis). Kant emphasized the role of play in the constitution of imaginary realms associated with aesthetic pleasure. Ludology takes play as an anthropological given differentiated historically by the development of game structures. Neo-baroque theory postulates a labyrinthine, complex and de-centred entertainment culture, largely shaped by computing as a cultural practice. The article synthesizes insights from these perspectives and, drawing on ideas from Adorno and Benjamin, argues that computer games can occupy an oppositional or critical role within contemporary aesthetics and culture. Reflection on the constitutive processes of computer game play discloses a new place for instrumental reason within aesthetic experience, as the dialectic of form and analysis migrates from traditional art materials to digital electronics.

Ludefaction Fracking of the Radical Imaginary

This article presents the idea of ludefaction as the negative underside of ludification. The project of transforming human practices into games to “enhance” their performance is related to new management and technology design practices that have been dominant since the 1980s. Studies suggest that this is an ambivalent process through which work comes to seem more attractive even as it makes more intense and invasive demands on its human subject. Beyond this, however, ludefaction grasps the way in which gamification intensifies exploitation in the, probably unprecedented, development of allowing power to tap into the radical imaginary, that is, the facility we have for creating an alternative, better world. A comparison of games with relational art is presented to clarify the stakes and suggest negative principles for progressive game design.This article presents the idea of ludefaction as the negative underside of ludification. The project of transforming human practices into games to “enhance” their performance is related to new management and technology design practices that have been dominant since the 1980s. Studies suggest that this is an ambivalent process through which work comes to seem more attractive even as it makes more intense and invasive demands on its human subject. Beyond this, however, ludefaction grasps the way in which gamification intensifies exploitation in the, probably unprecedented, development of allowing power to tap into the radical imaginary, that is, the facility we have for creating an alternative, better world. A comparison of games with relational art is presented to clarify the stakes and suggest negative principles for progressive game design.

Evolution or progress? A (critical) defence of Habermas's theory of social development

Habermass theory of social evolution has been subjected to critique by environmentally motivated sociologists. They argue that his decision to recast social theory in terms of an extended, if selective analogy with biology leads him into a set of practical positions that are irreconcilable with Green politics and inconsistent with the goals of traditional critical theory. This article argues that these criticisms are based on an inaccurate assessment of the role of evolutionary concepts in Habermass thought. By drawing out the similarities between Habermas and Kant on the question of the relationship between history and natural history, it is possible to see that Habermass use of evolutionary metaphors plays a regulative rather than a constitutive role in his thinking on society. This strategy does not save Habermass position, but shows instead that it may be vulnerable to an immanent critique that pulls out the real underlying antagonisms in his system.

Historical Materialism and Social Evolution

At the funeral oration for his lifelong collaborator, Engels famously compared Marx’s achievements to those of Darwin: ‘As Darwin discovered the law of evolution of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of evolution of human history’. The contributors to this volume are united in seeking to investigate how these two theories actually relate. Whatever debates we may have concerning this issue one thing at least can be repeated with certainty; both Marx and Engels celebrated the publication of Origin of Species and greatly admired Darwin. Engels was the first of the pair to read Darwin’s ‘splendid book’ and warmly recommended it to Marx for its repudiation of teleological theories of natural evolution. Once Marx caught up with Engels’ reading he agreed that despite Darwin’s ‘crude English style’ his book ‘contains the basis in natural history for our view’. Interpretation of this line has divided Marxist opinion over the last century.

Making games normal: Computer gaming discourse in the 1980s:

Based on a study of 1980s UK computer and gaming magazines, this article argues that a gaming discourse emerges in the middle of the decade with the strategic goal of normalizing the activity. It succeeds – gaming spreads – but fails in that to present gaming effectively as an attractive leisure pursuit, gaming discourse has to absorb accusations of abnormality that were levelled at computer culture from the outset. Hence, ‘addictive’ gameplay becomes a good thing; the gamer is distinguished from the computer obsessive but is still defined as a ‘freak’, and gaming, having been presented as a realm of creative self-expression within the computer culture, becomes subject to the discourse of normal and correct computational practice. Gaming cannot escape the logic of its field, which determines that it will always try to be something more and better than gaming.

Feminism and technical capital: The case of the computer game

Taking the computer game as an example of digital technology the paper argues that the embodied aesthetics of technology use are an important dimension of its implication in gender. Drawing on ideas from Pierre Bourdieu and Nigel Thrift the discussion rejects analyses that focus on video game content and asserts the importance of looking at what players do with their hands in the course of game play. The experience of form and space in games are best understood as part of a popular cultural employment of dance as a method for the navigation of socio-technical complexes. This situates computer games as a variety of gendered performance that is conflicted and not straightforward, combining agonistic and aesthetic strains. The paper reflects on the importance of using dance terminology to comprehend this, in terms of our reflexive understanding of computer games, gamers and gaming as a cultural practice.

Towards reconciliation or mediated non-identity? Feenberg's aesthetic critique of technology

This article interrogates Andrew Feenberg’s thesis that modern technology is in need of ‘re-aestheticization’. The notion that modern technology requires aesthetic critique connects his political analysis of micro-contexts of social shaping to his wider concern with civilization change. The former involves a modified constructionism, in which the motives, values and beliefs of proximal agents are understood in terms of their wider sociological significance. This remedies a widely acknowledged blind-spot of conventional constructionism, enabling Feenberg to identify democratic potential in progressive agency at the scene of technology design. Feenberg argues that the aesthetics of naturalistic modernism may serve as a bridge between such interventions and cultural transformation. Referring to developments in design culture, especially as this relates to the human-machine interface on digital artefacts, the article suggests that this part of Feenberg’s argument has been falsified. This kind of aesthetic modernism is hegemonic in contemporary design and it has not brought about significant progressive advance. In conclusion, the article suggests a different approach to aesthetic critique that is based on difference rather than wholeness, and on the principle that there is no inherent correspondence of aesthetic standards and ethics in technology design.

How gaming became sexist: a study of UK gaming magazines 1981–1995

Computer gaming was not born sexist but was codified as an exclusively male practice as it peeled itself away from the rest of the burgeoning computer culture in the mid-1980s. This article traces the development of gaming’s gender bias through a discourse analysis of gaming magazines published in the United Kingdom between 1981 and 1995. In their early years (1981–1985), these publications present a milieu that was reflective on gender issues and concerned to include female participants. However, from 1987, the rhetorical framing of computer games, gaming and gamer performance was increasingly gender-exclusive and focused on the re-enforcement of stereotypically masculine values, albeit that much of this discourse had a humorous and ironic inflection. The article presents this as the gender-biased articulation of gaming discourse. Instead of viewing the gendering of computer games as something they inherited from previous kinds of games and activities, the article argues that the political economy of the gaming industry in the second half of the 1980s created specific conditions under which games and gaming were coded as exclusively masculine.