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Articles Conference Reviews |
2009C8KuhnSession C8: Portal(s) and Empire: The Spaces of Ubiquitous Gaming Scott Reed (University of Georgia) and Wendi A. Jewell (University of Oklahoma) I love panels that are smart and use a theoretical framework that is counter-intuitive in nature. This was definitely the case with Wendi Jewell and Scott Reed’s Portal(s) and Empire: The Spaces of Ubiquitous Gaming. They endeavor to extend the use of Empire (the notion advanced by Negri & Hardt’s classic) beyond its typical use as an interpretive framework. Examining Portal, the game where you solve problems based in your environment, one which does not obey the laws of physics, largely by using a ray gun to blast holes in surfaces that allow your avatar to escape to other planes of the game world. Rather than summarizing, check this url where they have the presentation’s assets online (including the wonderfully catchy Portal video, “Still Alive”): http://sreed.myweb.uga.edu/CW09/ ; in this space, I am going to hit on the moments I found especially valuable. The initial reading of Portal, as they note, renders it just another commodity in the “headless” and “decentered” space that is Empire. The game is bought and consumed and, indeed, fetishized in typical fashion, its players becoming the type of “working subject” that reproduces Empire. So Wendi and Scott proceed to “poke holes” in this simple construction by extending Empire as only an interpretive frame while concomitantly seeing Portal as more than a text: “Rather than pointing out how Empire can tell us so much about Portal, we’d rather ask what Portal has to tell us about Empire.”
Now things are very interesting. They suggest we see Portal as an interface, rather than a text (absolutely!) and wind up suggesting a Portal Pedagogy. But I get ahead of myself. They see this new strategy — reading Empire through Portal, rather than the reverse — as accomplishing the following:
This method also renders critique as more active, and play as more critical. They bring play and critique closer as activities via Portal and this seems to work nicely with Gunther Kress’s notion of design as viable academic activity since, in times of sweeping change, critique is only one of the activities academics should engage, and certainly not the most important one. Academics need to actually get inside of these mediated spaces; we need to get our hands dirty and use them and through that use, both critique and transform them. The critical distance shrinks, as it must. So while it would be common to see a cultural studies reading of Portal using the standard academic mode of, as they say “applying frame X to game Z” by turning the tables, by engaging multiple discursive and non-discursive modes themselves, Scott and Wendi move us toward this transformative scholarly practice. |