Exterior photo of Smathers Library (formerly Library East) at the University of Florida, photo from the University of Florida Digital Collections

Panel Proposal for FSU Transnational Conference

Panel Abstract

Video games, as one of the fastest growing entertainment media forms, cross both cultural and political boundaries, as well as national borders in their representations, translations, and influence on other media. Video games continue to be studied primarily from the perspective of film and media studies because of their relationship with visual technologies. However, the majority of video game theorists focus on the newness of the video game form, instead of interrogating the games' political, cultural, and social implications. While video games began their popular ascent as an entertainment form, they inherently carried with them the political and cultural norms from their predecessors in literature and film, as well as the cultural and political norms from their places of origin. Currently, the boundaries between video games and other media are being increasingly blurred as games, films, and even novelizations of the games and films are being simultaneously developed.

Our panel will explore the blurring boundaries between video games and film in terms of cultural, political, and historical ideologies using several digital media forms (video games, films, advergames, and commercials) as well as print media forms (graphic novels and novels). Our panel will configure these multiple texts and textual forms to show the transnational influence of video games for remediating existing forms and histories, as well as for changing the trajectory of video game evolution and development.

Laurie Taylor's presentation will cover the blurring of media divisions and the significance of this blurring in relation to video games. The section will include an analysis of how early video games relied on cinematic techniques, later developed their own techniques, and how films and video games are now being simultaneously developed with video games also influencing their filmic counterparts. In addition to the cross-media structural influences, this presentation will also specifically cover the relationship between video games, films, and education in terms of thematic cross-pollination through the Serious Games and Learning Games Initiatives, as well as games that embed cultural themes and histories within their game narratives, like Sid Meier's Pirates, Sid Meier's Civilization, Onimusha, Dynasty Warriors, and others.

Zach Whalen's presentation will investigate the politics of localization and toponymics in video games and whether such translations actually amount to a "one to one" transferral of values or a more discrete or subversive transposition of political content. Game designers and distributors frequently produce localized game content for specific markets to change the language of the game's narrative and player interface. Often, game localization also involves changing the visual content (for example, to be more or less violent depending on the market) or changing certain characters or plot elements to match local cultural norms. Games which exhibit a particular political ideology or uphold a specific system of values must also be adapted in further ways for the local market, and this presentation seeks to identify the politics and logic behind such localization. Also, Massively Multi-Player Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPG's) attempt a certain kind of "non-locality" or transnationality by creating a sustainable world with its own political landscape, currency, and even languages. The recent Final Fantasy XI even includes an automatic translator which instantly converts in-game player-to-player communication into the native language of the respective player. This presentation asks whether such attempts amount to a virtual Esperanto or whether games inherently possess culturally specific, politicized content.

Configuring video games and film within commodity cultures and transnational production, Cathlena Martin will present on cultural representations in children's games like The Oregon Trail and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? She will also present on nationalistic endeavors like the Children's Digital Library and its attempt at multi-cultural transfer and inclusion within a filmic format, as the Children's Digital Library is built using the animation program Flash. It also attempts to bridge and blur divisions using Flash both as an interface and as a means to create miniature movies when searching this library. Martin will examine the ways in which both children's games and websites rely on filmic representations in order to facilitate cultural transfer and to engender certain cultural conceptions.

Clay Arnold's presentation will examine the ways that third person video games, like films, immerse the player within the narrative spaces of the games. He will explore potential consequences of the interactions between players and narratives. When these games are set within historical war zones, how do such interactions inform popular thought about those wars? Looking especially at the recent Conflict: Desert Storm and Battlefield: Vietnam video games, this presentation will investigate the ways in which games' narratives set in present historical wars might affect the narrative construction of those wars in different local and international cultures.

Bios:

Laurie N. Taylor researches and teaches video games and digital media at the University of Florida. She has published articles in Game Studies, Media/Culture, Computers and Composition Online, and ImageTexT, and has forthcoming articles in several collections on video games. She has also written a number of radio programs on video games, girl culture, digital culture, and comics for the public radio program "Recess!"

Zach Whalen, PhD student at the University of Florida. His Master's Thesis and continuing research is on the narrative function of video game soundtracks, and he has an article forthcoming in Game Studies on the subject. He is also a Managing Editor and Webmaster for the online journal ImageTexT : Interdisciplinary Comics Studies.

Cathlena Martin, PhD student at the University of Florida, researches children's literature and new media. She has presented at the Children's Literature Association Conference on celebrity authored children's literature, at the Southwest Texas Popular Culture Conference on revisionist Little Red Riding Hood tales, and at the Conference on Modern Critical Approaches to Children's Literature on revisionist and award-winning tales of the Three Little Pigs. She also writes about children's cultural events for the radio program "Recess!"

Clay Arnold is a Master's candidate researching and teaching composition rhetoric and electrate writing at the University of Florida. His research interests include composition theory, visual rhetoric, cultural resistance both in the classroom and within popular media, and composition in digital media.

NOTES: My paper

Smith, David F. "Branding Iron: Virtual Billboards get Bigger in Games." Computer Gaming World. Issue 248. February 2005: 26-7.

"Gamers are a captive audience, so it only makes sense that marketing folks want to place ads within games[...] Some publishers are taking a bigger step forward. By 2006, more than 25 PC games from Ubisoft, Vivendi, Take-Two, and others--including Splinter Cell Chaos Theory and Rainbox Six 3--will have ads injected into gameplay through the Internet." (27).

Liu, Johnny. "Preview of Dreamfall: The Longer Longest Journey." Computer Gaming World. Issue 242. Sept. 2004: 34-35.

"Dreamfall's most intriguing and potentially controversial aspect is its allusion to real-life events: Tornquist describes a great tower in the game's central city of Arcadia and says the city will eventually meet with some kind of catastrophe. Though Funcom says this is not meant to be a direct parallel to the 9/11 tragedy, commentary within the plot is definitely directed at war issues. Heady stuff, but thankfully, it seems done with tact, not controversy for controversy's sake." (35)

"Preview of Killer 7." Play Magazine. Volume 29, May 2004: 29.

About Killer 7, a game which focuses on terrorist attacks by monstrous creatures from an Eastern power: "Worth noting is that while Killer 7 has recently been announced to come to PlayStation 2 in Japan and Europe, in the U.S., it remains a GameCube exclusive, though whether this is due to rejection by Sony or objections from Nintendo is unknown." (29)

"Preview of Van Helsing: Devil May Hyde ." Play Magazine. Volume 29, May 2004: 28.

After commenting on the Van Helsing's derivativeness of Devil May Cry, states: "Where Devil ends and van Helsing begins (finally!) is in the boss battles and story-derived design, in league with the them of the film, as the Vatican's monster-hunting pawn systematically hunts down legendary fiends of the silver screen on his way to hunt every monster's hunter's holy grail: the prince of darkness[...] This is going to be an awesome film and a good game, especially by crossover standards." (28)

SCREENPLAY - reread and use

Moledina, Jamil. "Hooray for Hollywood?" Game Developer. Vol 11:7, Aug. 2004: 2.

"While some see film and game more as a rivalry, throwing suspiciously tailored revenue numbers about, others see parity as a source of intense cross-pollination and a growing single resource pool." (2)

Video games, as one of the fastest growing entertainment media forms, cross both cultural and political boundaries, as well as national borders in their representations, translations, and influence on other media. Video games continue to be studied primarily from the perspective of film and media studies because of their relationship with visual technologies. However, the majority of video game theorists focus on the newness of the video game form, instead of interrogating the games' political, cultural, and social implications. While video games began their popular ascent as an entertainment form, they inherently carried with them the political and cultural norms from their predecessors in literature and film, as well as the cultural and political norms from their places of origin. Currently, the boundaries between video games and other media are being increasingly blurred as games, films, and even novelizations of the games and films are being simultaneously developed.

Our panel will explore the blurring boundaries between video games and film in terms of cultural, political, and historical ideologies using several digital media forms (video games, films, advergames, and commercials) as well as print media forms (graphic novels and novels). Our panel will configure these multiple texts and textual forms to show the transnational influence of video games for remediating existing forms and histories, as well as for changing the trajectory of video game evolution and development.

Laurie Taylor's presentation will cover the blurring of media divisions and the significance of this blurring in relation to video games. The section will include an analysis of how early video games relied on cinematic techniques, later developed their own techniques, and how films and video games are now being simultaneously developed with video games also influencing their filmic counterparts. In addition to the cross-media structural influences, this presentation will also specifically cover the relationship between video games, films, and education in terms of thematic cross-pollination through the Serious Games and Learning Games Initiatives, as well as games that embed cultural themes and histories within their game narratives, like Sid Meier's Pirates, Sid Meier's Civilization, Onimusha, Dynasty Warriors, and others.

video games and the military. Spiderman as keeping the boundary divided here Matrix as complement to this format with offering supplemental information in the game With the US and other military divisions making games for use in recruitment and for training devices, this section will address the commercial and advertisement value of video games as recruiting devices (with several military recruitment games available) and as the format underlying other recruitment media (as with the television commercials for the military that are easily confused with commercials for video games[army commercial with 3 days left and ran out of supploes already], where earlier military commercials appeared as miniature films [marines commercial with the dragon]).

NOTES: General

Cathlena
http://www.explanatoids.org/
It uses flash for a pretty interface and then comics on the pages to teach - very neat and very edutainment

Zach
toponymics -- machine limitations on older systems, dvd encodings and machines based on region
house of leaves as a digital text - imagistic text -- breaks down class boundaries --
problems of classification (in horror section)
run lola run as a positive example of video game adaption
// vs groundhog day // 30 first dates
XIII

Clay
On the official website for the Conflict: Desert Storm games, the programmers explicitly say that Saddam Hussein is not a character in
either of the games. You can't kill him, you can't be him, and he apparently never appears. I'm going to play the games eventually to see if they mention him, maybe in a bit of text in setting the scene - something like "Saddam's forces have invaded Kuwait" perhaps. Zach also mentioned that he (Saddam, not Zach) could possibly be a "secret" character you can unlock.

So obviously I'm thinking about characters now. This game is a 3rd person open world (is that the term for games like GTA 3?) game in which you control a team (theres' a term for this too, but I don't remember it). You primarily control one character, but at different times you have to control all four of the characters in your team. You can also choose to "be" a number of different soldiers for your primary character, each with a specific name, profile, and personal attributes. So there's the person actually playing the game, that player's characters, the AI characters (both those whom you kill, and the players you play, but which are AI when you don't actually control them), and the Saddam-non-character. What does it mean to be a character in a video game?

Questions for me: If Saddam's not directing the Iraqi army, then who is? What does his erasure from the scene suggest about the relationship of the game to the war? If you don't have the option to kill Saddam, then who is really in control of the game? Why can't you be a character in the Iraqi army? Why can't you decide to lay down your arms and work toward peace through diplomacy, like you can in games like CivIII? Instead, at least in the second game, you must wage war, and in the process protect Iraqi chemical wepaons plants, and "super-secret weapons" plants. What does this suggest about character "control" and about control in general in open world games? About narrative control?

Trans/National Film and Literature: Cultural Production and the Claims of History 30th Annual Conference on Literature and Film

FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY TALLAHASSEE, FL January 27-29, 2005

KEYNOTE ADDRESS
"Making Films with an Accent: Transnational, Transitional, and Translational Strategies" Hamid Naficy, Department Chair and Nina J. Cullinan Professor of Art History, Film and Media Studies Rice University

The thirtieth anniversary of FSU's Conference on Literature and Film presents the opportunity to consider the last three decades of literature and film and their study in today's national and transnational contexts. What are the historical claims made in and through trans/national film and literature? Are the borders between film and literature dissolving under the broader category of cultural production? How has the integration of commodity culture markets affected film and literature in the age of economic and cultural globalization? How do national or transnational frames refigure our sense of history in and through film and literature? And how do these frames introject different times, temporalities, and speeds into our sense of history and forms of cultural production? How are strategies of hybridity translating new cultural forms for cosmopolitan subjectivities? How is cultural production itself transformed in the response to life and death in a time of war, terror, and counter-terror?

CALL FOR PAPERS AND PANELS

The Conference Program Committee welcomes the submission of paper and panel proposals that address the conference agenda and any related issues, either through theoretical discussion or readings of particular aesthetic works.

Possible topics include:

http://english3.fsu.edu/~filmlit2005/

Individual questions may be addressed to the conference organizers:
Amit S. Rai (English): arai@english.fsu.edu
Frank P. Tomasulo (Film School): FTomasulo@admin.fsu.edu
Lisa Ryoko Wakamiya (Modern Languages): lwakamiy@mailer.fsu.edu


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