Lecture 0: Introduction to Interpretation

Part 1: Introducing this module and Assessment

A little about me
[Slide 3] For those who don’t know me yet I’m doctor Dean Bowman – but I’d prefer it if you just
called me Dean. I give the lectures during the Form and Function module. And you’ll either have
seminars with myself or Tarn, who you know from last year.

I have a Bachelors in English Literature from the University of East Anglia, a Masters in film studies
specialising in European and Asian Cinema from the Edinburgh University. Whilst I was there I did my
MA dissertation on New Wave South Korean Cinema. Then after a few years out where I was
involved in magazine editing and design and being involved in gaming websites I went back to
university to do my PhD which was an exploration of how videogame designers combine traditional
narrative techniques and gameplay mechanics to tell stories that are unique to games as an
interactive media.

My approach was based on a method called production studies and was about digging into how the
games industry is structed and how that informs the kinds of stories that get made. This was an
interview led PhD and I spoke to a range of really cool indie designers including Lucas Pope (Papers
Please, The Return of the Obra Dinn), Steve Gaynor (Gone Home, Tacoma), Sean Vanaman
(Firewatch), Rhianna Pratchett (Tombraider) and Greg Kasavan (Hades).

[Slide 4] The reason I took this approach was because everything I’d read from academics assumed
there was a really strong tension between a game as a story versus a game as something to play.
This is often referred to as the ludology narratology debate, which I will look at in depth in a future
session, which you might have touched on last year.

My big problem with the existing writing on the topic was that no one seemed to have bothered
asking actual game designers what they do to combine storytelling and game mechanics on a day to
day basis so I wanted to give the designer a voice within an academic context and actually value
what they say. Academics so often dismiss what practitioners think. John Caldwell, who created
production studies as a method with his big study of Hollywood, calls the kind of thinking that comes
from creative workers ‘industry theorising’ and this was what I was interested to find out about.

So here is a proposal that I am going to make. I want you all to start thinking of yourselves not just as
students but industry theorists – because you are already making games and overcoming the same
kinds of problems that people in the industry.

So to summarise I’m an academic with an eclectic range of research interests but I focus on
Narrative Theory in Videogames and media broadly and other forms of media theory.

[Slide 5] I’ve written on topics as diverse as Transmedia storytelling and fandom in the Kingdom
Hearts franchise, Jason Statham as a videogame avatar, the intersection of gender and technology in
James Bond, The marketing of Studio Ghibli, postcolonial ideology in board games, and subversive
approaches to gender identity in The Last of Us.

See my complete profile including publications here: https://www.nua.ac.uk/about-nua/meet-our-

staff/dr-dean-bowman/
[Slide 6] I also probably play too many videoagames mostly on my PS5. Where I’m more than a little
obsessed with chasing platinum trophies and generally being a completionist. [Talk about what I’ve
been playing over the summer]

[Slide 7] Aside from my interest in videogames I basically live to indulge my two core obsessions. The
first Is my growing synthwave record collection.

[Slide 8] The Second is my recent obsession with the murder mystery and crime genre, and
especially vintage detective stories.

[Slide 9] I’ve recently been trucking my way through the back catalogues of the so called Queens of
Crime – a group of female authors who revolutionised the genre at the turn of the 20 th century and
created the so called golden age of detective fiction.

[Slide 10] I also discovered Japanese ‘Honkaku’ detective novels. Example on the right. The book on
the left is an academic study on Japanese Detective Fiction of the 1920s-30s.

I think it’s important to have something that your obsessively interested in exploring to motivate
yourself and I’ve been wondering for a while what my own next big research interest should be. And
I think its going to be to explore the way detective fiction gets adapted into videogames and in
particular how the mechanics of detection are presented to the player.

Hopefully I can keep sharing my thoughts and my progress with you as we go forward. However I’m
notoriously lazy so I’ll need you to keep motivating me!

A little about the brief

[Slide 11] OK that’s enough rambling about what I’m into. This module is about examining games
within larger contexts.

Throughout I will be introducing you to ideas from key intellectual fields outside of games. It’s about
bringing ideas from a range of places and exploring how they relate to games. Like my interest in
detective fiction, for instance.

Its about reflecting on how games as the most successful (and I would argue interesting) artform of
our age intersects with global issues and big concepts.

This is for various reasons:

 To demonstrate the versatility and complexity of games as a medium and widen our
interpretation of them.
 To teach you a little about the key intellectual movements in art and culture and
demonstrate that games are a part of these processes.
 To go beyond the core debates of game studies, like ludology/narratology, that close down
the range of possible interpretations.
 To introduce you to key critical concepts and to deepen your knowledge not only of games
and media, but to allow you to more deeply understand the wider world in which they are
embedded.

Throughout I’ll be encouraging you to think about games not as isolated and pure objects, but
something influenced by wider cultural processes and histories.
This is about innovation. Taking your understanding beyond games will help you make better games
by applying ideas and knowledge in novel ways.

This is also about critique. It’s about not taking the surface assumptions at face value. About digging
deeper to speculate how things work really.

To always ask the question ‘why are things this way?’

Virtual worlds have their own character, agency and ancestry, and we will explore past forms of
interactive entertainment which have shaped the virtual and real environments of today.

Structure of course
[Slide 12] The course is a double length module that will run over 11 weeks. Each lecture is
accompanied by a seminar with either myself or Tarnia Mears that takes place the following week.
Often there will be a reading or short exercise that will prepare you for the seminar.

The seminars will be based around discussing readings that I have chosen deliberately as
provocations and overviews of topics. We will explore ideas from the lecture in the seminar in
interactive activities and discussions. So it’s important you try to do the reading to the best of your
ability each week.

BUT I would rather you do some of the reading than all of it. Try your best to pick out something you
like or don’t like or are puzzled by in the reading to discuss in class. The seminars are there to help
make sense of these ideas so try to make it even if you haven’t done the reading because you will
still get a lot out of these sessions.

Remember a seminar is not Reddit – you must engage in respectful and intelligent debate and
discussion. I really want you to try to be brave and get involved with the discussion this year because
this kind of discussion is important to learning in higher education. By doing it you are practicing
your ability to communicate and debate your ideas which are very important skills in the creative
industries.

There is a breakdown of the lecture and seminar topics you can look at on the VLE.

Part of an ongoing conversation

[Slide 13] Games are part of a larger ongoing conversation. These GIFs are from a brilliant animation
by the surrealist Czech animator Jan Swankmajer called ‘dimensions of dialogue’ which explores
human conversation as a messy, complicated and often confrontational process. I’m sure we’ve all
had chats like this, right?

We always exist in a language and culture which is always shifting and determines the way we view
the world. Just so, when we study a medium we have to be aware that we are all entering into a
conversation that has already been up and running, sometimes for centuries.

Even a medium as young as videogames has a 50 year history at least. But it also links to the history
of play as a cultural phenomena, which has been studied by anthropologists for centuries, and with
board games that stretch back millennia.

Our ideas and interpretations build on and add to that conversation, just like the dozens of reviews
about a game on its release are also really a part of the game.
This is why when you write an essay you need to conduct research into what arguments have been
made before so you can situate your ideas into the larger context. It may be tempting for you to
think you have come up with an idea for the first time, however I’m telling you this is highly unlikely.

Some of the ideas we will look at will be huge interconnected systems of thought that I can only
scratch the surface of in these sessions. So I will be giving plenty of further reading suggestions
should you want to pursue a topic further.

Art reflects life: Ford Maddox Ford’s the Good Soldier

[slide 14] This module is also about flexing our interpretation abilities. Building on all the good work
you did last year. So now I’m going to give you an example of putting interpretation into practice and
thinking about a work within its larger social and historical context.

Applying abstract ideas to concrete examples like this is called a case study and is an important way
to ground your argument. All of your essays will be in the form of such case studies.

So let’s start with a classic fin de siècle novel, The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford – I did say I was
going to introduce you to some varied works from other media.

There’s a famous expression that art reflects life. I think that this doesn’t just mean that art is about
copying from reality, but that art actually provides a running commentary to all the changes that
happen to us as a species. And if we want to find out what people at a given moment thought, we
just need to look at the art they produce.

To put it another way, deep changes in a society are reflected in its cultural output and the key
works of a given era will reinforce, critique or generally reflect its key outlook or ideology. This is
what Nietzsche famously called the ‘zietgeist’ or the spirit of the age.

Ford Maddox Ford’s 1915 masterpiece ‘The Good Soldier’ perfectly encapsulates the zeitgeist of the
fin de siècle. It was written in the lead up to and during the global trauma of the first world war and
its astonishing loss of life, so it is impacted by a deep pessimism about human nature and the forces
that delivered the war, specifically the rigid class structure that underpinned society.

It is a superb study of the fall of the old world, the collapse of its class structure and its values
through the metaphor of the tragic breakdown of two seemingly perfect relationships.

The title is of course ironic – this is actually not a war novel at all but a society novel set in the
exclusive Spa resorts of Switzerland – and the protagonist Edward Ashburnam turns out to not be a
particularly good person, even if he is respected in society as a good soldier. So the book uses irony
to undermine some of the Victorian values that Ashburnam represents: duty, honour and loyalty.

The wider suggestion the book makes is that the upper classes publicly expressed the values of
honour and duty, but we’re fundamentally hypocrites because in their private lives they rarely
actually followed these values. The concepts were there to maintain their own power in society
because if you could force the classes underneath you to follow these rigid rules then they would
continue to be subservient and generate wealth for you.

[slide 15] The novel is a characteristic work of modernism, a period of time that roughly describes
the emergence of capitalist society and up to the end of the twentieth century. In modernist art
nothing is as it first seems. So the Good Soldier was one of the first novels to use flashbacks and
unreliable narration to slowly peel away the layers of its story and expose the contradictions of the
characters beneath.

If you want to find out more about modernism and how it fundamentally challenged the traditional
values of art and society here are three great documentaries that explore the key ideas of that era.

I know you all think games are cool, but did you think about how important they are as a cultural
reflection? It is often said that we have moved away from modernism and now live in a postmodern
zeitgeist. Within this era videogames have replaced the novel and the cinema as the form best able
to reflect on the big changes in our society. I hope by the end of this lecture series you will be
convinced that they are too.

I’ll get into why I think this in future lectures, but for now I’m just going to leave this statement
hanging here as a nice little provocation.

WW1 as a rupture in history

[slide 16] So the period of high or late modernism, which kicks off at the start of the 20 th century is
being unpacked by Ford Maddox Ford in his art.

Late Modernism was a period born of historical trauma. The wars of the early twentieth century
provided a rupture in history. The society that emerged after those events was very different from
the one that had entered it and there was a strong sense that the world needed to be rebuilt.

Wolfgang Iser says that that WWI not only challenged our understanding of reason and religion, but
challenged the very way we interpret things. Over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the
development of modern science had placed reason and rationalism as the guiding principles of
civilisation, but there was nothing rational about the mechanised slaughter of the war.

The very machines that science had helped develop were let loose on the battlefield for the first
time in the early twentieth century with disastrous consequences. In the trenches upperclass
commanders still using the tactics of the Napoleonic era threw millions of working-class soldiers into
the meatgrinder.

“At the historical juncture, however, when reason as the structuring principle of truth was
no longer taken for granted, reason itself had to be understood. And the need for this
became all the more urgent because misunderstanding of speech and language in general
was no longer the exception but the rule…”
WOLFGANG ISER, 2001, P. 45

What do you think he means here? The idea of reason and religion simply become untenable in the
horrific reality of the early twentieth century which was a time of war and disease and poverty and
just loads of really, really rough shit.

Interpretation is not natural

[Slide 17] Wolfgang Iser is one of many intellectuals who argues interpretation should not be
thought of as something that comes naturally, rather it is always a motivated and intentional act. It
always comes from a particular position – that is to say it has an agenda. We will learn more about
this next week when we consider historical texts and videogames.

So, in your essay we want you to take a position and argue for it, rather than trying to be as
objective as possible. An essay by definition is a personal argument.
A personal argument backed up by evidence using rhetoric to convince the reader of your position.

Take this quote from John Caputo to heart!

“A neutral and disinterested understanding is pretty much a blank, unknowing stare. It is the
look you see on the faces of students with a writing assignment without the least idea of
what they are going to do. Their problem? No slant, no angle of entry, no interpretation. The
facts you find are a function of the interests you have, and disinterested interpretations are
nowhere to be found. A disinterested understanding has never got a term paper written, or
anything else.” (Caputo, 2018, p. vii)

So write about something you are passionate about.

This does not mean to say you can say anything. Your argument needs to be backed up by evidence:
 Secondary Research: Theories from other academics. OTHER ACADEMICS. Not those guys on
youtube, no matter how scientific they seem to be.
 Primary Research: Your deep textual analysis in which you find examples in the text that
back up your position.
 Rhetoric: Ass you learned last year rhetoric is about persuasion. The coherence of your
argument is its rhetorical weight. If your argument is strong it will avoid contradictions and
will be convincing.

However, game studies is not maths. There is not one magical correct answer for you to discover
and reproduce. Your ability to interpret will become richer and more nuanced the more you do it.

So it’s important to get into the habit of being critical by interpreting things on a regular basis. For
instance you could practice by writing a few hundred word’s reflection on each game or other piece
of media you experience, perhaps relating some of the ideas from lectures or your own reading.

These will not be marked but are a good way to come up with ideas and practice your writing skills.

Why theory?
[Slide 18] “Give me a lever and a place to stand and I will move the world” - Archimedes

A good theory should help you to move something in the world. And like Archimedes lever analogy,
sometimes an idea is so powerful it does change the world by transforming the way we think
fundamentally.

The philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn (2012) who wrote the book ‘The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions’ famously refers to this as a ‘paradigm shift’ – the moment in which an idea gathers so
much force it overturns former conventions and concepts.

Over the course of this module I might end up talking about some of my favourite theorists – the
ones like MM Bakhtin, Bruno Latour and Raymond Williams – who helped me to move things, and to
think about the world in a different way.

[Slide 19] A disclaimer: Remember, for every theorist I give you there are a dozen more that say the
same thing in a different way or wildly disagree. After all there’s an old academic joke that if you put
2 scholars in a room you will come away with three opinions.
Well, I’m going to show you that that’s just good practice. Never settle for your first opinion always
read around a little deeper. Remember even the scientific method is about challenging your existing
ideas – if those ideas survive then they will stronger because they have been tested.

Research is about your own personal journey, so don’t exclusively be guided by what I tell you
either. Use these ideas as jumping off points, then use the library and find thinkers that resonate
with you more. And don’t be intimidated, remember that all research is, is finding out something
you didn’t know before.

Game studies Study Buddies

[Slide 20] I’m aware that academic books can be difficult, but the more you try to read them the
better you will get. However if you are struggling I recommend this excellent podcast where two
American scholars discuss key game studies books.

I’ve deliberately chosen to discuss a lot of books that they’ve covered.

So I recommend listening to this podcast and thinking about their interpretations and in depth
discussions of the ideas in these books. Get used to how they talk about things and the kinds of
words and tone they use.

I will be counting this podcast as a legitimate academic source for the purposes of the essay, so feel
free to quote them but also try to look at the argument in the original context of the book where
possible.

Decolonising the curriculum

[Slide 21] A big discussion in academia at the moment is that of ‘decolonising the curriculum’ which
NUA is very dedicated to. This is also a form of subversion. The convention is for us to fall back on
white male sources because historically these have been prioritised. But now we are starting to
realise how important it is to make space for other voices who can offer a fresh perspective, just as
the games industry is starting to realise a diverse workforce can improve innovation.

So to go back to the previous slide of my favourite scholars, its admittedly all looking a little white
and male. So here are a few female theorists and people of colour whose work I also greatly admire
and will be trying to use as much as possible.

I hope that my interpretations will inspire and guide you to make your own readings of the art and
thinkers who surround you. Finding your intellectual voice and position is a major part of what being
at university is about.

So the sources you use is also strategic – its about whose ideas you want to prioritise and place front
and centre. This is part of being self-critical and aware of your own position.

Introduce assessment
[Slide 22] In the project brief this module is referred to as ‘Form and Function’. The assessment will
be to write a “reasoned and researched 3000-word academic essay”.

This is a long module and you won’t need to start thinking about your essay just yet. That said it
wouldn’t hurt to think about what kind of ideas start to interest you. Remember you can also bring
in theories and concepts you covered in the first year such as:
- Narratology
 - Ludology
- Procedural rhetoric
- Creative communication and Semiotics

Its important to add that I’m not going to be on your back about the essay. There will be a lecture
dedicated to essay writing advice and seminars set aside to generate and discuss ideas. But you are
all adults now so I’m going to leave it to you to be responsible and work at your own pace. However
Tarnia and I are both happy to talk about any ideas you have.

Remember you don’t need to master everything we talk about in every lecture. The range of topics
you can write about is now very broad and you should consider these lectures as jumping off points
rather than an exhaustive list of potential topics. If you here something in these sessions that sparks
your interest maybe start exploring that topic using reading suggestions from the lecture.

This is all good practice for the research report which we will start looking at towards the end of this
year, for which you chose your own topic from scratch.

The question you will be answering is:

Q: How do [your games] subvert or conform to the conventions [of your chosen topic]?

Every game will be constructed based on a series of conventions. A convention is set of pre-existing
approaches or attitudes. You might think of it as a heuristic, a rule of thumb, a tradition or a trope.

There will be plenty of examples of these kinds of conventions in the lectures and seminars that we
will explore.

By conform I mean how does the work simply repeat and reconfirm these conventions. And by
subvert I mean how does the work undermine, expose or reverse these conventions.

Rites of Spring
[Slide 23] Art and media often defies, undermines or reverses conventions. But what counts as a
convention also changes over time, and so do our attitudes to works that break them. When Igor
Stravinsky premiered his orchestral performance ‘The Rites of Spring’ in Paris in 1913 the
performance almost caused a right and the conservative newspaper La Figaro called it "a laborious
and puerile barbarity" – but one hundred years later we simply see it as another piece of classical
music and nothing to get particularly angry about.

This image is of a modern interpretation of the work by Phoenix theatre which tries to recreate
some of the provocation of the original work. You can also think about all of the ways Shakespeare
has been adapted, modernised and made newly relevant.

Conventions can take various forms:

These could be cultural.
[Slide 24] For instance, the work could be created to criticise or enforce traditional norms or power
structures in society – what we could call dominant norms. For instance, it is often said we live in a
patriarchal society. Patriarchy is a system that privileges men over women. It characterises men as
rational and in control, whilst women are shown as irrational and subservient. Men are typically
show to be the norm and women exceptions to the norm. Like secondary citizens. Patriarchy defines
very rigid gender roles to men and women and these are reinforced constantly by very real, material
structures in society like marriage, family life and education.
Patriarchy was much stronger in the past, but its legacy still exists today and there are still battles
being fought over things like the gender pay gap.

Tomb Raider is a game series that is often criticise for being sexist. For serving Lara Croft’s body up
to the male gaze of the gamer. This artistic reimagination of Tomb Raider starting Larry Croft as a gay
man is subversive, because it’s taking something we are familiar with and exposing its assumptions
by transforming them.

Our first reaction is to be surprised then it asks why we are surprised. Is it because we have a
problem with the image? Are our sensibilities offended by seeing a semi naked man who is being
coded as gay? Why?

So we might say this figure subverts the traditional image of Lara Croft as a sexualised figure for male
consumption.

Tarn wrote their PhD on female players and the Tomb Raider series so I’m sure they would be
interesting in talking to you about this.

[Slide 25] Perhaps this image of Larry Croft is so striking as well because we are so used to seeing
only one version of the male hero in games: the clean cut, straight, white, middle-aged hero. When
something is used so much it becomes a trope and we often accept tropes without questioning them
because we are used to them. But art can also play with tropes and by doing so can draw our
attention to them

So this image also subverts what the games journalist Rowan Kaiser has called ‘The Curse of the
Scruffy White Male’ – the tendency for AAA games to keep using a certain dominant type of hero.

When something goes against conventions it can be challenging – it can force us to assess
assumptions that we’ve made often without thinking. And reassessing our assumptions is hard but
its also incredibly valuable.

[Slide 26] To help understand this image and why it is subversive you might draw on the growing
field of queer theory which has recently been bought into game studies. For instance, the collection
of essays ‘Queer Game Studies’ edited by Bonnie Ruberg and Adrienne Shaw (2017) is excellent.

In this academic context queerness is used as a means of not only making a claim towards LGBTQ+
rights, but strategically uses the older meaning of the word queer as meaning ‘strange’. This is an
example of LGBTQ+ people using terminology intended as an insult and reclaiming it for the
community as a badge of pride.

Queer theory deliberately tries to make things strange and unfamiliar in order to encourage us to
critically question what is normal really? Here’s a quote from David Halperin that sums this up.

“Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant.
There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an
essence. 'Queer' then, demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis-à-vis the
normative.” (Halperin, 1997, p. 62)

We can see here that queer theory is one way of looking at conventions in order to subvert them.
Conventions can also be generic and this is the focus of the rest of this lecture and next week’s
seminar.
[Slide 27] For instance, we get used to a genre like the first-person shooter functioning in a specific
way with specific mechanics and specific themes. These usually celebrate military values, are morally
black and white and unquestioningly replicate scenes of violence from the real world. We’ll go into
this more deeply in a later lecture on how games relate to the military later in this course.

But what about Spec Ops the Line. This game famously subverts these conventions by pretending to
be a traditional FPS game, then introducing a narrative twist that forces you to question the values
and ideologies that are normally implied in this genre.

You might want to look at Brendan Keogh’s excellent close reading of the game Killing is Harmless
(2013), which demonstrates how the game pulls the rug out from under you.

What is Genre Anyway

[Slide 28] So genre is one of the simplest ways we can see how conventions work media. Genre is
from the French word meaning type or kind, but as a concept it can be traced all the way back to the
classical era philosopher Aristotle. His work ‘Poetics’ appeared roughly in 335 BCE, and is one of the
first known examples of someone attempting a categorisation of genres. Here he attempted to
classify the types of art of his period:

“Epic poetry and tragedy, comedy also and dithyrambic poetry, and the music of the flute
and the lyre in most of their forms, are all in their general conception modes of imitation.
They differ, however, from one another in three respects – the medium, the objects, the
manner or mode of imitation, being in each case distinct.” (Aristotle, 1996)

So we can see that some of Aristotle’s categories like comedy and tragedy still exist today, but
dithyrambic poetry and lute music is less common. This shows that genres and even media change
over time.

The classical arts are made up of Music, Sculpture, Painting, Literature, Architecture, Performing, but
in the twentieth century Film was considered the seventh art, and I think we might argue that in our
century digital games could be included as the eighth art.

Genre has been an important theory in literary studies for centuries, genre is typically seen as the
series of codes and conventions that links a number of works within a medium

After we establish what elements make up a genre, we can look at a case study to explore how it is
either conforming to the genre by following these conventions closely or subverting them or mixing
them with other genres to create new experiences.

[Slide 29] But we don’t need to go all the way back to Aristotle UNLESS it is valuable to our
argument. For instance, you might be arguing how videogames are similar to classical art forms like
theatre.

This is what Brenda Laurel (2013) does in her classic book ‘Computers as Theatre’ where she tries to
make a connection between the traditional form of theatre and how we interact with computers
and videogames through their interfaces:

"well designed" interfaces are pleasurable and clear; this is likened to theater where "The
interface (the venue, stage machinery, etc.) is not a matter of direct concern; when an
 audience is directly engaged with the action of the play, these elements literally disappear
from conscious awareness." (Laurel, 2013, p. 13)

This is also what Janet Murray (1997) does in the book Hamlet on the Holodeck, where she tries to
link the narrative structure of videogames to the way Greek bards constructed epic poems in the
oral tradition and how these varied in iterative ways from one telling to the next.

“Oral storytelling, as [Alfred] Lord describes it, relies on what we in a literate era devalue as
repetition, redundancy, and cliché, devices for patterning language into units that make it
easier for bards to memorize and recall. The stories are composed anew for each recitation
and are therefore multiform, with no single canonical version.” (Murray, 1997, p. 188)

Here we have two very different arguments that are both interested in linking games to earlier
forms, and as such each one goes back and uses the foundational arguments of Aristotle to different
ends to try to support this connection. These are examples of how a particular highly traditional
source can be used.

Modern Genre Theory

[Slide 30] But essay writing is also about choosing the most appropriate and up to date ideas, so
rather than go back to Aristotle its often more appropriate to draw on modern genre theory, and a
lot of this has been developed in the field of film studies where genre became a very important
concept.

Good academic work is sometimes about looking at other fields of study that have had more time to
develop theories and concept that you are interested in.

Genre theorist Rick Altman says that genre films are often seen to function symbolically, drawing on
genre conventions, sometimes called generic codes, to quickly cue audiences into what they are
watching and what they should expect:

“Whereas other films depend heavily on their referential qualities to establish ties to the real
world, genre films typically depend on symbolic usage of key images, sounds and situation.”
(Altman, 1999: 26)

Genre thus constitutes a form of shorthand, much like the notion of common sense that is
sometimes accused of presenting an over simplified and incorrect view of the world.

These genre codes serve a symbolic function – having a thing stand in for a larger concept. For
example, classic Westerns, a genre that developed a highly complex system of rules, often depicted
bad guys in black hats, whilst the good guys wore white hats.

There was a practical reason for this originally as it was an effort to clarify who the audience should
be rooting for, because they were often watching these early serials on tiny B&W TVs where it was
hard to tell who was who. Classical westerns had a very binary moral system of good and evil, which
then became associated with the black and white hats.

Spaghetti westerns in particular were a subgenre of the western made in Italy in the 70s that
playfully parodied and exaggerated the tropes of the genre. Works that revisit and parody a genre
after its classical period has passed are often referred to as revisionist.
Some of these modern revisionist westerns often complicate the morality of classic westerns – you
could say they introduce the grey hat.

So this started off as a solution to a technological limitation – B&W TVs, but developed into an
established convention (or trope) that became core to the classic westerns of the 50s (for instance
those of director John Ford) and was later subverted by Sergio Leone and others in Spaghetti
westerns.

Interestingly we still use this system of hats to refer to hackers: white hat hackers are try to expose
vulnerabilities and black hat hackers illegally exploit vulnerabilities, meanwhile grey hat hackers will
often try to break the rules for what they perceive to be the greater good.

Recently Westworld also tipped its hat to this particular trope, tasking the park’s guests to choose
between black or white hats before entering their lavish recreation of the wild west for wealthy
businessmen looking to blow of some steam through sex and violence.

This scene also comments upon the often binary moral decision making common in games: do you
want to take the renegade or paragon option Mass Effect asks? Do you do the peaceful or genocide
run in Undertale? Do you want to build a school or a brothel whilst being a king in Fable 3? Do you
want to have the black hat or the white hat?

Westworld is also an interesting genre case study in its own right. Part western, part dystopian
science fiction and part philosophical meditation on freedom, the TV show also draws its themes as
much from the medium of videogames as it does from cinema.

Rick Altman on Genre

[Slide 31] In his book Film/Genre Rick Altman explores ten ideas about genre that he argues critics
have often assumed to be true. He says these make up a a classical model of genre. Over the course
of the book he proceeds to questions and subverts these. He summarises the classical model here:

“According to this account, the film industry, responding to audience desires, initiates clear-
cut genres that endure because of their ability to satisfy basic human needs. While they do
change in predictable ways over the course of their life, genres nevertheless maintain a
fundamental sameness both from decade to decade and from production through exhibition
to audience consumption.” (Altman, 1999, p. 29)

This is a ‘hierarchical’ (do you know what this means?) model in which genre is forced onto
audiences in a one-way, top-down direction.

[Slide 32] Altman argues that genres don’t really work like this. Instead they are unstable and ever
shifting. This is a recursive view of genre in which it is always being remade in a loop between many
different people. Genres are not just built by producers and applied in a top-down manner but are
fluid and are created overtime by the actions and discussions of numerous stakeholders including
critics, consumers, producers, government agencies, public bodies, award ceremonies.

Genre is not just about sameness and familiarity but variation and difference. Yvonne Tasker sums
this up nicely in her analysis of masculinity and genre in the 80s Action movie called ‘Spectacular
Bodies’:

“Genre is in fact a mobile category, and the bounds of generic purity cannot be clearly
drawn within an industrial context which is constantly developing, shifting the terms of
 popular narrative. Generic production functions through the play of familiarity and
difference, rather than the repeated enactment of any static criteria” (Tasker, 1993, p. 55)

Genres help us to identify and analyse things because they let us name and describe them, but we
should be careful of relying too heavily on ideas of genres because they are only ever temporary
placeholders for larger debates that are always happening.

Conclusion: Interpretation as translation

[Slide 33] Interpretation is a means of crossing that gap, and in some ways this is the key point of
this weeks lecture. But another way of thinking about interpretation is that it is always an act of
translation. Interpretation is always an act of translating one set of ideas from a specific context into
another and as with translation meanings get lost or change on the way. Wolfgang Iser says: “Each
interpretation transposes something into something else” (Iser, 2001, p. 5).

There’s a kind of paradoxical operation happening where we try to interpret something to impose
order on it, but in doing so we inevitably change its meaning, by bringing it more in line with our
own thought processes.

The act of interpretation exists between the text (the thing that was written, or painted or whatever)
and the context into which its meaning has to be translated by interpretation (our experiences and
lives at this moment)

To take this back to the essay, the success of your argument comes down to whether you are
successful in crossing that gap and taking the reader along for the ride.

So this lecture has reflected that interpretation is never neutral and always involves a
translation and often depends on understanding an idea within a larger context. We are
always speaking from a situated place within culture. We are always already implicated. We
are always making decisions about what we are adapting and what we aren’t. Our
knowledge is always partial and is based on speaking from a specific historical moment.

Next weeks lecture will build on what we’ve learned here and explore just how partial our
knowledge is by looking at the field of history and how it relates to games.

A Couple of Examples
[slide 34] I want to try to connect the ideas in these lectures in a practical way to actual games you
can understand using these ideas. And to give you examples of what you can write about.

The recent indie game Chants of Senaar by Rundisc is a superb game about translation of languages
but also the ideas that languages convey. Its set in the biblical myth of the tower of babel where you
are moving up the tower trying to understand the languages of devotees, warriors, artists and
outsiders who each have their own unique cultures. It shows that often you need to encounter a
language within its cultural context in order to truly understand it. For instance in order to
understand the words ‘follow’ and ‘hide’ you play hide and seek with a child, which gives you words
you can use to translate other documents.

[Slide 35] I mentioned above that the Good Soldier was a famous book about the differences in
values between generations. For instance, the historical rupture between the nineteenth century
and the twentieth century that The Good Soldier explores can also be seen as a split in the values of
different generations. We can see similar tensions occurring between every generation since. The
baby boomer generation rebelled against the tired traditionalism of their parents through rock and
roll, drugs and sexual liberation of the 1960s. Today that same generation accuses Millennials of
being snowflakes for rebelling around issues like the environment and LGBTQ+ rights.

A great videogame example about the tensions between the values and world views of different
generations is Night in the Woods by Infinite Fall. Our heroes are gen Z zoomers who are trying to
find their way in a broken world in rust belt America. The generational divide is literalised here as
our heroes encounter a secret Boomer cult who have been manipulating events and are desperate
to hold on to the old world at all costs.

Preparation for seminar

Videogames and Genre by Mark J.P. Wolf
From the book: Handbook of Computer Game Studies Edited by Joost Raessens and Jeffrey Goldstein

You’ll find the reading on the Videogames as Form and Function section of the VLE.

Whilst you are reading it think about the following:

 Make notes! Ideally start a new word document (or page on your notebook) and jot down
quotes that you find interesting (make a note of the page number so you can find them
again). You’re starting to build a research dossier of ideas that you can draw on when essay
writing.
 Pick two ideas from the chapter that you either find interesting or confusing and we can
discuss them in the seminar.
 Have a think about the list of genres he puts forward. What are you surprised by?
 What is a videogame genre you find interesting and why? Be prepared to discuss this in class
next week.

Works Cited
Altman, R., 1999. Film/Genre. British Film Institute, London.

Caldwell, J.T., 2008. Production culture. industrial reflexivity and critical practice in film and
television. Duke University Press, 2008.

Caputo, J.D. (2018) Hermeneutics: Facts and Interpretation in the Age of Information. London:
Pelican.

Ford, F.M., 2010. The Good Soldier. Wordsworth Editions.

Halperin, D.M. (1997) Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography. New York: Oxford University
Press.

Iser, W. (2001) The Range of Interpretation. Columbia University Press.

Kawana, S., 2008. Murder Most Modern: Detective Fiction and Japanese Culture. University of
Minnesota Press

Keogh, B. (2013) Killing is Harmless: A Critical Reading of Spec Ops: The Line. Stolen Projects.

Kuhn, T.S. (2012) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Edited by I. Hacking. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.

Laurel, Brenda. 1991. Computers as Theatre. Second Edition. Upper Sadle River, NJ: Addison-Wesley
 Publishing Company.

Murray, J.H., 1997. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. MIT Press,
Cambridge, Mass.

Ruberg, B. and Shaw, A. (eds) (2017) Queer game studies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.

Tasker, Y., 1993. Spectacular Bodies Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema. London: Routledge