Okay, that was the more gamey part of my SHARP experience and it'll be a shame not to record the rest as being me, I managed to see videogames everywhere and even have deep conversations about gaming with people who seemed the unlikeliest interlocutors. Anyway, I was slightly miffed by the Early Modernists trying to mark the digital humanities for themselves in their very narrow fashion of creating electronic editions out of obscure (and not so obscure) Renaissance texts. Having seen the Digital Humanities (earlier called New Media Studies) emerge from their incunabular days, I see this recent trend for what it is: people who would shuddered, crossed themselves and shuttered their windows if you mentioned 'code' or 'internet' have now taken up cause with marking up text and xml. It's a good thing, if you ask me. I've spent enough of my life teaching luddite academics that someday they will need to check their emails not to welcome the digital Renaissance that these Early-Modern scholars are attempting to bring in. My beef is with the fact that they miss the woods for the trees. The digital umanista focus on printing and recreating texts like their counterparts in Renaissance Europe. As if that is the only area where digital technologies make a difference. The digital humanists for the most part need to move beyond the narrow confines of using their talents for xml  text-creation and also focus on the sweeping and deep cultural changes that your everyday facebook conversation, your tweets, Angry Birds games and iPad apps effect. We need our Aldine Press but we need the Da Vincis too.



Angry Birds, Da Vinci and Aldus Manutius : the Digital Humanities formula

So, thanks for the efforts with EEBO (Early English Books Online) and ECCO (18th century database - too lazy to check the full form) and with merging them. I totally appreciated the challenges of merging two different software systems having worked on databases myself. It was also heartening to hear that the Bodleian has invested substantial monies into digitising texts and researching around the area. The digital humanists also stressed on the importance of adding annotations to the text (a project they have been working on) and spoke about their 'commonplacer' tool which would allow undergraduates to potentially design their own commonplace book from the various sources available and to then print off such books.

                                                         

I also used examples such as Cortazar's Hopscotch and B.S.Johnson's The Unfortunates to talk about the ludicity of literature itself. Finally, I defined videogames as an 'assemblage' (following Deleuze and adapting DeLanda's definition of assemblages). Assemblages are characterised by rules of exteriority. A component of an assemblage may be detached from it and plugged into a different assemblage in which its interactions are different. The exteriority of relations implies a certain autonomy - 'a relation may change without the terms changing'. I've spoken about this before and this time I was a bit bolder in that I came up with a 'definition' of videogames.


Sonia Fizek, who is doing a PhD on videogames, picked up on this and very rightly asked why I called this a definition especially when many other things could be called assemblages. True enough -  Deleuze himself describes other things as assemblages. So the 'definition' is in effect a non-definition. Its aim is to indicate the complexity of videogames as a phenomenon and the problem of identifying something as 'the videogame'. I do not believe in 'the videogame'; videogames are multiple and arguably they resist any easy compartmentalisation more than other media. Instead, the videogame-assemblage plugs into other assemblages and the boundaries give way to organic relationships. I may have more to say when I describe videogames as assemblages but I certainly have less to define. However, definitions provoke people and my guess is that a thought-provoking idea becomes more interesting when put forward as a (non)definition. Thank you Sonia for highlighting this.


The other main issue that rings in my head is that about the 'Canon'. Do videogames have a Canon? Should they have one? And if I were to choose my ten games for the A-Level videogames and literature syllabus (should such a thing ever come to pass), what would they be? Humanities in general now makes it its business to resist attempts towards  sustaining the canonical. I do not see any reason why videogames should do otherwise. My personal theoretical orientation prevents me from singling out any specific examples for special attention. Instead of selecting individual games (although like everyone else I have my favourites), I'd go for concepts and ideas and leave the selection of related texts fluid. 



There were other questions asked and my memory fails me as to the finer details. Someone asked about videogames and morality. Astrid Ensslin gave us a singularly problematic example of a game where the player as Berlin Wall guard has to decide whether to shoot one of those who tried to cross over. From this and other slightly unrelated meanderings, the session closed with a question about whether we can have a Paradise Lost in videogames. I'm wondering ... after all, I had Milton as my special paper in my Master's. I don't think we need to have a videogame version of Paradise Lost just as we don't know whether a film version will capture its charm. What we need, however, is a work of such epic proportions in videogame-narratives. Videogame storytelling is getting richer by the day and I'm optimistic.


Here's a message to the naysayers, videogames are maturing as very complex narrative media  - face it or run away.