Postmodern Culture article

[Rimpy]

MosleyPresley, thanks for making my point with those readability statistics in your post.

Passive Sentences -- Remember your Egnlish professors telling you to always avoid passive sentences and write in the active voice? 16% of the sentences in that article are passive.

Flesch Reading Ease score -- That article measured 27.8. This is how MS Word says to interpret that score: "Rates text on a 100-point scale; the higher the score, the easier it is to understand the document. For most standard documents, aim for a score of approximately 60 to 70."

Again, like my letter to the author stated, I enjoyed the article. I read all of it, but it took more effort than it needed it. My main point was that the author was overinterpreting an arbitrary game rule, and I think that's still true. As far as his writing style, that's another issue, but for what it's worth, I thought he was unnecessarily wordy.

Rimpy

[Alex]

This discussion seems to be absolutely irrelevant considering the nature of the article. It is an academic piece, guys. He's trying to contribute to an academic field of studies which is just forming and shaping up: digital game studies. It is not a gamer's point of view. He is not arguing with fun in mind. He's trying to make a point on a "meta-game" level.

Imagine Marx trying to sum up his works: "hmm, capitalism sucks" (insert smilie here). Come on!

[Standup]

I agree with the comment 'its only a game'.

Reminds me of when i use to read books because they were interesting, fun, exciting etc and then be told i'd missed the whole point. Or when in English classes we'd attempt to assign meaning or design to a poem that nobody really knew whether there was an underlaying message/metaphor etc because the author was dead and maybe he just thought the words went together or told a story?
Its late and i'm probably not expressing myself too well but bascially what i'm trying to say is why try and add meaning when its not there and the only aim is to show off your vocabulary/education ?
Now i'm sure someone can tell me there a school of thought for this - deconstructionist or similar

[Mad Bomber]

Originally posted by Rimpy


I don't always think that, far from it. But that guy could definitely use a few lessons from Strunk & White, "The Elements of Style". Often, your message will be better understood if you make it as concisely as possible. He could've easily made the same point in much less space, and more people would've actually read the article to the end. And I also got the impression that he used a lot of big words for the sake of using big words. The end result was an article that overwhelms the reader with its length and its complexity.

The point of writing is, after all, to convey a message to your reader. Did his writing style make his message more or less difficult to understand? I think that it made it more difficult to understand, which is why I thought that it was poor writing.

Rimpy

Couldn't have said it better myself. I understand that this is a work of academia, but even by the most elietist universities such as Fordham this would be considered unnecissarily verbose. Worse the author does not even introduce his thesis until paragraph 15 His use of documentation is far in excess of needed and he cites a work before he even bothers to name the work, terrible for even a ninth grade report. To sum up, his writing style is crap, I hope that I am not misunderstood by anyone.

[MosesPresley]

Originally posted by Theseus
MP, did you not read my post?

The dynamics of civ expansion / failure are not specific to the Western European expansion against Amerinds, MEsoamericans, or Aborigines.

They have been played out *countless* times in the Middle East, Africa, India, SE and Central Asia.

To say that this is an American phenomenon, and thus so is the design of the game, is an extremely limited view, and an argument not worth making.

It is the writer's OWN bias and either intellectual laziness or a lack of knowledge that are demonstrated here. The sophistry, acting as a cloak of invisibility, is irrelevant.

To say that a history game has been designed with history in mind is reflexive and rather pointless.

I don't think his point was this is a history game designed with history in mind. It is more that it is a history game designed from a Western perspective. Especially the Western perspective of the role of indigenous peoples. Read this quote and tell me what you think:

"The best defense against barbarian-Indians is to "settle" the land by extending one's cities. In Civilization II, if all squares of what Bradford called the "hideous and desolate wilderness" come within city radii, the "wild men" he referred to never emerge. In other words, the game imagines the indigenous presence as a kind of wildness in the land that simply disappears when the land has been domesticated. In this way, these games arrive at an ideological solution that echoes the one achieved by early Christian settlers of America. The problem is this: how can the pagan Indian presence be accounted for in this land that is understood to have been given by God's grace to his Christian people? This problem and its resolution are nicely articulated in another early Christian record of settlement, Mary Rowlandson's 1682 account of her capture, enslavement, and eventual ransoming from the Wampanoag nation in what is today Massachusetts. When Rowlandson is captured during a raid on the settler town of Lancaster, she has to try to make sense of her Indian captor's presence and agency in terms of the mythology that was currently governing the northeast colonies. In this "the vast and desolate wilderness," as she calls it (122-23), echoing Bradford, the Indian presence is seen, ultimately, to be a method whereby God tests his people. Why, for Rowlandson, has God seemed to leave His people to themselves? After all, God could annihilate the heathens but chooses not to. The answer Rowlandson comes to is that the Wampanoag are the means by which God teaches His people moral lessons (158-59). This answer takes the agency away from the Indians--it's not their own knowledge about how to feed themselves during a particularly brutal New England winter that gets them through it (they've been there for centuries, after all), but God's will."

Of course his view is biased. All points of view are biased. His appears to biased towards pluralism. That is not the point. He is simply trying to point out the latent narrative of the game. Is he looking too deep? That depends on what you mean. This is just a game of course. But as you are playing it, it reinforces certain concepts and acts on specific assumptions. Might makes right and other such platitudes. His paper is simply trying to articulate those unspoken lessons.

As to whether or not he is a sophist, his argument is logical and appears to be well researched. He obviously has played the game and seems to spend time on these forums. He has a link to the Guns, Germs and Steel forum and he makes a few references as to what the fans expected from the Civ 3.

"The dynamics of civ expansion / failure are not specific to the Western European expansion against Amerinds, MEsoamericans, or Aborigines."

I think I know what you are trying to say with that statement, but would please clarify it somewhat? If I'm not mistaken, (my less than encyclopedic knowledge of history)only Europe colonized the rest of the world. If that is true, it would lend credence to his essay.

Just out of curiousity, what do you think the latent narrative of Civ 3 to be? I'm not asking you to do a report, just a quick synopsis of what the game is about to you.

[MosesPresley]

Originally posted by Rimpy
MosleyPresley, thanks for making my point with those readability statistics in your post.

Passive Sentences -- Remember your Egnlish professors telling you to always avoid passive sentences and write in the active voice? 16% of the sentences in that article are passive.

Flesch Reading Ease score -- That article measured 27.8. This is how MS Word says to interpret that score: "Rates text on a 100-point scale; the higher the score, the easier it is to understand the document. For most standard documents, aim for a score of approximately 60 to 70."

Again, like my letter to the author stated, I enjoyed the article. I read all of it, but it took more effort than it needed it. My main point was that the author was overinterpreting an arbitrary game rule, and I think that's still true. As far as his writing style, that's another issue, but for what it's worth, I thought he was unnecessarily wordy.

Rimpy

16% passive sentences isn't too bad. 27.8 for reading ease is pretty bad.

I don't think any of the rules are arbitrary. They are put there for a reason. Obviously, they are put there for specific gaming reason. I think his article was making the claim that our cultural conditioning is what makes us think these rules are just natural or arbitrary and will not or should not be questioned. Any activity, even the most banal, has a purpose or motivation behind it.

[MosesPresley]

Originally posted by Alexnm
This discussion seems to be absolutely irrelevant considering the nature of the article. It is an academic piece, guys. He's trying to contribute to an academic field of studies which is just forming and shaping up: digital game studies. It is not a gamer's point of view. He is not arguing with fun in mind. He's trying to make a point on a "meta-game" level.

Imagine Marx trying to sum up his works: "hmm, capitalism sucks" (insert smilie here). Come on!

Agreed. If you ever read an academic article about sex, you might not think it was an enjoyable pastime.

[MosesPresley]

Originally posted by ruby_maser
MP, there is another thread in hear commenting on the article in question. you should perform your readability status on that thread because that is the one most people are referring to.

Though all I've read of this college boy's thesis is the excerpt you have provided (and I will take the time to do so fully when I get home), I can already tell it a significantly better quality of writing.

I avoided posting in that thread, because it had degenerated into a discussion of patriotism, semantics and the meaning of post-modernist deconstructionism. The thread also seemed to be accusing the author of criticizing the game for being an Amercican biased perspective. When the author is clearly arguing that the game suffers from a Western perspective.

The author is suffering from the current vogue of historical revisionism, but somebody once said that "history is the propaganda of the victors."

[ruby_maser]

Originally posted by MosesPresley
The thread also seemed to be accusing the author of criticizing the game for being an Amercican biased perspective. When the author is clearly arguing that the game suffers from a Western perspective.

then you read it wrong because I going with the later of the two.

[MosesPresley]

Whacchoo tockin bout Willis?

[punkbass2000]

Originally posted by MosesPresley
Whacchoo tockin bout Willis?

Pure gold!

[Alex]

Originally posted by MosesPresley


I avoided posting in that thread, because it had degenerated into a discussion of patriotism, semantics and the meaning of post-modernist deconstructionism. The thread also seemed to be accusing the author of criticizing the game for being an Amercican biased perspective. When the author is clearly arguing that the game suffers from a Western perspective.

It is for this same reason that I avoided to post in the thread too.

[MiloMilo]

Originally posted by MosesPresley
I think I know what you are trying to say with that statement, but would please clarify it somewhat? If I'm not mistaken, (my less than encyclopedic knowledge of history)only Europe colonized the rest of the world. If that is true, it would lend credence to his essay.

MP, I believe Theseus's point was that your knowledge of history is in fact mistaken, and that Europeans were not the only colonizers. They just happened to have both gunpowder weapons and transoceanic ships when they did it, so the effects were more grievous and more recent. And thus, more well-known.

Of course his view is biased. All points of view are biased. His appears to biased towards pluralism. That is not the point. He is simply trying to point out the latent narrative of the game. Is he looking too deep? That depends on what you mean. This is just a game of course. But as you are playing it, it reinforces certain concepts and acts on specific assumptions. Might makes right and other such platitudes. His paper is simply trying to articulate those unspoken lessons.

The criticism that has been levelled at the article if of two kinds:

1) It read too much into civ3's design decisions; in all likelihood they were made not as reflections of cultural assumptions, but rather to increase playability and fun. For all the author and we know, Firaxis may have made a concerted effort to avoid embodiment of those assumption, and it just didn't turn out to make for a great game.

2) The points made by the article are simply uninteresting, academically or otherwise. Yes, our culture tends to operate with certain underlying assumptions: might to some extent makes right; possession is 9/10ths of the law; manifest destiny; history is written by the victors; biological and cultural darwinism; etc. And yes, the narrative techniques and strictures used in a video game made in this country and by its citizens, who were most likely all educated under the same public education system and watch(ed) the same six television networks after school/work, will to a greater or lesser extent reflect the mores of this culture. My question is, so what? On my reading, the author was basically using civ3 to show the reader that these cultural assumptions exist. Problem is, I already knew that, so the article quickly became boring.

I admit that I'm not well-versed in (post-)modern cultural studies-- I studied classical philosophy in undergrad (that's university to you europeans). So I expect a certain level of deep and interesting analysis, as well as verbal economy, to accompany a given piece of observation. In this article I simply found that both of those things were missing.

[MosesPresley]

Originally posted by MiloMilo


MP, I believe Theseus's point was that your knowledge of history is in fact mistaken, and that Europeans were not the only colonizers. They just happened to have both gunpowder weapons and transoceanic ships when they did it, so the effects were more grievous and more recent. And thus, more well-known.

Please provide examples of other colonial nations. The fact that the European nations were so much more powerful than the colonized is why they were colonial nations.

The criticism that has been levelled at the article if of two kinds:

1) It read too much into civ3's design decisions; in all likelihood they were made not as reflections of cultural assumptions, but rather to increase playability and fun. For all the author and we know, Firaxis may have made a concerted effort to avoid embodiment of those assumption, and it just didn't turn out to make for a great game.

Whether these decisions whether unconscious or conscious still reflect a latent cultural perspective.

2) The points made by the article are simply uninteresting, academically or otherwise. Yes, our culture tends to operate with certain underlying assumptions: might to some extent makes right; possession is 9/10ths of the law; manifest destiny; history is written by the victors; biological and cultural darwinism; etc. And yes, the narrative techniques and strictures used in a video game made in this country and by its citizens, who were most likely all educated under the same public education system and watch(ed) the same six television networks after school/work, will to a greater or lesser extent reflect the mores of this culture. My question is, so what? On my reading, the author was basically using civ3 to show the reader that these cultural assumptions exist. Problem is, I already knew that, so the article quickly became boring.

As to whether or not the article is interesting is purely subjective. I found the article to be very interesting, although it was from a revisionist perspective. Kind of like Monday morning quarterbacking.

I admit that I'm not well-versed in (post-)modern cultural studies-- I studied classical philosophy in undergrad (that's university to you europeans). So I expect a certain level of deep and interesting analysis, as well as verbal economy, to accompany a given piece of observation. In this article I simply found that both of those things were missing.

Again, this is subjective. I found the article's analysis of the game unique. I had never considered the viewpoint of the barbarians in the game before. Is he looking too deep. Obviously, too deep for simply having fun, but not too deep if you are looking for subconcious undercurrents of thought.

If your only thought as to the game's purpose is that is fun, then you are the one who is being uninteresting. The author of the article was interested in the underlying subtexts and assumptions of the game's rules and mechanics.

[punkbass2000]

Well said, MP.