This post was written by Brian Croxall, a Humanities Center faculty fellow.
This semester and with the support of the College of Humanities, my colleague Michael Call and I launched a new initiative: the game of the week. Every week, one video game will be available to play in the Humanities Learning Commons (1141 JFSB) and every Monday at 4pm, there will be a short lecture by a BYU faculty member on that game. The series kicked off with Stardew Valley and Minecraft, and in the weeks to come, other games like Tony Hawk Pro Skater and the infamously bad E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600 will each have a turn in the spotlight.
Why should the university dedicate time and resources to playing games? While no one has asked us this question yet, I’ve been thinking about my answer—just in case.
I have loved video games since Christmas in 1984, when our family unexpectedly received a Commodore 64 and its companion 1541 disk drive, accompanied by an Omega Race cartridge and the disks for Winnie the Pooh in the Hundred Acre Wood. Someone in my dad’s military unit must have also had a C64 because shortly thereafter we had a few diskettes full of pirated games, including classics like Pac-Man and Spy Hunter and more outré fare like M.U.L.E. and Pogo Joe.
A few Christmases later, my brother and I successfully waged a targeted campaign for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Thanks to my paper route, I later managed to get my hands on a Game Boy (a wise purchase because it had Tetris), a Power Glove (a foolish purchase because it was useless), and, with my brother, a Super Nintendo. Meanwhile our family had upgraded our computer, and I spent a lot of time exploring point-and-click adventures: Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis; Dune; King’s Quest III; and, perhaps the greatest of them all, The Secret of Monkey Island. Somewhere around 1990, my best friend introduced me to the Internet and bulletin board services, where I could get in games of Trade Wars. This early online experience made it much easier for me to help everyone on my BYU freshman floor register for classes since we didn’t have to fight a crowded phone system. One of the two guys that owned a computer let me play his copy of Civilization as a thank-you.
And then…I went on a mission. I served as best as I could and came home with the words of Paul to the Corinthians echoing in my head: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things” (1 Cor. 13:11). Something had changed in those two years, and I found myself largely walking away from video games. When my fiancée told me that she never wanted to own a video game console, I told her that was fine since I never wanted to own a TV.
While I had loved video games, I had also always loved reading. (I will spare you the recitation of devouring Lloyd Alexander, Beverly Cleary, Susan Cooper, Gordan Korman, Ursula K. Le Guin, Charles Schulz, Bill Watterson, Gary Larson, and more.) My years as an interdisciplinary humanities major allowed me to read more widely and to begin adding art, music, and architecture as things that I could read. Video games did not appear anywhere in the curriculum and that seemed right to someone who was doing his best to “adult” and who was very interested in amassing cultural capital (in lieu of, y’know, real capital). Shortly after the start of the new millennium, I found my way to graduate school with the express interest of becoming a professor. And against all odds, I appear to have succeeded.
So why on earth have I returned to video games, like “a fool to his folly” (Prov. 26:11)? Part of it was my having children of my own and wanting them to be able to connect with their peers. (Yes, we did eventually get a video game console—but the TV came years before.) Part of it was the encounter in graduate school with Espen Aarseth’s concept of ergodic literature:
In ergodic literature, nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text. If ergodic literature is to make sense as a concept, there must also be nonergodic literature, where the effort to traverse the text is trivial, with no extranoematic responsibilities placed on the reader except (for example) eye movement and the periodic or arbitrary turning of pages. (Cybertext 1)
While reading always requires some effort, ergodic literature requires effort to literally move through the text. Perhaps the easiest comparison is a choose-your-own-adventure book, which refuses to let the reader turn the pages in a normal progression—at least if the reader wants a coherent narrative. Something very similar is at play in Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch, which predates CYOA books by six years. Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves takes a different approach with its representation of a haunted house, which literally causes the reader to spin the book to be able to read it and creates labyrinths in its footnotes. I had encountered plenty of other strange print books that met the definition of ergodic, and the term also clarified aspects of the electronic literature I was studying.
There was nothing trivial about what it took to read Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story. One of the first pieces of hypertext fiction, afternoon tells the story of Peter, a man who witnesses a car crash. Clicking on any word in the text will advance you to another page of text, but some words—only a very few on most pages—will take you to different pages of the story. Each word acts as what we today would call a link, but they are not marked visually nor do they indicate where they will take you. What’s more, some sections of the story cannot be visited until other sections have been passed through. Invisible logic gates impede the reader’s progress, making it impossible to know what parts of the story remain to be viewed. It was frustrating. It was fascinating. And to find my way through it, I had to drawing charts on graph paper like I had done for The Bard’s Tale II. It turned out ergodic literature was remarkably game-like.
My forays into e-lit led to an invitation to write a book review of Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan’s edited collection First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game. The essay “From Work to Play” by Stuart Moulthrop struck me particularly; in it, he discusses a transition in media from narrative, where “the reader’s primary ‘cognitive activity’ consists of interpretation,” to games, where “the primary cognitive activity is not interpretation but configuration, the capacity to transform certain aspects” of the media object. Configuration helped to articulate fascinated me about both ergodic literature and video games: both required me to play an active role in its completion.
With the vocabulary I gained from Moulthrop, Aarseth, and others, I returned to video games and started reading them afresh. (Yes, it’s terribly immature to require postmodern theory to feel comfortable around your objects of affection. I have a therapist and I’m working on it.) As I’ve made space for teaching video games in my classes alongside literature, I’ve found they are frequently as important to my students as they were to me: some come alive when we discuss gender roles in Mrs Dalloway; others perk up when we discuss the gender politics of Fortnite; and some land squarely in the middle of this particular Venn diagram.
What I have finally learned to embrace is how video games are just as complicated, just as immersive, and just as beautiful as poetry, paintings, the Parthenon, or people. Why play games? Why on earth wouldn’t we?
