Peace at the Posthuman Games

BOOK REVIEWS Peace at the Posthuman Games Stuart Moulthrop My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts N. Katherine Hayles University of Chicago Press http://www.press.uchicago.edu 290 pages; paper, $22.00 Half-Real: Video Games Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds Jesper Juul MIT Press http://www.mitpress.mit.edu 233 pages; cloth, $35.00 In a remark with special resonance for this reviewer, N. Katherine Hayles remonstrates with Jerome McGann about invidious comparison. It is not entirely fair, she notes, to contrast certain early hypertext fictions with the masterworks of contemporary novelists. Young forms that depart from established traditions are incommensurate with their predecessors , and if one aspires to be a Michael Joyce, not an Eco, that should not exclude one from literary discussion. The observation exemplifies Hayles's critical temper at its best—generous, broad-minded, and profoundly curious about new ideas, qualities on regular display in My Mother Was a Computer. How then to justify this two-handled review, which pairs Hayles's latest offering with Half-Real, the first major study from the video game theorist Jesper Juul? In many respects these books belong to different categories. Juul is concerned primarily with cybernetic systems, Hayles mainly with books, though as we shall see, each has something important to say about the other category. Hayles writes in the middle of an illustrious career, having already produced several essential books. Juul is just getting started, but with hardly less ambition, seeking to create the first theory and interpretive model for the increasingly important medium of video games. Nonetheless, each book has good claim to significance within its immediate field, and taken together, they suggest something quite crucial about the future of the humanities. Hayles has once again produced a compelling synthesis of highly complex, widely scattered discourses, ranging with great erudition from Wolfram , Fredkin, and Morowitz to Bolter and Grusin, McGann, and Aarseth. Upon this conceptual framework she builds a series of close readings, touching on books by Neal Stephenson, Stanislaw Lern, and Greg Egan, as well as Shelley Jackson's hypertext, Patchwork Girl (1995), and the simulated creatures of Karl Sims. The achievement is formidable. Long ago, Apple Computer produced a vision of twentyfirst -century computing in which a lazy Stanford professor instructs his laptop to "pull up all the articles I haven't read" on a certain subject. In my imaginary reçut ofthis ad, the computer replies, Now calling Katherine Hayles. She is the great American reader. Juul's scholarship is also comprehensive, though focused in a narrower band. He builds productively on Huizinga, Caillois, and other foundational game theorists, draws intelligently on Thomas Pavel's doctrine of possible worlds, and opens important threads of dialogue with Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, Gonzalo Frasca, Celia Pearce, and other contemporaries in game studies. Juul made a mark for himself in early papers as a muscular, unstinting neoformalist, eagerly clearing ground for a new theory of games. With this book, his theoretical project assumes new subtlety, balanced by a genial irony that comes more easily once one has achieved a certain measure of respect. He notes, for instance, that the recent vogue for game studies constitutes an academic "gold rush" in which not all claims will bear scrutiny. Not so his own insights, which consistently expand our understanding, as in his discussion of the unseeen or "rumor" dimension of game play, or his very suggestive approach to "fiction," ofwhich more presently. The greatest virtue of these two books seems less parochial than ecumenical. Each arrives at a point where dialogue with the other's methods and assumptions seems enormously compelling. Scholars serious about contemporary media and culture should read both. They represent piers or footings on opposite banks of a cultural flow, and if the bridge still needs constructing, Hayles and Juul at least help us understand the challenges to its design. This is as much a matter ofpolitics as doctrine. Both authors quietly address a rift that broke out some years ago between certain members ofthe American scholarly establishment (most prominently, Hayles and Janet Murray) and a party of Scandinavians (Markku Eskelinen, Espen Aarseth, Juul) who protested the use of literary...