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Afterword: The Frog Critic
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Afterword: The Frog Critic Ian Bogost I never know what to say when people ask me, “What’s your favorite game?” I’m bad with favorites. But it’s an easy half-personal, half-business question that interviewers and auditorium audiences like to throw as a softball. It gives them a sense of their interlocutor. It’s polite conversation. In response, I usually hedge, talking about the games I’ve been playing recently, or the ones that have interested me over time, or the ones that I’ve found the most influential in my own work as a critic and a creator. It’s an unsatisfying answer, and it probably seems disingenuous. Really, my audiences must think, shouldn’t this guy be more excited about the object in support of which he purportedly advocates? I’m sure I’ll tug at no heartstrings for saying this, but for me, video games are work. They’re what I do for a living—as both a researcher and a developer. That’s not to say that I dislike them or that I’m bitter for having the ridiculously good fortune of being able to make and play and write about this wild, magic medium for a living. It just means that I hold it at arm’s length, inquisitive, suspicious even. What can games do? What have they done? How do we make them do it? These questions require a certain distance. As scholars, we should be somewhat disinterested—not entirely disinterested, of course, but somewhat detached. Such an idea runs counter to the notion of the aca-fan, an idea advanced by media scholar Henry Jenkins and embraced heavily within media studies . This somewhat awkward portmanteau signifies the academic-cumfanatic , a critic who allows the love of a work, genre, or form to inspire and guide his or her scholarly pursuit. For the aca-fan, fanaticism opens the door to deep engagement rather than risking its oversight. When Espen Aarseth joked some years ago that game studies risked becoming World of Warcraft studies, he meant it as a provocational warning. But there really are corners of media studies content to call themselves 162 Afterword: The Frog Critic Buffy Studies, Lost Studies, or what have you. They wear their fandom as a badge of commitment and honor. Aca-fandom is most frequently associated with scholars of popular culture like television and the Internet. But it doesn’t take too much squinting to see that just about every form of scholarship is a kind of weird fandom. This is perhaps more easily seen in the humanities, where scholars of Shakespeare or Homer are no less susceptible to eccentric, absent-minded, blinkered commitment to a single object, one that goes well beyond reason and normalcy. But arguably, aca-fandom extends just as easily to science and engineering, fields in which dorkship and obsession drive insular , laser-focused infatuation with protein structures, algorithm optimization , polymer synthesis, aeronautical logistics, or any number of other specialties. In truth, all academics are aca-fans first. All are driven by freakish overcommitment to a particular object or idea. The PhD is a credential that skews the world like a funhouse mirror, stretching one subject to comical proportions while shrinking everything else into insignificance. It’s this threat of madness, perhaps, that makes me withdraw when people ask about my personal video game obsessions. I fear such obsessions. They dot the landscape like countless rabbit holes, all threatening to slurp me into so many video game wonderlands. Yet the alternative is likewise stark. If Lewis Carroll’s Alice best analogizes the lurid, carnal indulgence of favoritism and fanaticism, then T. S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock characterizes its opposite, the prim, formal, timorous cerebralism that worries so much at the consequences of doing anything that it dooms itself to doing nothing. If Alice is a Pollyanna, Prufrock is a cynic. If Alice asks what could possibly go wrong, Alfred asks what could possibly go right. If Alice surrenders to curiosity, Alfred yields to ennui. This book offers a compelling alternative to this dichotomy. It shows us an alternative to both Alice and Alfred, to both groupie and skeptic. This is how I understand Jan Holmevik when he calls himself an amphibian: capable of breathing when immersed but likewise content when dried out on the rocks. The one does not long for the other. Neither takes priority. Despite the implications of their visages, the frog and the newt are not apathetic...