Game Work: Language, Power, and Computer Game Culture

2 A Grammar of Gamework

At precisely 6:00 p.m. Mountain Time, Sara dials into her Internet service provider, hisses “y-e-s-s-s” when she snags a clean data line, and doubleclicks on a screen icon labeled heavy gear. As soon as the battered plate armor interface appears, she rapidly navigates her way through the selections: Main Menu, Multiplayer, Campaign. A tactical information screen replaces the game’s setup interface: dirty blue neon piping outlines various panels that provide details about her other teammates and her Gear’s weaponry, armor, and maneuverability statistics. Two other panels, outlined in black, give a summary of her team’s mission and display a reconnaissance video that is meant to help clarify her objectives. After reviewing the information, Sara punches the launch button and in thirty seconds ¤nds herself looking out of the cockpit of a four-story-tall battle robot and across a vast desert of shifting red sand. Sara has come to ¤nd the deep rumble of the Gear’s enormous engine both soothing and exhilarating, and she scans her heads-up display with satisfaction: weapons, stealth, armor status, radar, speedometer, and navigational instruments. She taps into the tactical computer to see if the other members of Red Tide Squad, an all-female team of Gear Commanders, are assembled. “Red Monkey to all Red Tide pilots, identify,” Sara—aka Red Monkey— types into the communications console. One by one, four other players send their identi¤cation signatures, and each of their exact positions appears on a satellite view of their headquarters that Sara has called up on her screen. “Red Rose, A-O-K.” “Red Menace, all systems go.” 2 A Grammar of Gamework “Red Baroness, check. Good to see you, Red Monkey!” “Red Eye, ready, Squad Leader.” Sara grins a tight-lipped smile, furrowing her brow as she quickly types, “I’m transmitting your nav coordinates now. Stay in a loose right echelon until we hit Nav 1, then peel from the back to your respective stations . Radio silence and passive radar ’til ¤rst contact. Keep your eyes and ears open, girls, and let’s bring the Curse of the Red Tide down on their HQ. Move out!”  One of the challenges of describing how meaning is made in a particular situation is discerning an explanation that doesn’t compromise that situation ’s culturally transitory nature. This is especially dif¤cult with phenomena that reside in the public sphere. Contemporary rhetoricians like Barry Brummett , William Covino, and Cynthia Selfe, for example, know well the dif¤culties of describing the techniques by which horror movies, Bruce Springsteen songs,or university Web pages manipulate an audience’s consciousness. Such popular experiences play on people’s imaginations in so many ways and depend on so many factors that the idea of developing a uni¤ed explanation for them is a daunting prospect, to say the least. The complexity—or even impossibility—of such a project should not, however, deter scholars from trying to understand these meaning-making processes. Such attempts can discover both the details and the broader contexts of particular manifestations of cultural in®uence such that even though they are incomplete, they are still extraordinarily revealing. Two consequences of the critical revelations that emerge from these attempts are that they create opportunities for transformative action and that they highlight the fact that critique is a never-ending, never-perfectible process. This chapter proposes one approach to revealing these processes’ work within the context of computer games and the people and industries linked to them. While this approach is strongly in®uenced by rhetorical theory and critical cultural studies, readers not well versed in these disciplines needn’t fear. Computer game studies is new to most people, no matter what their background, and for that reason the ¤rst part of this chapter serves as a brief orientation, particularly to concepts like “rhetoric,” “dialectic,” and “ideology.” Also, because there is some debate over what exactly constitutes a “computer game” (not to mention why I prefer that term over “video game”), I will propose a de¤nition of that too. By situating these terms and concepts at the center of a ®exible critical method, analyses of the computer game complex—the combina28 grammar of gamework tion of computer games, gamers, and the industries that support them—can be developed. At the end of the chapter I will suggest how the method I have proposed can...