Gamer

Every gamer knows those buildings that are just standing in a level for effect, to make it seem like you are standing in a huge, buzzing city. But whenever you try to enter one of those doors, you just bump head-first into some flat texture.

The thing is – the same thing happens in the real world as well from time to time. Which is exactly why the bldgblog's post on subway air vents disguised as houses has such a gamey feel.

Makes you wonder whether you could reverse that – create levels that seemingly consists of pure facades turn into actual buildings, where stuff is hidden, where dungeons open up. Question is – how do you visualise that? Directly followed up by the question of whether the general public is ready to play games that are meta on some level.

Yes, I should still play Robert Yang's Level with Me.

Source: Flickr

It's clearly not the first time I stumbled over the assumption that the mainly heteronormative depiction of gaming characters causes "severe disconnections between player and avatar if the player identifies as a minority".¹

So maybe this seems "logical" at first, but the weird thing is that I can not really relate to that. The character might be male and hetero – as long as he looks good, I don't have a problem with that. After all, most of the cultural products I consume now (and consumed in my childhood – books, films, plays) usually feature heterosexual couples. The world would look pretty bare if I set aside every medium that does not involve (exclusively) a minority.

So, instead of keeping the question "How does a girl gamer feel while playing as Mario, a stereotyped Italian male plumber in Mario Sunshine? How does a gay gamer feel while playing as Jack and being forced to marry a girl or live alone forever in Harvest Moon?" purely rhetoric, it might be time to ask people exactly that. Do they feel disconnected? Can't they play a game because the main character isn't gay, or female, or black? Or do they accept those figures as stand-ins, purely metaphoric representations to deal with the game mechanic, just as a board game token? As parts of a story, where the characters just happen to be male and straight?

Are games just mere entertainment? Or can they be more? Obviously, I strive for the second part – and here is why I might not be that wrong.

This year, for the first time, a video game will appear on the syllabus of a course required for all students at Wabash College, where I teach. For me - and for a traditional liberal arts college founded in 1832 - this is a big deal.

Alongside Gilgamesh, Aristotle's Politics, John Donne's poetry, Shakespeare's Hamlet, and the Tao Te Ching, freshmen at Wabash will also encounter a video game called Portal.

This comes, of course, from the Brainy Gamer, Michael Abbott. And it is a logical consequence: games are becoming more and more mainstream. Practically all kids that are just a bit younger than I am (and a lot of my own generation) have grown up with games, they know the game's language, they can read those texts¹.

But most of the time, they can not analyse it. Just as you have to re-learn to read literature and watch films in university, you have to re-learn to play games.