The Gamer's Quarter

[Redeye]

[Mr Mustache]

I guess I was thinking along the lines of a few scholarly essays and articles contributors could reference to establish a solid point of departure, facilitating a more literate discourse.

Unfortunately, I'm not really sure what the best free resource is for this sort of thing.
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Straight up

[Nana Komatsu]

Aha, that makes more sense.

The wikipedia article doesn't do a terrible job of explaining it, if you can wrap your head around the concepts. It also has a list of essayists and authors who have helped define the movement (or lack thereof).
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resetbutton.net: videogames for unattractive people

[Ketch]

I've read at least two introductory books on postmodernism, and can't really understand it. hey "postmodernists" can't even settle on one way of writing it !! Is it postmodern POSTmodern, postMODERN or post-modern?

[dhex]

wikipedia surfing is awesome:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-racist_math

(is this post postmodern? or is it reactionary bourgeois finger-pointing? OR IS IT BOTH?)
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[Nana Komatsu]

Wikipedia is great in that lately the vandalism seems to be worse than normal and I'll be reading something that suddenly starts making no sense, and upon refreshing the page it is corrected.

Like when headon was a blue ball reliever or Kurt Vonnegut participated in the Circle Jerking of Dresden.
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resetbutton.net: videogames for unattractive people

[GSL]

[Dracko]

Regardless, it's irritating when people assume postmodern to be synonymous with awful, and are loud about it.

I have a hard time expressing exactly what I take to be postmodern or not, fair enough, and God knows I've read books on the subject. Generally, it's accepted as trends growing beyond, and often against, most other modernist ideas of the early and middle twentieth century. Don't ask me about modernism, especially in literature, because I've got even less of a grasp on that, beyond it being reactionary against romanticism and such.

I tend to view it as a hodgepodge of ideas with clear knowledge and acceptance of its influence, medium, genre trappings and so forth. It's hardly an infertile ground for thought in any case.

Chambers defines it as:

[Scratchmonkey]

If people want a reasonable overview of Modernism, I could do that.

[Dracko]

I'd find that useful.
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[kirkjerk]

Post-Modernism is kind of funny.

I mean, if it would seem to be way paste its expiration date, unless you consider Modernism as kind of an ongoing optimistic thing about the potential of humankind.

And there are certainly aspects of it, especially (from my point of view) the 4th-wall-breaking and genre-self-awareness stuff that have become incredibly trite.

Personally, I think Post-Modernism died with this commercial, or should have.

What big movements have come after post-modernism? That's part of the thing I guess; as a movement "after" another movement, arguably neither of which are going away, it seems harder to make a new movement. Also, post-modernism itself, with its winking self-awareness and ironic detachment, is a too-easy way of making sincerity look silly, sometimes these other potential movements never have a chance.
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==/\/ >_ kirkjerk.com

[Scratchmonkey]

Modernism in a nutshell:

PREAMBLE: Since "Modernism" covers a wide range of artists, artistic mediums and time, vague generalizations are the order of the day. Anything that you refer to as a "movement" is always a certain amount of cobbling together in hindsight. There are always exceptions and transition points (for example, Berlioz and Mahler are "bridges" between Romantic symphonic music and Modernist symphonic music, Impressionism was a transition form into more abstract art and Yeats was a bridge between Romantic and Modernist in poetry). Many people only associate "Modernism" with poetry, with "Modernist literature" being separate, as well as several visual arts movements. I like to lump it all together. Also, this is a dang forum post.

Most people associate the beginning of Modernism with the period around the turn of the century and the start of the First World War. While many Modernist writers, like Yeats, were working earlier, the "movement" as it were didn't really start to become something recognizable until this time.

Pre-WW1 Modernism concentrated on dynamsim and change from the "old order", as represented by the poetry of writers like Pound, the music of composers like Stravinsky and the paintings of artists like Kandinsky and the futurists. Emphasis was placed on abstraction and fracturing of conventional concepts like narrative and representation, the rejection of the ideals of the "old world" with the concept of using new techniques and new technology to create better art (like twelve-tone music) and more practical design (especially industrial design and architecture).

WW1 was the "death knell" of the Romantic era in that it represented the failure of "honor" and other highly upheld ideals that led to piles of bodies gunned down by machine-gun fire and veterans with reconstructed faces, flesh melted away from gas attacks. It also tempered the dynamic optimism of the early Modernist movements, in that it showed that "modern" life was not going to be all nice-looking chairs and a reenvisioning of rhyme and meter. From this came a dominating nihilism and cynicism and reinforced certain earlier tendencies like fascination with "mundane" matters like the basic functions of the body. The concentration on warping and abstracting representation and the human experience became thematically dominated by death and the grotesque.

Apart from the macabre, Modernism pre- and post-war was also obsessed with the de-humanization and alienation that are part of living in "modern society" (quotes mine), with emphasis on the absurdity and controlling nature of modern governments, especially in the light of the various political manueverings that took place between the wars. Modernism was never clearly on one side or another, with plenty of Modernists being involved with the Spanish Civil War and the arguable father of the movement, Ezra Pound, falling in with the Facist governments and eventually being captured as a prisoner of war in Italy (where he continued to write his Cantos, burning his flesh in a metal cage in a village courtyard).

Post WW2, as happens with all successful revolutions, Modernism became the norm. Depending on who you talk to, this is when Post-Modernism began, either as a reaction against or an extension of, Modernism. (This is of course more complex than a single sentence; however, there's probably enough references in this post to start down any number of roads and get there plus I'm gettin' tired.)

some Art movements associated with Modernism:

Imagism
Vorticism
Dada
Futurism
Cubism
Expressionism
Surrealism
Absurdism

some Artists associated with Modernism:

Ezra Pound (maybe the most Modernist dude ever)
T.S. Eliot
Gertrude Stein
Ernest Hemingway
James Joyce
W.B. Yeats
Wassily Kandinsky
Igor Stravinsky
Henry Cowell
Hilda Doolittle
Henri Gaudier-Brzeska
Franz Kafka
Garcia Lorca
Arnold Schoenberg
the Bauhaus design group
Le Corbusier
Albert Camus
Egon Schiele (and Klimt, except Schiele is way cooler)

[Nana Komatsu]

Awww yeah my boy Kafka up in this hizzay!
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resetbutton.net: videogames for unattractive people

[Dracko]

[Scratchmonkey]

And, uh, all videogames are postmodern. It's because games are a postmodern medium. That sounds horribly pretentious, it's not really.

Just think about it this way: you're never actually playing the game, you're playing a representation of the game as interpreted by the console and then through output fed to the player:

- video through screens
- sound through speakers
- tactile input through rumble or other methods

You never actually directly interact with the information on the cartridge/disk/storage medium. In a way, the act of playing a videogame is a microcosm of the whole postmodern understanding of "the text", with the information on the storage medium playing the role of artistic intention.

Okay, so maybe it's a little pretentious.

Ketch is probably asking about games that are postmodern thematically, so I'm not really being helpful.

[Cycle]

I always thought games as post-modern since there is never really any fourth wall to speak of.

Also I agree with Kirkjerk earlier. Most post-modern work I see these days is just boring and feels dated, but when it's good, it's really good.
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[kirkjerk]

[Scratchmonkey]

[kirkjerk]

[Scratchmonkey]

[dhex]

after postmodernism is farce. we live in the age of farce.
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[kirkjerk]

[Harveyjames]

So pop culture references in games!

Browsing VGMuseum, I'm noticing that roughly half the games that came out for the Amiga seem to have a reference to Bill and Ted or Wayne's World in the end credits.





Also I discovered this little gem:

[dessgeega]

vigilante has some pretty great cutscenes.

when terrorists kidnap madonna, it's time to take the law into your own hands
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[kirkjerk]

[Perseus]

So uh... anybody care to define the term "postmodern"? I used to think I knew what it meant, but reading this thread has me completely confused.

[Mister Toups]

[Nana Komatsu]

[Mister Toups]

[Perseus]

[Nana Komatsu]

To be artsy and cool and appeal to the HARDCORE SERIOUS GAMERS who inhabit forums like this one.
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resetbutton.net: videogames for unattractive people

[GSL]

I concur.

When groups of people discuss postmodernism in media such as games and books, it also makes me think of that scene in The Princess Bride where Inigo remarks to Vizzini, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

[Dracko]

[GSL]

[Scratchmonkey]

[Mister Toups]

[Shapermc]

Whoa! Hey now. There's room enough for both things.

Also, Wes didn't write the mission statement, that was a group effort by the staff, he just posted it. Not to say he didn't have a hand in writing it, but it wasn't a solo effort is what I mean.

Did I mention that issue 8 comes out soon!
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“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

[SuperWes]

[player 2]

I think the easiest way to understand postmodernism is through modernism. When modernism started kicking around was when people really started to think and live globally. People started believing in a universal kind of perfection. With that you have all these philosophers who wanted to decipher the world and present it to the world in little pamphlets, artists who stopped using subject matter and drew red yellow and blue squares, and so on and so forth. Post modernism is named post modernism not because of a realization that universal perfection was impossible, but because of a rejection of universal perfection and an effort to realize the opposite. As such DuChamp follows Picasso only because Picasso came first chronologically. Any kind of "self awareness" or "awareness" of the medium is just a side effect of the rejection.
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Wii #: 8749 9109 9732 3653

"It is a peaceful way of understanding life, to play"
_Marcel Duchamp

[Scratchmonkey]

Duchamp and Picasso were contemporaries.

Fountain was 1917 and Guernica was 1937, just to put their most famous works into perspective. Duchamp's art may have been more "postmodern" than what Picasso did, to claim that the former followed from the latter would be wrong.

[GSL]

[Scratchmonkey]

Think of it this way: if writing about subjective experiences with games (or any text, for that matter) is the end result, does how the writer got there matter? Does it change the end result if somebody gets there through formalism?

It does sound like you've got some kind of Issues with academia, since you've decided that it has no value simply because it's formalism, which suggests all kinds of things to me that I'd rather not get into on the Intertron with somebody I don't know; I will say that I find that kind of attitude as equally disturbing as that of the most head-up-his-own-ass graduate student.

(Or to put it another way: we're talking about videogames, which have no real practical application to anybody's life. So what makes this intagibility more worthwhile than the intangibility of formalism?)

[Ketch]

Ah damn, I knew I shouldn't have put the word post in my post.

Anyway, I think that one of the main points of postmodernist stuff is that it points out that it is only telling a story about one tiny subset of the population. Ie. That it is talking about white rich men, rather than poor sub-saharan women's lives, or eskimo's or Japanese Gangsters. It tries to stop the establishment of broad assumptions about things.

Anyway, having 'done' university, a French degree no-less. I have a bit of a grudge against Sartre, Lacan, Marguerite Duras, Simone de Beauvoir, Camus, Rousseau, etc.

[Perseus]

[dhex]

[Perseus]

[dhex]

not really. (you can find archetypes in anything if you distill long enough; i.e. white noise is by don delillo is the grail mythos with the main character's son as parsifal) but i don't pay that much attention to the stories. or another way, the stories people tell about games are different than the stories people tell about movies or books, because they're buried in the experience of playing it, player skill levels, etc. my experience of fear, for example, has little to do with the story and a lot to do with the environment, with which i interact in various ways, depending on difficulty levels, etc.
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[kirkjerk]

[Dracko]

[dmauro]

bettar graphix = modernism, wario ware = dada, Wii = postmoderism, neXt-gen vs. sustainable gen = WWII