The past two weeks have been a bit dizzying--full of excitement and possibility and adventure within and beyond the walls of the academy. Here's some recap, and preview of up-coming stuff I'm involved in. SCMS: Society for Cinema and Media StudiesThis year's Chicago conference was a time of great connection and re-connection. The media archaeology panel was a pure success; I've been encouraged to flush out my feminist critique of media archaeology and pursue publication. As a grad student, this was feedback I very much needed--I operate in a department largely unaware of the emergent trends in media studies, and my engagement with the field outstrips that of my advisor. Demoing this work for folks who are "stakeholders" in this conversation, and having them socially "sign off" on the project was just the POV I needed to confidently move forward with what I deeply, naggingly know is work I have to do. Other academic highlights included the "Debugging Terminology in Video Game History," which previewed some of the great work forthcoming from Henry Lowood and Raiford Guin's co-edited Game History Lexicon, the Platform Studies Roundtable (do we have any agreement on what "platform studies" means? absolutely not), and the Digital Networks panel, which included Patrick Jagoda's breathtaking presentation on network aesthetics. As the Sounding Out! blog reported, the terrain of the conference is shifting; new domains in media studies--sound studies, materialist media studies, videogame studies--are capsizing the long-standing primacy of film (and even television) at this conference. Many of the young scholars I spoke with--ABD grads and jr. faculty--are curious to see if SCMS will be able to hem these increasingly divergent interests together, or if there may be some need for media studies to strike out on its own. Where IS the big-league media studies conference that isn't a tack-on to some other discipline? (as we experience at SCMS, 4H, MLA, ACLA, ICA, etc.) Marketplace TechReport InterviewWhile at SCMS, my Marketplace Techreport interview aired on NPR! It was an aweing experience to meet the famed and insightful David Brancaccio in this context. David has been carrying a beat on "Who is Tech?" and paying special attention to the issues around sexism in the game industry. My report was, in part, to provide alternative histories that can help us be more thoughtful about how we frame these debates today. Different GamesDifferent Games is fast approaching! This conference is the first of its type organized around issues of difference, diversity and intersectionality in game design, game scholarship and game criticism. The conference was created by Sarah Schoemann of NYU-PolyTech, and is co-organized by myself and Sarah (with the assistance and input of many!). Different Games will be hosted by the Technology, Culture and Society Department at Poly, April 26-27. We'll have tracks of academic papers, design presentations, a game arcade, workshops, and breakouts. Our keynotes are Mary Flanagan and Celia Pearce, and the event will also include presentations by Anna Anthropy, Mattie Brice, Adrienne Shaw, Raiford Guins, Nick Fortugno, and lots of other ballers, big and small. The schedule is still pending, but should be out soon. This conference could not have been better timed to be in sync with current events in the game industry. Personal Best @ NYU Game CenterAs part of an effort to build excitement about Different Games, and also bring attention to feminist issues in game scholarship, Sarah Schoemann (TCS, PolyTech) and Toni Pizza (NYU, Game Center) have been working together on a lecture series called Personal Best: A Series on Feminist Game Design Practices. Personal Best first featured Jessica Hammer, speaking on designing games for Ethopian teenage girls. I'll be the second figure in Personal Best, speaking on Roberta Williams (surprise!). There will be new content here, compared to my Provost Talk--including info on the larger West Coast game industry Sierra was a part of, and a more theoretical examination of why women's play has been left out of early game history. Full verbage below; Facebook invite here. Talk Title: Before We Were "Gamers": Roberta Williams, Sierra On-Line and How We Write Women into Video Game History
Personal Best is excited to welcome our second speaker, Laine Nooney whose lecture will cover some of the founding hits of Roberta Williams' game design career and offer insight on how Williams' understood her own design practice, put in the context of Sierra On-Line as an important company of the 1980s home computer software boom. Furthermore, the contributions of Williams will be framed within the larger context of video game history, and focus on how women like Roberta Williams aren't simply "additions" to a historically male gaming narrative but could actually challenge what we understand the history of games to be. So Ray and I have just finished our 2nd run of edits/feedback on When Games Went Click: The Tennis for Two Story. We're imagining the video should be out by mid-to-late Spring semester. Above is a "movie poster" I made for Ray after the shooting finished in the fall, as a gift; eventually we're going to have them made into posters to hang in the department office and in our own homes. It isn't every day you cut a video about the first analog computer game!
For those interested in the documentary, here's some gentle teasers. The documentary will include interviews with four figures:
Sometime after the video is done, it will be available to the public on YouTube, hosted by SBU's YouTube channel. There will also likely be a main screening at SBU, and hopefully I'll be working with a friend to have some local screenings at more small-scale sites around NYC. Check this space or follow me on twitter for updates! This post will be adding some more details and some of my own aesthetic analysis to my last post, Illustration in Video Game History. I've been extraordinary lucky to have caught the attention of Roberta Williams' brother-in-law, John Williams (Ken Williams' brother). John managed most of Sierra On-Line's marketing, especially in the very early days when the whole enterprise was basically under his charge. He watched my Provost Talk, felt that my analysis resonated with him, and has been kindly letting me pick his brain about Sierra, particularly their marketing. Following up on some questions illustration dealer and historian Robert Reed has asked in the comments section of the last blog, about how much Sierra paid for these illustrations: According to John, the very earliest stuff was (roughly guessing 1980-1982) was done for around $100 a pop (about 40 bucks today), and mostly composed by local high schoolers and rouge Coarsegold hippies (see examples of some early 1981 On-Line ads below). The Stinson piece, however (see my last post) which is from 1984 and part of the black box releases of the Hi-Res Adventure series, was commissioned at about $800-1000, according to John Williams. Inflation calculators tell me this about about the equivalent of $2000 - $2400 then, or $300 – $380 now--which sounds about right, although low, for the quality of the work, but perhaps Roger Reed will correct me on this? These prices were inclusive of full license to reproduce the work on boxes, ads, promotion, etc. John Williams has also informed me that Stinson also did the artwork for the computer arcade-style game Marauder (1982), and possibly Ultima I and II (1983 and 1982, respectively, see explanation below), as well as some of On-Line's competitors. My assessment of these covers is formally speculative, I'm not an expert at these matters, but do have a BFA in graphic design that helps inform my readings. So, it's a fact that Ultima I and II had the same artist—the castle from the Ultima I box is actually just from the back of the Ultima II box (see back and front of Ultima II box here). Sierra's Ultima I came a year AFTER the Ultima II release, because it was simply an Atari 8-bit port of the game, which had been originally published in 1981 for the Apple II by California Pacific Computer Co.
I struggle to decide whether Stinson was also the artist on the Ultima games. Marauder's main figure has a similar ¾ posture to the figure in Ultima II, and the helmets and guns strongly share stylistic qualities. However, the Marauder figure's pose is much more awkward (as are those of The Wizard and the Princess). Very stiff, physiologically improbable, and the detail in the clothing is overworked. By contrast, the foreshortening of the left thigh in Ultima II shows a good degree of competence with drawing human anatomy--whereas Marauder and W&P seem to purposefully avoid the more natural poses that would require foreshortening of the legs. Yet again, the foreshortening of the gun arm in Marauder is much stronger than the over-cocked arm in Ultima II. I'm not sure how to read that a-genital winged troll/orc thing—part of what might be tripping me up is a difference in materials used, as I realize now that I can't tell if these covers are brush painted or airbrushed. The castle on the back of the Ultima II cover seems telling to me. While very structurally similar to that of The Wizard and the Princess--with its tropey fantasy illustration standards of turrets, flagpoles, jagged stone walkway and the balancing presence of a spherical object in the sky (the wizard's blast in W&P, a moon in Ultima II)--the Ultima II castle is much more convincingly rendered, the atmospherics more smooth, and the outline of the castle against the sky less jarring. Given that The Wizard and the Princess cover was painted in 1984, and the Ultima II cover designed in 1982, I'd actually argue that what Stinson did was a riff on the work of whoever did the Ultima II cover (or maybe he was just paid a ton more; Ultima II was a HUGE deal, and Richard Garriot demanded invested, professional packaging and marketing--which I guess shows you what the standard was in the early 1980s). Was Stinson just cheaply copying his previous Ultima work for The Wizard and the Princess? Would love feedback from what others think who are versed in these matters—I'm always in the mood to refine my aesthetic detective skills! I'd also be interested to know, from players, if these settings actually represented real locales in any of these games (was there a castle far away on a stone walkway? a swamp?) With all my writing, I've not yet gotten around to playing The Wizard and the Princess--although I know, at least, to LOOK at rocks and watch out for scorpions :) |
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