This is the move Crogan calls a correction to “the elective naivety of much media and games studies, which avoid a frank consideration of computer games as forms that emerge out of ongoing interchanges between war, simulation and contemporary technoculture” (p.14). Technoculture is a uselessly broad term, but Crogan’s project is far more specific anyway: it traces connections between Cold War science and technology and computer games. “Technoculture” is one common name for media and culture’s tendency to inherit the logics of technology (Penley & Ross, 1991), and it’s the feature Crogan finds most absent in today’s literature. They throw the baby out with the bathwater, avoiding the question concerning technoculture’s relation to war and the military that computer games pose so insistently beyond the media effects debate, which itself is unable to articulate it adequately in these terms.
Crogan gently rejoins us all: Most media studies and video game researchers either outright reject or avoid engaging the mainstream moral panic approach to video games and their relation to violence. His caution and ambiguity speaks in a different tenor than we are used to hearing in game studies, which remains largely positive, even euphoric about games (even if its members disagree about the particulars). Nor are they are simply forms evolved directly from military training simulators, nor are they forms entirely separate from such traditions. Not just the digital apparatuses on which the game was made and is played, not just the global network that makes its “passive multiplayer” sharing possible, but something slightly different: “to model phenomena by hypothetically extending and extrapolating its future to see how that future may be predicted, modified, and controlled” (p.13).įor Crogan, video games don’t just share material features in common with computers, like digitization and procedurality. But others, argues Crogan, are less explicit, namely the various military genealogies that make a game like Spore possible in the first place. Some of its connections to militarism are explicit: the routinization of entire genres based on military tactics like “realtime strategy” and the ultimate goal of planetary victory and intergalactic expansionism. The book starts with an understated example: EA/Maxis’s famous title Spore. Crogan makes a surprisingly modest if far-ranging argument in the book, which amounts to: computer games owe much to Cold War military technology, both in their construction and in their conceptualization.
One signal of such accomplishment is a book like Patrick Crogan’s Gameplay Mode: War, Simulation, and Technoculture (2011). Perhaps the era of claim staking in game studies is coming to a welcome and overdue close. Who can deny that games are different from other forms of human activity? But yet, who too can deny that games share much in common with previous forms of human activity?
Such distinctions are sometimes interesting and often convincing. Games are a social practice, say others still, or a formal structure, or a kind of storytelling, or a neoliberal ideology made flesh. Games are a kind of computational media, say others. Games are their own cultural form, extending back for millennia, say some. If game scholars share any intellectual common ground, perhaps it is our tendency to stake claims regarding the scope of game studies. Pretty Hate Machines: A Review of Gameplay Mode by Ian Bogost