Zach Whalen Sometimes Blogs Here

I have recently been disappointed to discover that I have missed deadlines for major conferences I wanted to attend. In some cases, I missed the event before I even remembered that I had wanted to apply. I can chalk this up to being too absorbed in teaching, as well as the hiatus of the re-nascent UPenn CFP list, but ultimately, my head has really just been elsewhere, priority-wise. I even had to back out of an edited collection in the very late stages because I didn’t have time to revise my chapter (I feel terrible about this, by the way).

So now, I’m getting together a submission for a conference I really want to go to, Digital Art and Culture, 2009 at UC Irvine, and since the first deadline (for abstract submissions) is May 1st, I have a few days to think about it. I definitely want to present something from my dissertation and/or the eventual book project it will soon start becoming, so I’m pleased to see that there is a “Software / Platform Studies Theme” being led by Jeremy Douglass and Noah Wardrip-Fruin.

When I was in grad school and I wanted to get ready for a submission like this, I would often find the most success if I crafted my abstract and then passed it around (say, in the Image Lab) for some feedback. Since I don’t have the same kind of immediate community here, I thought I’d post the abstract in progress here on this blog (which I hardly ever use, for now), and invite some feedback through Twitter. I’ve heard Twitter described as kind of like working in a coffee shop where you can bounce ideas off whoever’s in earshot. So this is me using it like that.

The abstract (which is limited to 600 words) is below.

Title: The Videogame Text

Videogames are an important genre of digital media with broad cultural and intellectual relevance. Even the earliest cartridges created for home consoles such as the Atari VCS, Fairchild Channel F, and Mattel Intellivision demonstrate the compelling expressive potential of interactive entertainment. In this paper, I will offer platform-specific, close readings of typographic images within videogames in order to argue that the affordances (both ludic and aesthetic) of computing and gaming systems are emblematized in these designs. Moreover, since the software and hardware used for character generation in these games deal with the hierarchy of image and text (as different types of information) in different ways, a characteristic of digital ontology is proposed as analogy to a modern cultural and institutional hierarchy between visual and textual modes of expression.

The significance of gaming platforms cannot be understated in this context because the differences in methods for storing and retrieving character data comprise the specific textuality of games produced on a specific platform. The Atari VCS lacks a built-in BIOS, nor does it employ a character generating chip, unlike its less successful predecessor, the Channel F. This parsimony of resources on the VCS forced programmers to find creative solutions to basic problems (a process that is well-documented in Bogost and Montfort’s Racing the Beam) so features like text generation and scorekeeping display take on an aesthetic of convenience. By looking for patterns among the variety of lettering and numbering styles of VCS games, it is possible to infer which games comprise moments of innovation or adaptation. By contrast, platforms which offer a single, built-in character set impose a typographic hegemony on their content. This hegemony, which may be considered an in-house style, may even extend to other platforms. For example, the VCS Cartridge Burgertime, published in 1982, employs the same character set for displaying a player’s score as one would find in any contemporary Intellivision game. This demonstrates that this cartridge is a port of the Intellivision game, not the original arcade game. The genetic history of this game is, of course, easy to determine anyway — since the box clearly identifies the publisher of Burgertime for Atari 2600 as Mattel’s “M Network” — but it is significant that this identification holds even without resorting to paratext. The economic history of the game is inscribed into its material substances (literally, burned into the cartridge ROM) and it is indelibly present alongside the game’s diegesis. This trace of influence exerts other pressure on the actual content of the game, but its presence is most unambiguously apparent within the specific character shapes.

Finally, videogame typography occupies a number of liminal spaces. It is both word and image, text and paratext, diegetic and non-diegetic. It is, in other words, marginal, and within a Heads-Up Display interface, one commonly finds textual data residing near the edges of the screen – closer, as it were, to the player than the game world itself. Textual and numeric signification within this boundary space solidifies the distance between the player and the game, even as it constitutes and qualifies her agency within it.

That’s it, so far. I have room for about 80 more words if necessary. I’d like to add a “this is why it’s important” conclusion, and I’ll probably trim some fat in the middle.

Any suggestions? Typos to point out?

Most importantly: does this sound interesting to you? If you saw it in a conference program, and there were competing concurrent sessions, would you come to this one?