October 20, 2004
20 Pixel Avatars and Me
I've been working on a couple of projects lately that are taking up a good portion of my time. One deals with movements within digital spaces and the body, and the other deals with Katherine Hayles' idea of cross-sited media, using Neil Young's
Greendale as an example of a project with a central narrative (re)mediated across different formats (more on this below).
Pasted below is an early (and I stress
early) abstract of my investigation into the impact the Atari 2600 (and early home-console gaming), GUIs and early text gaming had on the rendering of the digital, sexual body:
In 1982, at the height of the early video game boom, a company named Mystique (AMI) released a game called "Custer’s Revenge" for the Atari 2600 home video game system. According to Mystique’s description, the game required players to “rise to the challenge, dodge a tribe of flying arrows and protect your flanks against some downright mean and prickly cactus” in order to accomplish your goal—to reach (and rape) a “ravishing maiden named Revenge” Immediately upon its release, both "Custer’s Revenge" and Mystique were protested vigorously by various groups such as Women Against Pornography, National Organization of Women and the American Indian Community House. Mystique denied any wrongdoing, persisted in its distribution of “adult” games and, eventually, was sued by Atari for “wrongful association”, causing the company to fold (and symbolizing, in many ways, the rapidly hastening dissolution of the video game industry at the time). But what exactly was the significance behind Mystique’s claim that the game presented nothing but “mutually consenting visual images”? And, more importantly, how did Mystique use the hardware of the Atari 2600 and, relatedly, gamers’ conceptions of social and digital space to depict the body’s sexuality?
In this paper, I intend to investigate the ways in which the sexual(ized) body has been digitized and made to perform since the conception of electronic space (as both a temporal and dimensional medium). I plan to look at not only early video gaming (circa 1978-1984), but also early "spoof" text adventures (such as SoftPorn) and the metaphorical GUI (as played out in the Mac's "Virtual Valerie") that followed as media through which the female body is portrayed as an either yielding or enterable corporeality. New technologies of mediation always seem to attach themselves to the exploitation of the female body as a way to “explore” the rendered signals of that space (think stag movies). With electronic media, however, it seems that the body is not only mapped upon the aesthetics of the media itself, but also our (often) subconscious habits and behaviors within that space, be it through texted, joystick-controlled or graphically interfaced virtualities. By exploring these sites, one can not only witness differentiations of “idealized” and controlled sexual bodies (I’ll deal with this definition at length) but also the ways in which these idealizations are endemic of larger cultural justifications for pornographic and coerced sexual intercessions in bodily discourse.
Much has been done with
"Custer’s Revenge" already. I plan to look at how the inputs of gamers, whether through typing, pressing the action button or moving a mouse, are separate from the "new media, old problems" paradigm. Just as some have argued that, say, the point of "Super Mario Brothers" is to jump, not to save the Princess, I think it's equally plausible that the end result of many of Mystique's erotic games is not to simply bring pornography to a new medium but also to filter it through already established playing habits.
And so I come to my question:
Does anyone know of any research that examines the body-as-avatar, especially as it relates to sexuality? I found a small amount on the early days of cyber-pornongraphy but not much on the role of the player or user (
Mary Flanagan is the exception here-- her work on digital activism and gaming is quite good).
Your thoughts, as always, er, as always from this point on at least, are appreciated.
Posted by marcusrp at October 20, 2004 4:06 PM
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Hey -- Jason and Matt both pointed here. Nifty.
If I were you, I'd email Nina Huntemann and ask her for some pointers.
http://www.mediacritica.net/lectures/lectures.html
Thanks, Greglas. The email has been sent!
OK, so I'm months and months late here, but lots of my PhD thesis deals with this kind of stuff - I don't talk specifically about sexuality but I do try to look at how the user/reader/player can be required to enact or perform stuff in order to access the text. There's other stuff in the references that should be useful to you too -
Here: http://jilltxt.net/?p=1206
You might also be interested in Ken Hillis's Digital Sensations, which I'm surprised to find isn't in my bibliography - he does talk about some of this stuff, as far as I remember.
Or perhaps you've already published on this? If so, I'd love to know about it!
Jill-- thanks for the comments. I've been aware of your work for a while now, and I keep meaning to post something on your blog. You beat me to it. I expect to do something with my paper (it just won best paper at an American Studies conference over the weekend) and I'll be sure to let you know when I do. At the very least, I'll be posting it to the blog here for some feedback.
Also-- I'm very interested in some of your work on distributed narratives (see my recent post called "Narrative Networks + Xmen + EA") and I've been thinking about the degrees to which we could consider some affiliations between, say, Montfort's "implementation" and Marvel/ EA's "Rise of the Imperfects". Each type seems to view narrative as something that functions in both fragmentation (or explosion as you call it) and in collaboration with other sites. It's an interesting challenge to try to come up with a way to talk about these sorts of stories, and I think your paper is a big step in the right direction (Henry Jenkins' upcoming chapter on Transmedial Narratives in his book "Convergence" will certainly lay some significant groundwork, too).