analysis

(Re-)Watching The X-Files

Chuck Caruso Conspiracy Theories, Crime & Detective Fiction, Cultural Criticism, Film & Television, Science Fiction & Fantasy Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

Thanks to Netflix streaming services, I’ve recently been re-watching The X-Files in order from the beginning. I have an abiding interest in conspiracy theories so the show is a natural fit for me. However, while I enjoyed the numerous episodes I saw back during the show’s original run from 1993 to 2002, my life at that time wasn’t such that I could watch anything too religiously. So I missed a lot.

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For the most part, the episodes worked as stand-alones since this era when shows like The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer were first pioneering their ideas of multi-season story arcs, a bold move back in the 90’s, before the advent of Netflix or Hulu or other “on demand” television providers. It’s true that shows were released on VHS tapes but these still had nowhere near the social currency currently enjoyed by DVD boxed sets in the 2000’s, and they lacked the commentary tracks, alternate takes, and other special features now routinely available on DVD.

The release of shows in DVD boxed sets marked the potential for endless re-watching, but binge-watching a series doesn’t seem to have gained quite the popularity it currently enjoys until shows started appearing via online streaming. As few as five or ten years ago, you still would have had to swap out the DVD in your machine every hour or two. Now you don’t even have to buy anything, just subscribe to an inexpensive monthly service, and if you do nothing but keep watching, Netflix streaming will run episode after episode of a show one full season at a time, and it even conveniently edits out the opening credits so you don’t have to sit through those repeatedly.

Instead, you can stare in full spectatorial wonder without so much as touching your TV’s remote or the screen of your iPad from sunrise to sunset. Or perhaps, as is more commonly the case, from sunset to sunrise, when you groggily turn on your side and hope to catch a short nap before the world expects you as a civilized person to make your first dignified appearance for the day.

I’m not much of a binge-watcher, but clearly the current technology has opened new frontiers in sleep deprivation and social catch-up-ism. Miss the first season or three of that show everyone seems to be gabbing about at the water cooler? No problem. Just bluff your way through a cursory chat and then power through the requisite material over the weekend. Just like with Wikipedia and Shazam, we’ve never had such rapid ability to fake and amass cultural literacy. There’s really no excuse anymore for not watching everything.

Personally, I tend to watch shows and films like I read books, slowly to savor them and to give some attention to detail. For me, the joys of analysis always overmatch our contemporary drive for sheer consumption. I recall a few terms back when I had an undergrad boast to me that his Netflix queue showed that he’d watched over 10,000 films, but I wasn’t overly impressed by this factoid since he had a hard time performing a decent critical analysis of any of the stories or novels we read in class. Shoveling massive amounts of media into your head doesn’t mean you’re actually digesting it,, which is why I have a bit of a hard time watching things that don’t satisfying my interpretive impulse.

Fortunately, only half way through the first season I’m already finding The X-Files holds up. Yes, the clothing and hairstyles are a bit dated. And the technology is occasionally quaint, like when Scully gets paged at dinner and needs to find a pay phone or when Mulder develops old-fashioned rolls of film in a chemical bath or gets lost in the woods and can’t call anyone for help or look up his location on GPS. But these are minor details. The central premise of the series and various phenomena and conspiracies taken up by the individual episodes are still as rewarding and intriguing as they ever were.

I’m taking notes as I go and plan to use episodes along the way to launch into broader discussions here. For example, the pilot starts with the reliable and rational Scully first receiving her assignment to work with conspiracy-minded Mulder. Her exchange with the FBI bosses and her subsequent initial encounter with Mulder warrant some closer scrutiny. Similarly, the second episode, about a missing Air Force pilot, contains the series’ first truly uncanny moment and it’s something I think could serve as the basis for a larger exploration of Freud’s notion of the unheimlich.

Not that all my planned posts will be so densely theoretical, diving into psychological or philosophical esoterica. Not at all. It’s television after all. It’s meant to be entertaining. So you can count on me to also explain why I think The X-Files could be looked at as the anti-Scooby Doo. See, fun!

Finally, this particular post launches a couple new categories for my blog, “television” and “conspiracy theories.” I’m hoping the introduction of both these topics will prompt me to blog more regularly. Next time I write about The X-Files, I plan to start by examining its trio of catch phrases: “The truth is out there,” “Trust no one,” and “I want to believe.” Evocative statements, but what does each of these really mean?

Teaching Video Game Theory, Part Two

Chuck Caruso Academia, Cultural Criticism, Video Games Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

What Video Game Study Can Do for Academia

In my last post (“Teaching Video Game Theory, Part One: What Academic Study Can Do for Video Games”), I argued that video games deserve critical attention. But the question remains whether video games have anything essential to offer in return. What benefits can the inclusion of video games offer to Culture & Media Studies?

Well, in many ways the humanities are suffering. It’s no secret that universities around the world are in financial straits. While cutting budgets and raising tuition, administrations are looking at the numbers. And the liberal arts are not pulling their weight. According to a New York Times article about the global crisis in liberal arts, the number of students studying the humanities at Harvard has halved in the last 50 years. Yet another NYT piece about waning student interest in the humanities reports that although nearly half of faculty salaries at Stanford University go to professors in the liberal arts, only 15% of recent Stanford grads have majored in those disciplines. Those are alarming trends and suggest the humanities are fundamentally unsustainable. At least as they are currently imagined.

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In response to this crisis in the humanities, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences issued a report last year stating: “At a time when economic anxiety is driving the public toward a narrow concept of education focused on short-term payoffs, it is imperative that colleges, universities, and their supporters make a clear and convincing case for the value of liberal arts education” (32). This report also stressed the importance of facing the new challenges of the Digital Age.

So, how do we do that? How do we make the case that a liberal arts education is worthwhile especially with the advent of the Digital Age?

Well, teaching video games is a start. We need to bring this powerful cultural medium into the classroom and engage students on their own terms. Over the past decade I’ve become aware that fewer and fewer of our students read for enjoyment. But nearly all of them use significant amounts of their free time to play video games. Male or female, younger or older, they choose to experience these video game “texts” of their own free will.

I already argued last time for the significance of video games as cultural artifacts. Every year more academic studies of video games are published and certain trends of intellectual thought about games have already begun to emerge.

All of this scholarly focus on video games is performing interesting and culturally important work; however, as academics we need to do more to translate this emerging discipline into the classroom experiences of our students.

They crave it. Not only that, but they deserve it. And so do we.

Video games can revitalize the humanities.

In order the remind the world how valuable a liberal arts education can be, we first need to entice students into taking our classes and then we need to make the classroom experience meaningful enough that they want to pursue degrees in our disciplines. When students are clamoring to study the humanities, financial support become available.

Three keys to attracting students are relevance, fun, and depth.

Relevance. Students want to take classes and study subject that connect to their actual lives and provide them with better ways of understanding the real (and often virtual) world they inhabit on a daily basis. For a class to be relevant, it needs to provide students with the analytical tools that help them interpret the information that bombards us from every side. Part of this is learning to ask the right questions. Part of it is learning how to understand the stuff our social interactions are made of – language and ideas and assumptions and rhetorical strategies. When it comes to teaching critical thinking and effective reading and writing skills, the humanities are not just relevant but central. There’s a reason two out of the three basic R’s of education are in the humanities! Yes, ‘rithmetic is important, but try surviving a day in the Digital Age without reading and writing.

Fun. Students learn best when they’re having fun. This is why so many young people retain seemingly endless minutia about the video games they play (which they experience as fun) and recall so little about that boring world history or chemistry class where they were forced to memorize dates or formulae. Fun lights up the brain like a Christmas tree. Just look at all those presents! By contrast, boredom shuts down the mind. “Eat your peas” and “do your chores” do not inspire enthusiasm and engagement. Psychological studies bear this out and pedagogues are already busily trying to create “useful” video games that can surreptitiously indoctrinate players with real world information.

Depth. This one is trickier, but in some ways it’s the secret ingredient because it’s key to what students crave from classes. Relevance and fun are both very important, but alone they cannot complete the circuit of education. The avid mind of a student wants to think new thoughts, to make surprising connections, to explore uncharted areas, to see the ordinary as strange and to view the strange as ordinary, to learn how to ask important questions and how to find interesting answers, to discover the mysterious joys of an intellectual life.

Video games offer a powerful way to provide students with relevance, fun, and depth. Not only is that good education; it’s where the humanities shine.

**This essay is cross-posted on the Marylhurst Blog.**

Teaching Video Game Theory, Part One

Chuck Caruso Academia, Cultural Criticism, Video Games Tags: , , , , , , , 8 Comments

What Academic Study Can Do for Video Games

This past spring I presented an academic paper on issues of spatial representation in the video game Portal at the annual Society for Textual Studies Conference. My paper fit well with papers by my fellow panelists, including Marylhurst’s English Department chair Meg Roland, who offered important new insights on early modern maps, and recent Marylhurst alumna Jessica Zisa, who presented a smart paper on social and natural spaces in Sebold and Thoreau. As it turned out, the juxtaposition of our various analyses provoked a lively discussion with the audience. But as we jostled out of the room after our session, I couldn’t help overhearing one of the curmudgeonly older professors grumbling, “I can’t believe there was an academic paper about a video game!”

But why not? Did I do something wrong? Was I squandering my mental energies and straining my peers’ patience with a topic beneath scholarly attention?

As you can imagine, I’ve thought about this a lot for a while, but the more I considered the issue the more important it seemed to me that I continue studying video games.

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In fact, I “doubled down,” as they say. I’ve already presented another conference paper on the video game L.A. Noire‘s adaptation of the detective genre, and this fall I’m attending a semiotics conference to discuss the paradoxical fantasies of military first-person shooter games. Not only that, but I developed a reading list that turned into a syllabus, and this summer I’m proud to say that I’m teaching Marylhurst’s first ever Video Game Theory class.

So, I suppose I have some explaining to do. Why is a 19th-century Americanist with expertise in textual studies and psychoanalytic criticism spending his time playing video games? Even worse, why is he talking about it in public?

Video games are no longer the exclusive province of nerdy teenaged boys who live in their parents’ basements. Recent demographics studied by the Entertainment Software Associations show that over half of American households own a dedicated gaming console, the average gamer is 31 and nearly 40% of gamers are over 36. While men do still edge out women among the gaming population, currently 48% of gamers are women.

And, beyond these basic stats, we really need to recognize that it’s not just about online fantasy games or military shooter games. Just about everybody has a game or two on their phone these days. Angry Birds anyone? Farmville? Flow? These games are changing how and when we communicate with each other. Some people use Words with Friends as an excuse to chat more frequently with friends and relatives over distance. Others use a regular online gaming night to maintain group friendships across the miles that separate their homes.

Games have been adapted to create fitness programs like Fitbit and Nike+. There are community-oriented good Samaritan game-type apps like The Extraordinaries app or the app that notifies CPR-trained specialists if someone in their vicinity needs help. Apart from the studied benefits of video games helping autistic kids adapt to social rules and learn how to communicated, there are also games specifically designed to help a variety of medical patients recover better and faster.

Beyond the stereotypes about video games that persist, what are some of the other reasons we need to think critically about this topic? For one thing, video games are big business, with the gaming industry generating over $21.5 billion last year. 2013’s top-selling game, Grand Theft Auto V, made over a billion dollars in its first three days. Compare that to other media. Top-grossing film Iron Man 3 also made over $1 billion in worldwide ticket sales, but it took nearly a month to hit that mark. Runaway bestseller Fifty Shades of Grey shattered every publishing record by selling 70 million copies in the U.S.–in both print and e-books. Counting those all at $15 (the print price), that’s also over a $1 billion, but it took a couple years to reach and it’s exceedingly rare.

Yes, I know it’s funny to hear an English professor measuring cultural significance by looking at sales figures. I know money isn’t the be all and end all of social values, but it’s a strong indicator. We all fundamentally “know” that books are obviously better and more serious works of art than movies, and even TV shows and comic books are infinitely more important than video games.

And yet… can we really just assume (or even argue) that either Fifty Shades of Gray or Iron Man 3 is an inherently superior cultural artifact than Grand Theft Auto V? In fact, do we even want to try to assert that position?

Granted, part of our job in academia is to serve as a standard bearer for important works from the past, to ensure they are not forgotten. As a 19th-century literary scholar, I’m acutely aware of this duty and I’m proud to say that I routinely inflict canonical “high literature” on my students, many of whom I actually convince to enjoy the experience and continue it of their own free will. But part of our job too should be showing our students how to use these powerful analytical tools at our disposal to analyze cultural artifacts that the general public chooses to experience on their own. What good are these various apparatuses we develop if they only apply to analyzing the works of “high culture” that Academia elevates to special, masterpiece status? Shouldn’t we also be able to apply our tools to “low-brow” works created primarily to entertain?

I think so. And I’m not alone. In fact, English professors have been expanding the canon from the very beginning. It’s a slow and painful battle, but notice how (despite the vestigial name) English Departments now routinely teach American literature. We take it for granted now of course, but that wasn’t always the case. We even teach post-colonial “world” literature and regularly include works of “popular” fiction in our academic purview. It’s much the same throughout the humanities. For years now Culture and Media scholars have been analyzing films and television and comic books, so isn’t it time we stretch ourselves to include video games in our conversation?

Whatever one thinks of them, video games are cultural artifacts. They are “texts” of a sort, and as such they communicate meaning. Furthermore, as we know, people are choosing more and more to experience these video game “texts” on their own in preference to reading or even to watching films. So, isn’t it better for us to teach our students how to apply critical thinking and analytical tools to these new texts?

It doesn’t mean that we will quit teaching Chaucer and Shakespeare. Not at all. But it means that we must also find a way to discuss Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty.

*A slightly edited version of this multi-part essay is being cross-posted on the Marylhurst Blog.*