December 5, 2022: Constitutional Contexts: The Articles of Confederation

[On December 7^th, 1787, Delaware became the first state to ratify the U.S. Constitution. So for the 235^th anniversary of that historic moment, this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Constitutional contexts, leading up to a special weekend post on present issues and debates!]

On what was drastically different in the new nation’s first unifying documents, and what wasn’t.

Until researching this post, I hadn’t really understood just how much the Articles of Confederation paralleled the American Revolution. I knew they went into effect in March 1781, while the Revolution was still very much ongoing, but it turns out that that timing was due solely to how long it took all 13 states to ratify the Articles (Maryland was the last state to do so, on March 1, nearly two years after Delaware had become the 12^th to ratify); they were initially proposed in the immediate aftermath of the Declaration of Independence, in July 1776, and were after more than a year of heated debate approved by that Second Continental Congress and sent to the states for ratification in November 1777. Which is to say, the Articles weren’t a product of the Revolution (as I had always thought of them) so much as part of its impetus and origins, which now that I’ve reframed it that way does make sense—once the colonies had declared independence, it was vital that they immediately and consistently envision a political and civic arrangement through which they could exist in Perpetual Union (the usually elided part of their full title) without England, even (if not especially) while their war to establish and cement that independence was entirely ongoing.

Better understanding that Revolutionary context for the Articles can help explain some of the ways in which they differed from the Constitution that would eventually replace them. The most famous such difference is that under the Articles the central government (known first as the Continental Congress and then, after 1781, as the Congress of the Confederation) was quite weak, both on its own terms and in comparison to the individual states. I had always attributed that to the colonists’ hatred of the King and thus fears of a tyrannical government, and of course those were factors; but given the highly regional nature of the Revolution (with different battles/campaigns fought across the regions and states in somewhat disconnected and certainly discrete stages), it makes perfect sense that the Articles granted each state the power necessary to respond to those particular, evolving circumstances without needing to rely on or wait for a central authority. It’s harder to understand the choice to deny Congress any ability to levy taxes, leaving the central government entirely dependent on funding from the states; that limitation frequently left not just Congress but the Continental Army in the lurch. But on the other hand, that too can be seen as a wartime decision: fighting a war requires continued support and buy-in from civilians, and it’s fair to say that in a war which originated with opposition to onerous taxes, many colonists might have been unwilling to continue supporting a new government which immediately began imposing its own taxes.

Explicable or not, that element of the Articles continued to produce financial difficulties after the Revolution, and (along with the related histories of Shay’s Rebellion) contributed significantly to the move toward a new governing document. The ability to levy taxes was just one of many powers given to the far stronger federal government created by the Constitution (although not without extended debate, as I’ll discuss in tomorrow’s post). But despite those shifts, the Articles can be seen as a predecessor to the Constitution, and not just in symbolic ways (ie, how the Constitution’s Preamble echoes part of the Articles’ opening: “The said States hereby severally enter into a firm league of friendship with each other, for their common defense, the security of their liberties, and their mutual and general welfare”). In particular, the Articles created the new nation as a representative, democratic republic, with the state legislatures appointing representatives from each state to the Congress of the Confederation. Since the fundamental nature of the nation’s political system was just as uncertain as every other Revolutionary aspect, this was a vital choice, and one that was carried forward into and enhanced by the Constitution.

Next Constitutional context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

December 3-4, 2022: November 2022 Recap

[A Recap of the month that was in AmericanStudying.]

October 29-30: Tiffany Wayne’s Guest Post on the Jewel City: Suffrage at the San Francisco-Panama Pacific International Exposition: The month kicked off with another great Guest Post!

October 31: Symbolic Scares: The Wendigo: For my annual Halloween series I focused on the symbolism behind scary stories, starting with a cross-cultural supernatural legend.

November 1: Symbolic Scares: Sleepy Hollow: The series continues with an original American scary story that’s also an American origin story.

November 2: Symbolic Scares: Last House on the Left: A horror film that’s more disturbing in what it makes us cheer for than how it makes us scream, as the series scares on.

November 3: Symbolic Scares: The Lost Boys: A textbook definition of mindless pop entertainment, and what it can still symbolize.

November 4: Symbolic Scares: The Shinings: The series concludes with what we can make of the two opposed endings to the novel and film versions of the same scary story.

November 5-6: Anya Jabour’s Guest Post on Legionnaire’s Disease: My second great Guest Post of the week!

November 7: 12 Years of AmericanStudying: Guest Posts I: For AmericanStudier’s 12^th anniversary…

November 8: 12 Years of AmericanStudying: Guest Posts II: I decided to focus on a favorite aspect…

November 9: 12 Years of AmericanStudying: Guest Posts III: Of the blog from across these dozen years, …

November 10: 12 Years of AmericanStudying: Guest Posts IV: The awesome Guest Posts I’ve been able to share!

November 11: 12 Years of AmericanStudying: Guest Posts V: So across these five posts, here were the 26 most recent Guest Posts!

November 12-13: 12 Years of AmericanStudying: My Reflections: Leading up to this special weekend post featuring my own reflections on the first 12 years!

November 14: Public Art: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial: On the DC memorial’s 40^th anniversary, a public art studying series kicks off with two levels to why that memorial is so important.

November 15: Public Art: The Shaw Memorial: The series continues with a historically, culturally, and symbolically crucial monument.

November 16: Public Art: Two Midwestern Statues: The inspiring messages and missing histories of two linked statues, as the series sculpts on.

November 17: Public Art: The Harriet Wilson Statue: How a wonderful recent statue corrects a wrong and makes the case for right (and writing).

November 18: Public Art: Murals: The series concludes with a couple links to collections of awesome public murals!

November 19-20: Lily Hart’s Guest Post on Voices of the River: My third great Guest Post of the month, which ties a record I hope to keep tying!

November 21: Thanks-givings: Bruce’s Soul: A Thanksgiving series kicks off with a new album we should all be thank-full for.

November 22: Thanks-givings: Purple Carrot: The series continues with the vegan food service that has meant a ton to me and my family.

November 23: Thanks-givings: Andor and Willow: Two Disney+ shows that make me nostalgically thank-full, as the series thanks on.

November 24: Thanks-givings: Fantasy Football: The unique reason I’m very thank-full for fantasy football!

November 25: Thanks-givings: Young Voters: The series concludes with the American community for whom all lovers of democracy should be eternally thank-full.

November 28: Video Game Studying: Grand Theft Auto: A series inspired by Pong’s 40^th anniversary kicks off with three aspects of video games we can learn from the GTA series.

November 29: Video Game Studying: Pong: The series continues with two lesser-known and telling moments in Pong’s history on its 40^th birthday.

November 30: Video Game Studying: Pac-Man: Three ways the arcade smash changed the game, as the series plays on.

December 1: Video Game Studying: Doom: Two striking and controversial collaborative sides to the first-person shooter.

December 2: Video Game Studying: App Games: The series concludes with a couple takeaways from a decade or so of app gaming.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. Topics you’d like to see covered in this space? Guest Posts you’d like to contribute? Lemme know!

December 2, 2022: Video Game Studying: App Games

[On November 29, 1972, Atari debuted Pong, one of the earliest and most influential video games. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Pong and four other groundbreaking games—I’d love the responses and nominations of gamers and noobs alike in comments!]

On a couple of takeaways from a couple decades or so of app gaming.

The lives of my two sons, now 16 and 15 years old, have correlated almost exactly with the rise and dominance of the smartphone, so it’s probably no surprise that it is through them that I have experienced the brave new video gaming world of app games. Indeed, I’ve listened to my boys excitedly go through phases focused on most of the games on the top ten lists of both the most downloaded and the most spent-upon app games of the last decade-plus (among other games they’ve loved that didn’t quite make those lists, such as their first app game addiction Spy Mouse); and for a solid year or so they got me similarly obsessed with one of the games that ranks high on both lists, Supercell’s smash hit Clash of Clans. While it would be easy to see app games as occupying a fundamentally different genre (and even perhaps a different medium) than other video games, I think that would also be largely if not entirely inaccurate: every gaming console or system has its differences, but every one still allows gamers to play video games; and most app games have direct parallels to other popular and more traditional video games (#1 download Candy Crush Saga to prior shape stacking games like Tetris, Clash of Clans to prior worldbuilding games like Civilization, and so on).

Thinking of app games as video games allows us to consider a couple of interesting 21^st century gaming trends that they both reveal and have helped popularize. Perhaps the most obvious is seeing video games as a constant activity and part of the regular flow of our day-to-day lives, rather than a distinct or separate use of our time. That is, to game on a system or computer generally requires turning on that console and game, and thus making a conscious choice to enter into that space for some particular period of time; whereas an app game is present on the device on which we’re already spending so much time, and generally requires barely a second to open and play (and a similar second to stop playing or pause in order to do other things, on or off that device). Of course some past games have already been able to serve that purpose—I used to play at least one game of Minesweeper religiously before starting any writing work—but I would argue that those were one small subset or niche of the gaming world, rather than the central category that app games have become. Obviously it’s not just the games that have become utterly tied to our moment-to-moment lives; but this particular change in gaming both reflects those broader technological shifts and represents an interesting specific effect within the world of video gaming.

The other thing I want to highlight about app games is less of a definite trend and more of a question, and one tied to broader questions about smartphones, social media, the internet, 21^st century society, and other such small issues. It’s possible to see app video gaming as one more way we’ve become more isolated from each other, linked more to what’s happening on these devices than to those around us (as, for example, we’d be if we were playing a video game with a group of friends, all staring at the same screen at least). But it’s equally possible to see app games (like video games overall, of course) as a way that we can and do connect to each other—my boys have shared every app gaming experience with each other, and as I mentioned also shared at least one extended one with me; and they similarly have connected to friends near and far in the same ways, both literally through online gaming and figuratively through discussing these shared worlds and experiences. The answer, of course, lies in a combination of these two poles, along with many other effects along the spectrum. But that doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t or won’t ultimately be possible to assess app games as creating more isolation or more community, and those are worthwhile and important questions to ask of this new gaming form, as well as of the technologies to which they connect.

November Recap this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other video games you’d highlight and analyze?

December 1, 2022: Video Game Studying: Doom

[On November 29, 1972, Atari debuted Pong, one of the earliest and most influential video games. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Pong and four other groundbreaking games—I’d love the responses and nominations of gamers and noobs alike in comments!]

On two strikingly communal and collaborative sides to the influential first-person shooter.

I could write a post about id Software’s Doom (1993) very similar to yesterday’s on Pac-Man, as Doom was nearly as innovative and influential in its own era and genre as the little yellow dude was in his. (To cite one such aspect that I won’t be focusing on in this post: the game was originally distributed through shareware, making it a very direct predecessor to internet gaming.) Indeed, having spent more hours than I care to admit during my first year of college playing Doom with and against (on which more in a moment) other residents of my dorm, I would be even more equipped (armed, one might say) to write overall about the game’s staggering popularity and effects. But I wanted to take a slightly different approach for today’s post, and to focus in more closely on two distinct but interconnected aspects of Doom, both of which in their own ways reflect the game’s striking communal and collaborative elements—and both of which have been frustratingly linked to critiques of the game and its first-person shooter ilk for inspiring (whether implicitly or even explicitly) acts of violence in the real world.

The first such communal aspect was a main reason why I spent so much time Doom-ing during my freshman year: the multiplayer mode known as “deathmatch.” The ostensible goal of Doom is to defeat level after level of swarming monsters using your array of weapons, and the game offered a “cooperative” (or “co-op”) multiplayer mode in which 2-4 players (linked through a shared network, such as, I dunno, in a college first-year dorm) could team up to fight those monsters as a unit. But that was only one of the game’s two multiplayer modes, and the other was the deathmatch, in which 2-4 players instead compete against one another, becoming their respective targets instead of the monsters. The deathmatch gameplay option became so popular that various corporations had to ban Doom entirely in order to keep their employees from devoting all their time to playing against each other. In my experience, Doom deathmatches were a great way to connect with my fellow dormmates and become better friends with this important academic community; but for critics, the chance to kill fellow humans (rather than unrealistic monsters) brought video game violence home to the real world in dangerous ways—a perspective that was seemingly validated when the 1999 Columbine High School shooters were revealed to have been avid Doom players.

That tenuous link between one of the first prominent school shootings and Doom was mythically amplified by a connection to the other communal and collaborative aspect of the game I want to highlight: the ability for players to create and play in their own custom levels, known as WAD files (“Where’s All the Data?”). The potential for such customization was a striking innovation, and became one of the most popular and shared aspects of the game for many players. But this aspect also became unhappily associated with Columbine, as one of the two shooters, Eric Harris, had apparently designed a number of WADs of his own (which came to be known as “Harris levels”). However, one of the key elements to how that fact was reported turned out to be entirely false: reports suggested that Harris had designed a level based on Columbine High and had used it to practice for the school shooting; but that was quite simply not the case. Here we can see quite specifically and frustratingly the way that violent video games in general, and this innovative collaborative side to Doom in particular, can be inaccurately turned into fodder for attacks on the games and their negative societal effects. Like any work of art, Doom can and should be analyzed and critiqued; but neither the WADs nor Doom overall are what gave us Columbine.

Last game tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other video games you’d highlight and analyze?

November 30, 2022: Video Game Studying: Pac-Man

[On November 29, 1972, Atari debuted Pong, one of the earliest and most influential video games. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Pong and four other groundbreaking games—I’d love the responses and nominations of gamers and noobs alike in comments!]

On three of the many ways Namco’s smash 1980 launch helped changed the game(s).

1)      Character: Arcade and video games had certainly diversified in the decade or so since the release of yesterday’s subject Pong, with the biggest hits in the years before Pac Man arrived space shooters like Space Invaders and Asteroids. But one thing that no game had quite featured until the little yellow dude was a recognizable and marketable main character, one who could become the mascot and (literal) face of the game and franchise. That focus allowed the game to include another innovation: cutscenes in between levels, brief mini-movies featuring that main character in wacky adventures. It allowed for hugely successful sequels like 1981’s Ms. Pac-Man that would not have been possible without a distinct character at the heart of the franchise. And it paved the way for many of the most popular video games and franchises of all time: the Mario Brothers, Sonic the Hedgehog, Kirby, the Angry Birds, and more.

2)      Artificial Intelligence: One of the game’s vital coding innovations was that the enemies—the four cute but deadly “ghosts” (Blinky, Inky, Pinky, and Clyde, natch) who pursue Pac-Man as he tries to eat all those delicious dots and fruits—were programmed with artificial intelligence and could respond to the player’s moves. I don’t imagine it was the most sophisticated such AI—Ex Machina this wasn’t, that is—but nonetheless, even the idea that every time you played Pac-Man, you could have an entirely different experience depending on your own choices and what effects they had on the ghosts’ behaviors was a profoundly new element to video gaming. I talked in Monday’s post about the flexible and interactive qualities to video games; of course that was somewhat true even with the Pong’s of the world, but adding artificial intelligence in this way (and at any level of complexity) really began to illustrate the possibilities for that kind of player-game interactivity.

3)      Winnability: That artificial intelligence and its promises of constantly evolving gameplay certainly contribute to a sense of Pac-Man as a particularly replayable arcade and video game, one that grossed over $1 billion in quarters (!) in its first year of release. But another important element was Pac-Man’s seeming yet elusive sense of winnabililty; as Atari’s Chris Crawford put it in an 1982 interview with Byte magazine, “An important trait of any game is the illusion of winnability ... The most successful game in this respect is Pac-Man, which appears winnable to most players, yet is never quite winnable.” Indeed, Pac-Man was designed to have no final level, although apparently if a player beats 255 consecutive levels, a bizarrely split-screen and supposedly unbeatable 256^th final level does appear. Even that strange, glitch-like detail, however, would only add to that sense of potential yet also ephemeral winnability, making playing Pac-Man again and again that much more appealing. Which, for nearly forty years now, is just what gamers have done.

Next game tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other video games you’d highlight and analyze?

November 29, 2022: Video Game Studying: Pong

[On November 29, 1972, Atari debuted Pong, one of the earliest and most influential video games. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Pong and four other groundbreaking games—I’d love the responses and nominations of gamers and noobs alike in comments!]

On two lesser-known and telling moments in the history of the first blockbuster arcade game.

While I’m sure video game historians would point to many moments and games as possible origin points for the genre, some as that hyperlinked timeline indicates from as early as the 1940s, there’s no doubt that high on any such list would be Atari’s 1972 arcade release Pong. Debuting on this date 50 years ago, Pong would quickly become a national and worldwide phenomenon, helping establish the viability of video game arcades in commercial spaces (and then eventually in spaces all their own), contributing (if in a complex way on which more in a moment) to the successful launch of the first home gaming system (the Magnavox Odyssey), spawning numerous sequels and copycat games, and generally changing the landscape of not only gaming and technology, but also entertainment, social spaces and interactions, and childhood. If that seems like an awful lot to attribute to one video game, well, that was the remarkable power of those two white paddles and that frustratingly bouncy little white ball. Indeed, I would say that only Star Wars measures up to Pong when it comes to 1970s popular culture landmarks that have influenced the next half-century of American and human life.

That overall influence is pretty well-known, but in researching this post I learned about a couple of a lesser-known and equally telling moments in Pong’s early history. For one thing, the game was the subject of a 1974 lawsuit from Magnavox (and its parent company Sanders Associates). In May 1972 Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell had attended a Magnavox event and seen a demonstration of the company’s own table tennis game, and he himself later admitted that seeing the game prompted him to ask his own employee, engineer Allan Alcorn, to make a table tennis game for Atari; as Bushnell put it, “The fact is that I absolutely did see the Odyssey game and I didn't think it was very clever.” Despite protesting innocence from any patent infringement, Bushnell and Atari decided to settle out of court with Magnavox, with the case concluding in June 1976. I can’t really weigh in on the merits of the lawsuit; the two games do look pretty similar to me, but I suppose all table tennis games, especially in that very early era of game design, would likely seem similar. What I can say, however, is that the subsequent history of video games has been defined again and again by competing games and systems, a trend very much foreshadowed by Pong’s controversial relationship to Magnavox table tennis.

The other telling moment is far less weighty than a lawsuit, but just as socially significant I’d say. In describing why and how Pong became such an arcade hit, Bushnell would later note, “It was very common to have a girl with a quarter in hand pull a guy off a bar stool and say, 'I'd like to play Pong and there's nobody to play.' It was a way you could play games, you were sitting shoulder to shoulder, you could talk, you could laugh, you could challenge each other ... As you became better friends, you could put down your beer and hug. You could put your arm around the person. You could play left-handed if you so desired. In fact, there are a lot of people who have come up to me over the years and said, 'I met my wife playing Pong,' and that's kind of a nice thing to have achieved.” This is of course another important side to the flexible and interactive qualities of video games that I highlighted in yesterday’s post—while of course many games can be played solo (not Pong, though, at least not in its first arcade iteration—it was two-player only), there is a fundamentally social element to gaming, and perhaps especially to arcade gaming. The art is often created, that is, through a communal experience, and one that, as Bushnell’s quote illustrates, links to other communal experiences like social interactions, friendship, and romantic relationships. All part of what Pong helped initiate as well!

Next game tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other video games you’d highlight and analyze?

November 28, 2022: Video Game Studying: Grand Theft Auto

[On November 29, 1972, Atari debuted Pong, one of the earliest and most influential video games. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Pong and four other groundbreaking games—I’d love the responses and nominations of gamers and noobs alike in comments!]

Forgive me for focusing this post less on GTA itself and more on broader gaming topics. But that seemed like a good way to begin this week’s series, and plus I’ve never played any of the GTA games (and welcome comments from those who have). So to wit, here are three aspects of video games that a focus on GTA can help us discuss:

1)      Their Effects: The elephant in the room when it comes to GTA, and really all violent video games for that matter, is the question of their potential effects on (especially) impressionable young players. From what I can tell, the first GTA featured mostly just cartoonish car violence; it was with the series’ fifth game in particular that the stakes were significantly raised, with players for example having the ability to rob and kill prostitutes after sleeping with them (and, it seems, being rewarded by the game for choosing to do so). I don’t believe that any form of art (which games on, on which more in a moment) can or should be directly correlated with any particular effects on their audiences; it’s nowhere near that simple. But at the same time, it’s worth noting that unlike most other art forms, video games ask their audiences to make many of the choices themselves, and it would be disingenuous to suggest that choosing to kill a woman is the same as watching a character do so in a film (for example). So while I don’t believe a game like GTA makes its players more violent, it does at times ask them to act violently in troubling ways that are worth recognizing and critiquing.

2)      They’re Art: Perhaps it’s now widely accepted that video games are an art form; certainly disciplines like Fitchburg State’s groundbreaking Game Design Major have that idea as a key starting point. But I’m not sure that the communal conversations about games tend to incorporate that definition, as it seems to me that they are still often seen more as a combination of toys (and thus more appropriate for children than any other age bracket) and distractions (and thus taken less seriously than other cultural forms and media). Obviously any definition of art is open to interpretation and argument, so I can’t claim with absolute authority that video games are an art form (although I believe very strongly that they are). But I will say that narratives which treat games more dismissively lead directly to less thoughtful and helpful engagements with questions like the ones I raised in point one, to perceptions of games as (for example) simply delivery systems for violence rather than an art form featuring artistic subgenres that include violence as a key element (just as action and horror films do, to name two other such art forms).

3)      They’re Flexible: If we do see video games as an art form (as I do), what differentiates them from most other such forms (other than Choose Your Own Adventure books, I suppose!) is that they are interactive, depending on the choices of their audience members (who of course are far more than just audience members) for how their stories and thus their art are ultimately created. I know that’s a well-known point, but I have a specific and surprising GTA anecdote related to it. When my sons were relatively young, a babysitter took them to his house and let them play one of the GTA games on his gaming system. I was initially horrified when they told me this, but then they described their game play at length, which involved all sorts of driving craziness and silliness (driving into swimming pools, trying to drive off bridges onto moving trains, etc.) and relatedly only self-directed violence (seeing what would happen if they climbed to the top of a tall crane and jumped off, for example). Not exactly the highest form of art, perhaps, but far different from a game focused on killing others. In this case, at least, the game’s flexibility had allowed my sons to make it their own in a silly but also, I would argue, very significant way.

Next game tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other video games you’d highlight and analyze?