This Blog: A Tutorial

A binary is composed of two parts. It often refers to the ones and zeroes which compose digital constructs. In criticism, it also refers to opposed realities which in their opposition create hierarchies of possibility. When you are in a binary, external forces have funneled your potential into one of two places. You are either for or against, up or down, conservative or liberal, inside or out. In digital worlds, these binaries are rule sets. By limiting, they make space for action. Without the binaries encoded in the games there would be no game at all. Mario exists because a 0 is not a 1 and a 1 is not a 0. In the “real” world, the political world, binaries encode the pathways of power. By simplifying society, one group can place another at a distance, on a level subjugated to itself. If we are the 1’s, and everyone else is the 0’s, then we can appropriate their oil resources. A space is created in these binaries too, but by virtue of the 1’s expanding until the 0‘s are squeezed, thinned, and pressed on the margins. This space is only for the enjoyment of the group that control’s the terms of the binary, the 1’s.
 

This is a gamer’s blog. It is also a movie lover’s blog, a writer’s blog, a student’s blog, a culture watcher’s blog, and perhaps even critical theory dabbler’s blog. But before anything else, it is certainly a gamer’s blog.

I used to go over to friends’ houses with the express intent of watching them play video games. Consoles were anathema in my house, for whatever reason, and the brief encounters I’d had with gaming were enough to convince me that my parents’ anti-Sega/Nintendo/Sony edicts were misguided at best. My friend Matt was the first person I knew who had the new Playstation. At his house I would watch for literally hours as he played through CoolBoarders, waiting for him to graciously hand his single controller over to me for just one run. 

Another friend, Alex, had an older console at his house: the SNES. His technology was less impressive, but at least we played together, and thus, I played at all. We usually horsed around with MarioKart. It was fun, and we didn’t need any kind of trumped-up narrative to convince us that video games were some kind of important cultural artifact. Imagining some kind of metaphorical gravitas were attached to Yoshi’s twitchily responsive go-kart would have seemed like nothing more than perverse absurdity to Alex and me. We were kids and it was just a game.

The question I want to ask now is, are we still kids and are the things we’re playing still just games? What would it mean for Halo LAN parties to be more than just a bunch of friends getting together to blow off steam? On some level, I think most of us understand at a very basic level that the way we use our imaginations matter. We know, instinctively almost, that the kinds of games we like to play say a little something about ourselves. But what do those games say about us? How do those games mark out the binaries that create our own ideas of possibility?

This is a gamer’s blog, made because I like to talk about games. This Christmas I received, for the first time in my life, a PS2. I have an Xbox 360, and I had its predecessor for a short while as well, but I’ve never owned a Sony game machine. Thus, I have up until this point, missed entirely out on some of the most lauded touchstones of gaming history: the Final Fantasy games, Metal Gear Solid, Grand Theft Auto, Shadow of the Colossus, etc, etc. I now have a stack of PS2 to play through and the need to do so in the context of dialogue. I want to play these games because I love playing games. I also want to play these games because I think they matter, and though there are more who agree with that sentiment than I had ever thought before, it seems the majority of us still believe that video games are only that: just games. Just: a word used to orient us between the two poles of cultural worth, important and waste of time. A word that keeps us from looking at the games we play as carrying social importance, formational power. A word that dismisses the politics of gaming by suggesting they don’t exist at all.

This might be something like a journal--thoughts on the games as I play through them. It may have a commentary feel to it, taking in what others are saying putting that up against my own experiences. Hopefully it will be a place for open discussion, ideas that mix with a general love for the craft of gaming. I believe that people learn best in community, and that’s what I most want to discover. This is a gamer’s blog. A place to learn together, playing in the binaries.