In Spring of 2012, I was living in New Jersey, teaching classes on comic books, hip hop, and creative writing at Cornell, and co-running a nonprofit in Louisiana via the internet and coach airline tickets. Hence my proposal to work on the subjects of popular expressive culture and the specific social milieu of southeastern Louisiana. In a way, these interests have not changed. I still plan to do “field” research in Louisiana. I still plan to figure out how television and Facebook and pro wrestling and superheroes fit into the collective identities that make up Louisiana culture(s). In another way, though, my trajectory into graduate study has been thick with detours and sinkholes. I came in thinking I might turn toward sociology or anthropology to fill out methodological gaps. But I’ve grown to be a very suspicious person.

I blame Professor Bobby Paul. In the fall, he taught the first-year foundations course, which in this specific instance involved reading some serious social theory. Some I’d read before: Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Simmel, Nietzsche. Others—such as Foucault and Butler—I had a frail familiarity with. But on the whole, each text unearthed me. It became hard to see myself participating in the “human sciences” as I began to see those fields so fraught with the totalizing force of the Enlightenment. Alfred Schutz, weirdly enough, was a wake-up call writer, probably because he was among the first unfamiliar writers I’d read of the semester. It was bizarre because he was a sociologist, and one who seemed to not have the punk politics of Nietzsche or Marx. He was like a slightly “off-kilter” Durkheim: a person who was quietly logical, but who acknowledged that we live in multiple registers of reality, that we order these according to relevancies, that we embody (happily, unconsciously) contradictions. Among that early part of the course, Schutz and William James cleared a way for the voices of late 2012 that took hold of my voice.

Foucault and Butler. I had, of course, read them before. But in this class, I found myself on the brink of understanding: discourse and iteration, power and agency, the limits and possibilities of a science of what people do. I thought about the term “genealogy.” This term, beloved by everyone in my home town only interested me during my most nostalgic-towards-a-Louisiana-I’d-been-away-from-for-years (and had never been never like that anyway) phase (fall 2005–spring 2007). And it only interested me in the way it interested my dad: where we came from, where the genetic line branches, what boat one came in on. But now I have the genealogy of fragmented and divergent lines of discourse, the
threads that somehow conspired to come together in some places, for some time, and then were unsewn. I began to think about how there are a lot of so-called natural things we perform: heritage, family, community—especially as I continued to return to Louisiana to help run a festival (bracketing, let us say, some of my wilder critiques of Louisiana and facticity). I began to see how my project was neveras split as I imagined it, how it was joined by the twin joinders of genealogy and performance.

I found another odd angle in while taking a class called Video Games taught by Professor Tanine Allison of the film department. While working through some of the Foundations theory in the context of video games, I began thinking about the process of playing, especially narrative-heavy games, or virtual experiences (like Second Life) that gave people “freedom” to inhabit other selves. While looking up articles on online virtual communities, I followed a wayward curiosity about where the term “dungeon” comes from in its erotic context. Turns out the word is first traced to a personal ad in the L.A. Free Press from 1974, the same year Dungeons and Dragons, the first table-top role-playing game, was published. Yowza! This happy confluence set off some heavy (fun) theoretical meditation: both phenomena, public alt-sex and RPGs, are excellent examples of how one might deal with an oppressive, restrictive power structure (a dungeon): turn it in to a place wherein fantasy is reality, wherein one incarnates the imagination into one’s living flesh. I began to strategize about how I could consider Louisiana culture, especially as it interfaces with both its own self-perception and the broader micro-fictions it encountersthrough popular media, in this lens. My paper for my video games course led me to the PCA/ACA conference in March where I began beta testing (ok, alpha testing) this idea on other scholars writing about kink and fetish and RPGs and TV, etc. In addition, I took Text, Images, and Sound with Professors Moon and Goldberg, which explored ekphrastic literature and foregrounded many of the questions of representation, reading, and the performance of different modes of “reality” or the “extradiscursive” or
“material traces” through engagement with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Giorgio Agamben among other critics.

Now, I’m in the middle of a Digital Humanities class, Postcolonial Theory, and Placing American Religions, encompassing three fields (media studies, theory-writ-large, and human geography) that will probably eventually name my comp reading lists. The theorists I’m falling into now are the likes of Michel de Certeau, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Trinh T. Minh-ha. And more Foucault (with some Derrida, Deleuze, and Lacan thrown in). My class on postcolonial theory, with Professor Sean Meighoo, has been especially useful in conceiving and reconceiving my project, the ethics of writing, my own position as a person who studies and who makes interventions. The religion studies class, taught by Doctor Bobbi Patterson, re-introduced Foucault’s “heterotopia,” another term that I hope to interpret and reinterpret in the context of Louisiana and the imaginary spaces it contains. Joining the chorus, my DH class is helping me rethink the borders of scholarship, especially as it pertains to the manipulation of technology as a way of both broadcasting and critiquing. I am currently creating a mass wiki that will act as both a repository for annotated bibliography and a visual map of scholarship (this is a long-term project) using semantic data harvesting, crowdsourcing, and visualization techniques. Although one might consider this a “tool” in the way the digital humanities are normally considered (Zotero, distance reading), I am architecting the program myself and hope to figure out different, procedural, object-oriented, modular, paratactical, metonymic ways of performing scholarly intervention.

This summer I plan on both gaining competencies in software development and media creation and doing field research in Louisiana. I am completing an online computer science class right now through Harvard and hope to take more courses throughout the summer (perhaps with PDS funds). At the end of May, I am travelling to Louisiana to consider what I might need to do in order to best “study,” to meet with Louisiana scholars Nick Spitzer and Richard Campanella, and to begin preliminary research through interviews, filmmaking, and continuing to run my nonprofit. I will be back over the summer to work on the Battle of Atlanta project with Southern Spaces which will also increase my media and development competencies. Right now, my main methodology is textual analysis, although I am growing very interested in how to combine that with expressive scholarship: studying through writing, creating, programming, etc. I plan to remix archival ephemera in my studies, including a syncretic use of theory, history, primary documents, video clips, records, industrial tools, statistics, cuisine, and maps.

In the fall, I hope to take Experimental Scholarship with Professors Bammer and Grimshaw, Pedagogy with Professor Loudermilk, and either Biopolitics with Professor Johnston of Comp Lit or Foucault with Professor Huffer of WGSS (I hope to T.A. for the one I don’t take). I see myself growing more suspicious of myself and any assertions that focus on reality and more obsessed with artificiality, hybridity, monstrous forms, and ambivalence. Even as I feel that my studies have taken me (intensely) into fields I didn’t quite imagine myself in (say, pure theory and computer science), my interests have also remained exactly the same. Consider that my writing sample for the ILA was on the subject of professional wrestling, specifically that though it is almost always dismissed as something fake, the brutal corporeality of this hippodromed sport undoes an easy dichotomy between real/fake, fact/fiction. My underlying goal (besides spreading my love of excess, physicality, and theatricality to scholars) was to bypass the question of authenticity altogether. I am still here, trying to carve up the real world to open the visceral world of the imagination. I want to say that yes discourse is oppressive, especially when it seems like it’s not there at all, but that if we know this, and we take performativity seriously,then we should also know that any reality can be reproduced in new, stranger, hopefully more gentle ways.

It’s a bit unfinished here and there, and there’s at least one grammatical error that I may fix at some point post-conference. But for now, it’s for you.

A suspicious reader might begin to recognize that a substantial portion of “The Waste Land” was sampled from earlier works. Although the two most famous lines from the poem (“April is the cruelest month” and “I’ll show you fear in a handful of dust”) seem to be more or less original witticisms, one could argue that the April line is a direct parody of Chaucer’s first line of The Canterbury Tales (“Whan that Aprille, with hise shoures soote”) or, at the very least, a general jab at the reverdie that pervaded lots of poetry since the medieval period. Nevertheless, I would say the third best line of the poem bit a line from La Divina Commedia. As far as I can tell, people went bonkers over “The Waste Land,” his most popular poem until he (more or less) wrote the musical Cats.

James Boyles, lawyer and disseminator of fine pdfs, traces a history in The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind that is similar in some ways to this kind of poetic sampling in an extended genealogy of “George Bush Don’t Care about Black People” by Legendary K.O. who snatched the title from a Kanye gaffe and the sample from his song “Gold Digger,” which in turned mimicked Ray Charles’s “I’ve Got a Woman” except with different lyrics, which, ironically, is exactly how Charles created his hit: by taking another person’s song—in this case Baily Gospel Singers’s “Jesus Is the Searchlight”—and changing up the words. This type of shit, it happens every day. Boyles shows how this kind of derivative creativity, which at each juncture was transformative for music culture, would be more or less totally illegal today, that Kanye had to license the music of Ray Charles, that Charles could have been sued had he recorded “I’ve Got a Woman,” that Legendary K.O. could be subjected to litigation, etc.

While this history makes clear the abysmal way we handle copyright concerning mash-ups, homages, and sampling in music, it sort of elides the fact that this is how all creative expression exists. And U.S. copyright law is no more capable of handling literary expression than music, though it has certainly tried to regulate it. You can see this in the bizarre attempts at litigation against fan fiction on the internet, or the hilarious logic of E.L. James in wiping the Twilight slash origins of 50 Shades of Grey and then making a yacht full of money. The constant stream of derivation, of copies upon copies of mythologies and images, degrading gracefully like a particularly virulent game of telephone, seems to be at least one of the things we do both pre- and post-internet. And with the discourse on copyright and expression being something that is somehow couched in a binary hell of incentivizing creativity versus protecting property, one has to wonder what compelled people to create anything before capitalism, market forces, copyright notice, and the Supreme Court of the United States.

One might look back toward poetry, the slightly fascist elder cousin, the one who keeps trying to kill itself (one year in every ten / [it] manages it). It has somehow escaped the litigation wars over copyright, small wonder given the price people pay for poetry. There are no careers to lose over pirated poetry and especially not poetry repurposed, which if done right, would grant a career. The distributors are largely the people who like that kind of thing anyway and do so for little money. I don’t know if most poets care about the free use of copyrighted material or not, fair or unfair, but certainly the body of poetry provides ample evidence that creativity and an imagination lettered by others can persist in an age of public domain.

Works Cited

Dante Alighieri. The Inferno of Dante. Bilingual edition, translated by Robert Pinsky, illustrated by Michael Mazur. New York: Frarrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1994.

James Boyle. The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind. New Have: Yale University Press, 2008. Accessed online at http://www.thepublicdomain.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/thepublicdomain.html.

Geoffrey Chaucer. The Canterbury Tales. 3-328. In The Riverside Chaucer. Edited by Larry D. Benson, based on The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, edited by F. N. Robinson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.

T.S. Eliot. The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose. Edited, with Annotations and Introduction by Lawrence Rainey. New Haven: Yale University Press,2005.

There is a growing movement of “open access” scholarship, finding homes in places like Kairos, Southern Spaces (full disclosure: I work here), Vectors, and The Institute for the Future of the Book (one of the few places that actually has projects that enable open feedback as well). There is even a directory of open access journals, even if it is sometimes populated with broken links. The dissemination of online scholarship is nowhere near as large, however, as the density of the online literary machine, which has its own “subculture” and internet territory, hierarchic prestige, and doomsaying critics who warn that too much poetry is indeed a bad thing. For the most part, online poetry is free in online journals. Even so, scholarly and creative online writing share some of the same “debates.”

Foremost, there is the debate about “what counts.” In academia, whether a publication counts can mean the difference between moving across the country after a failed tenure review. It can mean that, despite trailblazing the latest technology of discourse, one can be excluded from the well-landscaped, well-vetted communities of academics. For the literary world, when a publication doesn’t count, it could also mean losing jobs, but there’s also the stigma of not-being-taken-seriously. Which is especially ironic considering that many lucrative book deals are thrown to bloggers who have found the right balance of popularity and niche-appeal. The paper publishing industry, after all, is concerned with the ability of books to sell, and established popularity is a good enough indicator of success.

Once we agree that online publications should count towards whatever professionalization system exists, the next debate is over the quality, a debate tightly enmeshed in questions of volume. This is known as the Scary Democratization of Knowledge Production neurosis. Southern Spaces, Kairos, and Vectors are all “refereed” journals, which means that after an editorial staff receives a piece and determines that it sophisticated enough to pursue publishing, the work is sent to an expert in the field of study who offers a learned opinion, leading to revision and potentially rejection. Although this model is flawed (peer-reviewers, the academics calling foul or fair, don’t necessarily see submissions after they propose revisions; in some journals, especially scientific ones, the peer-reviewers are under pressure to accept or reject research for different reasons), it is the same one used for journals made of archival quality pulp.

Having worked at both an online academic journal and a print and binding literary journal, I would say that if nothing else, computer technology certainly makes submission management easier, but the basic premises remain: consideration of texts by humans who decide what gets published. With the obvious proliferation of whimsical grammar on Geocities webpages in the late nineties, I guess people have been afraid to associate their work with the expression of unlearned, uncredentialed wackjobs, and they’re even more afraid that the unlearned, uncredentialed masses will mistake Livejournal poetry with the poetry published by The Paris Review, or the posts on a paranoid conspiracy theory forum with a paranoid Foucauldian analysis of the U.S. government. But let me say it here: y’all need not be afraid.

For the most part, non-academics don’t seem to care about JSTOR. They aren’t in that conversation. This isn’t to say that non-academics are philistines, but that they’ve been excluded from what happens on campus for a lot longer than there was the internet. And POETRY. With the exception of the ballast of po-biz friends I have on Facebook, the only poetry I’ve ever seen referenced there is either “Footprints” or something copy-and-pasted from a devotional website with curlicue fonts and centered stanzas.The online poetry publishing “industry” is an artscene that is simultaneously where the most exciting contemporary verse exists and where it is the most banal, stuck in a time-lapse version of poetry professionalization (aided, no doubt, by the now pay-walled Duotrope, the literary journal stats reporting secret police).

While much debate about online publishing has centered on the open-access response to insane subscription prices, I feel an equally important issue to think about is how to truly enable access—not just for smaller universities—but for those who’ve missed our lovely jargon-filled conversations, and might have something to say. I know that the poetry I’ve published on PANK, decomP, and Lumina has reached many more eyes than my print publications, just by virtue of the scale of production of print journals. And since I republish my poems on my website when publishing rights revert to me, I can check stats on the stuff I’ve published in journals. I also know the stats for Southern Spaces, which are truly impressive. Even so, I think we need to have the conversation about not being afraid to grapple/grasp a public that just might appreciate some critical thinking or some poetry about Jean Grey from the X-Men about the abject body that offers challenging aesthetics.

My family first connected to the internet in 1996 with an ISP called Cajun.Net, basically the first service provider to lease the phone lines for data travel in Terrebonne Parish. Like many companies in Louisiana, its name is a bit “on the nose” emphatic local expression. Its logo features a zany crawfish on a surfboard, propelled no doubt by the tidal waves of information flowing through Cajun.Net’s routers. As far as I could tell at the time, most people I knew who used the internet sent chain emails to people who had the same area code, more for the novelty of sharing text and clipart than for serious communication. At 12 years old, I didn’t have (or know anyone with) a job in information, so who knows what Cajun.Net subscribers were doing with their computers. It seems Cajun.Net got at least the local ethos right: a crazy-looking crawfish on a West-coast transportation system, somewhere on top of an ocean. I mean that some people in Louisiana, who often make their locality visible (especially the well-defined tropes of their cultural groups), were able to participate in conversations they would have otherwise been left out of.

Cowabunga.

Nevertheless, there were physical problems with connecting to the internet that were neither foreign nor incomprehensible, ones that perhaps placed us more than our rad logos. Sometimes, when you dialed up the number of the ISP’s router, you’d get a busy signal. This meant the line was in use at the other end, same as in telephones. This and the other material trappings of telephony (sound at a distance)—phone lines, dial tones, etc.—emphasized the physical space between the user and the ISP, making visceral the gatekeeping aspect of local networks. Living in southern Terrebonne Parish, this distance was much more aggravating than magical. The phone lines were outdated technology with low bandwidth and no redundancy. I remember hoping for the day when AT&T would decide to drive down Highway 56 and lay some new wire. I longed for a T1 connection, though I’d have been happy with DSL. This was in 2003.

I would argue a type of “child-like” wonder was borne out of a serious consideration of geography. Chatting with French people on IRC chat servers in 1998, for instance, was a possibility opened up by the internet, but never elided that they were still over there. This is about access. Even as recently as 2006 when I spent an autumn in France, problems of connectivity were physical—searching for a place that was connected to the internet in order to bridge the gaps to communicate my family, searching (on foot) the Latin Quarter for a place that would give me access to both a plug-in and an internet connection. It was not as easy as it apparently is now. In 2004 and 2005, I worked on an offshore oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico, which was serviced by a fiber-optic loop in combination with cellular and microwave broadcasting. This system was buggy and unreliable. The main use of the network was to deliver and report information to and from the platforms and the oil base and LOOP (Louisiana Offshore Oil Port) or whoever handled the pipeline.

On disait : « A/S/L ? ? »

Although we may take the physicality of certain technologies for granted (a thing everyone always has done), I don’t believe we’ve yet entered the cloud metaphor entirely, even if the plutocracies (Google, Facebook, et al) insist we have. Access is neither universal nor guaranteed to those who have it. Not everyone treats the communication within the web as placeless—even if they don’t know the plot on land on which their data sit. But what we often do take for granted, even as we point out the materiality of the packet routes or the existence of deepsea fiber optics, is that these technologies and places—our data and communication stored there, the minerals that house them and the electricity that maintain them—these are loci of power and are loci that can be owned. This fact is a much more dangerous thing to overlook, and especially easy if we concede to Blum’s optimistic paranoia about how we are increasingly digital but the internet is increasingly human.

Fox Mulder, early proponent of linked computer networks.

I know this sounds dumb. The information, as Tim Berners-Lee says in his industrial autobiography, is the Web itself, made possible by the confluence of transmission protocols, hardware, and software (130). To continue paraphrasing people, this time Fox Mulder, “The truth is out there,” decentralized, everywhere and nowhere. I believe this to be a general consensus today in 2013, and also, despite its general accuracy describing the architecture of servers located across the globe broadcasting and receiving packets of machine poetry, hiding the fact that the stuff on the web (and transmitted through other protocols such as P2P, ftp, email, UUCP, whatever) is also somewhere.  With ARPANET, users in Cambridge, Massachusetts, would connect to a machine in Santa Barbara in sunny California through phone lines to access resources on that machine. The fact is this is more or less still how the Internet works: remote access of physical stuff. Even today’s “cloud computing”—despite its pretty name—is a commercialized, service-oriented, and more “remote” version of time-sharing, the system of computer lab resource management that was the basic premise of ARPANET to begin with.

With everything online in “the cloud,” it must have surprised some when some websites went down due to general natural-disaster mayhem during Hurricane Sandy last October. I remember certain sites making do with impromptu migrations over to Tumblr, one of a million “web 2.0” services that offer Mr. Berners-Lee’s utopian, everyone-can-do-it vision of universal content creation he came up with in 1989. These sites, Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, etc, etc, as we know, come at a price: some corporation sort of owns the content you post, and even if it doesn’t exactly, it certainly profits off of it. Tumblr has servers in Chicago and Texas and Utah. Everyone’s tweets are in San Francisco, Boston, San Antonio, and New York City. Some of these servers are leased from datacenters; some are proprietary. Here we see another network: a network of physical and economic entanglements, of private and public interests, of the manipulations of people by people.

This network is intrinsically tied to the means of power. For instance, the company charged with setting up ARPANET, Bolt, Beranek, and Newman—also known, apparently, as the “Third University”—was recently bought by Raytheon, one of the biggest offensive R&D contractors for the US military, a company who famously created a nice heat ray gun. The “Active Denial System”—a technology that has nothing to do with the Internet despite its name—shoots concentrated microwave beams 0.4 mm into people’s skin from a half kilometer away, creating the sensation of extreme burning pain. This is intended to be used to control populations such as protestors and prisoners. While we sit around and praise that new, wondrous situation that massive connectivity has afforded us, we must also be sober to materiality and its politics that lie hiding in the cloud, located in the servers and the companies that own them.

Decentralize this.

Coming back to the Berners-Lee hope for free exchange of ideas and extending human social processes to the digital world, after reading his book and the history of ARPANET, BBSes, and other Internet topics, I can’t help but be suspicious. While Berners-Lee does caution us to approach the new technology with both critical thinking and good will, we should also look at it not as an idealized, ethereal situation, but one as mired in the physical and geographical as anything else, something that can be owned, regulated, and denied. Something that created communities that allowed members to imagine across geographical distance, making imaginary places “real” in the pulse of electromagnetic vibrations running along cables, assembled into something comforting to the human mind. But something that is as subject to matrices of power based on location, money, privilege, and violence as what came before, even if it offers some glimmer of subversion.

This is the presentation I submitted to the BDSM/Kink/Fetish subject area for the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association conference. Unless I misunderstand their system for acceptances, I’ve been accepted. Here’s the proposal:

In 1974, the word “dungeon” entered the popular imagination in two distinct ways: 1) the first published use of the word to mean BDSM playspace, and 2) the publication of Dungeons and Dragons, the first table-top roleplaying game (RPG). BDSM community play and RPGs share more than terminology. Both are roleplaying situations that rely on pre-negotiated, albeit flexible, rules (system of play, limits of consent and desire) but also feature improvisation and imaginative exploration. In my paper, I will analyze how in roleplaying, exemplified in BDSM play and RPGs, rules function less as constraints and more as an alternative physics of the imagination, one that allows for endless creativity and variability. Following Staci Newmahr, I maintain that BDSM cannot be understood solely as “kinky sex.” Rather, BDSM practice constitutes a fundamental mode of late twentieth and twenty-first century human activity, what I call the “inhabited persona.” The type of play featured in both BDSM and RPGs encourages participants to shift, create, negotiate, and embody identities, a practice that has interesting repercussions in play and out. This slippage of persona is becoming a hallmark of twenty-first century social engagement. In addition, this play foregrounds a type of pleasure that, delimited from gratification and closure, is procedural, creative, and evolutionary—one based on a Foucauldian cultivation of the self. Using ethnographic research, archival material, and comparative history, I hope to show that both BDSM and RPGs are manifestations of a paradigmatic shift towards roleplaying, fantasy exploration, and creative personhood in American culture.

Just a note:
I’m not arguing that the word dungeon is used in BDSM because of D&D or vice-versa, but that, strangely, the term gains currency in both fantasy wargames/roleplaying games in the early 1970s and functions in a similar way: the construction of a limited space that allows for creative expression.

Any input would be hella cool.

Outside of Japan, it’s hard to find games with significant sexual content, let alone games marketed as erotic. In 2010, We Dare, a crappy Wii party game that promise spanking and striptease for consenting adults, was pulled from the North American and then British markets after outrage over its “PG” content rating. What the moral crusaders missed was that besides loading screens that gave factoids about orgasms and endorphins, the game was about as sexy as Mario Party. Whether the paucity of erotic oriented games in the English speaking world is due to Puritanical morality or technological constraints or some other reason, sex, or rather sexiness, finds its way into the videogame world through the time-honored Japanese tradition of “fanservice.”

It was always a beach day on LOST.

At first glance, the word fanservice seems to be a cooler, 21^st century way to say “male gaze,” a term coined by Laura Mulvey^[1] to indicate the way film presupposes a heteronormative, male point-of-view that reduces women to their body parts, objectifying and fetishizing them. Fanservice, as defined by TVTropes (the best website on the Internet) is “Gratuitous display of characters in skimpy clothing, or none at all, under the assumption that it will attract or “reward” viewers.”^[2] Unlike the male gaze, fanservice allows for both female- and male-oriented desire, often taking the form of buff dudes appearing shirtless for some reason or other (escaping from scientific tests that required nudity, bombs exploding off their shirts, “It’s so hot out!”). And in a way, fanservice does subsume framing and content that typically exemplify the male gaze (butt shots of superheroines in comics, the long pan from shoe to thigh of every female character in film/TV), but the term has the potential to do more than open the possibility of the objectifying gaze to the nonhetereosexual male audience.

Keith Russell, in his essay, “The Glimpse and Fan Service,” defines the term “glimpse” as a separate but similar type of looking than the gaze. He argues that in the case of the gaze, “the object of desire is located within a dramatic tension that implicates the viewer in the appropriation of the viewed,” whereas the glimpse is “a moment of free seeing.”^[3] While one could argue that the camera lingering on a woman’s breasts is taking its moment of free seeing thus objectifying her, Russell’s nuance comes from the history of anime and manga fanservice wherein the panty shot, the spread eagle, and the see-through shirt (three archetypes of so-called “male” fanservice) are not only fleeting and presented as accidental, but also not for the other characters, leading to no capitulation of desire. They are truly gratuitous and were a way for adult illustrators and animators to sneak adult themes into what was a children’s genre.^[4] In practice, fanservice/glimpsing and the objectifying gaze have so much overlap that it’s messy business.

Samus waves to you once her super heavy suit comes off.

Enter Metroid, an early example of gamic fanservice. Players played through hours (less than five hours or one wouldn’t know anything is awry) of platforming action as Samus Aran, only to have her take her helmet of at the end to reveal… crazy red hair. This small reveal (and probably word of mouth) led to a more dedicated playthrough, which if completed under three hours, Samus was revealed to be a woman wearing a one-piece swimsuit, an avatar you could use instead of armored Samus. If you beat the game in under an hour, you got a glimpse of bikini Samus, who was not a playable character. The fanservice aspect of the Samus reveal is that Samus’s eroticized body has nothing to do with any diegetic, gamic, or representational concept of desire. The hair-only reveal invites fantasy and speculation more than objectification: “Could that be a woman under all that space-armor?” This kind of speculation leads away from the game and its rules and diegesis, into the realm of erotic possibility and imagination and doesn’t make its way back into the text.

Whoops, I said “text.” Cue Barthes, early theorizer of what would later be called fanservice. Here’s how he defines what is erotic in Pleasure of the Text: “it is intermittence… which is erotic: the intermittence of skin flashing between two articles of clothing (trousers and sweater), [etc.]; it is this flash itself which seduces, or rather: the staging of an appearance-as-disappearance.”^[5] For Barthes, the fleeting image of possibility, the one that seduces the imagination, is very different from the clinical inspection of the human body in its nakedness. The erotic (female-oriented) imagination is fueled more by the hint that Samus is indeed a woman, embodied, sexed, beneath her armor than by seeing her fight metroids and Mother Brain in a red leotard. Barthes also dichotomizes types of pleasure we get from texts, a term which I’m going to go ahead and shove videogames into despite its akimbo algorithmic and interactive corners and protrusions. There’s pleasure—euphoric, comfortable, reaffirming culture—and there is jouissance, which is a French word for orgasm and bliss, and which Barthes aligns with the uncomfortable/pleasurable loss of the self as in ecstasy and with texts that force their audiences to question their assumptions and tastes. Though I have a problem with this dichotomy,^[6] these terms may be a good way to understand how certain types of fanservice function in videogames.

Lara with her original wire frame body side-by-side with an upgraded polygon count.

For instance, in Tomb Raider, critics have pointed to Lara Croft’s gigantic boobs as evidence of sexual objectification. Fair enough, if we bracket for the moment that they look like funnels and the player doesn’t see them for most of the game since it’s in third-person POV from behind Lara, and I particularly agree that it is problematic that for sexuality of videogame avatars only comes into discussion when we get the first 3D action heroine.^[7] But even as intermittent glimpses, Lara’s breasts have less erotic potential than her butterfly stroke underwater, where the gamer sees straight into Lara’s crotch as her legs open and close. The swimming scenes, though, resist the unidirectional gaze of inspection through the gameplay, which forces the player to hurry up or drown in an underwater maze. Moments like these and the constant, nearly sexual grunting of Lara’s climbing and exploring call attention to her as a sexed being, but do not encourage the player to linger. As you can imagine, Tomb Raider has inspired a lion’s share of erotic fanfiction, much more than, say, Kratos from God of War, a gnarly brute whose ripped body is on display throughout the game and enjoys sex minigames for powerups.

Fanservice for undead pirates.

While I am not arguing that fanservice, in its manifestations as glimpses, accidental exposure, “realistic” and gendered sounds and body movements, is not problematic, heterosexist, infantilizing of women, or a continuation of oppressive stereotypes, it is also not the subject/object hierarchy that is characteristic of the male gaze. It is supplementary, gratuitous, only there as a seed for imaginations. Rather than reaffirm the comfort of the diegesis and the ideologies inherent in it, these instances, weirdly, make the digital characters more bodily and have the potential to do what Barthes claims writerly texts do: confront their own subjectivity, their own desires, to separate their desires from the overdetermination of the game. This potentiality, of course, is almost always limited by the very concept of fanservice: to give fans what they want.^[8] But who knows what fans want? All the cleavage and crotch-shots in the world can’t account for the rich variety of erotic scenarios fans write Lara Croft into, but it would be a good bet that almost all of these works of the imagination began with a glimpse.

This is what fun looked like in 1994.

The word fun has no known origin, coming into Middle English ex nihilo. The free version of the Oxford Dictionary defines it as “amusement, enjoyment, or lighthearted pleasure.”^[1] This definition doesn’t attempt to theorize what having fun (or even being fun) might be like, what it feels like, or how one might experience it. It offers no phenomenology of fun. The entry itself is not fun—there are no funny examples, no word play. Not that there would be, of course, but one could imagine the British dictionary writer barely able to restrain himself, adding in a sentence about a fish or a mob of policemen. Can The Sims stand up to the Oxford triumvirate of amusement, enjoyment, or lighthearted pleasure? In The Sims, playing the game as intended (by the mechanics and reward system, at least) is clearly not amusing, a word meaning “finding something funny.” Making sure your avatar doesn’t stink or pee himself, making sure he’s fed, and picking out what he wears isn’t funny unless he does stink, pee himself, burn his food, and wear something preposterous. Doing regular things isn’t funny.

In terms of enjoyment, a word that means “taking pleasure in something,” I suppose there may be a Zen-like satisfaction in the orderly regiment of eating, cleaning, and sleeping (maybe a little meditation thrown in), but the gameplay itself encourages that Sim-life less than the zany, burn-a-house-down ambitions of anti-realists such as myself. Raph Koster, one of the few videogame theorists who tries to define fun, says, “Fun is all about our brains feeling good.” He sort of conflates and reduces the endorphin system (endogenous chemicals that act like morphine) and the mesolimbic pathway (a specific transit of dopamine that some consider the brain’s reward system for evolutionary advantageous activity) and goes on to say that we activate these centers by learning. He continues, “Fun from games arises from mastery. It arises out of comprehension. It is the act of solving puzzles that makes games fun.”^[2] Koster points toward the recognition of new patterns as the locus of fun, putting us into a cycle of learning. For example, if in The Sims all you did was feed and bathe, then you’d get bored pretty quickly: you need new avenues to explore, new patterns to recognize, mastering them and then moving on to the next thing. And so, you set out to have an affair with your neighbor.

This video of a Sims affair by dannidanz is definitely NSFW:
Watch this video on YouTube.

Pleasure, which deals with happiness and satisfaction according to the OED, is a cluttered geography of connotations and theoretical baggage. We’ll bracket its genealogy for now and since its inclusion in the fun definition is redundant (see “enjoyment”), let’s focus on its modifier: lighthearted. This killer metaphor-word means “cheerful or carefree” according to Oxford. The word carefree points to a more fruitful aspect of fun, one that is potentially well-nuanced and heavily problematic. This is the type of lighthearted pleasure afforded in The Sims: start a lifelong romantic partnership, gain the experience necessary to become a successful professional, continue to accumulate wealth and consume consumables. One hypothesis for why people might have fun with The Simsis that it allows them to play out things that would have serious consequences in real life in a safe environment based on achievement (pattern recognition, learning) and norms. I get this.

But on the other hand, I disagree with it. Really falling in love is fun, even if it is often full of anxiety and apocalypse.^[3] If you have so much privilege that you can choose a career based on interests and advance through it, then you’re probably in a fun situation. I find myself seventeen years after I discovered SimCity on a Macintosh Performa still avoiding “work” by playing video games as part of my job. Why do I need a computer simulation to play out the same types of things I do happily for consequences, consequences that are necessary for my overall wellbeing?

It’s time to give a preliminary and partial definition of fun, one slightly different than either Oxford’s or Koster’s definitions: fun is when I’m not thinking about the fact that my body will cease to function and I’ll die. When I’m not thinking that what I’m doing is keeping me from doing what I want to be doing. When I’m not insurmountably face-to-face with my own very consequential failures. That’s my triumvirate: anti-awareness-of-mortality, anti-feelings-of-impediment, and anti-guilty. Note that I’ve avoided talking about pleasure here, because not everything pleasurable is fun, and fun is not always pleasurable. For me, at least. Also, I believe fun can be carefree in that a condition of fun may be bereft of certain consequences, but it is never carefree qua trivial.

Dogsledding is never trivial.

After asking my creative writing students one semester why they were taking my class, one student answered, “Because it’s fun.” I answered, “Do you think it’s going to be fun when I’m calling your emotions cliché?” Guess what? That drew a big laugh, and I got my best student evaluations ever. The reason is that it was fun. Though I knocked Koster for his shoddy science earlier, I agree with him that learning can be fun. It often satisfies numbers one and two on my tripartite definition. For me, The Sims is not fun. It pushes the very banality of my life into my face, traps me in the grind of processing energy to stay alive (a cycle that will one day give out) without the rich, imaginative pleasures staying alive affords. Every time I encounter this game I feel that I should hurry up and finish so that I clean my own house and sleep with my neighbors and fight my friends and generally become a capitalistic workaholic. Even with the option to work jobs you wouldn’t in real life but would like to explore, the foregrounding of the quotidian calls attention to its own triviality in a way that makes me despair.

Here, I’m obviously not thinking about my impending death.

Fun is a condition that rests on the very personal feelings of individuals, and I’m probably just a little too macabre for The Sims. That said, the promise of The Sims can still be a promise of fun. It offers found narratives the way other god games do: stories not designed by the designers but stumbled upon in gameplay. Even yoked to chores and an even more unreal free market meritocracy than the one we already have, these stories chart into an imagination. This is what unites my three-part definition, the spark at the heart of fun: imagination. We imagine universes where what we do matters and where we can save our progress and never really die, and then we have the humor to call those universes games. Silly us.

In 2011, Sucker Punch Productions launched inFAMOUS 2, a sequel to an open-world action platform, wherein Cole MacGrath explores a Louisianian city, New Marais. There are aboveground cemeteries, balcony verandas, an old cathedral in need of constant repair, busted up shotgun houses, canals, and a street car. The main feature of the inFAMOUS franchise is Cole’s interactions with architecture: he’s a parkour dude, meaning each pipe and windowsill has to be actionable for him to climb, jump, and crawl his way through the city. According to a backstory revealed in-game, after New Marais was destroyed by a hurricane in 2004, the combination of a nearly empty city and an overwhelmed police force meant Cole could parkour in peace.

inFAMOUS 2 interprets Hurricane Katrina as the hollowing out of a city, allowing the pure distinctions of its architecture to function as a site of play. This play extends into Cole’s missions as an interesting counterpoint to art that confronts recent tragedy. Literature of witness, as Carolyn Forché defines it, forces us to face the memory of devastation: “they will not permit us diseased complacency. They come to us with claims that have yet to be filled, as attempts to mark us as they have themselves been marked.”^[1] inFAMOUS 2 seems to be as divorced from this idea as one can get, especially when the more recent destruction of Empire City, the series’ New York City, propels the storyline of the game. But I wonder whether, in its obliviousness to the politics of setting a game in a postdiluvian city, inFAMOUS2 formulates a type of material witness through its meticulous attention to the geography of New Orleans as the springboard for play, for the imagination.

In his essay “Nymphs,” Giorgio Agamben explores the relationship between memory, movement, the image, and the imagination. He writes, “Images are alive, but because they are made of time and memory their life is always already… after-life; it is always already threatened and in the process of taking on a spectral form.”^[2] Images stay with us. We see them, but when we close our eyes, they still exist, forming the basis of our memory, peopling our imagination, haunting us. This observation not only applies to art, but to images destroyed by disaster. I remember watching the news coverage of my city drowning on August 29, 2005, and I remember the after-image burn of the city I had known, now emptied out by new meanings. With inFAMOUS 2, we get the pathosformel^[3] of “The City that Care Forgot,” the touristy nickname that’s been around since 1938, evoking the wrought-iron decadence of the French Quarter, alongside the “pure image” of architecture, which we know intimately through the game’s parkour mechanics, as field of play.^[4]

With the form of the images semi-divorced from the legacy of Katrina, the player explores the pure images that serve as the vessels for New Orleanian culture, and wildly enough, the images aren’t that inaccurate: the combination of Bible-belt gun and momma evangelism alongside European architecture and laissez-faire attitudes, the chemical refineries which make the tropical ecosystem a breeding ground for cancer, the run-down a few streets away from neon tourism. The gameplay of inFAMOUS 2 is mostly just getting from one place to another through repeatedly climbing buildings, a fact that deeply acquaints the player with the images and material, if not the cultural and historical significance of those images, of New Orleans masked as a fictional city. This revelry in the image better acquaints a gamer to the physical reality of New Orleans—its buildings, the style of its layout, its proximity to water, the economic randomness of the city planning—than watching the coverage of the storm from afar.

Only one mission directly references the yet ongoing struggle of being in a once-flooded city: “Flood Town,” wherein the gamer must restore power to the poorest area of town. Flood Town, as the cut-scene reveals, is where the poorest of the poor live, and though the “flood” that wrecked New Marais was four years ago in the diegesis, Flood Town is still mostly underwater. In this way, the designers were able to have a vibrant, colorful city, alongside a dangerous one that recalls the images that tore a hole in real people’s live seven years ago.^[5] Absurdly, four years later, part of the city is still underwater, and the people who live in this underwater community need electricity. The historical contradiction links the form of New Orleans with an impossible content: at once whole and flooded—suspended in a state between physicality and an ahistorical flood, complete with the orange bodycount Xs on buildings partially submerged in a game where corpses don’t stay corporeal but vanish into algorithm.

X Code from real New Orleans, photo by ercwttmn.

X Code from inFAMOUS 2

Though the designers were insistently apolitical concerning setting the game in a fictional post-Katrina New Orleans, these images become uncannily the site of a play of exploration, of helping and hurting, and of charting a memory of disaster from the roofs as the ground sinks below a water that will kill you.^[6] In this way, the experience of playing inFAMOUS 2 becomes a game that serves as both witness to the legacy (and stereotypes) of New Orleans and its tragedy and, devoiding both from their history, allows for the play of the imagination to make new stories, new futures, while not quite shaking off the specter of the past.