On Second Thought …

Abstract

The core problem concerning the place of games and writing in our culture is familiarity. Mass culture possesses a “common sense” understanding, reaffirmed through ritualistic repetition, of writing and games (considered separately, rarely together), an understanding supposedly shared by all like-minded, right-thinking persons. The old saying tells us pretty clearly what is bred through familiarity, however, and in the area of games and writing, this contempt is directed at practitioners and those who help shape the practitioners’ experience. Game studies scholars are thus more than familiar with the numerous stereotypes about players as seething cauldrons of antisocial tendencies and game developers as amoral panderers. Writing studies scholars for their part are all too familiar with the “Johnny/Jane can’t write” laments on the one hand, and the regular indictments of the lowest status and most poorly paid members of the professoriat for failing to turn all students into Proust in a single semester on the other. The coupling of comfortable familiarity with the careful evasions of contempt then justifies all manner of interventions from unholy coalitions of the clueless and the Machiavellian. Perhaps most distressingly, gamers and student writers have thoroughly absorbed this contempt and reach for it themselves as a default conceptual framework, albeit one rendered horribly complex and confused by its incompatibility with their own experience.