In the early 1880’s, professional baseball in the U.S. had a popularity problem. It couldn’t shake its association with gambling and fixing games, and the nation’s top professional league, the National League of Professional Base Ball Clubs, had a penchant for kicking out popular players and teams if they did not tow the company line.…
Seals in Japan and Jackie in Congress: Baseball as Anticommunism
by Alan Kloosterhof •
In October 1949 an independent minor league American baseball team, the San Francisco Seals, embarked on a goodwill tour in Japan. The tour, whose mission was to contribute to the building of goodwill between the United States and Japan, and to help revive baseball in Japan after its prohibition during the Second World War, was…
Playing for Keeps, Muscle Memory, and Public Gaming Spaces
by Alan Kloosterhof •
I really enjoyed Taylor’s book. A lot of her discussion on the growth of e-sports reminds me of some of the growing pains experienced by baseball in the late nineteenth century, especially some of the difficulties that come with such a decentralized format of sport. For all of the regimentation that comes with bureaucratic leagues,…
Controller Texture: More than Cold Plastic?
by Alan Kloosterhof •
I really enjoyed this week’s readings. The Aarseth, Bogost, and Dyer-Witheford pieces all provide nice insights into the ways in which academics approach the study of video games. One aspect that particularly struck me was Bogost’s section on texture in video games. Bogost focuses on the visuals and sounds contained within the game environment as…
BotRT 1: Cheesing vs the Legitimate in Destiny
by Alan Kloosterhof •
The end-game content of Bungie’s Destiny can be fairly challenging. This especially goes for Destiny’s raids. Though they are smaller than the World of Warcraft raids we read about in Nardi’s book (Destiny raids cap out at 6 people), they are similar to WoW raids in that they are long missions requiring coordination and communication between…
Nardi, WoW, Freedom, and Farming
by Alan Kloosterhof •
Nardi’s My Life as a Night Elf Priest was a pretty fascinating read. One theory of hers that I found particularly enlightening was her comparison of the rule-less structure of a game like Second Life compared to a more traditionally ruled game like World of Warcraft. Though players could ostensibly do whatever they wanted in…
Source Analysis: Bill Brown, “Waging Baseball, Playing War”
by Alan Kloosterhof •
Bill Brown’s article “Waging Baseball, Playing War: Games of American Imperialism” is a pretty interesting read. He briefly traces some of the American global baseball tours of the early twentieth century, and also how the Japanese used baseball in 1914 as a tool to colonize the island of Truk, a Japanese colony in the Caroline…
Aarseth, Bogost, and Juul
by Alan Kloosterhof •
All of this week’s readings used elements of literary criticism to examine digital games. All three authors were quick to note that there wasn’t complete overlap, but the tools of literary analysis are certainly in play here. In his piece, Aarseth notes that, at least according to the state of the humanities at the time…
The Shock of the Old
by Alan Kloosterhof •
I usually try to avoid framing these sorts of reading responses in terms of whether or not I “enjoyed” the reading, but I must say that I really liked Edgerton’s analysis of technology in The Shock of the Old. In particular, his focus on use instead of innovation brings the analysis of technology outside of…