ReAnimate, Montréal, Multidisciplinarity, and Method

I had the wonderful and privileged chance to attend a summer school organized by Concordia University, Université de Montréal, and École de Technologie Supérieure. ReAnimate happened in Montréal from the 10th to the 14th of June 2024 and was comprised of keynotes focusing on studying old video games, on retro as a thing in video game development and design, daily lighning talks by the participants, a game jam where we worked with AMOS BASIC for the Amiga, a little exhibition of old computers and, of course, a lot of gaming.

My intention for attendance was twofold. I get to learn and exchange on topics that are important for my Dissertation and Confoederatio Ludens. And, the event also gave me a chance to visit Montréal, the city I would love to go to as a visiting scholar during my PhD time. I got to know some people, also some whose work I already cited, and I got to know the local Video Game Studies scene. It is somewhat smaller than expected, but vibrant and engaging. It was inspiring and thought-provoking, but also shaking the foundations of my ideas regarding my Dissertation.

Montréal isn’t a city I would describe as beautiful right away. It has its charm in some corners. The one aspect that makes it really a great city, and me falling a little bit in love with it, are the people. What a lovely, friendly, and welcoming bunch. Summer is, so I heard, the time when everybody tries to make up for the harsh winters. There is constantly something somewhere going on and people are joyful and celebrating. Just this week there was the ReAnimate Summer School on retro-games, the Canadian Game Studies Association conference, the Colloque interuniversitaire francophone d’études ludiques, and some smaller Video Game Studies related events.

ReAnimate

Speedrun Summaries of the presentations

• Jimmy Maher: Origin story of him being a video game historian and how that shaped his approach to his studies.
• Alex Custodio: Game Boy homebrew in between elitism and activist practices and modding hardware as a research approach.
• Chris Gibbs: Origin story of his video game dev and producer career.
• Carl Therrien: Speedrun-presenting 15 important Amiga games and linking them to fundamental research in the Video Game Studies.
• Charlotte Courtois: Retro homebrew as feminist and activist practice.
• Frédérick Maheux: Noise, video-games and research-creation.
• Cindy Poremba: New materialism, rotoscoping and the discourse on “motion capture”, and Mechner’s work.
• John Aycock: Origin story of video game archeology/archeogaming and cases from his own work.
• Rilla Khaled and Darren Wershler: Materiality, technique and culture in Video Game Studies, and how all three are always entangled.
• Carlos Pinto Gomez: The history of video game development technologies.

In hindsight, a larger topic emerged from all these presentations, and also from the informal talks between us participants. Game developers in the 1980ies figured out, that it needs a team to create a decent game (Chris Gibbs, Carlos Pinto Gomez). Likewise, no single researcher can encompass all the perspectives needed to analyze a game. Rilla Khaled called out for more multidisciplinary¹ approaches, where we help each other out, and bring with the necessary humility in knowing that we can’t do or know everything. This is a general approach at the Technoculture, Art and Games institute (TAG)², where Rilla Khaled, Alex Custodio and Darren Wershler are located. Being trained in one discipline, they constantly dabble in others, with the help of others. The same is true, of course, for John Aycock’s video game archeology. Coming from computer science, Aycock was able to further develop his approach through the intense engagement and collaboration with people coming from archeology.

Next to these keynote-length presentations, we had shorter-ish lightning talks. I hope I remember them all.

• Robert Glasshüttner: About the history of the pinball machine and his research on pinball and the discourse on luck and skill.
• Aleks Franiczek: His take on narrative design in video games for his literature courses, and examples from the JRPG genre.
• Cristiano Politowski: Categorizing a video game easter egg corpus with GPT-4.
• Fábio Petrillo: Modeling and analyzing video game post-mortems with computational method regarding the production’s organization.
• Sophie Bémelmans: Her research on the Smaky.
• Myself: See Struggling, below…

My expectation of the presentations matched most of the time with what was delivered. All the talks were massively insightful, and I have yet to comb through my handwritten notes. As such, I will waive a more detailed summary for here and now. I must mention Khaled’s and Wershler’s contribution tho. It was their joint-presentation that sparked some thought on multi-disciplinary.

Their talk concentrated on the Gordian knot of materiality, Technology, and culture, and how profoundly researching video games (or anything else for that matter) will need to traverse all three aspects. Both discussed their own career and how they experienced this first-hand in their own work and research. Wershler brought a modded SNES console to the table, as a great example. He bought the machine of eBay, wondering why it was modded the way it was and opened up the discourse on video ports in different countries, signal processing, fashion (trends) in soldering, the hierarchies and power of knowledge in hobbyist circles and engineering. He used the example to outline the approach to the Residual Media Depot, which is a mix between an archive and a hackspace, or a Video Game Studies hardware archive geared towards Preserving Video Games as Cultural Heritage for use³. I was especially fond of Khaled’s approach to things, since she comes from design, but the kind of that I got trained in, in my masters. Her focus was on the entanglement of academic Video Game Studies and video game design/development courses as well the importance of research-creation and the indie/alt scene. Their point being, don’t walk alone and get your hands dirty.

Struggling

I was asked if I would like to present my Dissertation or research focus in a lightning talk. There were more participants from the computer sciences, then humanities people, and already in informal talks I struggled with explaining what I do the way I do it. Apparently, using code as a lense to research the past, wasn’t good enough for somebody who doesn’t know what the humanities actually do. Trying to come up with an arc that would fit a slightly different audience, I spiraled down the cave of doubt. Listening to senior researchers brining forward their fantastic and insightful cases didn’t help at all (damn you Poremba and Aycock).

At first, I tried to explain why the Video Game Image is of such an interest to me, and what it means to research that type of image as an interface. And I just couldn’t make it work. I set up the outline, I worked on the slides, but it always felt amiss. There was a fissure in the overall arc, where I jumped from one topic/focus/approach/discipline to another. RG, another participant, asked me once during the week, what I identify with, in terms of discipline. And, I didn’t really have an answer for him. Not because I wanted to be mysterious, I just didn’t actually have an answer for him. I do have the feeling, that aforementioned fissure and the lack of a clear answer might be related.

In the end, I was able to stick together a presentation that I was more or less happy with⁴. I started out with my focus on programming practices, talked about how I see and research code, and also talked about my work on analyzing images. But I still didn’t feel quite comfortable with the setup. After having found some time for some reflection I figured that recently, I started to center too much on the image, and lesser so on the code. The recent research and insights on video game images are essential to my Dissertation, but not the main focus and should subordinate to my studies on code and programming. Luckily, I was able to advance the latter as well this week.

Outlook

Darren Wershler started his part out with the anecdote, that a friend of him often says that there are no methods, just Case Studies rebranded as methods (or something like that, can’t recall it fully). His point being that research on the ground is messy, and can’t usually be pressed into a form from the beginning. I do feel that. But, I also feel the need to invest more in that specific corner. My approach to image clustering was lax at best, and I seriously need to investigate clustering algorithms and their approaches. So see you soon, t-SNE and UMAP…

On the other hand, I also feel the need to recenter on code and programming practices, which is my main topic and where I bring in the expertise. The recent meandering into video game interfaces was great, but is also way beyond my comfort zone, or what I realistically can do.

I had the chance to speak with some people about my approach of distant reading source code, and learned that I am, of course, not the only one to do so. Some of the computer science people were working in that direction, for example Gabriel Ullmann with SyDRA: An Approach to Understand Game Engine Architecture. Their code inspection has plenty of results, but he struggled coming up with a research question that reframes the results into answers. On the other hand, I had the feeling, that a lot of the humanities people get lost in details and discourse-analysis⁵. This is probably just my reading of the situation, but it seems there is space for an approach that tries to bridge those two worlds.

I tried to expand some thought on what such a methodological approach should be able to do in Source Code Analysis in the Humanities and came up with an exemplary case in Source Code Analysis in the Humanities. Not everything is discourse and the digital humanities are learning from computer science, that methods can sometimes be formalized and that this is helping explainability and formalization of the results. I do feel that this is one of the main weak points of Critical Code Analysis as outlined in Critical code studies. It often lacks from a methodological template that helps and supports researchers and reproduce the approach.

Last but not least, I reflected once more on the very basics of what interests me. When I started out explaining to people what is the most fundamental thing I’m looking at I’d say something like “creative coding”. But that’s not quite it. After reading and discussing some of Homo ludens: a study of the play-element in culture, as well as my time here in Montréal, I found the following outline to work and feel really well.

Usually, programming is seen as something very utilitarian, a means to and end. This is of course true, but it’s not all of it. People don’t just decide they want to create a video game or software and start coding away. Programming is a very specific and unique way of production, with outcomes that can differ massively in terms of cultural value. Usually, people are drawn to, or try and stick with, programming. Either it is their socialization, or it fits with their way of being. A lot of the times, it can feel meaningful to them.

Within that frame, it feels better to speak of my interest in the Conceptualizing Programming. The Hacking away, the experimenting, tinkering, and bricolage, the creating of homebrew games and software. Which is probably the most common way to engage with programming and get accustomed to it. I’ll stick to that for now.

Footnotes

1. Multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinarity; what is what? - Educational Development & Training - Utrecht University ↩

2. Technoculture, Art and Games | TAG ↩

3. See Assembling Auras: Towards a Methodology for the Preservation and Study of Video Games as Cultural Heritage Artefacts ↩

4. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11840613 ↩

5. See Game Studies - Game analysis: Developing a methodological toolkit for the qualitative study of games ↩