NMSU Game Labs Visit

Nov 13th, 2008
My visits to the games lab at New Mexico State University are always welcome. Because the evaluation of rhetoric is so often considered serious business, it is easy to forget that there is an entire branch of the communicative spectrum that is playful, joking, and capricious, which is also entirely necessary for our collective well-being.

My recent visit tot he NMSU Games Lab provided me with the opportunity to check out some of the games that are available for the Nintendo Wii gaming system. Admittedly, I find most Nintendo games cute, but hardly attention grabbing. I tried about five different games for the Wii, and the one that stood out for me was Raving Rabbids. It is a single-player game in which the main agent is a lunatic rabbit who has to complete a series of mindless tasks. Upon completion of each trial stage, additional stages open up for play. The game is exactly what one might expect. Two stages that stood out were the cow hammer toss and the disco bunny burn up, my names for the stages, by the way. Because the game is completely pointless, meaning it is not contextualized as some great quest, and I could not find a clear objective, it allows the user to play for the sake of playing. There is no pressure to keep playing, as in many other games. When the gamer has had his fill, he simply turns it off and walks away. One might even consider games of this type to posses some cathartic, escapist quality, which could be beneficial to many stressed out people.

If I were to place Raving Rabbids under one of Brian Sutton-Smith's "Seven Rhetorics of Play", it would definitely fit under Play as Frivolity. It does evoke some historical memory of the trickster. The characters are loony rabbits that the gamer has perform a variety of sardonic tasks, some might say sadistic. Additionally, Raving Rabbids is devoid of any "work ethic". It nonsensical nature is what makes it fun. Perhaps the cultural reflection to be found in Raving Rabbids is that its frivolous escapist element is necessitated in the hectic, western world.

Final Paper Proposal

What if you could see the future? What if you could see the effects and ramifications of all of your decisions? This paper will focus on the representation of all possible worlds within virtual, video game environments. It makes a strong case for the reestablishment of the humans as phenomenological objects, which rely entirely on a foundational reality that we must incorporate through the use of language. By utilizing Wittgenstein's notions of object necessitated language, as put forth in Kripke's principle of contingent truths operating in all possible worlds, I move beyond the positivistic trappings of the linguistic turn. By making a strong argument for the existence of a foundational ontology and an objectivist epistemic, I can move freely into a deeper discussion of the existence of parallel universes, or "Relative State" Formulations of Quantum Mechanics, first posited by Hugh Everett. By incorporating Gary Saul Morison's treatment of antideterministic, linguistic temporalities, I aim to bring language back into the discursive fold so that we can make suppositions about what benefit we all might gain by seeing the outcome of our choices, singularities on our personal timelines.

Each philosophical and theoretical discussion makes an attempt to get closer to looking inside both of Schrodinger's boxes, at the same time! The translation of a discussion into the digital, new literacy realm is what makes possible the playing out of our thought experiments in the visibly, virtual environment.
Emergent technologies has empowered us in the digital age to outline algorithmic environments that calculate and visually represent the result of our life's decisions.