Michael Workman

"It's going to be just like the Rapture," grins Alex Golub, "except with T-shirts."

The graduate student at the University of Chicago and founding member of the Digital Genres Initiative has organized a conference at the U of C on the subject of video games and gaming culture, scheduled for the last weekend in May. And with papers that boast titles like "The Body of Christ, The Blog of Heaven: Performance, Virtuality, Embodiment" and "Battles of Blood and Ink: Apophasis, Identity, and Naming Conventions across Digital and Theological Genres," Golub's evangelist overtones can almost be believed. That is, until you get to Holly Swyers' paper, "Gary Stu Doesn't Fuck Here: the Panache of Slash," which references the idealized avatars of fan fiction, role-playing and video games, and promises less sacred but no less fanatical territory.

Interest in gaming culture, like the advent of such innovations as massively multiplayer games ("MMPs") which allow a large number of players to interact simultaneously in a single virtual environment and the fully realized theaters found in the immensely popular Grand Theft Auto series, has skyrocketed. Of course, it doesn't hurt that video-gaming revenues rival the blockbuster totals of Hollywood studios.

"Television and radio send one message to many people. But the Internet allows many-to-many communication," says Golub, "In the last century, mass media and corporate ownership snuffed out the popular energy of the 1920s. Maybe the next version of jazz is out there on the Internet. That's what this conference is about: exploring how new technologies enable a new and popular creativity, just like the phonograph and movie galvanized creativity in the 1920s." In hot pursuit of this idea, Golub has enlisted twenty-four graduate students and professors from twelve universities and four countries to present at the DGI conference, insisting that the approach will not be sardonic nor overly academic; many of the presenters are enthusiasts first. "This a chance for academics to let their hair down and come clean about what they do in their free time. The result is the best of both worlds: the thoughtfulness of the academy and the web-savvy of the Internet hipster."

The recent ascendance of video games in popular culture can be more attributed to a state of radical fandom than to the formation of a new religious movement, unless the Second Coming actually has been fulfilled by Keanu Reeves. Or do video games have something more to offer than the spiritual fulfillment of Christendom, Judaism, Islam? "Absolutely," says Golub, "I told you about the T-shirts, right?"

(2003-05-28)

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