chapter
07 Thomas Spies
2 July 2024, 5:30 PM
Introductions
03:59 My name is Thomas. I’m living in Cologne now and working from here. I am a lecturer, a publisher. I’m a researcher. My specialty is game studies. So this is like my focus in media studies, but I did my PhD in this area at the University of Cologne about the representation of trauma. I’m also working on this panels which are dealing with video games from a critical perspective. I’m inviting experts from different fields to play live in front of an audience. To try to get some different angles on the medium. Because of that, I was also publishing an anthology together with Holger Pötzsch from the University of Tromso and Sheyda Kurt. He is an author, who wrote two bestsellers and also is a journalist and moderator of different panels. He is an activist and we together created or hosted this idea for an anthology and gathered different contributors for that. The anthology is called Spiel*Kritik, which translates to game critique, you could say. We focus on different perspectives on video games and capitalism.
Why: Politics of Publishing
05:59 If you could get a bit into the why’s behind your work or your politics of publishing in a sense. If you have theories, references that you work with that inspire your work. Could you put together a sort of syllabus on publishing practices that inform your own?
06:26 I could start with the theories which are sharpening our understanding of dealing with video games and then see how they translate into our practice, because they are intertwined in many ways. referencesFor our anthology, we relied on a range of critical theories, beginning with the Frankfurt School, and also drawing on Michel Foucault’s ideas about power, knowledge, resistance, and government, of course. We incorporated Edward Said’s postcolonial theories, highlighting how knowledge production can reinforce colonial power structures and perpetuate stereotypes. We had Judith Butler, her insights into subjectivity and resistance. And this is maybe where this connection I already mentioned comes in. We tried to have a connection between acting and thinking. Often in universities, you’re only thinking about some topics that the world does not deal with. So we tried to close this gap and think about things we can actually put into practice. What can this be and how can it be translated? We thought we can’t do this by ourselves, so we invited not only academics, but also people from the arts or from journalism to gather and think about how we can translate these theories into something practical. Which also then can be positive for our world or understanding of the world and of media and video games.
08:47 Gaming has become part of our understanding of publishing, or maybe more as a competitor of the traditional publishing field. So how would you place gaming in this media and publishing environment?
09:18 I would say video games are a very special medium because they need an active player or a person being active. If you have a movie, you can watch it passively, but of course, it can still activate you in some ways. However, when you play video games, you have to be part of the experience, you have to be part of playing. Playing itself for us is like a social experience, also a very historical one. So there were always people playing games and now of course we have these digital games in the capitalist environment. So play is not for itself anymore. So of course it can have rules, but you create the rules by yourself or they’re created by the playing participants. Now we have rules from a capitalist system intervening in what a game can or should be. So we have a very different product now and this is important to research because it is the biggest entertainment industry at the moment. It has more income than film and music combined. Even sports, I think. So it’s very big industrial complex and this is why we have or thought we have to look closer at it.
How: Infrastructures of Publishing
11:05 If you could speak a bit about your personal workflow when it comes to producing knowledge, the tools, operations and models that are at play here. The neoliberal model of game production probably influences it a lot. Also the distribution and promotion and how those operate.
11:53 It was clear to us that we needed to reflect on the diversity of content at the editorial level. So the three of us connected, coming from three different generations and three different fields of work. Holger Pötzsch is working in Norway and is the oldest among us, he also has numerous publications in media studies. Şeyda Kurt is the author of the two books I mentioned, so she was coming in as someone writing in a very different style. I myself sit somewhere between writing academically and also organizing those panels – the let’s play critical panels. sustainability of workflowsSo we regularly exchanged ideas, via Zoom, due to Holger being in Norway. We also met in person several times. For us, it was very important to give the authors a sense of working together on a project, which is why we set up a joint meeting before everyone started writing. For this, we specifically asked experts to cover various areas. And fortunately, no one declined. We granted them relative freedom, including in formatting the text, resulting in both classic academic and essayistic texts in the final volume. Then we found a publisher, Transcript, a German publisher from Bielefeld, willing to support and finance the entire project. This is not common as publishers usually are not prepared for such volumes. As you know, they either focus on academic publications or non-academic literature. So, normally academic volumes are funded by universities, but we were not based on any university for this volume, even if we worked on them or at universities. So we had to find a way to finance the whole project. As I said, business modelsTranscript has this funding from, I think, different universities from Germany. They have a pool of money and they can split it into different projects. So this was very good for us, and they also funded Open Access, which was also great.
Besides that, we have also changed how our anthology is produced and thought about the authors that are freelancers. In academic works or volumes for them, you don’t get paid. So we had the problem there. sustainability of workflowsWe somehow had to get money to fund them and this was also not part of Transcript's funding, because they never thought about paying the authors. So we had crowdfunding, we ran a campaign, had a video for that, we put it on social media and it came to be very successful. In this way we could really pay all the people involved. Now, after the volume was published, we sent out some copies and are promoting it through classic channels.
15:42 Have you ever been more closely involved with game studios, game publishers, people who produce games? Do you interact with them? Have they ever been interested in your work and maybe financing research relating to their games?
16:07 So I tried to reach out to them and wrote to a few game companies, especially some in Cologne and Berlin, because I live there. I thought that this could work. Some of them responded. I think one paid us 400 euros. But also we had to think about this so that this doesn’t look like we get financed by the industry we are critiquing. So this was very important, but it was a small indie company. It’s not Electronic Arts, one of the biggest ones or Activision, which are highly problematic when it comes to production structures. So we were okay with it. Many of them didn’t respond, because I think it didn’t fit into their framework of things they should be financing. So we didn’t rely very much on them. And also there’s a big gap between production and researching or working on a theoretical level with games. This gap is closed somehow in some areas where game design and game studies connect. But usually they go separate ways. So there was no big cooperation or anything like that.
17:33 On these more problematic aspects of production, how can you ensure that your work practice is financially sustainable? We’ve been talking to other people about the personal toll or personal involvement, ideas of caring for each other or helping each other. How does that play into your work?
18:05 conditions of workEspecially with the freelancers, we had a few problems to work out, because they are often underpaid or overworked. So we couldn’t make the deadlines or there were problems on the way to the final text. It is very important not to see them as production values, but as people, and also see that you have to do care-work if you are publishing. This is very important, because you are dealing with individuals and you have to find individual ways to make it work. This also included talking on Zoom for hours about different things in the text. This is what we think is important as a practice, along with paying them and not having crunch time, a term coined by the game industry, where people are stuck in a room for weeks, programming before a big deadline. We try to avoid that by having reasonable deadlines, by having some spielraum. So we could give them more time by not having a fixed date.
Who: Community of Publishing
19:48 In terms of collaborations and the professional network. The community and industry of gaming is quite different from that of traditional publishing, both in terms of audience and producers. So how does your work fit into that network and how do you create and maintain collaborators, allies?
20:24 I think this also applies to other areas. If you’re like a biologist of course you have an interest in biology and are talking to other people interested in that topic. This is also true for games, communityI’m a gamer myself and I hesitate to call myself that because it can be a very toxic term. So on the one hand I’m part of it and on the other I’m critical of it, but this gives me a room to really see tendencies and to explore the direction of the community. So I have talked to gamers and I reached out to them for panels, for example, to a store owner who sells these classic game consoles, and if they don't see me as some academic person trying to research the next hot topic then they’re much more likely to open up to me. Of course, it’s important for me to think about them when I publish something. I do not want to only write for an academic bubble. Community work was present on the panels but they are, as I tried to explain, part of our publishing practice. So this is like practicing what we are writing about. I would say this was the one community I was part of. For us it’s not only researchers, it’s also other people writing text. So people who produce text in some way, we are the other community and we were also of course dealing with them, reaching out to them. A special thing for our anthology was that we were handpicking them: we had some topics we thought were important and reached out to experts to write about them, something they responded positively to.
23:02 I guess the gaming community is not necessarily well seen. I mean, there’s a lot of negative connotations, rightfully so, with some of its aspects. But the sort of collective experience of gaming and of becoming or being part of that is very interesting. I guess quite different from the more traditional formats of publishing. So how do you see it bringing a vantage point? Or do you also see more positive aspects of speaking to that audience or working with that audience? Or what can that level of connection bring to your work?
23:58 I think there’s a very big transformational potential in it, because I can always see, and maybe you heard from Total Refusal in Ljubljana how people react to other people playing games in front of them. It’s very nice to see that it works every time. They’re very interested and can’t get enough of it. You can use this format to communcate something or leave an impression. Maybe it’s like this cathartic thing where you watch something and realize something else about how society works or how society is structured. I think there’s a big potential in that. So you rely on experiences nearly everyone has because we all play games in some way, even if it’s not digital, but also many people do play digitally nowadays. So there’s a big potential to gather an audience from very different backgrounds. There are also some games that are diverse or dealing with topics from a different angle. You can spot them and of course show them to people who didn’t know about them before that. So I think there’s a potential to see what the medium can also be besides the mainstream titles and games you already know.
25:41 What do you make of this obsession with watching other people play? Does it bring entertainment value or a community connection? Are there any critical aspects in that? Because of course, gaming is big, but what seems to be even bigger is streaming. That’s evident and it’s one of the newest forms of publishing in a sense of knowledge and entertainment production.
26:34 It’s cool to think about this, really. alternative publishing practicesIt’s like an interactive publishing somehow because you get instant feedback and you can also integrate this feedback in a live play. So I think toolsTwitch is a very interesting format now because you are very close to the community and the community aspects are central to the experience on Twitch. So if you play a game and say something critical, another person can respond instantly in the chat and you can have a discussion on that topic. But also it’s not just because there’s a community, it doesn’t have to be progressive. Of course, there are also right-wing or other communities as well. Although, there’s a chance to use that as a publisher. With streaming, you can reach a different audience or bigger audience. I think what’s interesting for people is to maybe be a part of it, but also why is it interesting to watch? Maybe because it somehow works when you watch someone doing something social. Maybe this is another medium, it could be like a reality soap or something like that. So you have the feeling something real is going on and something which is authentic and also reliable. So you are having a close connection to the person doing something, in this case, playing a game. Maybe you also know the game, so it’s like you are thinking about what would I do or what would I say? And you ask about the critical aspects when doing this. I think there are two opportunities. You can play critical games and look at what they bring up, or you can play a mainstream game and criticize it, but you have to make this your focus. I think this focus is not often present in the moment when you look at what kind of people play Fortnite or something like that for fun, which is also fine, but if you’re asking about critical aspects, you have to bring those into your stream.
Discussion
29:30 I’m Lorenzo from Nero. I’m really intrigued by play critical. I participated in Total Refusal performance in Ljubljana and I was really astonished by that practice. I’m curious to know more about it, more about this practice, when did you start? Did the community exist already? How did you encounter this practice? Is it more like a theory that then transforms into a practice? I’m curious to understand the genealogy of it.
31:26 There are so many layers to it. I was also always interested in playing games and just playing for fun. At some time I discovered, I can also apply film study critique on the games I was playing. Of course, there were critical games I was playing too. So maybe it was my first epiphany when I saw that I can now dive into a realm where not many people were working.
communityThen I discovered a small community gathering around game studies and doing practical or theoretical things in this area. It all started with my PhD where I discovered there are some institutes which now accomodate people working with or researching games. Especially in Cologne, there’s a big bubble of researchers. I think I wrote an introduction and also a paper for Benjamin Beil, and he’s one of the professors here at University of Cologne. I was looking at trauma representation, as I said. Yet now I would say that one has to go beyond that.
This also reflected how I saw games in a capitalist context. For me, it was important to see what other people are thinking about video games in that way. Soon I discovered it’s not only researchers, but also artists. There are many artists doing short movies and video games, the Machinimas. Maybe this was the next step, to discover Machinimas and their community.
Because I’m used to taking photographs, I then dove into virtual photography and photographing in-game. There’s also a big community for that, especially in Italy. It’s very interesting. I met Matteo Bittanti a few weeks ago in Lenzburg in Switzerland. He was doing an exhibition there. On the way, I discovered Total Refusal. They were there for a short film festival. And we instantly connected. And this was the step to do something more practical. They were part of the first two panels. I organized them with some other people, of course. This synergy was the starting point for many projects since then. So maybe it was really discovering people, areas, and possibilities which are somehow not present in the mainstream until now.
35:03 I was curious about Total Refusal, to understand this new way of playing a game: looking for glitches, looking for alternative options and beyond the mainstream scope that a video game proposes to you. I’m asking this because I was trying to see if this kind of practice is somehow the mainstream narrative part in a critical way, together with other people as we experienced with the Total Refusal performance.
36:11 So, in classical publishing areas, where can you add the element of play? Can you have room for playful ideas? I know there’s always this capitalist structure, and it’s very hard to do that. But can you somehow create a space where everyone can be creative. You can’t be creative if you are forced to have a text ready in two weeks, or if you’re underpaid for it. So we have to see where there could be a room for the people you’re working with. This would be one thing I would translate to other publishing methods or areas. I think sometimes we fall into the trap of writing something about people, but not working with them.
37:35 Building on this idea of gaming and streaming as forms of instant interactive publishing, are there people, writers, artists, editors that you see using this more playful and participatory aspect of gaming in their practice? Or do you see that being a possible horizon of the “future” of publishing? Or is there something already happening in this direction? Of course, your work is in between and this more playful, critical aspect.
38:29 It’s hard to say, because of my particular place in this whole structure. I’m not very experienced in dealing with other publishers, for example. So I was in contact with a few other publishers besides Transcript last time. What I always liked was when we met in person and or we came together for events. We had this event in Vienna. There was the network of critical communication science. This was coming together not only because of the things we talked about, but also because of shared ideologies or views on the world. I think this is also important to maybe have a focus on the things which are important to you, and then to translate them into a product and not just come up with an abstract idea. I share ideas with a community and then see how this community can work together. I know this is not very broad. I don’t have specific names I can mention, but often I discovered that there was not enough space to do the kinds of projects that we did. So often you just have typical ways of doing an anthology or something like that.
40:46 That’s interesting in itself, that there’s this sort of gap, because we’ve been seeing the expansion of the gaming industry for the last 10–15 years. So it’s interesting maybe that that space is not fully yet occupied by projects.
42:47 The Let’s Play in Ljubljana was the format which emerged from Total Refusal and Valentina Tanni, where Valentina took the chance to present her book, or at least some of the topics, and the aesthetics that she’s discussing in her book that we did in collaboration with Aksioma and Nero. And we used that opportunity to kind of experiment with a new format of delivering in front of an audience in a performative way, a book presentation, so to say. Now we are in the final phase of editing this material to will launch it again online, where people can really consume it as a Let’s Play, in the sense of watching the game while the protagonist is featured talking in the bottom right corner. So I have two questions: how would you define that format that you saw live? How would you define the objects in terms of publishing that we are going to upload on YouTube or whatever online?
44:08 And if you can imagine this material online – you, as a gamer, perhaps consume some Let’s Play’s or similar content – who could the audience be that can consume a talk between Valentina Tanni about her book and Total Refusal on their big screen in their living room?
44:38 Even if you are trying to find the term fitting for what Total Refusal is doing there, we often discuss that it’s not that easy, because there is no term yet. So we thought about different expressions, ‘public gaming’ being one of them. I’m not a fan of that. ‘Public gaming’ also reminds me of a football stadium. It’s not fitting for what we are doing there. We also called it ‘live playing’ at some point. But again, live playing could also mean that you’re just playing Mario Kart. And it’s lacks this critical perspective, or even this Let’s Play aspect of it.
And this is why my panels are called Let’s Play Critical. This is what we are doing. But I don’t know if this term is good if its used in a broader field for a longer period of time. I don’t know if it’s fitting for all audiences.
46:24 But if we change the perspective, and we look from the angle of a writer, or somebody who published a book, and then did a presentation in that format, when you were looking at it, what actually happened in your head? Did you just perceive it as a promotional kind of thing? Or maybe as an attempt at using the game to vehiculate critical discourse? Did you perhaps perceive in this experiment an attempt of generating a new discourse? Did you see an attempt to expand the practice of publishing?
47:48 I interpreted it as an in-game presentation of a book. And so I was watching it from that perspective. And also I saw the similarities between what Valentina’s writing and Total Refusal is doing. But I was interested in how they can bring these two fields together. Of course, they are writing about video game culture in the broadest sense of the term.
I think there’s a very good opportunity there to expand on the book you are presenting in the video game. But you have to be very specific about what you want to represent or present from the book and if it fits in the game. So there was a small gap between what Total Refusal was showing in the game and Valentina’s comments. Of course, they tried to find those similarities. But for me, it was two worlds sometimes colliding, but not melting together as a whole. This is maybe because you have to look at what the ideological underpinnings of the book you are presenting are, as well as the ideology of the people playing the games. I think there were some similarities, but also some differences. So for Valentina, it was to explain this nostalgic view on games and game culture, both memes and other limited spaces and other internet phenomenons. For Total Refusal, it’s always this political standpoint where they try to have an anti-capitalist and even Marxist critique of society. Of course, Valentina is a person, I think, who shares this ideology, but not really in her book, which was about other topics. So, for me, there maybe was a gap that emerged when presenting those two together. But as a format, there’s potential to have your book presented in a video game.
50:22 But I’m thinking that video games, especially multiplayer video games, could also be perceived as a new space for traditional narratives or discourses produced in books. For example, in Ljubljana, I really perceived that environment as a new space to inhabit with certain discourses. toolsMultiplayer games, especially multiplayer games, give you this common space to create new narratives and even to challenge the rules of the video game itself. So, I’m really intrigued by this aspect that is difficult to find in traditional publishing practicestraditional publishing. When I mention traditional publishing, I refer to printed books. Of course, you can have book clubs in which you find other people, where you can read collectively. For video games, it looks like an expanded version of that with a lot of people. Like Travis Scott’s concert in Fortnite, all these kinds of experiences are quite disruptive in a way.
51:49 Yeah, totally. I wanted to ask if you knew the Fortnite concert, as there have also been many exhibitions in multiplayer games recently, especially in Fallout, for example. In Roblox, this kids game, there were also demonstrations for Palestine and other topics which are suppressed in society. Here, multiplayer games present a potential for political expression or just reaching a wider audience. As for publishing books, it’s also super interesting because, as I know, no one has used this format yet. But if you can imagine having a reading event in the game. So you have this area and maybe also advertise it in the game. You could talk to other people in the game or just write a sign. In some games, you can be very creative with the aesthetics or graphics. So you could have an area where you point out that there will be an event later, and then you can have the author or someone else sitting there and reading from the book. You could just use this as another version of a book launch. But maybe some people would randomly come in and gather around, allowing you to reach out to people who don’t usually go to a library or other literary spaces. So I think this is a good idea.
53:41 I think what we have been discussing at the moment here with you, but also in general, is trying to understand this concept of expanded publishing as coming from the traditional publishing world, trying to understand that in all these years, a lot of tools have been developed that change the way in which books are produced, but that also change the ways in which books are read and consumed. We said, okay, let’s stretch it the old way and open up the possibility that a book is not only a paper book. But when you have to deal with publishing, you deal with a set of media that can be very broad. In that sense, we jumped to Total Refusal as an example of this. There was a moment of writing, there was a moment of publishing, and there was a moment of reflection on the book.
But I’m thinking about examples that try to do the opposite, or try to conceive, for example, gaming as a book or form of reading. I am not much into gaming, but I recently started playing Kentucky Route Zero and it’s more like a book than a game. It’s interactive, you cannot win or lose, and has a narrative that actually has a very long history from the first DOS system, etc. My question is, very sincerely, again, can a game be a form of publishing? Of course, I understand, that producing a game and producing a book require completely different skills, but then how can these two very different worlds be combined? Especially considering that multidisciplinarity is something that we cannot avoid at the moment?
57:16 digital objectsThere’s a game called Citizen Sleeper. And it resembles a book more than a game. It has very nice graphics, but not moving graphics. It’s like standing still all the time. It’s perceived from a single view, and you see the characters that are talking. Other games did this as well, while thinking about how to present text in a modern way. So maybe there’s a connection. I think there were experiments in books, trying to look like Instagram or something like that, which doesn’t work very well most of the time. Maybe there’s formats which somehow copy back game text into a book, or the book cover or the marketing of the book. You could also produce a game which is related to your book, although this could fail because people are used to good quality now. I’m also thinking of graphic novels, which are classic books where you have some level of interactiveness as a reader. If you want to publish in-game or with games, you have to have people who really know what the game is about or how games work. If you want to appeal to the audience playing games, you have to have people experienced with games assisting you.
59:32 But then, to be even more direct, do you think it makes sense to open up publishing to this different context, or would it basically be defining everything as publishing?
59:53 I think the format of Total Refusal is very promising in thinking about how we can present a book, and also invite people to a cinema to watch a book premiere. It’s like a transmedial presentation. Using already existing games is also promising, finding games with an existing audience and developing ways to integrate books into them, or at least ways of presenting books in-game. These strategies are more promising than just developing new game, which is very difficult to do and it can’t be the first step. But think about how you can be in games or present games with your book. This is a good way to go.
What: Future of Publishing
1:00:45 So if you have any sort of ideas on urgent aspects of publishing, what are some things that already exist and that you see developing further or that you would like to be developed further? Which should we reflect upon and abandon? And if you had a five year vision of the future, ten year vision, what would you see?
1:01:48 Maybe firstly, I would discover the value in positions that are not present yet or marginalized. Seeing whether there are new ways of thinking about things such as video games, for example, and expanding on those areas. alternative publishing practicesWhen it comes to the publishing itself, find ways to get rid of the idea that there’s one expert for an entire topic, try to have a broader pool of people working on books, and to see if the books themselves can be made public for everyone. To have them online and in some way digitize them is very important, but maybe there would be a way to have book presentations you can record for YouTube or something similar. So people can have a summary of it and maybe even something interactive. Or you can do an event where you have a chat function and people can react to parts of your books, this could be before it is published. If you look at video game companies, they do this beta testing where they have almost-finished version of the game. People can openly play it and you can see how they react to it and what they think of it. In terms of publishing, this could mean that the publisher isn’t the only one who receives the draft before it’s edited, but that other people can read it and provide their first impressions. But the most important part is that it get’s published in some way and that it is accessible for free, although this is very difficult to do with the financing system nowadays.