Toby Miller on Games

by Sal Humphreys

Toby Miller is Professor of English, Sociology, and Women's Studies and Director of the Program in Film & Visual Culture at the University of California, Riverside. His teaching and research cover the media, sport, labor, gender, race, citizenship, politics, and cultural policy. Toby is the author and editor of over 20 books, and has published essays in more than 30 journals and 50 volumes. His current research covers the success of Hollywood overseas, the links between culture and citizenship, and anti-Americanism. His forthcoming book is Cultural Citizenship: Cosmopolitanism, Consumerism, and Television in a Neoliberal Age. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

This interview was conducted during Toby's recent stint at QUT as a visiting fellow of the Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation. Toby delivered a lecture on the games industry in which he directed attention both to the production cycle of games hardware and software, and to the historical context of moral panics about new media, where games can be viewed as the latest in a long line of new media to generate anxiety within a culture.

In this interview we canvass the directions that games studies might take, and the issues of production, particularly as they relate to the role of players as producers, and the politics of labour in this new model of networked production.

Sal: I thought a good place to start might be for you to explain your interest in games studies. I mostly know your work through film studies. Why the shift to games?

Toby: I was involved in film studies simply because it was a place where I could be employed. I've rarely if ever been employed doing the things that I'm most interested in or that I most work on, and I am concerned with a project that is about the political economy and the political technology of subjectivity. Another way of saying the institutional power and the discursive experiences of the creation of collective identity. So I'm interested in how that happens at a whole variety of sites and I don't really care what the sites are. So film studies was just an area that was offering jobs where you didn't have to be very smart to do it and you didn't have to know very much. So that's why I got involved in it and it's really just a venue for a whole stack of other projects. Now that I'm in an institutional location that's called English, Sociology and Women's Studies I'm probably more aptly designated in terms of what I do than I have been before, although those are three areas in which I have no formal training - so one could argue that I don't deserve to be in any of them. But I do feel reasonably at home with those departmental descriptions so it's not as though this is a shift from film to games. This is just one more site where I hope to learn both about the specifics of the area and the lessons that it can teach about questions of political economy and political technology, of subjectivity and collective identity.

Sal: So how's it going so far, in terms of what you are finding out about games and how that fits within your framework?

Toby: Well a lot of young faculty in the United States who have worked within the games industry and have fled it to do PhDs don't have many people who are interested in listening to them and talking about their problems. They have plenty of people prepared to talk to them about their passion for gaming, but they don't have any people to talk to about the social relations of it. So they have plenty to teach me and I am a listening post I hope for them. In addition I was asked by Doug Thomas when he established Games and Culture - a Sage journal of which he is the editor - to be an associate editor, along with some other people who are able at some kind of significatory level to offer games studies a location within media and cultural studies to the extent that it wants it, because there is the question of intellectual legitimacy that comes with print journals published by leading entities like Sage. And the idea is to try to be able to allow medium specificity, as with all the different media, but at the same time to give some kind of standing. That's just about, in a sense, old professors and younger professors.

I think the other thing that's been important for me that I've learnt, is that for a great many young people that I teach, who are from mostly very underprivileged backgrounds, mostly first generation college, mostly not white, mostly not from English speaking backgrounds, gaming really is a luxury that's not part of their world. In fact in many ways email and the web are not part of their worlds - it's sms and texting that are part of their worlds. So I think what I'm gaining from all this is that, (sorry it's a long winded answer to start with) it's not good enough to talk about 'the media' anymore, meaning any particular segment, even as you need to know about all of them. I think that's the most important thing that I have gained. And also to see that the telephone, the most intellectually boring media appliance in history, probably is going to be the most important for all these things. It already is so important for games obviously, and the experience of these students is teaching me that. So I think it's allowing me to understand some things about convergence and also about divergence.

Sal: Last night in your lecture you were talking about the production of the hardware as being part of the industry. It's interesting because nobody ever really talks about this and yet the whole industry is predicated on it. It can't exist without it. But no-one really wants to look at it because it's seen as quite a separate area. [There is the notable exception of the work of Kline, Witherspoon and De Peuter (2003)who discuss the labour conditions of the workers who make gaming consoles in chapter nine of their book on computer games.] Can you see ways of marrying it into analyses that are, for instance about content production?

Toby: It's interesting isn't it? Are you talking about bits of cardboard and disks or about consoles and PCs?

Sal: I was thinking of where you addressed the production cycle of consoles and PCs and the environmental impact of those technologies, and the labour that produces them and that pulls it all apart on the rubbish dumps in the third world when they've been discarded.