Kiri Miller > Quotes

“But I argue that the most important value-added aspect of these games is the potential for performance. Actually, the term value-reconstituted might be more appropriate: you reconstitute instant soup by adding water, and you reconstitute a recorded song by adding performance. Guitar Hero and Rock Band let players put the performance back into recorded music, reanimating it with their physical engagement and adrenaline. Players become live performers of prerecorded songs, a phenomenon that I refer to as “schizophonic performance.”
― Kiri Miller, Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance

“In the early twentieth century, technological innovations in the mechanical reproduction of music began to reach a large market of middle-class consumers. The perceived affordances of the player piano, the phonograph, and the radio delineated a new distinction between live and recorded performance.6 These technologies also inspired a century of eulogies for amateur musicality. Mark Katz notes that early critics of the phonograph worried that it would “deter amateur performance and turn Americans into passive musical consumers”; by 1916, an organ teacher had reported that some students “gave up study when they secured a mechanical machine, as it enabled them to enjoy correct performances of music which they could never be able to execute” (Katz 2004:68).”
― Kiri Miller, Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance

“GTA’s space-structuring mechanisms also have imperialist-ethnography overtones. With the conceptual advent of virtual reality came a similar terrain-based paradigm for understanding digital “new frontiers”; consider the web browsers named Explorer, Navigator, and Safari.”
― Kiri Miller, Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance

“I suggest that it is more accurate to think of it as playing between—that is, playing in the gap between virtual and actual performance. Chapter Three addresses Guitar Hero and Rock Band gameplay as a developing genre of collaborative, participatory rock music performance that is generating debate about the nature of musical and performative authenticity.”
― Kiri Miller, Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance

“These games index both a revival of musica practica and a host of anxieties about inauthentic musicality and mindless consumerism.”
― Kiri Miller, Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance

“Steve Dixon notes, many digital-performance scholars push theories of “the metamorphosis and fragmentation of the body in virtual realms” so far that they end up believing in disembodiment (2007:215)—whereas “what is practiced by digital/posthuman performers is commonly the search for the opposite: for cohesion, for meaning, for unity, for intimate cybernetic connections between the organic and the technological” (155).”
― Kiri Miller, Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance

“Late in his career Adorno noted that “The ability to repeat long-playing records, as well as parts of them, fosters a familiarity which is hardly afforded by the ritual of performance,” and he vividly described the process by which “recordings awaken to a second life in the wondrous dialogue with the lonely and perceptive listeners” (1990 [1969]:64, 66; cf. Frith 1996:203–204 on popular music).”
― Kiri Miller, Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance

“In addition to my web-based fieldwork, I have undertaken participant-observation. I have played the GTA games alone in my living room, as most of my survey respondents reported doing; I have played it while friends watched and commented; I have watched others play; and I have conducted post-gameplay interviews. The survey responses were collected between 2005 and 2007. Face-to-face interviews and gameplay observation took place during the same period in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.”
― Kiri Miller, Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance

“In 1974, Michel de Certeau wrote about popular-culture reception practices in a manner that seems eerily appropriate to contemporary digital gameplay: He described “a certain art of placing one’s blows, a pleasure in getting around the rules of a constraining space” that develops as people navigate popular culture’s “established forces and representations” (1984 [1974]:18). Decades”
― Kiri Miller, Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance

“Digital-game scholars are somewhat more attuned to interactivity, practice, and process, but their arguments are often driven by rules-oriented analysis that assumes gameplay is sealed off from players’ everyday lives—as though the constraints of game rules and the immersive qualities of virtual play could completely override one’s prior knowledge, life experience, and critical faculties.2 A performance-oriented approach grounded in ethnographic methodology brings different perspectives to this burgeoning field of cultural production and criticism: that is, the perspectives of players and producers, as well as the analytical insights they inspire (cf. Willis 1990).”
― Kiri Miller, Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance

“the virtual is not that which is deprived of existence, but that which possesses the potential, or force of developing into actual existence”
― Kiri Miller, Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance

“As I provide the cues for virtual motions that I could not accomplish in my own body and did not design myself, I am aware of the perpetual tension between my performative agency and the encoded rules that govern CJ’s every gesture—rules derived both from CJ’s personal history and from the kinds of tasks that the player must accomplish in the course of any GTA game.”
― Kiri Miller, Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance

“The case studies in this book represent a spectrum of practices that take place in that in-between terrain between virtual and actual experience; they each “approach the actual” in a different manner and to a different extent. In fact, in some cases they arrive at actuality—as when an online guitar student or a cybershala yoga practitioner makes the jump from imaginatively channeling a technique to performing it in her own body.”
― Kiri Miller, Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance

“Hours of practicing the physical skills that are required for successful gameplay also contribute to dispersed comradeship. Imagine the sense of shared experience that we might derive from having watched the same movie; now compare that to what we might feel if we had each performed the lead role in the same hundred-hour play.”
― Kiri Miller, Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance

“As James Gee suggests (writing about digital games in general), “The player and the character each have knowledge that must be integrated together to play the game successfully,” an instance of “distributed knowledge” in action (2006:177).”
― Kiri Miller, Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance

“Charles Keil, an ethnomusicologist known for his work on the social and musical dynamics of live ensemble performance, apparently had something of an epiphany when he experienced “a very different cultural adaptation to electrically mediated music” on a visit to Japan. After encountering karaoke, he found himself wondering, “Why haven’t I paid any ethnomusicological attention to the fact that since I was a teenager I have spent more time playing bass or drums to records than I have playing with other people?” (1984:92, 95).”
― Kiri Miller, Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance

“As Marie-Laure Ryan puts it, “In scholastic philosophy ‘actual’ and ‘virtual’ exist in a dialectical relation rather than in one of radical opposition: the virtual is not that which is deprived of existence, but that which possesses the potential, or force of developing into actual existence” (1999:88).”
― Kiri Miller, Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance

“For the ethnographically inclined, the ludologists’ emphasis on the improvisatory negotiation of unique paths through an established text or a rule-based system might suggest connections to theories of oral transmission, ritual, and traditional games—all of which involve individual improvisation within specific constraints. Anthropologists, folklorists, and ethnomusicologists routinely decry the notion that anonymous tradition-bearers just go through the motions required to replicate a given cultural text; their work offers reminders that video-game players aren’t automatons, either. For instance, we might use oral-formulaic theory to model players’ creative work as they string together episodic missions into different performances of what always counts as “the same” game (cf. Murray 1997:194).”
― Kiri Miller, Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance

“Espen Aarseth characterized the difference between conventional linear texts and “cybertexts” in terms of individual agency: When you read from a cybertext, you are constantly reminded of inaccessible strategies and paths not taken, voices not heard. Each decision will make some parts of the text more, and others less, accessible; and you may never know the exact results of your choices, that is, exactly what you missed. … Trying to know a cybertext is an investment of personal improvisation that can result in either intimacy or failure. (1997:3–4)”
― Kiri Miller, Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance

“As Susan Foster writes about choreography, “One can see the residue of strategic choices concerning representation as distinct from the bringing to liveness of those choices. And in this distinctiveness, the contrasting functions of choreography and performance are apparent: dance making theorizes physicality, whereas dancing presents that theory of physicality” (1998:10).”
― Kiri Miller, Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance

“Popular media ethnographers face particular challenges. With millions of media consumers scattered around the world, how can we make meaningful claims about common experiences or values? The ethnographic “field” for this kind of work is hard to locate or circumscribe. Its research sites include a preponderance of Internet-based communities, leading some to wonder whether digital ethnographers are interacting with flimsily constructed virtual personae rather than real people enmeshed in genuine social relationships.4”
― Kiri Miller, Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance

“Moving from participatory listening toward musica practica, we might consider various forms of mimetic performance (air conducting, air guitar, lip-syncing); playing along with recordings (including the music-minus-one recordings produced specifically for this purpose); and learning new repertoire or techniques by ear from recorded examples.”
― Kiri Miller, Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance

“to the contrary, racial representation and gendered performance are key themes.”
― Kiri Miller, Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance

“No one is ever truly alone in San Andreas, just as no one ever reads the newspaper, watches television, or surfs the net alone; all these media serve to constitute imagined communities of other readers, consumers, players, or citizens (Anderson 1991; cf. Fish 1980, Hermes 2005, Jenkins 2006b).”
― Kiri Miller, Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance

“the walls that allow the authors of a magisterial volume on “digital performance” to note in passing that they won’t be dealing with music, because “we do not have sufficient specialist knowledge and expertise to approach a worthy analysis,” even as they acknowledge that “music was one of the first artistic fields to experiment significantly with and embrace computer technologies” (Dixon 2007:x). Instead of signing on to fill that gap—bringing to bear the “specialist knowledge and expertise” housed in a music department on the fringe of campus and addressing an audience that shares those guild skills—”
― Kiri Miller, Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance

“This flexible narrative structure is a hallmark of the Grand Theft Auto series. In Gonzalo Frasca’s assessment (building on Caillois’s terms), the GTA games combine elements of ludus and paideia—the defining qualities of goal-oriented games and flexible “play” environments, respectively (Roberts 1999, 2003). Jesper Juul further suggests that the GTA games straddle the line between “emergence” and “progression” games, where “emergence” refers to games with a small set of well-defined rules that combine in complex ways (e.g., chess) and “progression” refers to games with a fixed series of tasks that tend to generate a narrative structure (2005:82–83).”
― Kiri Miller, Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance

“YouTube.com—a free, public, online video archive with built-in social networking features—has created a platform for countless virtual communities, many of which are focused on transmitting knowledge in users’ areas of interest and expertise.”
― Kiri Miller, Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance