Introduction Radical Visuals

Transcript


Welcome

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Radical Visual Podcast. I am your host, Radu Stochita, and this week we bring you an introduction into our world. We are here to discuss video games, films, graphic novels and analyse them critically by using Marxist and Anarchist theories. We bring as well into use visual, film and games studies theory in order to promote a cross-disciplinary approach to studying media.
We are comprised of one person at this moment, Radu Stochita, an international student from Romania, at Bowdoin College in ME, USA. If you want to stay up to date, subscribe to our show on all available podcast platforms, visit our website at radicalvisuals.noblogs.org and follow Radu on Twitter at @stochita_radu and on Instagram at @stochita.radu
We hope you will enjoy this episode! Have a great day!


Introduction of the author

I remember playing video games since a very early age. My father bought my first computer when I was three. It was second-hand, one of those bulky ones that take up a big amount of space on one’s desk. I remember playing Tomb Raider and Zuma, without giving much thought to what I was doing.
It felt fun and a good escape from everyday’s life. I was an introvert child for a big part of my early years, often finding refuge in stories or video games. As I grew older, so did my experience with the visual world. I became accustomed to Call of Duty, Battlefield, Borderlands, Mortal Kombat.
Those were the universes in which I would escape after a long day at school in which I did not manage to achieve much. I was not a bad student, but my curiosity at that time was not very much developed. School did not encourage asking questions, as much as it did the mere reproduction of whatever the teacher would tell us. To fulfil the need for curiosity, I turned more heavily to video games with a strong desire of tip-toeing through those virtual worlds.
I remember walking through forests in Ukraine, as I was on a mission of assassinating an enemy. I remember going through mountainous areas, filled with beasts and monsters, where I would clench my fists and yell out loud: Let’s go, boys! Let’s go! I was all by myself, a hero in those games, freeing the world from the danger of the Russians, or from the Zergs in Starcraft.
After hours of playtime a day, I would get into my bedsheets, thinking of how much greatness I produced today. I was happy for saving the world and it felt empowering that everyone else trusted me to do so, a kid in the boots of a soldier holding an M16.
It took me a long time to start looking critically at games. No one around me was talking about them in a critical manner. My friends would discuss the quality of the rifles in the latest Call of Duty or the enjoyment of killing some NAZIs in Wolfenstein. When we talked about the storyline, we often focused on ideas on enjoyment.
We did not ask questions and we were not encouraged to do so. Our parents did not know what those mediums presented and the powers that they held upon us. They were more afraid that we would become violent beasts once taken away from the computer screen, but none of my friends did so, even if we had hundreds of hours spent on shooters.
The first time when a critical thought rushed through my mind was when replaying Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2. At the beginning of the game, there is this mission in which you are disguised as a Russian terrorist, having to shoot up an airport. It was a massacre, you would shoot innocent people just not to be recognised as an intruder which might compromise the mission. You were the chosen one, the one to self-sacrifice, to kill those terrorists and to free the world from the Russian threat. I stopped after this mission, I felt a gut in my throat, starting to question why did I press the trigger. I tried not to, but the game said that I failed. I had to and in a hurry of getting this done, out of my mind, finishing it quickly, to move into killing the